Eden Close (10 page)

"Don't get up," he said.

He looked down the bench and saw a jacket on the other side of Sean. Leaning behind his friend, he jerked the jacket off the bench, casually laid it on his lap, and then he slipped it to Eden.

She tied it around her waist, knotting the arms in front.

"Hey, look," Andy said to Sean, who was absorbed in the game. "Eden's sick to her stomach." He was surprised how easily the lie came to him. "I'm taking her home. Put Warren in for me, OK? He's been dying to play first." Sean nodded absently without looking at Andy.

Andy turned to Eden. He hesitated. Then he said: "You know what's going on?"

She shrugged. "I guess."

They walked home the two miles from the playground diamond, each carrying a glove, Eden with the jacket tied around her waist. He punched his glove repeatedly, sometimes arced his arm in a pantomine of a pitch. Neither spoke of the reason why they were walking home before the game was finished. Neither mentioned that Andy needn't have come with her. Indeed, Eden hardly said a word. He thought she must be embarrassed, so he tried to talk of other things, tried for a tone just this side of flippant, but there were long pauses in his monologue.

When he thinks about that walk now—now, twenty years later—it is not embarrassment he feels (he smiles to think of their awkwardness and of her delicacy); rather it is sadness that overtakes him. For though she was young and tongue-tied, though she was barely able to negotiate this strange and bewildering matter, he has no doubt now that it was, for Eden, her last pure day of childhood.

 

T
HAT SUMMER
she quit the team, quit playing sports. She gave no explanation save that she found them "boring"—an
explanation that puzzled Andy. For though he, too, was reaching puberty—with his broken voice and faint mustache—he felt himself to be essentially unchanged, still passionate about hockey and baseball, still tied to his friends like a brother. He was busy days with his first summer job—at the dairy, unloading the trucks as they came in, setting up the bottles for the washer. In the evenings, after supper, in this second summer they had together, he and Eden sometimes played catch or escaped from doing the dishes into the fields. But they bickered for the first time. He said he thought her newly pierced ears were barbaric; she stubbed out a cigarette and called him "an infant." She teased him when he couldn't name the Top Ten, and he accused her of doing nothing all day but lying in her plastic chaise longue in the backyard, listening to the radio. That was not all she did, she said, and showed him earrings and rings she'd shoplifted from the Woolworth's in the next town. She got on the bus in the mornings, she said, and got off when she felt like it. She said she'd try for a Timex for him next time, and he said, irritably, "Don't bother." In truth, he was horrified. Stealing frightened him. Finding a ten-dollar bill on the floor of a truck he was emptying just the week before, he'd sought out the driver at once; simply holding the ten had made him feel guilty.

She wore shorts and halter tops and was developing a backyard tan. She curled her legs under her when she talked, and when she smoked, she sometimes absentmindedly ran the tips of her fingers along her arm up to her shoulder and back again. The gesture mesmerized him. She was letting her hair grow out, and she had painted her nails.

By September, the transformation was complete. He remembers the first day of school that year, waiting for the bus. She was late. He could see the vehicle, a yellow dot in the distance, making its way along the straight road from
town. He turned and cupped his hands around his mouth and shouted toward her house:
Eden.

She came around the corner from the back stoop; not running as she would have in the spring, but swaying lightly from side to side, adjusting the strap of a pocketbook on her shoulder. Before she met his eyes, he saw a slow smile crawl across her face. She was enjoying his bewilderment. Out of her mother's sight, she opened her pocketbook and took out a tube of lipstick. She parted her lips slightly and removed a speck at the corner of her mouth. He had never seen her wear lipstick before. Her hair was combed to the side and hung in a long curve across one eye. She was wearing a straight tight black skirt, but it was her blouse that plunged him momentarily into the red heat of confusion. It was a white short-sleeved shirt with a collar—a schoolgirl's blouse or a shirt you'd wear to camp—except that the cotton was thin and he could see that beneath the shirt she was wearing a bra. Her breasts had sprouted overnight, it seemed, too fast for her small frame; they pushed against the fabric. The bus came lumbering to a stop. Quickly, he climbed the steps, walked past several boys he knew and sat on an empty seat close to the window. Too late, he realized his mistake.

In the spring, she'd have sat down beside him, with more of a thwack than you'd have thought possible from her tiny body, and would have said, through the clicking of her gum, where the fuck did he get that wimpy shirt, and he'd have shrugged and felt OK, for it
was
wimpy—a thin white shirt with shiny stripes on it—and he was wearing it only this once, to please his mother, who had bought it the week before.

Instead he watched the leer of the driver and the astonishment of the other boys as this creature he felt he no longer knew at all made her way down the aisle, holding her own as the bus lurched forward, grasping with her fingers the
metal bars above the leather seats. Then he saw a brief flash of painted nails and heard the swish of her skirt sliding on the leather seat behind him. He stared out the window, furious with her.

He felt in his mouth, for the first time in his life, the metallic taste of betrayal and longing. With it came the knowledge that the shape of things you had known and trusted as certain could be twisted, overnight, out of recognition.

 

I think you know. I think, of all of them, you're the only one who knows. You talk like you don't know, but I think you do.

I hear you scraping, scraping, and then you move the ladder. My window is always open. My world is what I hear. I can tell you exactly what time of day it is just by the sounds outside the window.

My life is nothing but this.

She washes my hair. She bends my head back in the sink. Her hands are rough. I am like an old person she has to care for.

I listen to your voice and T.J.'s. His is full of lies. You can hear them when he laughs. He once was in a car with me, and I let him touch my breasts. I opened my blouse, and there were other boys with him. I bet he never told you that.

There was a shimmer on the water. You sat on the ground with your knees up. Your arms were on your knees. You were growing your hair long to go away to school, you said. I made you look at me.

I said, Afraid?

You shook your head.

You said
I
might have been your sister.

T
HE WALK IS SHORT, SEVENTY FEET
. T
HE LAWN IS DRYING
, and he could even now be mowing it. He thinks:
In an hour, I'll be doing that.

He has washed, changed into a pair of khaki pants and a dress shirt, rolled to the elbows. He walks with his hands in his pockets, a walk he made unthinkingly a thousand times in his youth. He heard her car in the drive when he was washing up in the bathroom, and the faint clatter of a screen door; like clockwork, she is home at two-fifteen each day. A dozen large rosy-brown hydrangea blossoms are strewn along the top of the long grass by the drive; the small tree, he notes again, took a beating during the electrical storm in the night. He can't imagine it will last much longer now. His mother planted it the year she and his father bought the house, forty years ago at least, and he has always associated it with his mother, its lush growth with her well-being. Now it seems to him its foliage has grown too dense for its spindly trunk and must soon topple over.

His heart is beating too fast when he reaches the back stoop. Annoyed, he takes a deep breath and squares his shoulders. When he puts his foot on the first step, he feels it
give—as if it had accustomed itself all these years only to her weight and could not bear a pound more. It has been nineteen years since he entered this house—and he is aware, as he raps quickly on the frame of the screen door, that he is stepping again into a scene from the past, even though he knows, from the encounters of the last several days, that it won't feel at all as he has remembered it.

She comes to the door at once, wary, then alarmed. Their eyes involuntarily flicker away from each other, in the manner of people who do not like each other much but feel compelled to be polite.

"Andy," she says, not opening the door.

"I came to say hello to Eden," he says almost too brightly, and with this greeting, he opens the door and steps up into the kitchen. Edith backs away from him.

"Eden's asleep," she says quickly.

She is still wearing the pinkish-gray silk dress she had on earlier, a color that immediately begins to fade as he follows her away from the bright sunlight of the doorway into the kitchen. The shades are drawn over the sink and over the window facing the drive, a detail he has not noticed before, coming and going in his car. The effect is of a kitchen shut up for a season, waiting for the summer people or the new tenants to enter. He has a powerful urge to raise the shades with a snap, to see her kitchen and her face in the sunlight.

"I keep them closed to shut out the heat," she says, noticing his glance toward the window. "It's cooler that way."

He stands in the center of the linoleum floor, waiting for his eyes to adjust to the interior dusk, waiting for a cue, but she gives none.

"May I sit down?" he asks.

With an odd nervous movement of her hands, she indicates the: chair. She offers to make him a glass of iced tea. She is at the sink and then the refrigerator, getting ice, her back to him still.

"Thank you for everything you did for my mother," he says, although he is not entirely sure exactly what was done.

"I feel badly about your mother," she says, turning now with two tall glasses in her hands. "I ought to have seen it coming on. She did say once she had headaches. And in June, I was in the market when Carol—you remember Carol Turner—Carol said your mother had nearly fainted in the store just the day before. But I thought it was the heat, not a spell."

A
spell.
He hasn't heard the word used this way since he lived at home and his mother spoke of his grandmother-to make him understand why she was sick and couldn't see him.
She has these spells, Andy,
his mother said. And so had his own mother, only there'd been no one at the house to know.

"We see them in the patients at the nursing home," she says. "They're small strokes, and there's medication that can be given. And I should have realized..."

"It's not your fault," says Andrew. He takes a sip of iced tea. It has been made from a powdered mix. It has sugar in it, which he doesn't like. Now that his eyes are adjusting, the color is coming up on the walls: a pale green he remembers now, a green of hospitals or of government buildings. He recalls that this particular shade of green, reflecting off the walls, changed the color of your skin. Or was it his mother who said that, shaking her head critically, and he noticed it himself later, coming for Eden or to collect his weekly money? A sickly green, he thinks now, though the effect is muted without the light.

The kitchen is like his mother's in its layout, and both
have the same rounded Magic Chef stoves, but there is otherwise little resemblance. There are no signs on the counters or on the table to indicate that anyone ever cooks here, or ever comes here—not a crusted sugar bowl, not a toaster oven with crumbs on the bottom tray, not a misshapen pot-holder made by a child. On the wall beside the fridge, where in his mother's kitchen there is a framed collage of snapshots—most of them Billy as a baby—there is only a plastic wall clock. And most disconcerting of all, though perhaps troubling only to Andrew, who has missed the intervening nineteen years of the evolution of this house, there is no sign that Jim was ever here—not a trace. Always, he remembers, there were coats and felt hats on the hooks at the back of the door, a row of heavy leather shoes by the stove, a pile of magazines on the table—
Life, Reader's Digest, Popular Mechanics
(this last a family joke in his own house)—and Jim's bowl of fruit, ready to be peeled, never empty. Not only is there now no fruit in the room; there is not a hint of anything edible at all. Perhaps it's different in the bedroom upstairs. He thinks of his father's dresser in his own mother's bedroom, kept intact, as though any minute his father might come back and need the items on the linen runner. The windows, he notices, have no curtains on them—just the shades. He tries to recall if this was always true.

"You'll be selling, then," she says. She takes a sip of iced tea. He remembers this trait of hers: how she is able to conduct entire conversations without ever once looking at you. He forces himself to study her face, and in doing so sees again, in the dim light, as has been happening of late, the woman she used to be, the profile more defined, superimposed over the face across the table.

"Well, I'll have to sell," he says, knowing his steady gaze is making her uncomfortable. "There's no reason now to keep it."

"No," she says, touching her hair at the nape of her neck. "No, I suppose not. Though with new people coming..."

She doesn't finish her thought. Andrew repeats what he has said earlier. "I'm doing some things to tidy up the place—not much; just cosmetic, really. It's no trouble to lend a hand here too, while I'm at it. The grass, of course. And your back stoop needs fixing. It's dangerous. You could break your leg on it. And I could put back that shutter that's fallen from the upstairs window."

"Oh," she says, taken aback. "No. Not the shutter. I ... I haven't got it. And it's not necessary. The steps, if you like, yes. I'll pay you, of course."