Saint Maybe (38 page)

Thomas said, “It’s getting on toward eleven, you two. Maybe we should be setting out for the airport.”

“Not to change the subject or anything,” Daphne told him.

He pretended he hadn’t heard. They all stood up, and he said, “Then driving back, you and Grandpa can drop me at the train station. I’ll just get my things together. You want me to put my sheets in the hamper, Daph?”

“Are you serious?” Daphne asked. “Those sheets are good for another month yet.”

Agatha rolled her eyes and said, “Charming.”

“You have no right to talk if you’re not here to do the laundry,” Daphne told her.

“Which reminds me,” Agatha said. She stopped short in the dining room, where their grandfather was collecting his cards. “About the linen closet and such—”

“Don’t give it a thought,” Daphne said. “Just go off scot-free to the other side of the continent.”

“No, but I was wondering. Isn’t there some kind of cleaning service that could sort this place out for us? Not just clean it but organize it, and I could pay.”

“There’s the Clutter Counselor,” Daphne said.

Stuart laughed. Agatha said, “The what?”

“Rita the Clutter Counselor. She lives with this guy I know, Nick Bascomb. Did you ever meet Nick? And she makes her living sorting other people’s households and putting them in order.”

“Hire her,” Agatha said.

“I don’t know how much she charges, though.”

“Hire her anyway. I’ll pay whatever it costs.”

“What?” their grandfather spoke up suddenly. “You’d let an outsider go through our closets?”

“It’s either that or marry Ian off quick to that Clara person,” Agatha told him.

“I’ll call Rita this evening,” Daphne said.

Rita diCarlo was close to six feet tall—a rangy, sauntering woman in her late twenties with long black hair so frizzy that the braid hanging down her back seemed not so much plaited as clotted. She’d been living with Nick Bascomb for a couple of years now, but Daphne hadn’t really got to know her till just last summer when a bunch of them went together to a rock concert at RFK Stadium. They’d had bleacher tickets that didn’t allow them on the field, where all the action was; but Rita, bold as brass, strode down to the field anyway. When an usher tried to stop her she held up her ticket stub and strode on. The usher considered a while and then spun around and called, “Hey!
That
wasn’t a field ticket!” By then, though, she was lost in the crowd. Daphne hadn’t seen much of her since, but she always remembered that incident—the dash and swagger of it. She thought Rita was entirely capable of yanking their house into shape.

On the phone Rita said she could fit the Bedloes into that coming week, so she dropped by Monday after work to “case the joint,” as she put it. Wearing a red-and-black lumber jacket, black jeans, and heavy leather riding boots, she ambled about throwing open cupboards and peering into drawers. She surveyed the basement impassively. She seemed unfazed by the smell in the linen closet. She did not once ask, as Daphne had feared, “What in hell has
hit
here?” She poked her head into Doug’s bedroom and, finding him seated empty-handed in his rocker, merely said, “Hmm,” and withdrew. This was tactful of her, of course, but Doug’s room had urgent need of her services; so Daphne said, “Maybe after Grandpa’s gone downstairs …”

“I got the general idea,” Rita told her.

“That’s where Grandma’s closet is and so—”

“Sure. Clothes and stuff. Hatboxes.”

“Right.”

“I got it.”

She climbed the wooden steps to the attic, which had a stuffy, cloistered feeling now that it was no longer in regular use. She bent to look into the storeroom under the eaves. When she plucked one of Bee’s letters from a cardboard carton, Daphne felt a pang. “I guess these … personal things you’ll leave to us,” she said, but Rita said, “Not if you want this done right.” Then she added, “Don’t worry, I don’t read your mail. Or only enough to classify it. Stuff like this, for instance: too recent to have historical interest, no postage stamps of value, and the return address is a woman’s so we know it’s not your grandparents’ love letters. I’d say ditch them.”

“Ditch
them?”

Rita turned to look at her. Her face was tanned and square-jawed; her heavy black eyebrows were slightly raised.

“But suppose they told us what young women used to think about,” Daphne said. “Politics, or feminism, or things like that.”

Rita shook a piece of ivory stationery out of the envelope. Without bothering to unfold it, she read off the phrases that showed themselves: “… 
tea at Mrs.… wore my new flowered … self belt with covered buckle …
”

“Well,” Daphne murmured.

“Ditch them,” Rita told her.

They went back downstairs. Daphne felt like a little fairy person following Rita’s clopping boots. “What I do,” Rita said, “is sort everything into three piles: Keep, Discard, and Query. I make it a practice to query
as little as possible. Everything we keep I organize, and what’s discarded I haul away; I’ve got my own truck and two guys to help tote. I charge by the hour, but I generally know ahead of time how long a job will run me. This place, for instance—well, I’ll need to sit down and figure it out, but offhand I’d say if I start tomorrow morning, I could be done late Thursday.”

“Thursday! That’s just three days!”

“Or four at the most. It’s a fairly straightforward house, compared to some I’ve seen.”

They were back in the kitchen now. She opened one of the cabinets and gazed meditatively at a collection of empty peanut butter jars.

“It doesn’t look so straightforward to
me,
” Daphne told her.

“Well, naturally. That’s because you live here. You feel guilty getting rid of things. This one old lady I had, she could never throw out a gift. A drawing her son made in nursery school—and that son was sixty years old! A seashell her girlfriend brought from Miami in nineteen twenty—‘I just feel I’d be throwing the
person
out,’ she told me. So what I did was, I didn’t let her know. Well, of course she knew in a way. What did she suppose was in all those garbage bags? But she never asked, and I never said, and everyone was happy.”

She slammed the cabinet door shut. “I’ve seen houses so full you couldn’t walk through them. I’ve seen closets totally lost—I mean crammed to the gills and closed off, with new stuff piled in front of them so you didn’t know they existed.”

“Your own apartment must be neat as a pin,” Daphne said.

“Not really,” Rita told her. “That Nick saves everything. I
would
end up with a pack rat!” She laughed. She hooked a kitchen chair with the toe of her boot, pulled it out from the table, and sat down. “Now,” she
said, drawing a pencil and a note pad from her breast pocket. The pencil was roughly the size of a cartridge. She licked its tip and started writing. “Six rooms plus basement plus finished attic. Your attic’s in pretty good shape, but that basement …”

Ian appeared at the back door, lugging a large cardboard box. “Open up!” he called through the glass, and when Daphne obeyed he practically fell inside. Whatever he was carrying must weigh a ton. “Genuine ceramic tiles,” he told Daphne, setting the box on the floor. “We’re replacing an antique mantel at a house in Fells Point and these were just being thrown out, so—”

“Will you be putting them to use within the next ten days?” Rita asked.

He straightened and said, “Pardon?”

“Ian, this is Rita diCarlo,” Daphne said. “My uncle Ian. Rita’s here to organize us.”

“Oh, yes,” Ian said.

“Do you have a specific bathroom in mind that’s in need of those tiles within the next ten days?” Rita asked him.

“Well, not exactly, but—”

“Then I suggest you walk them straight back out to the trash can,” she said, “or else I’ll have to tack them onto my estimate here.”

“But these are from Spain,” Ian told her. He bent to lift one from the box—a geometric design of turquoise and royal blue. “How could I put something like this in the trash?”

Rita considered him. She didn’t give the tile so much as a glance, but Ian continued holding it hopefully in front of his chest like someone displaying his number for a mug shot.

“You see what I have to deal with,” Daphne told Rita.

“Yes, I see,” Rita said.

Oddly enough, though, Daphne just then noticed how beautiful that tile really was. The design looked kaleidoscopic—almost capable of movement. She couldn’t remember now why stripping the house had seemed like such a good idea.

Rita did do an excellent job, as it turned out, but Daphne hardly had time to notice before something new came along for her to think about: Friday afternoon, she was fired.

It wasn’t entirely unexpected. Ever since she’d got her raise, she seemed to have lost interest in her work. She had shown up late, left early, and mislaid several orders. The messages people sent with their flowers had begun to depress her. “Well, I think I’ll say … well, let me see,” they would tell her, frowning into space. “Why don’t we put … Okay! I’ve got it! ‘Congratulations and best wishes.’ ” Then Daphne would slash
CBW
across the order form. “To the girl of my dreams” was
G/dms
. “Thanks for last night,”
Tx/nite
. She felt injured on their behalf—that their most heartfelt sentiments could be considered so routine. And when they were not routine, it was worse:
I am more sorry than I can tell you and you’re right not to want to see me again but I’ll never forget you as long as I live and I hope you have a wonderful marriage
. “With delivery that comes to twenty-seven eighty,” she would say in her blandest tone.

The way Mr. Potoski put it was, she could either leave now or stay on for her two weeks’ notice, but she could see he was eager to get rid of her. He already had a new girl lined up. “I’ll leave now,” Daphne told him, and so at closing time she gathered her few possessions and stuffed them into a paper sack. Then she slipped her jacket on and ducked quietly out the door, avoiding
an awkward farewell scene. On the way to the bus stop she found herself composing messages to Mr. Potoski.
Tx/fun: Thanks, it’s been fun. TK: Take care
. Not that she had anything against Mr. Potoski personally. She knew this was all her own fault.

Her bus was undergoing some heater problems, and by the time she reached home she was chilled through. Still in her jacket, she went directly to the kitchen and lit the gas beneath the kettle. Ian must be working late this evening. She could hear her grandfather down in the basement, rattling tools and thinking aloud, but she didn’t call out to him. Maybe there was some advantage to living alone after all—not dealing with other people, not feeling responsible for other people’s happiness. Although that was out of the question, now that she had no salary.

She took a mug from the cupboard, where everything sat in straight rows—eight mugs, eight short glasses, eight tall glasses. The mugs that didn’t match and the odd-sized glasses had been sent to Good Works. The cereals that people had tried once and never again had disappeared from the shelves. In just three days Rita had turned this house into a sort of sample kit: one perfect set of everything. But Daphne hadn’t quite adjusted yet and she felt a little rustle of panic. She wanted some extras. She wanted that crowd of cracked, crazed, chipped, handleless mugs waiting behind the other mugs on the off chance they might be needed.

She ladled coffee into the drip pot and then poured in the boiling water. Coffee was her weakness. Reverend Emmett said coffee clouded the senses, coffee stepped between God and the self; but Daphne had discovered long ago that coffee
sharpened
the senses, and she loved to sit through church all elated and jangly-nerved and keyed to the sound of that inner voice saying enigmatic things she might someday figure out when
she was wiser:
if not for you, if not for you, if not for you
and
down in the meadow where the green grass grows
 … She waited daily for caffeine to be declared illegal, but it seemed the government had not caught on yet.

She poured the coffee and sat down at the table with it, warming her hands around the mug. Now her grandfather’s footsteps climbed the basement stairs and crossed the pantry. Daphne looked up, but the figure in the doorway was not her grandfather after all. It was Rita. Daphne said, “Rita! Aren’t you done with us?”

Well, she
was
done. She had finished yesterday afternoon and even presented her staggeringly high bill, which Daphne was going to mail on to Agatha as soon as she figured out where the stamps had been moved to. But here Rita stood, flushed from her climb, looking a bit better put together than usual in a flowing white shirt that bloused above her jeans and a tan suede jacket as soft as washed silk. “Daphne,” she said flatly. “I thought you were Ian.”

Ah.

Daphne had been through this any number of times. Back in high school, girlfriends of hers showed up unannounced, wearing brand new outfits and carrying their bosoms ostentatiously far in front of them like fruit on a tray. “Oh,” they’d say in just such a tone, dull and disappointed. “I thought you were Ian.”

But Rita already had somebody, didn’t she? She was living with Nick Bascomb. Wasn’t she?

“It just occurred to me,” Rita said, “that I ought to try once more to sort out your grandpa’s workbench. Not that I’d charge any extra, of course. But I didn’t feel right allowing it to stay so …”

Her voice dwindled away. Daphne, sitting back in her chair and cupping her mug in both hands, watched her with some enjoyment. Rita diCarlo, of all people! Such
a tough cookie. Although Daphne could have warned her that she was about as far from Ian’s type as a woman could get.

“But it seems your grandpa’s sticking to his guns,” Rita said finally.

“Yes,” Daphne said. She took a sip from her mug.

“So I’ll be going, I guess.”

“Okay.”

In another mood, she might at least have offered coffee. But she had troubles of her own right now, and so she let Rita see herself out.

Daphne started reading the want ads over breakfast every morning. A waste of time. “What
is
this?” she asked her grandfather. “A city where nobody needs anything?”