Eden Close (11 page)

"I couldn't—"

"I'll pay you," she says, cutting him off.

Her face, her aged one, comes clearly into focus. Beneath a faint dusting of powder, he sees a delicate calligraphy of lines around her eyes. Her eyes are hard to look at, but he would say, in telling someone about her (which he thinks fie may never have done), that she is still quite handsome. It is not simply that she has aged well (she seems not to have the deep scoring that so changed his mother's face these last several years); it is, rather, a particular something she holds in reserve—her shoulders held back—that something patient and waiting. He thinks, too, about all the longing there was inside her, so intriguing for a boy, from a distance, to observe. Where does it all go to, he wonders, when the person you long for dies?

He turns his gaze away from her. Despite the years, despite his discomfort here, he has a strangely familiar sense of this room. Sometimes when he dreams, this kitchen is the setting. The characters are ones who don't belong here: his boss at work; Billy; a woman he has seen that day turning a corner. They gather in this kitchen; or there will be, in the
middle of another dream, a shift in place, so that he is here with them, unfolding a plot begun elsewhere.

"How is Eden?" he asks suddenly. His voice is louder than he has intended.

She looks at the sink. "Eden is not well. She tires easily." The sentence sounds rehearsed, or oft repeated.

"I'd like to see her," he says recklessly.

She shakes her head. "It would upset her."

"I wouldn't upset her. I would just..." He searches for a word. "Visit."

"Well, not today." She rattles the cubes in her glass, and her mouth tightens. She raises her chin.

"Why not?"

"She's sleeping. And I've found that memories from the past upset her," she says. "I have to contend with that for days." She brushes an imaginary strand of hair from her forehead.

"But does she see anyone?" he asks. (His persistence surprises him. Why is he being so rude? But he is in it now and cannot stop.) "Does she go anywhere? There must be programs, centers for the blind."

She stands up and rinses her glass at the sink. "I'm a
nurse,
" she says, with emphasis on the last word, as if that should settle the matter. As if trying to make him again the neighbor's child. "As you must know, Eden
was
away for several years in the beginning, but we've found she does better with me here. We have a quiet life, and it suits her."

He is about to quiz her once more, when above him he hears a sound, like that of a chair leg scraping against the floor. Or he imagines that he hears a sound. Edith Close says nothing; he examines her to see if she, too, has heard anything. Then he hears another sound, the weight on the floorboards of footsteps moving from one side of the room to the other. Eden's room, in the corner, is above the kitchen. Or does she have another room now?

Edith Close walks to Andrew and holds her hand out for his glass. "Will five dollars an hour be enough?" she asks.

He looks up at her. He sees no point in protesting. He knows she won't let him do the work without an arrangement of some kind. He says,
Fine.
He gives her the glass, which is still nearly full. "And there will be lumber for the steps," she adds. "Shall I give you some money now?"

He shakes his head. He knows she wants him to go.

He stands up, and as he does so, he hears music from a radio. He freezes and listens. It is definitely a radio. She hears it too; he sees her shoulders hunch almost imperceptibly, as if wishing to ward off the sound. He thinks he hears a phrase of "Glory Days," then silence, then the voice of a disc jockey. He looks at the ceiling.

She touches him, a hand on his elbow, and the touch startles him. Her fingers are cold on his skin.

"I have to see a patient," she says, guiding him toward the door.

And though he knows this can't be true, and though he wants to say that Eden must now be awake, her touch—that cold, unwelcome touch—makes him feel as if he
were
a boy again, eager to get away, to be gone from the dark kitchen.

She walks him to the door. The radio voice follows them, seems distinctly louder, in fact.

"Thanks for the iced tea," he mumbles.

He backs down the steps with something like a wave, and she quickly closes the door. He forgets the rotting stoop, and with his weight, the bottom step cracks. He nearly falls backward onto the gravel, awkwardly catching himself on the railing. When he turns, his hands are shaking. He thrusts his fists into his pockets to collect himself.

He is almost to his own back stoop when he feels a prickling at the back of his neck. He stops and turns quickly.
One, two. He sees first, at the edge of a shade in the kitchen, a swift settling; and then, in the upstairs window, a gentler movement, a slow blur of a turn, a faint afterimage of a blue dress and a thin white arm.

The image is gone in a second. But he stands straining after the open window, willing it to come back, unable to move away.

She can't have come to the window to see me,
he is thinking.
She must have come to be seen.

 

H
E FILLS
the mower with gasoline and checks the oil. He has no idea how old the oil is, or when the machine was last used, but he is too impatient to make another trip out to the gas station. Bending to the pull cord for the fifth time, he gives it everything he's got, more in frustration than with any common sense, and against the odds, the machine belches into life. The sound is harsh and satisfying, shattering the silence. He hopes the loud noise is irritating to the woman behind the drawn shades. He takes a deep calming breath. The noise soothes him. It is a sound that feels good, that he can understand—even though, ironically, it's been years since he has mowed a lawn, anyone's lawn.

The work, he thinks, is equally satisfying. You push the mower down a straight and even path, you look behind you and you see a neat swath, though he is only taking off the top two or three inches this pass—the mower set high, so as not to clog the blade with the damp clippings. He is throwing the grass out to the side; but later on, he'll put the bag on and go over the lawn again, trimming it shorter, picking up the clippings.

The sun is hot and dry on his face. He can feel the tension leaving his body, even as his arms vibrate from the machine. The trick, he thinks, is to keep moving, to move inside the noise, to let the noise drown out the thoughts in
his head and the images behind his eyes, until they fade into something distant and manageable. He wants to shut his eyes altogether, but, of course, that isn't possible. He wouldn't mind, though, he thinks, standing just for a second inside the roar, his eyes shut, his face tilted toward the sun.

 

She was one fantastic-looking girl. You remember?

I remember.

Sometimes he felt as if he hardly knew her then, though he saw her every day. But he heard what was said about her. And he knew the stories. He watched her—as you'd watch a house you once lived in become transformed by new owners.

He saw her on the bus on the way to and from school; in the backyard, meeting in the driveway; in a corridor, stopping for a drink of water from the fountain. She liked to tease him, and he let her. He didn't know how to make her stop. Confronting her, as he did at first when her growing reputation alarmed him, made it worse; he lost the verbal battles. His best defense, he decided, was to ignore her—though she persisted, drawling his name in a husky voice that seemed to have blossomed overnight with her anatomy and that, unhappily, carried the length of the school bus or across a room. And he sometimes wondered, when he was being honest with himself, if he didn't enjoy the odd status that her attention conferred upon him.

She's hot for you.

She is not. I've known her since she was practically born.

She's giving it away, man. Perillo felt her up at the drive-in four times in August. He says her boobs are
—

She's only thirteen, for Christ's sake.

She's been doin' it since school started. A chick wants it, she wants it.

Why don't you guys leave her alone?

Leave her alone? Hey, you sure you're not getting any?

 

I
T WAS
as if she were changing to suit her body, was somehow growing into the body that was developing too fast for her. He had no other explanation. Or rather, he thought, the basic traits were still there—her nerve, her brazenness—but they'd veered off in a new direction so that she used her talents not to
be
one of the boys but to have power over them.

Sometimes, sitting on the back stoop, pretending to study his French, he would see her across the grass and gravel and wonder about what it would be like to be in a car with her at a drive-in. He couldn't keep from thinking about it: the idea was in the air and in his blood. But the thoughts made him uncomfortable, nearly in the same way that thinking about his parents doing it did. And sometimes he felt guilty, as if he were supposed to have taken better care of her somehow—though that,
he knew,
was crazy. She was beyond his care, or anyone's, for that matter.

And sitting on the stoop, he would sometimes hear raised voices in the Close kitchen, a mother and a daughter scratching at each other like cats: words thrown whining and bickering through the screens. The fighting had come on gradually during that summer and the school year following that awkward day on the baseball diamond, Eden beginning it (seemingly demanding it), taunting her mother with her outrageous dress and behavior, until Edith Close, a novice at this combat, began to learn from her daughter, raising her voice to a new shrillness—born, he imagined, out of bewilderment. You cannot, he thought, remain indifferent to a stinging bee.

In the beginning, he and his parents had been mildly
alarmed by the raised voices next door. His own parents rarely yelled at: each other or at him. But then, as the weeks and months passed and the bickering voices seemed to find no truce, he began to grow accustomed to the nightly battles—like the rattling of a scheduled train—as though these, too, were part of an evolving landscape.

And sometimes the screen door would slam, and Eden, her eyes inflamed, roughly pushing her hair off her face, would spot him on the stoop. She might put a fist on a cocked hip and narrow her eyes at him. Or she might, with dizzying speed, change her stance and her expression entirely, sashaying across the yard to meet him, a smile skimming her lips as she clutched a pack of Old Golds or Winstons. She would smoke after these battles, in full view of her mother, prolonging, by this gesture, their animosity. (He couldn't conceive of smoking in front of his parents; indeed, he was thinking of giving it up altogether.) She would reach the steps where he was sitting, lean against the rail and shake a cigarette from the pack, deliberately offering him one. She kept her matches in the cellophane. Sometimes, maddeningly, she would ruffle his hair, and he would toss his head sharply to shake her off.

"Enjoyin' the entertainment tonight?" she would say.

When Jim was home, there was no fighting. It was not so much that Jim kept order in his household; it was that in his presence, Edith would not criticize their adopted daughter, nor rise to the bait if Eden dangled it, by wearing a too tight sweater, or by missing supper entirely, or by coming home at eleven o'clock, an hour after her nominal curfew.

"Sweetie," Jim would say, coming out onto the steps on these late nights, intercepting Eden before she entered the house.

"Daddy," Eden would say, though out of earshot she referred to her parents as Jim and Edith, and Andrew had
never heard Eden address Edith as "Mother" or "Mom" at all.

"Sweetie, your mother is upset. You should have told us where you were going. We waited supper for you."

And Eden, brilliantly contrite, would tilt her head ever so slightly and murmur, "Sorry, Daddy," in a voice Andy seldom heard, the voice, he thought, of a regular fourteen-year-old girl.

Jim, instantly mollified, poised to be charmed by what he imagined to be his daughter's sweetness, would kiss the top of her blond curls.

"Sickening," his own mother would say of Jim's inability to discipline his daughter, as she witnessed the scene from their kitchen window.

 

O
NE AFTERNOON
that last spring, he remembers, he was changing the oil in the car for his father when he heard a sudden and particularly loud spate of bickering, followed almost immediately by the sound of splintering glass. It was Sunday, and Jim had been away for days. There'd been no buildup of voices, no warning of a coming storm. Until the fighting, Andy hadn't even known Eden was home.

The caliber of the bickering was different than he'd heard before, and while normally he would simply register the sound and then go back to what he was doing, this time he slid out from underneath the car and sat up. His father, working that afternoon on the plumbing under the sink, came to the back door.

"What the...," said his father.

But the shouting had stopped by then, and his father turned away from the door. Andy was about to go back under the car, when Edith Close came out of the house, her coat on, her purse over her arm, her mouth set in a thin line. Without acknowledging Andy, she turned down the drive,
made a right on the road and walked to the tree where the county bus regularly stopped.

Andy sat on the gravel. His hands were smeared with grease. He stood up and walked to the other house, hesitating below the steps, out of sight of Edith at the bus stop. He wiped the palms of his hands on his jeans. He listened, heard nothing and then climbed the steps. It was April, he remembers; he had on two old flannel shirts of his father's. Edith, in her haste, hadn't closed the door. He put his face to the screen, put his hand up to shade his eyes.

Eden was sitting on a chair by the table. She was wearing a long nightgown and a bathrobe. Her hair was disheveled, uncombed, as if she'd just woken up. She was crying. He didn't think he had ever seen her cry before. She brought her hand up and touched the corner of her mouth. He remembers thinking how small she looked in the chair. He remembers wanting to go in and sit beside her. He wanted to knock, but he didn't.