Duet for Three (30 page)

It's June who's seen the bleak terror on Aggie's face when she's had an accident. No one else, not a soul anywhere, knows so much. Certainly not Frances.

Also, no one knows as much about June as Aggie does. Without Aggie, who would know her at all?

Oh, but that's silly, like one of those questions Aggie used to ask about something she'd been reading: what exists if no one sees the existence?

What would June be, if someone weren't there to watch?

But God sees, how stupid to forget. God is always watching. That's a comfort, of course, but also sometimes a little irritating. She might wish occasionally that God would go and watch somebody else for just a little while. It might make all this easier.

Anyway, she never wanted to know all the things she knows about her mother. She never asked to see Aggie naked in the bath. She didn't force her to lust after food so much that she finally can't manage her own body. The perfect mate for Aggie, food: something she could roll around and stir and beat and cook and then consume.

It's Aggie's own fault, what she's become. If she prattles about people being responsible for themselves, well then, let her take the consequences.

Keep going, that minister said years ago when June was still a child: one step and then the next. Well, she's done that. The difficulty has been with the rest of it: doing it with joy and courage. The shininess gets blurred, with all the wearing details of getting through the day. Maintaining joy appears to require some kind of nourishment not provided by teaching small, scary children and raising a wilful daughter and living with a woman whose ideas of nourishment are contrary.

Sometimes, though, she has the feeling that her memories are incomplete, or may have gotten twisted somehow; that words have been spoken and events have occurred that have been turned around in her head, or tucked away. Like putting things for which there's no immediate use away in the attic.

She is irritated by confusion. A few weeks ago she wasn't especially confused. She knew her duty and was doing it. And not only that: there was considerable comfort in having days the same.

It was Aggie's accident that stirred things up. Once, as June struggled to cut a turnip, the knife slipped and caused quite a bad gash in her hand. She wrapped it in a tea towel and called a taxi and took herself to the hospital, where they gave her a shot and bandaged her up and said it wasn't serious. But she couldn't use the hand properly for some time. It was surprising how much she needed it. Until it healed, she was almost constantly aware of what it couldn't do, and she had thought what a poor cripple she would be, how badly she reacted to a minor deprivation.

Now this other sort of accident has happened, and although it isn't even hers — how much worse is it for Aggie? — everything has been disrupted. She has had those wild moments of hope, imagining a different future, the luxury of coming home to an empty house; of being free. To what? It came as too much of a surprise. She still hasn't prepared herself for freedom. She can only think so far ahead.

At the moment, her job is to enter the schoolyard, filled with racing, shrieking, tumbling children who are nevertheless careful not to accidentally bounce into her, and get to her classroom, and, when they file in, to subdue and teach them. Her job is to take one brave step at a time, until it all comes out somewhere.

She watches out the window at recess. The children play tag, throw balls, skip rope. From where she is on the second floor, she can discern the patterns and alliances, the friendships and small rages, all the energy, altering and shifting. She thinks this must be something like what God sees, looking down. Even, perhaps, thinking benevolently that they will pretty much turn out all right, once they settle down.

TWENTY-TWO

There have been various rumblings and shiftings going on upstairs all evening. “What on earth are you doing up there?” Aggie asks when June finally appears, dusty and straggle-haired.

“Getting things down from the attic. I thought we might as well sort through them and clear them out a bit. Anything worth saving, maybe Frances would like to have. We can ask when she comes if there's anything she'd like.”

“Why now?” As if she didn't know.

“For one thing, one of these days I'm not going to be able to do it. I can't believe all the junk we must have put up there.”

“So what are you going to do with it now?”

“Bring it on down. I've got it as far as the landing. Boxes and boxes of stuff. I can't imagine what it all is, can you?”

No, not really. Things from away back, Aggie supposes. Even a few things she brought from her parents' house, after they died and their pathetically few possessions were divided up. She remembers how small and insignificant those things seemed, with the people who had used them gone. A cushion, she remembers, with a Scottie dog embroidered on it.

“There's a trunk up there that must be yours, too. I'm going to have trouble getting it down. I'm just taking a tea break. Do you want some?”

Hardly. Is this some none-too-subtle sabotage? Aggie has not forgotten, and has followed, George's advice against having anything to drink after eight o'clock at night. Not that it has made a great deal of difference. Nor did his other advice. She has thought and thought, going off to sleep at night, concentrating on control, and has still wakened a number of times to find her body has once again betrayed her.

Oh God, what is Frances going to say? If she finds out.

Is there any hope she might not? At this point, if Aggie gets safely through the weekend, it'll be as accidental as any accident.

Her dress is damp. That scares her for a moment, until she realizes it's only perspiration, she hasn't done anything so dreadful as wet herself sitting up awake.

Imagine being frightened of Frances. Or not of Frances, exactly, but of having Frances look at her, knowing she is seeing not her beloved, understanding, helpful, hopeful grandmother, but an appalling, fat old woman who has taken to wetting the bed.

She could, of course, be blunt about it: speak right up and say something, preferably make a joke of it, as best she can. “I'm on the skids,” she might say. “I'm going downhill. Your poor mother, she wants me to go to a nursing home, and of course I can sympathize with her, but I won't do it, naturally.”

Just fine, as long as she doesn't actually wet the bed. Even Frances might then fail to respond as Aggie could wish.

But what sort of face does Frances have? Not cruel, after all. Not one that would deliberately inflict pain.

She is fairly tall, taller than June anyway, and slender, although not thin, and the last time they saw her, a couple of months back, was wearing her dark hair cut short and tight around her face. The style made her eyes seem large, giving her a curious and vulnerable look, a bit startling, like a waif.

She is now of an age when bones are becoming important, the ridges around which her middle age will form. With good cheekbones and a strong jaw, she is unlikely to become one of those women whose faces, in late thirties and forties, disintegrate, losing character instead of gaining it. Aggie touches her own face, seeking the bones. Frances is how she might have looked if she hadn't gone in for flesh. If she peeled herself down to the essentials, she might find a Frances.

Aggie was struck, the last time, by the webs of lines around Frances's eyes when she arrived. She hadn't recalled them being so pronounced before. But most of them vanished after a good night's sleep. When Frances tilted her head, the light from the lamp behind her caught her hair, and picked up the little streaks and slivers of grey in it.

The
pride
with which Aggie regards her. The last time she was here, she stretched out on the sofa and said, “You know, Grandma, Mother keeps saying I get away with anything, as if that's so awful. It's true, I can pretty much. But it's because I can get away
from
anything. The trick is, if something happens that really hurts, to be able to pick up and walk out and survive.”

Aggie thought right then that if Frances had done nothing else — had not learned, or gone to school, or made a career out of an inquiring mind — if she had not accomplished any of that, Aggie would still have been proud of her for understanding that most important piece of information.

Although she wonders now if such an intense interest in survival, like her own, will not leave Frances unprepared and bewildered at the end, when it is precisely survival that will be lost.

But how does a person let go and decide it's been enough?

Aggie has let go so often: of her family on the farm, of the teacher and of June, of Frances and Barney and the bakery. But she has never let go of herself.

Wouldn't it be simple? To put her head back and close her eyes, go limp and die? Can a person just die that way, willing the heart to stop beating and the lungs to stop pumping? The mind to stop thinking? Would she dare?

She puts her head back, closes her eyes, and tries to go limp, relaxing her body little by little, a limb at a time. The next trick is the heart. But it rears in terror and goes off racing and thumping, causing her eyes to flash open and her head to leap from the back of the chair in panic. Certainly not. What a stupid, not to say dangerous, experiment. Damned if she's done.

It's not so much pain. There may well be a certain amount of that, but she's had pain before: she's cut her hands with knives and burned her fingers and tripped on steps and gone flying. She's been bruised and sliced and had teeth pulled, and some of it has been quick and some prolonged, but never has it been unbearable.

What a coward, though: telling June for years, and Frances too, “You must be responsible for yourself, and your own actions.” With varying results, between the two of them. And then even to think of dying, taking that huge dark step into space, simply to avoid the look on a young woman's face when she sees that her grandmother has peed the bed.

Oh, really, love is one thing, but that would be ridiculous.

She won't die for Frances, and this time she doesn't intend to bake, either. Frances isn't the eater she used to be. “I have to watch my weight,” she says, refusing desserts, and Aggie, even thinking how lovely she is, is still a little hurt. The food she plans and prepares for Frances's visits is intended to speak love, and while she knows it isn't true, and isn't fair, it feels, when Frances turns it down, as if she has said, “I know, but there are more important things.”

It occurs to Aggie that June may not be the only one who makes untenable demands. That between the two of them, they push and pull in ways that may be hard for Frances to bear.

Only, food is what Aggie has done, and at some point it turned into a way of saying things. Well, though, maybe she can't expect other people, even Frances, to see that.

Just the way they fail to see the art in ordinary things: in her cheese cakes and banana bread, bran muffins, white and dark bread, chocolate chip and oatmeal cookies, rhubarb and apple and cherry pies. What is it if not art, to take ingredients not necessarily useful or desirable on their own and combine them into works of a certain symmetry and grace and usefulness? And not only that: because while painters might look at their work, and sculptors touch theirs, she could do that and consume hers also, containing her own art.

The difference is that with luck, other sorts of artists might never have to quit, whereas she did, although she hung on grimly until five years ago. By then, new types of bakeries had come to town, chains of them like fast food outlets, churning out breads and muffins and tarts, and not bad, either. They were convenient, and people didn't have to go out of their way, as they did to get to Aggie's. Her own old customers, the ones she'd built up through familiarity and loyalty, died, or couldn't get around much any more. So there was that.

But also it was too hard. Getting up in the mornings so early, all that kneading and stirring and bending and reaching took it out of her. The day June came home and found her sitting on the kitchen chair, leaning her head on the counter, grey in the face, all the pans and pie plates piled up still waiting to be washed, and the tins of flour and sugar and bran still out because she hadn't seen how she could ever reach those shelves again to put them away, or how she could stand in the steam over the sink and do the washing up — that day June came home and looked at her and said, “Oh Mother, that's it, you really have to close this up, you look absolutely dreadful,” that was when it ended.

June saw to putting the kitchen back the way it used to be. There are plants in the window now, and curtains on the back door, and a kitchen table. The sign disappeared from the front. What happened to the sign? Maybe they put it in the attic. Aggie hopes it didn't go out in the trash.

How odd it was, to lie in bed in the morning (and finally to have to, waiting for June to come in and help), and having only her own baking to do, and being able to sit down for hours to read or look out the window or think, having nothing that she absolutely had to do. June fussed a bit. “I hope you're not going to be too bored, Mother,” but in a way it was something of a relief.

How nice June was about it, how gentle. How kind June often is, really, in her way.

Sometimes, first thing in the morning, Aggie can still be startled to go into the kitchen and find it has a table and chairs and only one oven and no cash register; that it is missing counters and drawers where counters and drawers were for so many years. Sometimes, just for a moment, she disbelieves what she is seeing.

June has been staggering in and out of the front room, loaded with boxes, piling them up. “I had no idea we kept so much,” she says.

“I didn't even know the attic was big enough.”

Now there's a great thudding and scratching on the stairs, and a heavy dragging across the hall and into this room. June is perspiring. “Good God, June, what are you doing?”

“Your trunk,” she pants.

“For heaven's sake, that's far too big for you to manage alone. You might at least have waited for Frances to help you.”

“Well, it's not too big or I couldn't have done it.” Under the weariness there's pride.

This blue hump-backed trunk, with its leather straps and handles and brass catches — Aggie remembers it being lifted into the back of the buggy as she and Neil left her home, and turning around in her seat waving over it. This trunk is what caused the scratches on the floor of the hallway inside the front door when he dragged it in. She doesn't remember who could have put it in the attic, or when. And now here it is, making another appearance, looking a bit daunting and making more scratches on the floor.

“Oh my,” she says, “that really takes me back.”

“Mmhmm. I'm going to have a bath now, Mother, unless you want to go to bed first.”

For the moment, however, it might be unwise to move. She shakes her head. “No, you go ahead.”

All of this, all this past — it crowds a whole life, an entire eighty years, into this room, making it feel cramped, like her heart struggling to pound out a space for itself against the pressing flesh.

Funny, that old trunk sitting right beside the big colour television set, the one they bought when the bakery was shut down. She hopes she isn't one of those old people who seize on things like that, to point out how much times have changed. But still, how times have changed, her times, between that trunk and that television.

“It'll be nice for you during the day,” June said when they got the colour set, replacing the old black-and-white they'd bought when Frances was eight or nine because all her other friends' homes had TV and if she didn't have an ordinary family, she might at least have that. A retreat into television, at least in daylight, however, is Aggie's idea of sin: uneventful, passive, dry, and passionless. Even in the evenings it's not turned on very often. What she sees now, looking at the screen, is her own self looking back, a furry grey reflection.

Between the day the trunk and she arrived here and the day the television was delivered came the bookshelves. There are more, added over the years, than the teacher started with, and they're loaded now with her own books. Aggie remembers thinking she'd maybe read some of her favorites again someday, perhaps when she was eighty. Now she wonders why she had ever thought she would manage that when there are still so many stories she hasn't read, so many facts she doesn't know. It makes her feel a little frantic.

Maybe when she's ninety the time will come for rereading.

Ninety? What's she thinking of? It's a miracle this body has held up this long; she can hardly expect another decade out of it. If she were a car, she'd be a collector's item, worth a fortune; although she would also have to be restored with some care, and probably with a fair number of spare parts. “I'm just going to drive her into the ground,” people say about their cars. Well, here she is, an old model driving herself into the ground.