Duet for Three (20 page)

“Such a good girl,” said her customers. “And so smart. You must be proud of her.”

Well, yes, Aggie supposed so. But surely only an idiot could have such a smooth surface, such pale eyes that said nothing; and June was no idiot. Who knew what sorts of explosions might be erupting inside? And these things built up, and eventually were manifested in messy ways. When she stopped to think about it, Aggie viewed June uneasily. Or maybe she was just what she seemed, restrained. Or perhaps God took the brunt of all her passions.

In any case, Aggie was quite busy and had little time to fuss. She did, however, take the time to get books from the library on growing up, in preparation for the necessary talk with June. She tried to wing it a little on the pleasures of marriage, although June seemed neither to absorb nor to appreciate, and Aggie wasn't sure how convincing she'd sounded.

On Saturdays, she made June take over the cash register for a couple of hours while she slipped out to the library. It was good for June to face the business instead of skirting it, hiding away upstairs all the time. Well, of course it was hard on her when her friends came in. June didn't like that: exchanging Aggie's labors for money. She seemed to have some idea that the customers were buying more than bread and cakes, that parts of her were being purchased too. “I do honest work and I make honest money,” Aggie told her, but it didn't seem to make a difference. “And I'm damned proud of it, and you should be too.”

But June wasn't proud, although she was skilful enough at bagging bread and slapping cakes smartly into their fold-up white boxes, and ringing up sales and making proper change. Aggie tried praise, and told her, “You've caught on very quickly,” but June only shrugged and returned to her room.

So what could she have done about the child? June may now complain that she suffered a lack of attention, but she seems to forget that she refused any attention that was offered.

Spending her days mainly in a world of women, Aggie heard great tales of other people's lives. What did men talk about? Sports or business. They called the talk of women gossip. She looked up gossip in the dictionary, where it was said to be “familiar or idle talk; scandal”; and one who gossiped was “a babbler.” To gossip, it said, was “to tell idle tales about others, tattle; chat.”

Enough to make a person suspicious of other definitions. How many words might she have learned from the wrong point of view? As far as she could see, it was sports and business that were idle chat and babbling. Even with her own business to run, she did not find finance very interesting.

The women, her customers, who came in for a loaf of bread and stayed to talk, were the ones who got down to real events. The dictionary had it backwards. It seemed to her something like the difference between the books men wrote and the lives that people really led. All that fictional roaming and leaping from adventure to adventure had very little to do with changes that were really radical.

She remembered the evening she and Neil arrived here, and driving past all those trim houses, assuming that lives were as neat as the lawns; and exploring this house, finding dustballs rolling on the trapdoor leading to the cellar and wondering if elsewhere there might be secret grimy corners also. As the teacher's wife, she'd never known. As Aggie running a bakery, she learned a great deal.

Back when Neil was alive, the man who was now mayor had been merely an alderman. His daughter was in June's class. Aggie had heard the girl boasting once, “My father is going to be in parliament someday,” and June boasting back, “My father is going to be the principal.” Now June's father was only a man who'd been dead a few years, and the other girl's father was mayor, but not likely for long.

“Poor Arnold,” complained his wife, Emily, “he works so hard. So many meetings and long hours.” The eyes of other customers met behind her back. She might know, or not, that poor Arnold, while he might well be enduring long meetings and hours, was also carrying on with his secretary. They had been seen, inevitably; his car in dark lanes and the two of them in unmistakable hideaways outside town. He would not be mayor again; the women had their votes. Emily would suffer too, a loss of pride, perhaps not altogether a bad thing. They would be kind to her afterward, although Aggie suspected that sort of pitying kindness would be the hardest to endure.

And there was Audrey Sullivan, a tiny dark-haired young woman married to a garage mechanic, and well known as a shoplifter. So well known that proprietors of stores all over town watched for her and when they caught her leaving with, perhaps, a pair of stockings tucked into her blouse or a powder compact in her purse, they called her husband, who came and apologized and restored the goods or paid for them, and fetched her home. In the bakery, her small hand stole toward a tray of cookies while Aggie bagged a loaf of bread. Well, what did it matter? Poor Audrey surely ought to be permitted one place where her efforts were successful. What, Aggie wondered, happened at home when Audrey's husband had been called? Did he try to persuade her, did he strike her or did he just sit wearily with his face in his hands? Did she weep and make promises?

What was irritating was that she was so bad at stealing, and never seemed to get better. One would have thought she'd make some efforts to improve. Also there was no discrimination about it: the woman would take anything. As far as she was concerned, apparently, a pair of stockings from the five and dime were as enticing as Aggie's oatmeal cookies.

“Maybe if they had children,” the women said, diagnosing the source of Audrey Sullivan's disease. Did they consider offspring a cure? Or, like hanging, a deterrent? Perhaps only, Aggie thought, that a child imposed an order, a structure, a system, that it was very difficult to escape. Medication for wrong-headed impulses.

Unless, of course, children appeared outside the order, structure, and system. Then they were sin. Girls vanished out west for long visits with distant aunts. Their mothers were regarded uneasily; after all, whose daughter might not grow up to betray? There were so many unsavory pressures, not the least of them secret and sudden impulses toward lust. Bodies were unpredictable, capable of grave errors in moments when judgment was in short supply. Whims led to tragedies.

Aggie pictured prairies dotted with generous aunts, every home with a swelling eastern niece. Where did western daughters go? Not to eastern aunts, apparently. Much more broad-minded out there, people must be.

She smiled to herself, thinking how fortunate she might be, after all, to have a husband who was dead and a daughter who was good.

Elsewhere, she quite realized, people probably discussed her. She had a small curiosity about what they might be saying, but kept herself to herself with the women. Well, if she started, where would she stop? Would she say, “You remember my husband Neil? The teacher? We really couldn't bear each other. My daughter says it's likely my fault he died.” They might know things anyway, just from watching. It was remarkable what they knew. Someone had the flu but would be back on her feet in a couple of days, no doubt. Someone else sprained a wrist, slipping on steps, and came in bandaged, laughing about her clumsiness, although in fact, people said, she drank. Some people got cancer. News of deaths spread like wildfire.

Between customers and in the evenings in her big chair in the front room, Aggie read novels and histories and textbooks. She read about other people's lives, how they managed and how they were seen to have managed. She read about ideas, and about systems of ideas. She decided that people in groups were different from people in ones and twos. Masses became mobs, which had their own rules. Any revolution proved that; or any social gathering. Just she and June in a room together were different, she expected, from either of them apart. Also, she thought, primitive, death-dealing passions, anarchy, always lurked beneath the surface. And even God, if He existed, seemed to act to prove His own divinity. “Listen,” He said, shaking people up when their attention wandered.

She often felt herself stabbing at knowledge in the dark, and sometimes the librarian gave her odd glances, checking out her choices.

Her attention turned for a time to biology. Books on insects were particularly fascinating. Whole tiny lives going on, and whoever noticed them unless they were eating something a person particularly wanted, like the lettuce? Yet there they were, beautiful and grotesque and camouflaged, busy and full of purpose, scurrying and burrowing and chewing and spinning and flying, all, apparently, to the end of surviving. Not for the survival of a single insect, but of the group: all efforts geared to a future that would be geared to another future. Peculiar and single-minded; but it worked. Some books said it would be the insects that would survive any disaster. Where man might vanish, a bug could adapt and thrive. The books also mentioned rhythms of survival among certain animals and insects: that particular intensities of population triggered some form of mass demolition or exploration. Either they killed each other off or they split up to form new colonies.

She moved on to history, discovering it was often the study of the periodic slaughters of war, the winners and the losers, the little bits of land changing hands, whole populations shifting with new conquerors.

To see the eager young men leaving for the war was like watching lemmings, or ants. This impulse to slaughter, this yearning for the scene of death, was puzzling and fascinating, and she read and read, trying to find out what the lure of it might be.

June, on the other hand, took to the war like a duck to water, and became a proper pest about it. In a peculiar way it seemed to cheer her, and certainly unleashed all her do-good instincts. “But Mother,” she told Aggie impatiently, “there are men dying for us over there. Surely you could give up a little time, you could surely make some sacrifices. You might do something.”

But there, Aggie thought. Was she not doing something: trying to work out what might be worth killing for?

Ideas, she gathered; systems. But how could it actually be done? Closing her eyes, she tried to place herself in battle.

Well, she could see it might be possible to drop bombs from a plane. That might not seem real. But how to lie in a hole and take shots at a person whose eyes might even be seen, the shape of a mouth, the way the hair stood up or ears stuck out?

But by then it would be too late. It would be shoot or be shot, just survival.

Surely though, those departing young men couldn't think they were merely going on an outing, like June heading eagerly for her bandage-rolling evenings? They seemed to view it as a game, with dummy bullets, guns made from twigs, like her little brothers playing kill-the-Hun around the yard, during the last war in which her older brother died.

They couldn't imagine, couldn't have understood, that they might die, these young men, fragile, mortal, and eager, marching off to embrace blood. They must have been unable to see their own blood beneath the unbroken flesh.

June, coming home in the evenings satisfied with her contribution, saw the bandages she made as white and pure and crisp. Aggie saw them bloody and pus-filled and stinking, which they would be if they were to be at all useful, and basically, she thought, that must be the difference between their points of view.

June pointed out that these men, on behalf of herself and Aggie and civilization, were lying in muddy trenches thousands of miles away, cold and wet and terrified. She seemed to find this heroic. Aggie thought it astonishing.

In books, war was one thing or another: glorious or flat. In the history books, it was flat: this treaty, that battle, these defeats, this result. In novels it was glorious: these heroes, those victories, that daring, this evil overcome. Romantic and painless. Maybe that was what misled the young men. Maybe they were under the impression that pain, after all, didn't really hurt; or if it did, they would inflict not suffer it.

The women, more intimately acquainted with blood, might have told them something about pain. Why was their pain ordinary and the young men's heroic? Maybe the men just wanted their own blood, to even things out. At least when they got where they were going, they would be occupied, quite busy dodging death, and would have to be impressed by its reality.

But here a woman wept in the bakery, broke down over a loaf of bread. New lines appeared on familiar faces.

The impulse to roll bandages and knit was understandable: they wanted some part in protection, and if they could not knit suits of armor, they would make socks. They were used to protecting their boys and providing comfort. Probably if they could have, they would have stepped in front and stopped the bullets; if for no other reason than habit.

In the books, death was numbers or nobility. In reality it seemed trivial, coming at awkward moments, catching a person in an unprepared pose. Like Neil, frozen gaping like a fish drowning in air.

And how does it come in a nursing home where it must be a daily expectation?

Maybe there she would find out what dying looks like. She has never seen it, and might like to. She would like to scrutinize the disappearance of the spirit, watch a face as that occurs. Because surely there must be something, a clue right at the moment.

It is quite possible, however, that the people there are kept anaesthetized. Maybe instead of achieving their own grace or resignation, they are merely drugged. So then, when they finally doze their way into death, the staff can tell whatever grieving relatives there may be, “Don't worry, there was no pain, she died peacefully in her sleep.” They would call that a natural death. Which is what they will call hers. “She had a full life,” people will say to June. “She had her time.” Not considering it a waste when someone dies after eighty years, not the same thing at all as a young man dying in a war or an accident or from some disease.