Charms for the Easy Life (16 page)

My mother told her that hadn’t happened. She said she told the women to leave and go knit socks for Stalingrad, and then one of them assured my mother that she’d be hearing from her husband. My mother, knowing exactly how gorgeous and smart she was, and how threatening to women like these, announced, “That would be fine with me! I’m home most evenings.” The women herded themselves together like lambs and left.

That night after supper, when my mother had had a chance to calm down, the three of us sat at the kitchen table with my typewriter, Arlene’s letter, and the one the Lumberton boy had dictated to me. My mother and grandmother read them through several times. After a few minutes, my grandmother said, “I know exactly what to say to the girl. Get ready and take this down.”

She began to speak, but my mother interrupted and told her she was concerned that this might be mail fraud.

My grandmother said, “What? What do you think? Hugo’s going to arrest you at the post office?”

My mother thought about Hugo a moment. He presented no danger. He was just a tiny old man who sold stamps and money orders and who had never learned to count change. Sometimes he got lucky, but usually he slid a mix of coins back across the counter and looked away while the customer slid back what was necessary or, if it wasn’t enough, said, “Excuse me, Hugo, but I need another nickel.” Hugo would flush and apologize, chalking the error up to his tendency to think in foreign money. He had taken a Cuban holiday as a young man, and he spent the rest of his life trying to learn Spanish.

This is what my grandmother dictated, stopping every couple of lines to wink at me. It was a grand curse:

My grandmother was enormously proud of this. She and my mother laughed out loud and had me read it back several times.

My grandmother said, “Type his name to it, and be grateful his hands are bound up so he can’t sign it.”

Writing the letter was intrusive and audacious, but it was also a thoroughly practical and seemingly harmless method of vengeance. And there was the matter of getting caught, which in and of itself was rather titillating, as illicit actions naturally are. But I put myself in Arlene’s shoes. Would I write back? Certainly not. I knew she’d never find a little box for that friendship bracelet. I thought she’d keep it in her cheap white ballerina jewelry box, which I suspected she owned, for the two weeks or so it would take her to distance herself from uncomfortable memories, and then she would either wear it and lie about where it came from or give it to a little sister or cousin who would lose it at the playground. Either way, she would feel nothing, or at best, little. Therefore she deserved the letter, even though it wouldn’t shame her. I believed it would embarrass her, though, shame and embarrassment being different only in the degree to which her cheeks would redden and her stomach would churn; and she would tear it up so her mother wouldn’t find it and make her confront the guilt she had long since put in a little box and tied, taped, or nailed shut.

My grandmother told me to roll in another sheet of paper. “We’re going to do the Larvex boy,” she said. She then recited what she believed he would believe to be the truth if it were not for the sparrows:

My grandmother thought this was splendid. I did, too, especially his memory of having been read to as a boy. Everything was designed to make his mother feel better about what had happened. I imagined her reading it, going upstairs to his room, sitting down on his twin bed, no doubt with a cowboy-and-Indian bedspread on it, and crying her eyes out, a good cathartic cry. I liked her immensely. I imagined her bosom wet with her tears, her house perpetually the odor of pine cleanser and peanut brittle, the walls papered in worn trompe l’oeil, her shoes a little down in the heel because she didn’t like to spend money on herself.

After my grandmother sealed the two letters for me to address and stamp, she put her feet up on her ottoman and did what, sadly enough, she was spending more and more time doing lately. She read aloud the names of that week’s enlistees in the newspaper, remarking on the ones she had delivered, telling us what a big baby this one had been or how jaundiced another had been. She would say, “It was very rough. I remember how it was raining when I got there. I remember how the other children played at my feet.” She had delivered many of my classmates. When the list of combat fatalities started to swell, she would read these names aloud also, and when I recognized them, I didn’t think of the young men as ensigns or privates or whatever else they had been when they died. I thought of them as the boy who picked his nose during the senior play or the boy who was caught with French verbs conjugated on his sleeve or the boy who tried to abandon his date at the dance, the one whose wingtips my grandmother had stood on. He died early in the war, having enlisted at the first chance he had. So did the boy who could not for the life of him remember that Samuel Clemens and Mark Twain were the same person and who spoke of this as if it were a conspiracy to confuse him.

I mailed the two letters the next morning. It started snowing that day about noon, a great, blowing snow that stuck, a rarity in the Piedmont of North Carolina. By late in the day, we had six inches of snow. Mr. Baines left work early and risked his neck driving the unplowed roads to our house, no doubt because he knew he wouldn’t be able to get back into town after sunset. He walked with us down the road to a going-away party for a boy named Nathaniel, who was due to leave for training camp the following morning. I remember the gift we brought, a tooled leather wallet with a five-dollar bill inside.

Nathaniel had been two years ahead of me in high school, and although we had lived down the road from each other all our lives, he had never said more than a handful of words to me. He would get on the school bus with his head down, sit by himself, and gaze out the window. He was crippled by shyness. He never went forward to receive his perfect-attendance certificates at school. He’d just sit there when his name was called, and I could see the principal laying the certificate to the side, thinking, Oh yes, he’s the shy boy. Whenever I spoke to him, his face would suddenly become blotchy, as if I had reached out and slapped him hard on both cheeks. I could all but hear his heart pounding in his throat. A couple of times his mother sent him to our house to borrow things, and he’d blurt out what he’d come for, snatch it, and run like a thief back across our yard.

His father bullied him into enlisting, for all the usual reasons—to put hair on his chest, to make a man out of him, to stop him from being a sissy. His mother forced this reception on him for the same reason she had organized birthday parties he didn’t want. She meant to bring him out of himself. His father chose that night to bring him out of himself also, pouring mint juleps into his son, making him so sick that he vomited, fell while running to the bathroom, vomited again, fell again, and then repeated the process until he was finally down the hall with the bathroom door shut behind him. My grandmother went after him and made him let her in. She stayed with him in the bathroom for an hour, fending off his parents at the door, saying, “You caused him to heave, now let him heave!” I remember my mother’s whispering into my ear: “Now we know why the South lost the war.”

This was the first time Mr. Baines spent the night at our house. My mother made a big show of fixing up the guest room for him, knowing all the while that as soon as my grandmother and I were asleep either she or Mr. Baines would take a trip down the hall. Many times before, he had stayed until he believed we were asleep. I would hear him and my mother sneak down the hall, and an hour or two later I would hear them sneak back the other way, and then hear the door shut and his car start. My grandmother rolled her eyes at all the commotion of fluffing pillows and adjusting the radiator, telling me, “Why they haven’t slipped up yet is beyond me. He must be fixed.”

The next day it snowed again. Mr. Baines was stranded at our house for the duration. My mother was gleeful. They could play house. My grandmother and I couldn’t drive the thirty minutes to the hospital, so we hung about and watched my mcther leading him through all the activities she believed a happy modern couple would do together. They used up all the rationed sugar to bake cookies. They used all the cream to make eggnog, and all the molasses to make a ginger cake. They danced in broad daylight, and mixed martinis for the lot of us and served them in our best crystal. It was like being at camp for adults. My mother would sip her martini and gaze out the window, wishing for more snow.

Lassiter Mill Pond was frozen again, and when my mother and Mr. Baines had run out of things to do indoors, they announced that they were taking the dining room chair back out there. My grandmother told them that this was foolish and dangerous and that their reason had been distorted by what she called their “unrelenting boozing before sunset.” She doubted the pond was frozen hard and deep enough to support their weight. They went anyway. I got my grandmother’s coat and the two of us followed them to the car, my grandmother telling Mr. Baines as she crawled into the backseat, “Somebody needs to be there to pull you two out.” I wasn’t so much worried about the ice’s cracking and taking them under as curious to see my mother in full motion on the pond, legs up and head back.

The frozen pond did support them, and the exhilaration my mother felt came to me, it seemed, in a correspondent breeze of the sort Wordsworth wrote about. It filled my chest, all my mother’s happiness blown directly into me. This was also happening to my grandmother. I could tell by the way she stared at them. I imagined her memories of watching my mother as a child, sitting at the kitchen table with her Blueback Speller, learning hard words with such joyous ease. I imagined my grandmother’s memories of all the times my mother had pleased her, supremely. This was one of those times.

The old man who shined shoes at Poole’s Pie Parlor appeared at the pond, with a bucket, a pole, and a camp stool. He stood at the edge of the pond, looked over to my grandmother and me and waved, and then pointed to my mother and Mr. Baines to let us know he thought they were a fine sight. We waved back to let him know we felt the same. Then he proceeded out toward the center of the pond, and when he was no more than four feet away from the bank, the ice cracked and he went down quickly, as if something underwater had jerked him hard by his pants leg. All four of us fell into motion. Mr. Baines got the jumper cables from his car, ran and lay on the side of the pond, and tossed one end of the cables into the hole. My grandmother took off her coat and instructed my mother and me to do the same.

Two young women, exquisitely dressed for a weekday walk on the path beside the pond, came over to watch. My grandmother looked at them for the few seconds it took her to realize that they weren’t going to offer their coats and she wasn’t going to waste her energy begging them. And then she stood by Mr. Baines’s feet, clapping her hands together, shouting in rhythm as she clapped, “Take it! Take it!” After the miserable eternity of three or four minutes, we saw hands at the top of the ice. We all yelled for the man to hang on as Mr. Baines pulled him with the cable, hand over hand, to the bank.

When the man was safely out of the water, my grandmother fell to work on him. She tucked our coats around him, and then tilted his head back, ran her finger around inside his mouth, tilted his head back even farther, and checked his throat. When she took her finger out, it was coated with wadded plant matter, which she shook off over to her side, directly onto the stocking of one of the onlookers. The woman hissed, “Oh, please,” and borrowed a handkerchief from her companion to wipe her leg. My grandmother got down on her knees behind the man’s head and told Mr. Baines to ride his chest and pump it between her blows. She put her mouth over the old man’s. She and Mr. Baines worked on him for another miserable eternity; finally his eyes opened and he coughed until my grandmother told him to stop before his throat became too raw. She told him how to breathe. “Look at me,” she said. “Do what I do. You have to get back in charge of yourself.”

The two women left. They ambled back along the path. It was as if they had just watched handlers unloading animals off a circus train and one of them had accidentally stepped in something unpleasant. Did they go home and tell their husbands? Did they dream about it? For years after this incident, thinking about the two of them caused a neuralgia to grip my neck and shoulders that could be mitigated only by imagining them trapped in unhappy homes with husbands, children, pets, and servants who bristled when they passed.