Mrs. Kimble (5 page)

The waitress sat at the counter and lit a cigarette. “Lord,” she said to no one in particular. “It’s good to sit.”

Birdie smiled. She’d never learned how to strike up conversations with strangers. Her father did it naturally, casually; he made friends with every waitress, cashier, and salesman in the county. Her mother had been more reserved. Without anyone telling her so, Birdie understood that certain things, while fine for men, were unbecoming to women.

“Lord,” the waitress said again. She was a different type of woman, the kind who talked to strangers all day long. It occurred to Birdie that the world was full of these women: girls who stood behind candy counters, shoveling cashews into tiny bags with an aluminum scoop; salesladies in lingerie departments, who wrapped up your new underclothes in layers of tissue. She had never paid much attention to such women; but suddenly, inexplicably, she envied them.

She glanced at the luncheonette window, at the
HELP WANTED
sign affixed with yellowed tape, the letters barely discernible, faded by the sun. She tried to imagine herself smiling at customers, taking down their orders with a pad and pencil. It seemed almost possible.

The men got to their feet. The older one took out his wallet and left a bill on the counter. “Take it easy, Fay,” he called over his shoulder.

The waitress stubbed out her cigarette. “See you Monday,” she called back. She stacked their dirty dishes on a tray, then reached for the bill the man had left and tucked it into her apron. No, Birdie thought. She could learn to take orders and serve food, but she hadn’t been raised to take strange men’s money. Her mother, if she weren’t dead already, would have died from shame.

Birdie finished her pie and left a dollar on the counter. Outside
the sky was bottle-blue, clear as glass; the sidewalks were busy with shoppers. She caught the bus, crowded now, at the corner. She found a seat next to a stout woman in a flowered hat.

Birdie settled into her seat. The bus was stifling; next to her the woman radiated heat. Across the aisle sat a young couple: the girl buxom and olive-skinned, like an Italian; the fellow blond and husky, a college boy. He leaned over and whispered something in the girl’s ear, making her laugh. His hand rested on her suntanned thigh.

Birdie looked away, at the pedestrians waiting for the light to change, the mannequins gesturing in shop windows. She could almost feel the boy’s hand warming her thigh, his mouth at her ear, his warm breath activating the nerves beneath her skin. Her husband had never touched her in public. He came to her silently at night, careful not to wake his parents on the other side of the wall. She remembered his cold hands under her nightgown, his breath hurried and shallow. Eyes shut tight, he seemed to disappear inside himself like a turtle retracting its limbs. The first few times, at Hambley, he’d withdrawn from her, making a mess on the floor; once they were married he simply left the mess inside her. Afterward he collapsed on the bed, exhausted, his skin perfectly cool and dry. She was mystified by his persistent interest in the act, which amounted to five minutes of intense concentration and a brief spasm that didn’t appear pleasurable. She decided it was hopelessly beyond her, like geometry or algebra, yet another part of life she had failed to grasp.

Birdie glanced back at the couple. They were kissing now, the boy’s hand tangled in the girl’s dark hair. Birdie had never seen, up close, what kissing looked like. She watched, fascinated by the boy’s clutching hands, the soft chewing movements of his jaw.

Next to Birdie the stout woman was looking too. “Heavens to Betsy,” she murmured.

The bus trundled to a stop; a few passengers filed past. The boy and girl hurried to the front of the bus, flushed and giggling, the girl tugging at her short skirt.

“Good riddance,” said the woman in the hat. She shifted indignantly in her seat. “There used to be such a thing as privacy, at least in our day.”

Birdie looked closely at the woman. Her face was heavily powdered; she looked fifty, maybe older. She thinks we’re the same age, Birdie thought. Birdie was twenty-six years old.

The bus stopped at the bottom of the street; the doors opened, admitting a blast of fresh air. Birdie got to her feet and stepped down to the curb, crossed the street, and climbed the hill. The sun heated the dark crown of her hat. She thought of the bottle of wine chilling in the refrigerator, so cold it would make her teeth hurt.

She glanced at her watch. She’d told Miss Semple she’d pick the children up at four. She had another ten minutes.

D
RINKING, SHE THOUGHT
of Evelyn Luck.

She hadn’t thought of Evelyn in years. It was a special gift of hers: the ability to rewrite past disasters, to unhappen them in her mind. The worst debacles, her memory simply refused to record, so that there were periods of her life she barely recalled at all: her mother’s illness, the long months after her death. Birdie’s memories of Missouri stopped after the first year, when the gossip about Ken and Evelyn Luck started.

Birdie had never met Evelyn, but she’d seen her around: a small,
narrow-shouldered woman with smooth dark hair and a sad, beautiful face. Evelyn and her husband were schoolteachers in the town; the year after Charlie was born they came to Ken for marriage counseling. It was a part of the pastor’s job that Birdie couldn’t fathom: strangers telling him their most intimate problems, asking his advice. She often wondered what Ken said to them, how their own short union could have given him any insight into other people’s marriages. Most of the time she didn’t feel married at all. They were apart all day; at night they slept in twin beds, Birdie in the bed that had belonged to Ken’s dead brother.

Ken saw the Lucks twice a week at his office behind the church, a tidy room full of his father’s old books. After a time he started seeing them separately. Once the Lucks had divorced, Evelyn continued to come for counseling, spending hours at a time in the pastor’s office.

At first Birdie ignored the whispers at choir practice, the conversations that stopped when she came into the room. Then, little by little, she retreated. She quit the choir, the Sunday school, the church suppers and rummage sales. Pregnant again, she had a perfect excuse. She was in her fifth month when Ken was called before the parish council and asked to resign.

He never told her what was said at the meeting, and she never asked. He made vague references to wagging tongues, vicious gossip. She nodded sympathetically. That spring he wrote to an old seminary friend who’d become the dean of Pennington College. His parents would get along fine, he explained. By summer they were on the road to Richmond.

Life was different at the college, at least for Ken. He taught two classes a week, theology and Scripture; the rest of the time he spent in his campus office, counseling feuding roommates, arranging
tutors for those failing math. He no longer comforted the sick and dying; instead he served on the Student Life Committee, planning prayer breakfasts and homecoming dances. He grew his hair, bought colored shirts to replace his old white ones. He became friendly with Walter Whitacre, the college president; they sang together in the faculty choir, and Whitacre’s daughter Dinah sometimes baby-sat for Jody and Charlie.

Birdie spent the days alone. To her surprise she missed Ken’s father, the helpless old reverend who’d watched her adoringly while she fed him. She found city life unsettling; walking alone downtown, the sheer volume of strangers intimidated her, the endless parade of faces she’d never seen before and would never see again. She rarely left the house; she had no one to talk to except the students who phoned each day to ask Ken’s advice. Birdie began to recognize certain voices: the stammer, the Texas drawl. A particular girl called often, first several times a week, then every day. “This is Moira Snell,” she announced each time, as if Birdie should recognize her name. Her husky voice became as familiar as that of the weather girl, a plump little blonde who stood in front of a Virginia map on television.

Then one morning the husky-voiced girl came to the house. She looked nothing like the weather girl: she was tall and thin, her eyes rimmed with dark liner, her hair the color of molasses, hanging straight and shiny down her back. She wore blue jeans and a blouse that left her shoulders bare. She wasn’t wearing a bra.

“My husband has already left for work,” Birdie told her; but the girl hadn’t come to see Ken. She looked Birdie right in the eye. Her confidence was unnerving.

She’d come to tell Birdie that she and Ken were lovers.

C
OOKING SMELLS
floated through the open window; next door Mrs. Gleason was preparing dinner. Birdie glanced at the clock. The children, she thought. I have to get the children. She stepped clumsily into her shoes.

The sun hung low in the sky, the feverish end of a hot afternoon. Birdie emerged squinting from the house, her legs soft and unreliable. In front of the house, the trash had piled up. Six, seven bags were heaped at the curb, ripening in the heat. Birdie looked up and down the street. At each neighbor’s house sat a single neat bag.

She crossed the street to the Semples’ and knocked at the door. Miss Semple answered, holding Jody by the hand.

“We were expecting you an hour ago,” said Miss Semple.

Birdie smiled. Her teeth felt thick, her breath fruity. She’d forgotten to rinse with Listerine.

“I’m a little late,” she confessed. “Did they behave themselves?”

“We-ull,” said Miss Semple, her voice trailing off. She stepped back and let Birdie inside.

“What’s the matter?”

“Charlie is under the weather,” said Miss Semple. Behind her Birdie could see through to the sunporch, where a scrub brush sat in a pool of water. “We put him in the parlor.”

“Goodness.” Birdie followed Miss Semple down the dim hallway.

“It was very sudden. I don’t know what came over him.”

The parlor was dark and crowded with furniture: an ornate love seat, a highboy, an old Victrola draped with doilies. In one corner sat a cabinet full of china thimbles. Charlie lay on the brocade sofa holding a metal bucket.

“Sweetheart,” said Birdie. “What happened?” She sat next to him and lay her hand on his forehead. “You’re white as a sheet.”

Charlie looked up at her with watery eyes. “Sick,” he said. His breath was hot and sour. Birdie flushed. She turned to Miss Semple.

“I hope he didn’t.”

“I’m afraid so,” said Miss Semple. The hem of her dress was wet, her face as white as Charlie’s. Nothing in her ordered life had prepared her for the mess of a little boy’s vomit.

“I’m so sorry. I had no idea he was ill.”

Miss Semple’s mouth tightened. “I need to check on Mother. She’s a little upset.”

She went out to the sunporch, her man’s shoes silent on the carpet.

T
HEY CROSSED
the street, Charlie holding Birdie’s hand, Jody grasping the hem of her skirt. Once inside, Birdie sat Jody on the sofa.

“Come on,” she told Charlie. “Let’s get you out of those clothes and into bed.”

“But I’m not sick anymore,” he protested.

She looked closely at him. His color was back, his eyes bright; he seemed perfectly fine. Yet a boy didn’t throw up for no reason.

“Charlie Kimble, what has come over you? Was it something you ate?” She bent down and untied his shoes. “You get right to bed. Later on we’ll give you another bath.”

She tucked Charlie in and went into the kitchen. The heat was oppressive; the empty wine bottle stood alone on the table. An engine rumbled in the distance, growing closer: the garbage truck.
Finally, Birdie thought. She peered out the window just in time to see it cruise past her house and stop in front of the Gleasons’. “For heaven’s sake,” she said aloud. She ran out to the front porch and hurried down the street. A colored man reached for the Gleasons’ trash and tossed it into the back of the truck.

“Excuse me,” she called. “I think you forgot my house.”

The man turned to her, shading his eyes from the sun.

“I live at 507.” She pointed to the house. “No one has picked up my garbage in weeks.”

He squinted at her. “You paid the bill?”

Birdie thought of the basket on top of the refrigerator. “Of course.”

The truck began to move. The man shrugged apologetically and broke into a slow trot behind it. Birdie followed him, her heels sharp on the pavement.

“I can pay you now,” she called, though she couldn’t. “If I pay you now, can you go back for it?”

“Sorry, ma’am. You’ll have to wait until next week.” He hopped onto the back of the truck. His uniform was the same dark green as the trash bags. The truck accelerated and turned at the bottom of the street.

Birdie glanced back at the house, the mammoth pile of trash advertising to the neighbors that she hadn’t paid her bill. A curtain moved in the Semples’ window. Birdie walked quickly back to the house, sure that Miss Semple had seen her running behind the garbage truck. Now what? she thought. Now what will I do?

C
harlie made a slow tour of the neighborhood, cutting through backyards, looking for signs of dogs. The Gleasons had two terriers, the Raskins a toy poodle that stood in the window and yapped whenever Charlie crossed their yard, its jaws snapping soundlessly behind the glass. These dogs were no good to him; they were fed indoors. Other dogs—the Fleurys’ German shepherd, the hounds Mr. Pitt kept for hunting—lived outside, chained to doghouses; but they were big and mean.

He scouted every backyard on his own street, and on the street below. He avoided the Hogans’ yard, afraid Mrs. Hogan would see him through the kitchen window. Finally he approached the Fleurys’ house.

The yard was strangely silent, the German shepherd nowhere to be seen. Charlie crossed the bare patch of dirt to the doghouse, near it a shiny metal bowl. His heart raced. The bowl was full of kibble.

Charlie was bending to fill his pockets when he heard a low
growl, a deep bark. The German shepherd was inside the doghouse, its large head and shoulders filling the small doorway.

He ran.

T
HERE WAS NOTHING
in the refrigerator except a jar of olives; in the freezer, a chicken wrapped in plastic, hard and heavy as a bowling ball. Charlie was near tears. He hadn’t fed the puppies in two days.

His mother came into the kitchen. “What on earth is that smell?”

Charlie looked down at his shoes. He had stepped in something as he ran from the Fleurys’ dog.

His mother looked too. “Go outside and take off those shoes.”

Charlie went out the back door and sat on the steps. He was sitting there when Mrs. Gleason came out of her house holding a pie tin.

“Hi, Charlie,” she called across the fence. “Have you seen the cat?” A striped tomcat had been hanging around the neighborhood; every once in a while someone would give it milk.

“No’m,” said Charlie.

Mrs. Gleason set the pie tin on her patio and went back inside.

Charlie waited. When he could wait no longer, he shimmied through the slats in the fence, into the Gleasons’ backyard. Carefully he picked up the pie tin. It was full of milk. He crossed into the Raskins’ backyard and headed for the woods.