Duet for Three (3 page)

It's a wonderful thing to sit on a toilet in a warm room instead of hurrying through darkness to a smelly outhouse. Of course this is something she should have thought about the other night, not now, when it's too late.

She's never been free to travel, but she imagines how astonishing it must be to move among continents in a matter of hours, not weeks.

But the real change is choice. In her day, Aggie could not have seen a way to break the pattern, to say no, and Frances can. That seems a greater leap than a mere journey from, say, the earth to the moon. Travelling between continents and planets, that's just a matter of technology, wires in the right places and certain calculations. But being able to say no as well as yes, that is progress, that is revolution.

She's of two minds, however. All this change has also brought a loss of sorts. There is something to be seen in old photographs: a quality in even the oldest of them that she doesn't see in pictures now, despite improvements in cameras and film. What it may be is that, as the clarity of sharp, distinguished color and form has grown, the clarity of character has diminished. The old photos may have turned brown, the faces faded, the tinted cheeks may no longer be so rosy and the poses may be stiff and formal, but there is something riveting about them: in the squarer jaws, the sterner faces, the stonier eyes. Those pictures do not show people who think anything is easy.

They have simplicity, perhaps, but never ease.

Aggie herself is in some of these photographs, a child, a girl, almost a woman. She would have trouble interpreting now the small, sharp brown face of her childhood or her youth. A picture of her now would be blurred, lacking edges.

There is one that marks the dividing line between her childhood and adulthood. She was eighteen. Sylvia was married by then to a young farmer from down the road. Her mother said, “Will, we should get everyone together for a photograph. They'll soon be all grown up.”

So everyone dressed in Sunday clothes, the horses were hitched, and they went to town, to the photographer's, nervous, giggling, conscious of appearance. This was unusual, since spending time before a mirror signified vanity, but for this one event, pride in appearance became a virtue. Aggie blushed when the photographer said, “Fine-looking family you've got here,” and thought he was looking particularly at her.

That photograph that marks the final moment of her being young shows a girl who is slender, high-cheekboned, rosy-tinted, looking solemnly at the camera, sitting beside Edith, with the others — the two remaining brothers, Sylvia and her husband, and their parents — grouped around. Her face contains some delicacy, fragility, and hope. It's not exactly a joyous face, but there is strength and sturdiness in it, and in the straightness of the spine.

That slim girl's heart is the same heart that now pounds so hard against layers of flesh. Where is the connection? She might be inside Aggie now, buried away in there, struck still by time, protected in the past. Rather the way it was when she was expecting June, keeping someone fragile and not ready for life yet safe inside.

The girl in that picture had three wishes: to marry, to be a mother, and to be free in her own grown-up life. And how many people have made three wishes and had them all come true? Is she not extraordinarily fortunate, to have made three wishes and had them granted?

All very well in a fairy tale, of course; something else in life.

Or, as Frances would say, “Oh Grandma, what a fuck-up.”

FOUR

June works in the evenings, as her father used to, at the dining-room table. A brass floor lamp behind her chair casts light over her left shoulder, the way it should to avoid eye-strain. She has to be increasingly careful about such things; all sorts of bad things may happen, not least of them failure of the eyes. Blind, she could not teach, would have no job, would be poor and would starve. The smallest things, like a poorly placed light, can have catastrophic results.

It may all be the will of God (and He has a way of testing with disaster), but she foresees possibilities, accidents. She might be walking home from school and a car loaded with the sort of young louts that hang around on street corners, the kind she crosses the road to avoid, might career around a corner, missing the turn, and roll up onto the sidewalk right where she is, crushing her. She can hear her own bones cracking. “You're all skin and bones, June,” Aggie has always said, making it sound as if June is too insubstantial to survive, and there are circumstances, such as that speeding car, in which that would be the case.

But taking one of the rickety old buses the town runs also has its hazards. Sometimes, if she is loaded down with packages or groceries, she does take one the few blocks home from downtown. She feels fairly well protected in a bus, since it would take quite a crash to do much damage. But how careful are the mechanics hired to maintain them? The brakes or steering might fail at any instant. Who knows the intricacies, the potentials for failure, in a piece of machinery like a bus? June might be killed. Worse, she might be crippled in some painful way. And who would look after her then? Not Frances, for sure. Frances is not the sacrificing kind. She will not do for June what June has done for Aggie.

Even sitting indoors is unsafe. Even a sturdy old brick house doesn't offer much protection against someone who decides she and Aggie are vulnerable. June keeps the drapes closed at night and makes sure the doors are locked. Still, anyone could get in, smashing a window or doing some clever criminal thing with the locks. There may be rumors that the two of them keep cash in the house, it's the sort of story that goes around about women on their own. And aside from that, there is random violence. It may be pretty well unknown around here, but she reads about it in the newspapers and sees it on TV. Aggie would be no help. And terrible things could happen to June. She may be aging, but she is not yet old, and men are animals.

She prays to God for protection. But faith is a two-edged sword, inviting His testing. There are times when she feels like a regular Job, and while God may move in mysterious ways, the results can sometimes appear, even to a faithful human eye, peculiar as well as wondrous.

Pending terrible events, however, she has to get through each day. Tonight she has marked the arithmetic test she gave today. Three children have failed. It is depressing and irritating, when she has explained a thing so clearly, how often they don't hear, or can't be made to understand. Some classes, of course, are better than others, and some years are better than others. But there's always at least one small, impenetrable mind.

Can she really have spent almost forty years at this?

Finished, she puts the tests and tomorrow's lessons in the big leather briefcase that belonged to her father. He used it for the same purpose, and the wide strap over the top is worn thin, the holes for the brass buckle have grown large with age and use, and the buckle itself is scratched and worn, not shiny the way it was when he used it. Still, it's remarkable how it's held up, how well things used to be made.

Aggie has been very quiet tonight. A while ago, June heard her shifting in the front room, but there's been silence for a while. George will likely come tomorrow, and Aggie may be thinking about that. It's too bad, but what can she expect? Although this morning the sheets were dry.

Standing in the doorway between the dining room and the front room, June sees only the back of her mother's head; the rest of her is encased in the old easy chair. June would have liked to throw it out years ago, it got so shabby, and of course had no springs left at all, from years of taking Aggie's weight, but Aggie refused. “It fits me,” she said, and by then it did, like a dress, her body filled it up so thoroughly. “We'll just have it refinished.” Which would have hidden its shabbiness, if not its shape, but then Aggie spoiled it, insisting on a light yellow pattern with tiny flowers, which looks ridiculous. It's as absurd as decking Aggie out in lace and feathers.

She must have dozed off. June can see her head nodding, and there are periodic snorts as it jerks and she almost wakens. As a moment between them, it's almost peaceful; but only because Aggie is asleep.

Aggie's hair is white. She used to wear it wrapped in tidy braids around her head. At night before she went to bed she brushed it out, and when it was down she looked like an entirely different person, someone soft. June rarely saw her that way, but when she did, was startled at the way Aggie would be regarding herself in the mirror: as if she were seeing someone else.

Since Aggie has gotten old, however, and since the hair has turned white, and since weight combined with age has left her unable to deal with all the brushing and twisting and pinning up involved in braiding, and because June certainly doesn't have time for that sort of nonsense, her hair has been cut short. It seemed, when it was done, with the lengths of soft white hair spread across her lap, amputated from its roots, that Aggie might weep. But now she has a permanent every six months to keep it waved and curled, and it's quite easy to deal with.

Coming up behind, June sees that Aggie's hair has become not only white and short and waved, but thin. There are small pink patches where the scalp is showing through. It's odd, skin where there should not be skin. June has an impulse to place her hands over those naked places on her mother's head.

But Aggie is abruptly awake, turning to see what's behind her, alerted either by her own breathing or by a sense of her daughter coming up on her. From the front, June sees what she usually does: a fat, old, greedy woman.

“George may come tomorrow, so you should probably have a bath tonight. You'll want to be clean.”

Breasts flap and belly droops, thighs roll and calves quiver, as Aggie ripples into the tub and out. Once in, June only has to wash her back, and her legs from the knees down. Aggie can manage the rest herself, might almost manage the whole thing herself, except that it is just that shade too risky. Bending to put the plug in the drain, she might topple. It's difficult for her to undress herself. And in that one teetering moment of stepping in, her balance could be just slightly off, and for someone Aggie's size, being only slightly off balance could be something like a tree blowing down.

So June's arm must be there to support the weight if it's needed; and what would she do if Aggie really did crash? Be crushed beneath, no doubt. Also, there is something backward and unnatural about a daughter caring for a mother. It ought to be the other way around; but then Aggie has always been contrary.

And maybe, after all, this is only how things round out: someone who fed and diapered and bathed comes, at the other end, to being fed and diapered and bathed. It hasn't come quite to that yet. The last thing to go will be Aggie's ability to feed herself. When she can't reach for food, she'll really be on her last legs.

Going to bed and waking up the next morning, June feels a subterranean excitement, a sort of thrumming, like Christmas when she was a little girl, when her father was alive.

That was a childish pleasure, of course. She would go downstairs when he called to her on Christmas morning and find gifts that were concrete, specific, and desired: a doll, a game, a dress. On this day, when George may come, there should also be a gift, but a grown-up kind: an event, or a movement toward an event. That is more subtle and not something that can be touched, but far greater than a doll. Harder to grasp, as well.

Today she can manage anything; which is as well, since it's happened again.

“Oh, Mother.”

Poor, miserable Aggie. She looks smaller in defeat. June has sometimes wondered why her mother can't be like other old people, who get quiet and shrink and seem to curdle a little inside their bodies, whereas Aggie has only increased, in size and volume.

Now George can hardly say, “Aside from her weight, she's healthy as a horse, for somebody her age.” And Aggie cannot tell her favorite death-defying joke. “Isn't it wonderful,” she likes to say, “that I'm dying in perfect health?”

Now her sins accumulate, and she surely has to shrivel.

“Never mind, Mother. Come on, let's get you up.”

There is more kindness than unkindness in her this morning. But would there be if she did not detect freedom in these sheets?

Aggie is bewildered. “I don't understand.” She looks so helpless.

“It's all right, it's probably something simple and George'll be able to fix you right up. Now let's get you cleaned up and dressed.”

It's quite a thing, not loving. Once, Aggie accused June of being un-Christian.

“Whatever do you mean? Of course I'm a Christian.”

“No, June, you're pure Old Testament, all judgment and revenge. What about charity?” Charity, Aggie said, was love.

But love, which is supposed to conquer all, could hardly manage the Everest of Aggie. Of course, there are different sorts of love, but all that means is that there are also different sorts of failures to love.

The love of a daughter for a mother, that's one. But how is it possible with a force like Aggie, who has dipped into June's life, rummaging around, taking out anything she wanted? Like Frances. And what has she given? She may claim that when June was a baby, her hands not only fed and diapered, but also held and comforted. She says that when June cried, she danced and sang with her. June would not say her mother is a liar, but she has no sense that those gestures ever occurred. At best it is true that Aggie rarely struck her.

What has Aggie's charity been? She has had only power and pride, and now, standing mute and humiliated while June strips off her nightgown, no longer those.

Then there is Christian love. But Aggie has always been too massive, too present, to love in that general way that seems, in practice, to be mainly a sort of intense goodwill.

The best that can be done in the same house with Aggie is survive. It's like one of those slow tortures practised in wars, or in one of those dirty little countries to which the missions send used clothes: someone with a knife, just breaking the skin of a victim here, now there, all over but just a little, so that there are only small oozings of blood and the trick is to see how long it takes to bleed to death.

Well, June has no intention of bleeding to death.

“We'll put something especially nice on you today, shall we, Mother? Because George may be coming?”

She doesn't really mean to frighten Aggie, but it is intriguing, this little power of words. Once again the sheets go downstairs to the washer, and later the mattress will be turned again. She must stop somewhere today and buy a plastic sheet. Nothing will happen overnight to move her toward freedom. Well, nothing new will happen overnight. But she can see the end, if not quite the form getting there will take.

She leaves a subdued Aggie sitting in the front room, a plate of date squares and a book beside her. It's odd, but interesting, how she is.

But interesting is Aggie's sort of word, her kind of cruelty, surely, not June's. It's the word Aggie uses when something, usually unpleasant, has happened and she has thought about it and decided how it felt and what she learned: and then pronounced it interesting. When her own husband, June's father, died, Aggie would have been sitting downstairs after the funeral thinking the whole thing had been quite interesting. June doesn't actually remember that, since she was upstairs mourning in her own room at the time, but she is quite sure that's what would have happened.

As far as June can tell, interesting is good enough for Aggie, all that can be asked.

Maybe when June is free, she will be able to concentrate on her own hope, which is for salvation. She may spend her freedom in contemplation, rather than in good works. They are equal in the sight of God, she understands. After all this, she would be able to stand quite a few years of silence and peace. Meanwhile, there are moves to be made. June's step, heading to school, is light and brisk, and her thoughts are turned more to plans than prayers.

With Aggie gone, she will redecorate. She will change all the walls, all the sprightly wallpaper and light colors. She will search down beyond varnish and paint to the rich, dark wood of the banisters and baseboards.

She will also put extra locks on the doors, although what difference the absence of Aggie will make to her safety she can't tell. But she will be alone, and there is, after all, something about Aggie's bulk that seems to offer some protection.

How different it would be, having breakfast in silence; maybe having no breakfast at all, no need to bother. And to come home to quiet, no jabbings or reminders or responsibilities.

From almost a block away, she can hear the uproar of the schoolyard. In a few moments she will have to be a teacher, her daily transformation that requires a straightening of the spine and a tightening of the face, achieving the sternness that protects.