Suncatchers (3 page)

The broom was still swishing outside, and he was surprised to see Jewel slowly heading back up, sweeping his driveway now. He remembered the sinking feeling last night when he had arrived and found that Beth's driveway was adjacent to the neighbors'. There was something about adjacent driveways that forced a closer relationship than he wanted to think about.

Jewel was a careful sweeper, going all the way to the edges. Had she been planning to sweep his side all along? Maybe so, or maybe she was afraid he had noticed her sweeping stuff from her driveway to his. He ought to go out and tell her not to bother, that he'd take care of it later, but that might seem ungrateful. Maybe he should stick his head out the door and yell a friendly thank-you. But he didn't do either.

He picked up the snow globe again and slowly wound the silver knob underneath. Immediately he wished he hadn't, but there was no way to stop it now. As the music started, he turned the glass ball upside down and watched the flurry of snow cover the tiny plastic people and the tiny plastic snowman. Then he turned it right side up and watched the small white granules settle on the roof of the miniature house near the snowman and slide off onto the ground. The loose figure floated lazily through the snowstorm. It was a little boy, he noticed—a little boy somersaulting dizzily and finally landing face down beside a little evergreen. Oh, Troy, what have I done to you? he thought.

He closed his eyes and tried to think of something else. “Snow,” he whispered. “Think of snow.” He and Troy used to build snowmen. They tried to see how many different things they could use for eyes. He still remembered the time several years ago when Dinah had come home to find a pair of her enormous glittery red earrings in the snowman's eye sockets. They had all three laughed about it. The earrings were only cheap dime store ones, and that was back when Dinah still thought everything he did was clever. Perry distinctly remembered wondering as they stood in the yard that day whether he would always be as happy as he was then. Well, he knew the answer to that now.

It had been snowing steadily when he had driven out of Rockford early yesterday. They could get some pretty heavy snowfalls in February. He wondered if there had been enough to build a snowman. Would Troy try building one by himself? He couldn't imagine Dinah helping with something like that. Would she think to check over Troy's arithmetic problems?

As he watched all the snow inside the glass ball settle and listened to “Winter Wonderland” seven times through, he thought about how stupid he must look standing there. Somebody ought to take a picture of him and label it “Regrets Only.”

2

Little Brick Boxes

All the houses in this neighborhood were more or less alike—small brick rectangles with little porches just big enough for a couple of chairs or maybe a swing if a person swung in moderation. The area, known as Montroyal, had all been planned and constructed in the early fifties by the big textile conglomerate that had once fed the economy in this part of South Carolina. Montroyal had financed the houses for their employees at reasonable interest rates and even landscaped and equipped a couple of corner lots as parks for the kids. By the time they had closed down operation in the late seventies and moved their main plant nearer to Columbia, Montroyal had made a nice little profit from their real estate venture and three or four hundred families had their own modest little homes—but no jobs now, at least not here in the town of Derby, South Carolina.

A few of the people had stayed on after Montroyal relocated, but mainly it was the older ones ready for retirement. Most of the younger ones had sold their houses and moved to Columbia with the company or taken jobs at a new Summerweave plant up in Greenville. A big Gerber baby-food plant had moved to Derby a year or so after Montroyal closed down, so that took up the slack a good deal.

All the streets in Montroyal were named after flowers. Daffodil and Violet and Daisy and Rose and Iris. Those were all streets. Then there were the avenues—Hyacinth and Petunia and Tulip and others. And a few lanes—Pansy and Lily and Geranium. Then there was the one circle, where Beth's house was located, tucked away in the far northwest corner of the subdivision—Blossom Circle it was called. Perry wondered if whoever had named the streets had run out of specific flowers by that time. He knew for sure there wasn't a Chrysanthemum or Rhododendron street, but maybe they figured those would be too hard for the mill people to spell. Blossom Circle was actually a cul-de-sac and should have been a court in Perry's opinion, but evidently the community planners hadn't known the rules about naming streets.

Perry remembered how proud Beth had been to become the owner of one of these little brick boxes two years ago. The family she bought it from had purchased it from one of the original Montroyal families. At the time, Perry had questioned her using their mother's money on something so inelegant. He had put his down on a $200,000 place Dinah had fallen in love with. Not a very smart move now that he looked back on it, since it seemed that her falling in love with the house had coincided with her falling out of love with him.

In her lucid moments, Perry's mother used to call Beth the practical one and Perry the experimenter. Perry had always wondered whether her labeling them that way had shaped their destinies. Maybe she had seen Beth one day at the age of, say, three or four stacking up her pennies in neat little piles while Perry pushed his through the slots in a heating vent, and from that day on she had decided their futures. Forget what they might have done the next day or the next. Her mind was made up now. Beth was neat and logical, while Perry was inquisitive and creative.

And so Beth had grown up to be a math teacher and pay cash for a $50,000 house and remain unmarried. And Perry had become a writer and gone into debt and married a woman who now hated the sight of him. “Two roads diverged in a yellow wood” and all that. But the two roads in that poem by Frost were equally attractive to the narrator, Perry recalled, which certainly wasn't true in this case. Perry had never wanted to be a math teacher, and Beth often said she'd go mad sitting around fiddling with words at a computer all day. “To each his own.” There, that was a more appropriate quotation.

Perry waited until the digital clock read 5:59 before he left to walk across the two driveways to the Blanchards' house. He hoped they would eat right away so he wouldn't be expected to sit around before the meal and make polite talk. It was bad enough when you had something to do with your hands, like hold the silverware. “For somebody supposedly so interested in people—I mean a
sociologist
no less—you sure are a dud in a crowd,” Dinah had told him once after a party. But for Perry, observing people and interacting with them were two totally different things, and the one usually got in the way of the other, he had discovered long ago. Participant observation wasn't his style. Give him a dim corner with a view, and he was perfectly happy.

The Blanchards' porch light was on—one of those unshielded bright yellow bulbs. Perry walked up the steps to the front door and stood beside a large white wooden goose listing to one side. The words “Welcome, Friends” were stenciled on its stomach, and an enormous green bow hung limply around its neck.

He heard the doorbell ring inside—or rather buzz. Another sign of a cheap house, he thought. There were three little square windows in the front door at eye level, but he was careful to keep his eyes down. He was standing on what appeared to be a piece of leftover carpet, and he suspected he'd see the same olive shag in a room somewhere inside.

The door began to swing open slowly, as if it hadn't been firmly latched in the first place. But then he saw a face peering around the edge at him—an old woman with short, straight metal-gray hair and eyebrows as thick as caterpillars. His first impression was that she was scowling at him, but when he looked more closely, he understood that she meant it for a smile. She must be tall, he thought, unless she was standing on a stool behind the door.

They stood there looking at each other for a moment, and then he heard Jewel's voice from behind her. “Well, for pity's sake, Mama, let him in.” Jewel opened the door wide and motioned him in.

“He was standing right in front of the screen,” said the old woman. “It wouldn't be very cordial to smack him in the face, now, would it?” She had one of those sticky voices that made Perry want to clear his throat to help her out. “Besides,” she said, “I wanted to look him over good.” She stretched her mouth wide, her eyes narrowing to dark incisions, and laughed a deep honking laugh.

Jewel looked at Perry over the old woman's shoulder and smiled.

Perry stepped inside and wiped his feet on a mat with a border of red teddy bears holding hands and “We LOVE Company” stamped in the center. The room was a splash of different colors, and it was so hot Perry wondered if he was getting sick. Why was he doing this? he asked himself. Not just the supper invitation but the whole business. What he was planning to do suddenly seemed so ludicrous to him that he wanted to laugh. What made him think he could move into this town and crank out a book about these people when he had turned his back on sociological research more than eight years ago? He had probably lost the knack for it by now anyway. He ought to just excuse himself and go to the Hardee's a few blocks away.

He realized that the old woman had just said something and was looking at him for a response. Dinah had always been after him to keep his mind on what was happening right then. “Half the time you don't make any sense whatsoever when you open your mouth because, while the conversation has been going one way, your mind has been going the exact opposite,” she told him once after an evening out.

It had been an awful night, the kind Dinah was always dragging him to, the kind Perry hated, with people clustered together pretending to be interested in what the others were saying and then wandering off to reassemble in another huddle in another room and go through the whole charade all over again. That was the time the interior decorator had asked him if writers ever thought of their pieces as undiscovered constellations in the solar system, and he had snapped out of wherever he had withdrawn to and replied with a quotation from
King Lear
: “A man may see how this world goes with no eyes.” He could still picture the woman cocking her head as if the relevance of what he had said could be grasped if she pondered it a while.

This was terrible. The old woman had said something else now, and both she and Jewel were staring at him, waiting.

So he did what he often did—smiled and bobbed his head. He'd have to do better than this, a lot better. Paying attention was pretty fundamental to observation. He was going to be earning money for observing and writing about these people—that is,
maybe
, if he went through with it—so he'd better start tonight.

Jewel was talking now, so he looked directly at her mouth. Her two front teeth overlapped each other just a little but were white and strong. Not the sort of thing you'd ever want to put braces on to correct. It was a nice smile, really. Combined with the blue eyes and dimples, it looked like a young girl's.

“ . . . with Mama if it's okay—oh, and I'll get Joe Leonard to come in here and meet you, too.” Jewel turned and left the room. Perry's stomach felt unsettled. It was so hot in here—and so bright.

Maybe he should have offered to help Jewel in the kitchen. But that was laughable since he couldn't even keep straight which direction the blade of the knife faced whenever he tried to set the table. At one time early in their marriage Dinah had thought his confusion over such details was comical, when he could remember others with vivid clarity, like the intricate paisley design of a scarf she had often worn when they were dating. He had drawn the design for her several years after they were married and even colored it in with Troy's crayons. And she had dug the scarf out of a drawer somewhere and compared it with the picture. “You aren't a normal human being,” she had told him after studying the two for a few moments.

The old woman turned and motioned for him to follow. She was one of the largest old women Perry had ever seen. She had to be close to his own height of six feet, with broad shoulders and wide hips, and she walked with the waddle of a pregnant woman, which was a ridiculous comparison, he realized. It wasn't that she was fat necessarily. She was just big all over. She wore a shapeless lavender knit dress with a black cardigan over it and a long string of lavender beads with matching earrings. She walked over to the sofa and sat down heavily at the end closest to a gas heater. Perry could sense the waves of hot air emanating from it, and he pushed up the sleeves of his sweater.

He chose a straight-backed chair across from her on the other side of the small living room. The seat was cane and sounded like a creaky hinge when he sat down. It was then that he noticed the old woman's feet. She was wearing black rubber boots, the kind with the little metal clasps down the front, like children used to wear, except many sizes larger. Above the boots he could see what looked like the tops of plastic bags cinched to her calves with garters.

He realized he must have been staring because she lifted her legs and held them straight out in front of her. “Poor circulation,” she said. “My feet get so cold! This here's something I read about in a magazine. You coat your feet all over with Vaseline, and then you put them in plastic bags to trap the heat. Then you put socks on over that. I got on three pairs. And then you wear rubber boots on top of those.” Her thick eyebrows drew together as she smiled broadly.

Perry couldn't think of a reply at first. He watched her silently for a moment on the outside chance that she was teasing. “Does it work?” he finally asked.

“Pretty much,” she answered.

Perry wondered how she cleaned the Vaseline off her feet afterward. Maybe she just left it on and layered over it every day. What would that look like by springtime? He looked away quickly.