Home Another Way (26 page)
My knees buckled, and I fell forward. Memory caught me, throwing one of my arms over her shoulders, behind her neck. “I’m putting you to bed,” she said, dragging me to her bedroom, to a mattress and box spring on a black metal frame. No headboard. No footboard. One window the size of a shoebox. She turned down the covers. “Get in.”
“I can’t stay here.”
“You ain’t going nowhere.” She nudged me onto the bed, untied my boots, took off my coat, and tucked the blankets around me.
“My stomach,” I said. “I think I’m going to—”
I puked down the front of my sweater, on the blankets. It stunk like the can of tuna fish I ate for dinner the night before. Memory stripped off the soiled coverlet and worked my sweater over my head without smearing the vomit in my hair. She wiped my chin and neck, dressed me in one of Robert’s shirts, and put two clean quilts on the bed. Then she left the room with the dirty laundry, returning with a glass of water and a batter bowl. “You go ’head and swish that water ’round your mouth, then spit right in this,” she said, jamming the bowl under my chin.
I did, and flopped back on the pillow. “Memory . . .”
“Ain’t you know when to shut that piehole of yours? You just rest up.”
I stayed in that bed for a week. Memory shoved broth in my mouth every hour, and forced me to sip sulfury, lukewarm water. I vomited several more times and peed myself once, the second day. Dizziness came over me every time I stood, and Memory had to help me—I refused the bedpan—to the bathroom. But on this occasion she didn’t get me there quick enough, and the urine spilled over my legs as we shuffled down the hallway together, leaving a trail from the bedroom, like Hansel’s crumbs of bread. I was so sick and feverish I didn’t care that Memory stripped me down, sat me on the tile floor, and turned on the shower. I did swear at her, though, for the too-cold water; she wouldn’t smack an invalid.
Doc came with his thermometer and stethoscope, peering and prodding, and declaring I had one nasty virus.
“I could have told you that,” I said, teeth chattering with my temperature of one hundred and three. “Can’t you give me something?”
“Other than Tylenol for your fever and general achiness, there’s nothing to give,” he said.
“Zuriel—”
“Is fine. As is everyone else. You just need to rest.”
Beth came every day, and I anticipated each visit as a child waits for summer and all it encompasses—swimming, vacation, Mr. Ding-a-ling’s ice-cream truck. Since the wedding, our time together had become much less frequent, perhaps once a week, and I missed her. Usually, I sidestepped those I met, arms pinned to my sides, never touching them. Never letting them touch me. Beth, however, had wedged herself into my tiny corner of the universe during the time we spent practicing for the pageant and planning her wedding, and as she dislodged to become more of a wife and less of a girl friend, I found I missed her. But marriage suited her. She moved like a woman now, spoke with newfound maturity, and told me she’d quit her job at the diner. Dominic asked her to.
“How archaic,” I said.
“I think it’s sweet that he wants to provide for me,” she said, twisting her wedding band around her finger. “Maybe if I had an important job, I would have put up some sort of fuss. But I was only carrying around plates of food. And not even very good food at that.”
I asked what she did all day now—unable to imagine anyone filling so many hours with mere domestic duties, wondering if she ironed Dominic’s pants to perfect creases down the front and cooked his favorite dinner each night, having the meal on the table just as he stepped foot through the door. She told me she made breads and pies and soups for the needy people around town, did some baby-sitting for the single mothers when they needed a couple hours alone to reclaim their sanity, and helped several elderly couples with their errands or housekeeping.
“My mom always gave like that, in little ways. She still does, but I know it’s getting real hard for her, with her arthritis,” Beth said. “And speaking of Mom, she was wondering if she could come see you.”
“I’ve been meaning to get over there,” I lied.
So Maggie came, and stood small and awkward in the bedroom door until I said, “I’m not contagious.” Still, I sensed she was afraid to say anything about our argument. I was, too. I didn’t think my queasy stomach—now able to keep down dry toast and crackers, but not much more—could handle looking at Maggie as she spoke of Luke, her eyes all lovey-dovey, her face pinched with sorrow.
And Jack stopped by once. Memory told me he was waiting in the den and wanted to make sure I was decent before coming into the bedroom.
“Decent,” I squawked. “I haven’t washed my hair in days, and do you see this zit on my cheek? It’s practically my twin. Tell him I’m sleeping.”
“I ain’t gonna lie,” she said, and I heard her tell Jack, “She’s a wee bit sen-see-tive ’bout her looks right now.”
“Great, Memory. Thanks a lot,” I shouted from the bedroom when I heard Jack leave.
“You be welcome,” she yelled back.
Memory. I’d figured she sat around all day eating cookies and caring for Robert. But the woman kept busy. She had people over every day for lunch, and sometimes dinner, too. No one I knew—mostly women she met at the thrift store or families from the church, and all poorer than her. Memory paraded them through the bedroom to make introductions, as she thought it rude not to, and I saw the sunken, toothless mouths, the shoulders—young and old—stooped with the weight of mountain living, the puffiness of too many potato dinners. I smelled their unwashed clothes, their kids’ rancid diapers. Memory treated them all like royal dignitaries, and they feasted on macaroni and cheese loaf sandwiches—yes, the pasta was actually pressed into some sort of pork by-product luncheon meat, I found out—pickled beets, and hot water chocolate cake.
In the evenings, Memory sat making rag rugs. She tried to teach me, when I could finally sit up without pain rushing to my head, but soon declared me all thumbs.
“I don’t know how you play that fiddle the way you do, with hands as clumsy as cows full up with moonshine,” she said, and started coughing, dry, crumbly coughs that shook her stout back.
“You’re not getting sick now, too, are you?”
“Nah,” she said, pulling a lozenge tin from the pocket of her flannel shirt. “Nothing these here horehounds won’t cure. It’s that ol’ poison wind. Comes in from the east every year. Makes me hack like a ninny.”
The jolt of concern I felt for her startled me. I was still getting accustomed to these intrusively bizarre feelings. They came often now—weekly, sometimes daily. I tried to fight them. They made me mushy, translucent, like onions sautéed in butter. I’d let people too close, and they could see through me.
Especially Jack.
He knew how I felt about him. He had to. I’d been slowly losing my chameleon skin, and each time I saw him my heart beat more rapidly, my desire seeping from my pores as I swayed between aloof and flirtatious, searching for the slightest indication he might be interested in me, too. But Jack remained a stranger.
I didn’t understand him at all.
I understood Maggie, and the lumberjacks, dour old Ima-Louise Saltzman, even sweet, simple Beth. They fit. If Grandma Moses painted this place, they would be on the canvas chopping trees, scrubbing pots, or picking tomatoes in the summer. But Jack, he wasn’t made of the same stuff as the others. I hoped he wasn’t. I didn’t want him to be.
I just wanted him.
“Memory, can I ask you something?”
“Sure thing. But don’t be expecting any sort of answer.”
“That first day I played my violin for Robert, and you were talking about children, and . . . Jack. Do you think—”
“Nope.”
“Aren’t you going to let me finish?”
“Nope. You be staying away from Reverend Watson.”
“You don’t think I’m good enough for him?”
“Ain’t nothing to do with good or bad. You just ain’t whole enough yet.”
“I don’t follow.”
“Say there be two little girls, both pretty as pumpkin pies, and they both got these real nice dolls. The fancy kind, with the eyes that open and shut. Now, one of them girls busts up her doll. Not on purpose or nothing. Maybe it just fell off the table and broke. You think that little girl with the busted-up doll is still happy for the other girl with the doll that ain’t broke? No, she ain’t happy, no, no. She wants to break that other girl’s doll, too, so they both can be sad together.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Girl, my grandmamma always told me that God gave folks two ears and one mouth, so they gotta listen twice as much as they talk. If you stop yapping, I’ll tell you my point. And that’s that you ain’t got no clue how to love nobody. Not like that way I read at Beth’s wedding. But that’s ’cause you ain’t never been taught.”
“Oh, really? Are you volunteering?”
“No, ma’am. Not me. Only Jesus can teach you something like that.”
I rolled my eyes and snorted, Jesus’ last name slipping out of my mouth.
Memory took a melamine dish off the bedside table—my dinner plate, I’d had a dry ham sandwich—and smacked me with it, hard, on the top of my head. I howled in pain.
“If you’re well enough to take the Lord’s name in vain, then you’re well enough to get whacked,” she said. “I gotta go feed my boy. You need something else?”
“A personal injury lawyer,” I said, rubbing the berrysized lump in my hair.
“Ha! You ain’t need no lawyer. Anything I got, you’re welcome to. G’night.”
She left, and I heard her in the den, speaking to Robert in hushed, gentle words.
I stared at the dark-paneled walls, hunting for pictures in the grain. I’d found dozens this week—a penguin with a fedora, several trees, a giraffe head, a shoe-shaped house, fish, snails, and a submarine. Now I spotted another, a heart with a harpoon protruding from it.
I switched off the bedside lamp. What did Memory know? I only needed to get Jack alone in a warm, dry place. Then he wouldn’t be able to resist me. No man ever had, and Jack put his pants on one leg at a time, just like the others. I figured he took them off the same way, too.
I could smell freedom.
Three weeks until my imprisonment ended. Three weeks until I could leave this cabin, this town, and take my money anywhere but here. I had plans, too. A week’s stay someplace tropical, in a posh resort with a king-sized bed, a sauna, and room service all hours of the night. On the beach, of course, with hundreds of hard, well-oiled male bodies available for my perusal—or more. I hadn’t lived six straight entirely celibate months in the past ten years.
Jack had been making himself unavailable to me. I went to the Grange three times since the skating debacle—and all three times he ran out the door as I slogged up the driveway toward his apartment door, tugging on his gloves and apologizing for having somewhere else to be right at that very moment. “But you can meet me for breakfast any time,” he’d said. “I’m buying.”
No thanks.
I shook off twinges of sadness when I thought about Beth, or Memory. There were stamps, right? And telephones? And, honestly, they’d go back to their lives, and I to mine, and in six months we’d all be lucky to remember to send a Christmas card.
Maggie had invited me for dinner, and I drove to the inn through a mid-April snow shower. The flakes, satiny and flat, whorled through the air with the swoops and dives of Kamikaze pilots, crashing to the ground, disappearing in the pavement’s dampness. After all the storms this winter, I’d begun to learn how to read snow. This squall wouldn’t last, and there’d be no accumulation; already the clouds thinned in the evening sky.
I smelled gravy as I entered the inn’s kitchen, the small room warm with baking pie and roasting chicken. Maggie handed me a wooden spoon and a cup of chopped scallions, asking me to add them to the rice, along with a little butter. I dropped my parka on a chair and cut a hunk of butter from the stick on the counter.
“Dom’s running late tonight,” Beth said, bursting into the kitchen and shaking the snow off her cute navy beret. “He said not to wait.” She swiped a carrot from the salad bowl, and Maggie slapped her hand.
“Go wash those fingers of yours,” Maggie said.
Beth tossed her coat on the kitchen chair and pumped some dish soap onto her hands. She lathered them in the kitchen sink, drying them on the blue plaid dish towel stuck through the cabinet handle. Then she took a slice of pepper, crunched it. “Did you tell Sarah the good news?”
“Tell me, what?” I asked.
Maggie frowned, giving Beth a long, scathing look, shrill with disapproval.
“Mom,” Beth said. “Stop.”
“You’re a married woman now, and you can do as you like,” Maggie said, tearing the lettuce in pieces. “It don’t seem to matter what I think.”
“What am I missing here?” I asked again.
“I’m pregnant,” Beth said.
“Already?”
She took a stack of dishes off the counter and set the table. “Six weeks.”
“Well, congratulations. That’s wonderful,” I said. “I think.”
“Don’t mind Mom. She’s just being a worrywart.”
“Elizabeth Grace, you’d be worrying, too, if you’d gone through what I did,” Maggie said, grabbing the kitchen towel. She wiped her hands in it, squeezing until I heard one knuckle, then another, crack. “When you have a miscarriage, and everyone is asking you how far along you are, and if you’re having morning sickness, and you have to explain over and over and over again that you lost the baby, then you’ll understand.”
