Homeland and Other Stories (15 page)

But Kay Kay is her everyday self. “Don't worry about Leon, he's got it all worked out, he's staying with me,” she tells Annemarie, not looking at her stitches. “He's going to teach me how to hit a softball.”

“He doesn't want to go to Buddy's?” Annemarie asks.

“He didn't say he did.”

“Isn't he scared to death?” Annemarie feels so weak and confused she doesn't believe she'll ever stand up again.

Kay Kay smiles. “Leon's a rock,” she says, and Annemarie
thinks of the pile of dirt he landed on. She believes now that she can remember the sound of him hitting it.

Annemarie and Magda have to stay overnight for observation. They end up in maternity, with their beds pushed close together so they won't disturb the other woman in the room. She's just given birth to twins and is watching
Falcon Crest
.

“I just keep seeing him there on that pile of dirt,” whispers Annemarie. “And I think, he could have been dead. There was just that one little safe place for him to land. Why did he land there? And then I think,
we
could have been dead, and he'd be alone. He'd be an orphan. Like that poor little girl that survived that plane wreck.”

“That poor kid,” Magda agrees. “People are just burying her with teddy bears. How could you live with a thing like that?” Magda seems a little dazed too. They each accepted a pill to calm them down, once the doctor came and personally guaranteed Magda it wouldn't cause fetal deformity.

“I think that woman's blouse was silk. Can you believe it?” Annemarie asks.

“She was kind,” says Magda.

“I wonder what became of it? I suppose it's ruined.”

“Probably,” Magda says. She keeps looking over at Annemarie and smiling. “When are you due?” she asks.

“October twelfth,” says Annemarie. “After you.”

“Leon came early, remember. And I went way late with you, three weeks I think. Yours could come first.”

“Did you know Buddy wants us to get married again?” Annemarie asks after a while. “Leon thinks it's a great idea.”

“What do you think? That's the question.”

“That's the question,” Annemarie agrees.

A nurse comes to take their blood pressures. “How are the mamas tonight?” she asks. Annemarie thinks about how nurses wear that same calm face stewardesses have, never letting on
like you're sitting on thirty thousand feet of thin air. Her head has begun to ache in no uncertain terms, and she thinks of poor old Leon Trotsky, axed in the head.

“I dread to think of what my hair's going to look like when these bandages come off. Did they have to shave a lot?”

“Not too much,” the nurse says, concentrating on the blood-pressure dial.

“Well, it's just as well my hair was a wreck to begin with.”

The nurse smiles and rips off the Velcro cuff, and then turns her back on Annemarie, attending to Magda. Another nurse rolls in their dinners and sets up their tray tables. Magda props herself up halfway, grimacing a little, and the nurse helps settle her with pillows under her back. She pokes a straw into a carton of milk, but Annemarie doesn't even take the plastic wrap off her tray.

“Ugh,” she complains, once the nurses have padded away on their white soles. “This reminds me of the stuff you used to bring me when I was sick.”

“Milk toast,” says Magda.

“That's right. Toast soaked in milk. Who could dream up such a disgusting thing?”

“I like it,” says Magda. “When I'm sick, it's the only thing I can stand. Seems like it always goes down nice.”

“It went down nice with Blackie,” Annemarie says. “Did you know he's the one that always ate it? I told you a million times I hated milk toast.”

“I never knew what you expected from me, Annemarie. I never could be the mother you wanted.”

Annemarie turns up one corner of the cellophane and pleats it with her fingers. “I guess I didn't expect anything, and you kept giving it to me anyway. When I was a teenager you were always making me drink barley fiber so I wouldn't have colon cancer when I was fifty. All I wanted was Cokes and Twinkies like the other kids.”

“I know that,” Magda says. “Don't you think I know that? You didn't want anything. A Barbie doll, and new clothes, but nothing in the way of mothering. Reading to you or anything like that. I could march around freeing South Africa or saving Glen Canyon but I couldn't do one thing for my own child.”

They are both quiet for a minute. On TV, a woman in an airport knits a longer and longer sweater, apparently unable to stop, while her plane is delayed again and again.

“I knew you didn't want to be taken care of, honey,” Magda says. “But I guess I just couldn't accept it.”

Annemarie turns her head to the side, ponderously, as if it has become an enormous egg. She'd forgotten and now remembers how pain seems to increase the size of things. “You know what's crazy?” she asks. “Now I want to be taken care of and nobody will. Men, I mean.”

“They would if you'd let them. You act like you don't deserve any better.”

“That's not true.” Annemarie is surprised and a little resentful at Magda's analysis.

“It
is
true. You'll take a silk blouse from a complete stranger, but not the least little thing from anybody that loves you. Not even a bottle of shampoo. If it comes from somebody that cares about you, you act like it's not worth having.”

“Well, you're a good one to talk.”

“What do you mean?” Magda pushes the tray table back and turns toward her daughter, carefully, resting her chin on her hand.

“What I mean is you beat men off with a stick. Bartholomew thinks you're Miss America and you don't want him around you. You don't even miss Daddy.”

Magda stares at Annemarie. “You don't know the first thing about it. Where were you when he was dying? Outside playing hopscotch.”

That is true. That's exactly where Annemarie was.

“Do you remember that upholstered armchair we had, Annemarie, with the grandfather clocks on it? He sat in that chair, morning till night, with his lungs filling up. Worrying about us. He'd say, ‘You won't forget to lock the doors, will you? Let's write a little note and tape it there by the door.' And I'd do it. And then he'd say, ‘You know that the brakes on the car have to be checked every so often. They loosen up. And the oil will need to be changed in February.' He sat there looking out the front window and every hour he'd think of another thing, till his face turned gray with the pain, knowing he'd never think of it all.”

Annemarie can picture them there in the trailer: two people facing a blank, bright window, waiting for the change that would permanently disconnect them.

Magda looks away from Annemarie. “What hurt him wasn't dying. It was not being able to follow you and me through life looking after us. How could I ever give anybody that kind of grief again?”

The woman who just had the twins has turned off her program, and Annemarie realizes their voices have gradually risen. She demands in a whisper, “I didn't know it was like that for you when he died. How could I not ever have known that, that it wrecked your life too?”

Magda looks across Annemarie, out the window, and Annemarie tries to follow her line of vision. There is a parking lot outside, and nothing else to see. A sparse forest of metal poles. The unlit streetlamps stare down at the pavement like blind eyes.

“I don't know,” Magda says. “Seems like that's just how it is with you and me. We're like islands on the moon.”

“There's no water on the moon,” says Annemarie.

“That's what I mean. A person could walk from one to the other if they just decided to do it.”

 

It's dark. Annemarie is staring out the window when the lights in the parking lot come on all together with a soft blink. From her bed she can only see the tops of the cars glowing quietly in the pink light like some strange crop of luminous mushrooms. Enough time passes, she thinks, and it's tomorrow. Buddy or no Buddy, this baby is going to come. For the first time she lets herself imagine holding a newborn against her stomach, its helplessness and rage pulling on her heart like the greatest tragedy there ever was.

There won't be just one baby, either, but two: her own, and her mother's second daughter. Two more kids with dark, curly hair. Annemarie can see them kneeling in the gravel, their heads identically bent forward on pale, slender necks, driving trucks over the moonlike surface of Island Breezes. Getting trikes for their birthdays, skinning their knees, starting school. Once in a while going down with Magda to the Air Force Base, most likely, to fend off nuclear war.

Magda is still lying on her side, facing Annemarie, but she has drawn the covers up and her eyes are closed. The top of the sheet is bunched into her two hands like a bride's bouquet. The belly underneath pokes forward, begging as the unborn do for attention, some reassurance from the outside world, the flat of a palm. Because she can't help it, Annemarie reaches across and lays a hand on her little sister.

T
HAT WOMAN
in the gable-ended house is not all there
.

In the beginning there is nothing else for Sulie to think. Her other neighbor, Estelle Berry, who spends a good part of each day picking yellow leaves off her jasmine bushes and looking down the street, comes over and says like it's Sulie's fault, “If you ask me it makes the place look slummish. She's started setting them out on her porch under a door stop, to flap in the breeze.”

“Well, Mrs. Berry, it's just notes,” says Sulie. “Maybe it's notes to the milkman.”

“Lord in heaven, child, you haven't lived here long enough to know. It's not to the milkman, it's to
Him
.”

For a dollar Sulie has changed a light bulb for the woman in the gable-ended house, whose name is Nola Rainey, and for free she has knocked down two paper-wasp nests from behind the ivy with a mop handle. In the eyes of the rest of the neighborhood, that is enough. Sulie is on Nola Rainey's side. But Sulie doesn't know the woman all that well, and when Estelle says
Him
, Sulie thinks she means Nola is leaving notes to God.

So it's a surprise when, on another day, Estelle knocks on
Sulie's door and sticks one of the notes straight into her hand. “This blew over on my jasmines. I won't tolerate litter on my shrubs,” says Estelle. Her square-hipped figure in beige stretch pants marches away. Sulie reads:

Sulie, who doesn't have what she would call friends here yet, decides to show the note to Gilbert McClure. She'll keep an eye out and be on the porch when he comes home from work. Gilbert McClure is the man she shares a house with, in a manner of speaking. It's divided, the way a house can be split down the middle when a landlord sees how he could get twice the rent for the same piece of pie, and makes it a duplex.
There's doors that go right through between my bedroom and his living room, but they're nailed shut and painted over
, she writes Aunt Reima.
Mr. McClure's side must have got the real kitchen because mine's a closet with a hot plate. But it went vice versa on the bathrooms
. And Aunt Reima writes back that yes she's heard those called “love's losts” or some people say “bereaved apartments,” because, she supposes, each one is missing something it once had.

 

Gilbert stands at his window, shaded by Nola's grove of date palms and old cedars, and mixes a gin and tonic.
That woman must be sitting on ten thousand, easy, in antiques
. He's seen plenty
of things go in, and nothing come out. This girl who's moved in, Suzie or Sukie, has been over there. Inside. But there's no point in asking; would the child know a Dunand end table if it stood up and talked? She comes from West Virginia.
If people are going to live in these beautiful old houses—going to own them—they could trouble themselves to do it right
. Every house in his line of vision was built before 1940, but decked out in postwar picket fences and venetian blinds, like a gorgeous woman going to dinner in a fireman's jacket. God knows what modern junk they've got inside; that's their problem. And then there is Sukie, who doesn't put up venetian blinds but India-print bedspreads; apparently the sixties have just arrived in West Virginia.
Treasures in Nola's parlor, he's willing to bet
. He stirs his drink with a pencil-thin silver rod, knobbed on the end like a pistol: Prohibition era. The invisible layers of liquid in his glass mix and briefly lose their clarity. Really all he wants is a good look.

 

If your neighbor is actually insane, I think you have a right to know
. Sulie will ask Nola point-blank, she decides. They're standing in Nola's living room. Nola seems small among her overstuffed chairs, but she holds herself straight and her white hair is done up in a whorl at the back that stays put. She wears a navy-blue suit with brass buttons and wide shoulders, very clean, under a clean apron. She's been dusting. What she says, when Sulie asks about the notes, is: “He's broken into my house over two hundred times.”

Sulie's arms tingle on the insides. “Who has?”

The feather duster twitches in Nola's hand like a living thing. “Some man,” she says. “Or boy. I haven't seen him.”

Sulie looks at the windows with their rusted-out locks, hidden from the street by heavy foliage, and sees that this would be
a snap if someone were of a mind. Sulie knows something of breaking and entering. “Have you called the police?”

“On more than a dozen occasions,” Nola declares proudly. “They have no interest in the elderly.”

Sulie says okay she'll have a cup of tea, when Nola offers it, although it's a warm day. The dark kitchen is filled with heavy things, left from a time when a woman needed muscles for cooking. Or needed a cook. Nola turns on the fire and it licks the brass kettle. She has to hold the heavy canister on its side and knock her palm against its bottom to free the last black leaves into the tea strainer.
It must be hard for her to get to the grocery. I could offer to shop for her, for five bucks or something
. Sulie realizes it isn't the money; she's drawn to Nola for other reasons.

They drink warm, weak tea and then Sulie checks the phone, which Nola says has stopped working. It's just come unplugged. Sulie tries to picture in her mind's eye, picture him coming through the window, the person who would break into an old woman's house more than two hundred times.

“You're so able,” Nola says. “When I was a girl we never suspected there was any need to know how to fix things.” She laughs at herself, waves a hand in front of her face. “And you can drive a truck. I never learned to drive. My husband said I might slaughter someone's livestock for them. This was a long way from town once, this was Senator Pie Allen's ranch.”

Sulie smiles. “It's just a pickup. It's not hard to drive. I haul around my stuff in it. I do odd jobs, clean gutters, that kind of thing.” She doesn't say what she used to do.

“Oh, I can't imagine. Do you climb up on the ladders? It must be invigorating.”

“Well, I guess so.” Sulie could leave, but Nola seems unwilling to part company. They return to the kitchen to look at Nola's toaster, which she claims has come unfrazzled near the plug. She
says
he
has been meddling with it. But she doesn't go to the toaster, she walks straight to the tea canister, opens it, and cries, “Lord help me, he's stolen all my tea!”

 

“Sulie, you have to bear in mind that Nola has been in that house for half a century,” Gilbert explains. “We've all been wondering which of the two would fall apart first.”

“It seems like everybody's mad at her for letting the house run down. Everything on this street's got to be new-looking and just-so. I bet if you painted your gutters some color other than brown or off-white they'd come lynch you.”

“Just-so-ugly,” he says. “But new-looking, yes.”

They're on the porch drinking sherry, compliments of Gilbert, who seems in a friendly mood. Sulie sets her glass on the low wall that divides the porch into halves. “Well, what else can Nola do but let it run down?” she persists. “She says she's got a son someplace but it looks to me like she's on her own.”

“She could pay somebody to paint her gutters,” Gilbert points out.

“I kind of hinted I'd do it for a good price. I don't think she's got much.” Sulie stretches her bare legs, crossing her ankles on the porch railing. Stretching is a habit she's had since living in a place where there wasn't room. Since Women's Correctional. She frees her mass of hair from a rubber band and shakes it off her shoulders, knowing he notices things like that. She wonders if he's ever lived with a woman without the doors nailed shut.

“So tell me the truth, what magic words did you use to get through the front door?” Gilbert asks. “She's never let anybody inside before. Not for years.” His back is turned to the gable-ended house and he also, carefully, looks away from Sulie.

“I didn't say hardly anything. She was standing up on a stack of boxes commencing to break her neck so I said I'd change the
porch light for her. And one thing led to another, I guess. She's got more ladders over in that garage than you can shake a stick at, but not one of them you'd trust your mother on.”

“Is the inside as bad as the outside?”

“Her house? Oh, Lord, on the inside it's decayed. The plumbing, the light switches, all the kinds of little things that go, you know, in an old place. The sash cords on the windows are rotted out. She raises up a window and ten minutes later, bang, back down it comes.”

Gilbert touches his mustache lightly, like a pet. “So she thinks this mysterious guy is closing the windows after she's opened them. And tampering with her light switches.”

“Uh-huh. And stealing things, whatever's run out. Stealing her
toilet paper
. And her tea.”

Gilbert looks down the street and laughs to himself.

“But really she's real respectable other than that. I mean, okay, it seems cuckoo leaving those notes on her porch, but how would you feel if your house was running down? Living in this neighborhood where everybody holds it against you?”

“Well, Sulie, I understand the dilemma. Believe me. But I don't think I'd invent a thief to blame my troubles on. I don't think I'd go quite that far off the deep end.”

“It's not really off the deep end,” Sulie says, looking at her feet. “It could happen. There's thieves in the world.”

 

I can't help the way I was raised. Aunt Reima would take me in a shoe store and try a good new pair on me and leave the old ones sitting on the shelf. Just walk out. I'd keep on thinking of my dirty curled-up shoes back there amongst all the nice ones. Think about somebody finding them
.

In front of the bathroom mirror, Sulie is desperate, trying on all her clothes. Everything has specks of paint on it and Gilbert
has invited her to dinner.
These are upstanding people here and I have a chance to be who I want because nobody knows what I am. Nobody in Tucson but the parole board
. Seems like he likes her, why would he talk to her otherwise? She doesn't think he's all that old. At first she thought he was, with the mustache, but now she thinks it's like in the black-and-white movies where the men look around fifty but really they're not. And real handsome.
Aunt Reima's idea of dining out was the Mack's Steak House kids-eat-free night. Sulie honey, you go over to the buffet table and pile up your plate. Then hang back behind some family until the daddy pays at the register, and then we'll sit over here at a back booth and we'll feast
. Well, maybe Gilbert and I have got potential, she thinks, who knows? Life's an adventure. Starting clean. She brushes her hair, by turns attacking it and then stroking it with remorse.
Hey, Miss America. They made such a big deal of her hair, and it was envy; you can't get a permanent wave in prison
. Of course they are worlds apart. Gilbert has a regular job he goes to, and nice things. He seems reserved, though, whereas she's outgoing. Well, opposites attract. Between the two of them together maybe they'd make a decent whole person. Sulie laughs.
Like our apartments
.

 

She is standing in his door, and beautiful. Her hair flowing over her shoulders is a cloud of natural waves—a Botticelli angel—and she has on a pink short-sleeved sweater he likes very much: 1950 or possibly older, angora, with a floral design in seed pearls. Yes, all right, he can go through with this.

“Grand Hotel,” he says. His arm pulls the air in front of her through the door, pulls her in with it. “I'm at your service. You'll just have to forgive the fact that there's no dining room.”

She is so precious. “I think I got the dining room,” she says, looking sideways. “Only I sleep in it.”

 

I stole this sweater
. She'd forgotten until his eyes came to rest on it. Now she avoids looking at him.
From a store ten blocks from here called Hearts & Flowers; the price tag said $59 but it was wrong I felt to charge that much for something that had already been owned. Zipped my jacket over it and walked out, thinking how Aunt Reima says: Nine-tenths of successful stealing is believing you're entitled to what you've took. Even now sometimes it's hard to see it any other way
.

Gilbert's living room is all antiques. A light orange rug on the floor, a polished wood coffee table, a curved white sofa shaped like a snail. Gilbert watches her look at it all and seems pleased, walking around laying his hand on things, saying, “This is just a copy.” A copy of what? she wonders. The tiles around the fireplace are rounded, old-fashioned-looking, orange like the rug. The exact same tiles as her bathroom, but of course, it used to be all one. His walls in here are painted dark purple, like an eggplant. Sulie supposes that purple walls are usual in better homes. It's hard to believe this is the other half of her own house. That she lives here too.

“
À l'escargot
,” he says, evidently meaning the sofa.

“It's nice. It looks brand new.”

“Art Deco, genuine. But it's watermarked.” He shows her where. “It sat in my ex-wife's store for eighteen months. If it were perfect it would be worth a few grand, but it's not, so it ends up here. I'm her charity case.”

“You used to be married?”

“For about ten minutes.” He laughs, waving his hand in front of his face as if he's clearing away smoke.