Two Rivers Page 4

  “I’ll just run down the street,” I said, checking my pocket for change. “I won’t be more than a minute.”

  She sipped on the coffee and closed her eyes.

  I charged down the stairs, two at a time, not considering, until I reached the drugstore, the ramifications of leaving a total stranger sitting at my kitchen table.

  “You been down to the wreck?” the clerk asked. “They’re saying a hundred people are dead.”

  “It’s a pretty bad accident.”

  “Some folks,” he whispered conspiratorially, “are saying it ain’t an accident at all. My uncle’s got a scanner. Picks up everything .”

  “How much do I owe you?” I asked, eager to get back to my apartment.

  “Fifty cents,” he said, reaching under the counter for a bag. “I’m going down there as soon as my shift lets out.”

  “Thanks,” I said, grabbing the toilet paper, and rushed back to my apartment.

  When she wasn’t in the kitchen, I felt something sink inside me, and a sort of panic set in. I set the toilet paper on the kitchen table and peered down the dark hallway. I opened the door to my bedroom and to Shelly’s room. Nothing. I returned to the kitchen and went into the living room, my heart racing.

  I’d been too out of it that morning to even pull the blinds; the room was completely dark except for the dusty rays of light shining through the cracks in the shades. I flicked on the overhead lamp worried that this room too would be empty. And so I was startled when I looked down to see the girl curled up on the couch, clutching the green afghan Hanna had made for Shelly’s last birthday. I felt my body sigh, my limbs relax.

  In sleep, she looked even younger than she had at the river. Sixteen at the oldest, I imagined. She was holding the edge of the afghan against her cheek with one hand like a child would. Her other hand was cradling her rounded stomach, which poked out from under Shelly’s T-shirt.

  I looked at my watch. It was nearly eleven o’clock already. Only four hours until Shelly would be home from school. I worried that if she saw my bicycle out front she’d come straight to our apartment rather than going to Mrs. Marigold’s next-door. And there still was the matter of work. I paced around the living room, trying to figure out what to do about the girl sleeping on my couch, until she stirred.

  “You can go back to work,” she said softly. “I ain’t going to steal nothin’.”

  “I know that,” I said, stung.

  As she slept, I went next-door to Mrs. Marigold’s and told her that my third cousin, a relative of my mother’s, by marriage, my adopted cousin from Louisiana, had just come visiting, that she was sleeping on my couch. Mrs. Marigold stood with her hands on her hips, scowling at me as she abandoned a pile of half-peeled potatoes. I told her about the train wreck, that my cousin had gotten off the train unharmed, but that she was exhausted from the trauma of it, and that I was headed back to work and maybe back to the river to help out with the accident if they needed me. And finally, when she looked at me, confused not only by my convoluted story but by why I was telling it to her at all, I asked her if she could make sure Shelly got a good dinner tonight. That she did her homework. That I might be later than usual but that I would be by to pick her up after supper. Mrs. Marigold smiled and picked up the potato peeler. “Honey, don’t you worry yourself about Shelly. You come by to get her whenever you want.”

  I checked on the girl one more time, and she was still asleep. I pulled the afghan gently up over her and turned off the light again. I found her pile of wet clothes on the bathroom floor and put them in the dryer. The wet fabric slapped around the inside of the machine, thumping rhythmically as I locked her inside the apartment and bounded down the stairs. I would figure out what to do after I got home. Maybe by then the girl would be having second thoughts and would call her father. She was probably still in shock about the accident. A good rest was probably all she needed. Some dinner. Some nice warm, dry clothes.

  The Folding Machine

  I n the summer of 1958, my father set out to invent a machine that would automatically fold freshly laundered clothes. Most of his inventions were aimed at making my mother’s life easier. She was an accidental housewife, a college graduate and once-aspiring musician whose life took a turn for the ordinary, as many extraordinary women’s lives did, when she fell in love. My father’s efforts at easing the burden of laundering and dishwashing and floor scrubbing were like small apologies for something understood but unspoken between them.

  My mother, Helen Wilder, met Charlie Montgomery at Middlebury College, where Charlie, my father, was studying engineering, and she, music. They married not long after they graduated and, despite more grandiose plans, moved to Two Rivers when my grandmother died, leaving them the house that my father had grown up in. Convinced that they might be able to save some money before moving on, my mother agreed to spend the first few years of their married life in Two Rivers. My father accepted a job at the Two Rivers Paper Company, and my mother taught piano. But when she became pregnant with me, she must have known that her tenure in Two Rivers would last more than a few years. And before she knew it, I figure, she had probably resigned herself to bake sales instead of classical performances—to the quotidian life of a New England housewife instead of the glamour of a concert pianist’s.

  The truth was, though I adored my mother, I was also embarrassed by her. She wasn’t like anybody else’s mother. Not my best friend, Ray’s, not Betsy’s either. She was fluent in French ( Parisian French, she emphasized, not the bastardized French of Two Rivers’s French Canadian population), and she had even been to France as a foreign exchange student while in college. She was constantly using French vocabulary when English, in her opinion, would not suffice. This, like much about my mother, was upsetting to the regular people in Two Rivers. First of all, she hadn’t taken my father’s name when she got married, convincing many people that they weren’t married at all but simply living in sin. She didn’t cook and she didn’t know how to sew. She wrote angry letters to the editor of the local paper and she refused to wear skirts. And, perhaps worst of all, instead of reading Redbook or Ladies’ Home Journal , she had the Rexall order one issue of The New York Times every week. This would have been fine, except that she insisted on picking it up each Sunday morning when everyone else was just getting out of church and stopping at the drugstore for their Sunday sundries. Thanks to The New York Times , everyone in Two Rivers knew that Helen Wilder did not believe in God.

  Betsy’s mother, on the other hand, had learned everything she knew from magazines: glorious glossy magazines that were spread out in full-colored fans on every end table in the house. She made cupcakes that looked like witches at Halloween and robin’s nests at Easter. Mrs. Parker believed wholeheartedly in God and went to church every Sunday in dresses she made herself from crinkly patterns that smelled like dust. Later, Betsy would let me hold the fragile parchment only after I’d washed my hands.

  The summer that we were twelve, I fell in love twice. First with Betsy Parker, and then with her mother.

  For a whole week after I’d spoken to Betsy outside her father’s barbershop, I’d been trying to come up with an excuse to go see her again. I didn’t need a haircut, or else I would have just returned to the barbershop. My father considered himself a competent lay barber and methodically cut my hair on the last day of every month (outside so as to a
void getting any hair on the floors, which already generated near tumbleweed-sized dust balls). Finally, after much rumination, I concocted a story about needing to borrow sugar.

  It was a typical Saturday; my mother was curled up on the overstuffed chair in our living room lost inside a book, and my father was in the basement working on his folding machine. It had to have been eighty degrees outside, but my parents were inside people. Especially in the summer. My mother abhorred the sun, and my father preferred his basement workshop to the outdoors. As soon as I was allowed to operate the lawn mower, I took it upon myself to tend to the overgrown and unruly chaos that was our yard, but then, when I was only twelve and not allowed to touch anything with a motor, I made my way through the shin-high grass to the sidewalk and across the street to the Parkers’ tidy plot.

  When Mrs. Parker opened the door, she could have been Elizabeth Taylor. Her hair was jet black, even darker than Betsy’s, and she was wearing a slinky sort of dress, looking more like she was at a cocktail party than simply puttering around that giant house. My ears were hot.

  “I live across the street,” I said, gesturing vaguely behind me.

  Mrs. Parker looked at me, her eyes the stunned eyes of a doe.

  “Do you have some sugar?” I asked, relieved to have remembered my excuse.

  She smiled then. “Sure, honey. How much do you need?”

  I had no idea how much sugar one might need if one truly needed sugar. I was also suddenly aware that I had no way of getting the sugar home. “This much?” I suggested, making a bowl with my hands, seemingly solving both the quantity and container problem.

  “About a cup? Sure thing, come on in.”

  The inside of Betsy Parker’s house was as tidy as the outside. Fresh flowers stood erect in thin glass vases, catching light from any number of the windows. The floors were completely covered in carpeting. I’d never seen, or felt, anything like it before.

  I followed her down a long hallway to the kitchen, where she motioned for me to sit at the clean white dinette set. Mrs. Parker opened up a tin marked “Sugar” in fancy red script and pulled out a scoop. She poured the sugar into a teacup and handed it to me.

  “Here you go, exactly one level cup. What’s your momma making?”

  I hoped my ears weren’t as red as they felt.

  “Doughnuts,” I answered, saying the first sweet thing that popped into my head.

  Mrs. Parker’s forehead wrinkled a little, and I was pretty certain I’d been figured out. “Can you be a sweetheart and get the recipe from her? You can bring it over when you return the teacup.” Mrs. Parker smiled. “I can’t find a decent doughnut recipe anywhere.”

  I nodded, and was backing down the hall, balancing the teacup by its delicate handle when I remembered why I had really come.

  “Oh,” I said. “Is Betsy home?”

  “Sure, honey. She’s in her room. Would you like me to go get her?”

  I thought about it for a minute, even pictured Betsy Parker in her room, maybe lying on her stomach on her bed, thumbing through a magazine, but the idea of actually talking to her suddenly seemed ludicrous.

  “Nah,” I said. “Just tell her I stopped by.”

  Mrs. Parker raised one perfect black eyebrow and then winked at me. “Sure thing, sugar.”

  The next time I went back, I pretended my mother was making beef stew. I pulled a dusty cookbook down off the highest shelf in our kitchen and scanned the list of ingredients. Bouillon… I couldn’t pronounce it. An onion . My mother didn’t even hear me go.

  This time, Betsy answered the door, breathing hard as if she’d been running.

  “Hi,” I said, my heart thumping in my chest so hard I was fairly certain you could see it pounding through my shirt.

  She grabbed me by the hand and pulled me into the house. “Follow me,” she said, leading me down the long hallway to the kitchen and then out the back door. Her hand was soft. She had a Band-aid on her thumb. Outside, she took off across the shady backyard, climbing nimbly up a giant maple. Once perched in the crook of two large branches, she whispered, “Come up.”

  Though the maple was unfamiliar, I’d climbed my share of trees and quickly ascended up into the tree’s depths. To my dismay, Betsy seemed unimpressed by my tree-climbing skills; she was fixated on something in the distance.

  The Parkers lived next door to Mr. Lowe, a widower with throat cancer and a reputation for losing his temper in public. He’d been seen screaming at waitresses and gas station attendants and store clerks all over town. Some people said the terrible sounds that came out of his throat were punishment for his temper. He’d even yelled at me once when I lost my baseball in his hedges. Through the trees, I could barely see the shadow of a figure moving in the yard below.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “Shhh,” Betsy whispered, pushing the back of my neck down so that my head lowered and revealed a better view.

  He was standing in the middle of his backyard in a sleeveless white undershirt, a pair of shorts held up by suspenders. When he bent over to pick up the hula hoop at his feet, Betsy let go of the tree branch and smacked me in the arm. Hard. Below us, Mr. Lowe held the hula hoop tightly around his waist before he set it spinning, released it, and let his hips do the work. Betsy covered her mouth to keep from laughing, and I smiled. He was diligent in this task. Ridiculous. When we finally couldn’t stand it anymore and Betsy started to giggle, the hula hoop dropped to the ground, and Mr. Lowe looked up. When he started to holler with that awful damaged voice of his and shake his fist at the sky, we scurried down the tree. By the time we got to the bottom, we were shaking with laughter.

  “I saw him naked once,” Betsy said.

  “Nu- uh ,” I said.

  “In one of those kiddy pools,” she said, nodding. “He was wacking off.”

  “Shut up,” I said, punching her arm. She didn’t flinch.

  “I know where there are some dirty magazines,” she said.

  “Really?” I asked. Earlier that summer Ray had stolen a copy of Modern Man from his dad’s collection. He’d even let me tear out a page with Bettie Page and Tempest Storm, both nearly naked, which I’d studied like a treasure map. As I traced breasts and teensy panties with my finger, I imagined myself an explorer, the topography both treacherous and thrilling.

  She nodded. “I’ll show you tomorrow.”

  Now I didn’t need another excuse to come back. I had a real, live invitation. And there was something pretty damn exciting about the prospect of looking at naked pictures with Betsy.

  I went back. Between June and August, I must have followed Mrs. Parker down that softly carpeted hallway a hundred times. Mrs. Parker was always wearing something none of the other neighborhood mothers (certainly not my mother anyway) could have pulled off. There was always something bubbling on the stove top, and she always had a frosted glass of lemonade or a Cherry Coke to offer. Betsy and I would gorge ourselves on homemade German chocolate cake or Lorna Doones until our stomachs ached, and then we’d take off on one adventure or another, usually spying on someone in the neighborhood. Betsy taught me the scientific names for genitalia both male and female that summer. And once, she even showed me a picture of Mrs. Parker wearing what looked like a skimpy caveman’s outfit, a giant bone in her hand. “A famous photographer took this of her. Before she married Daddy,” she told
me. “She was going to be a model.” I beamed. I figured now that Betsy Parker trusted me, it wouldn’t be long until she loved me too.

  But about a week before school started again, I went to Betsy’s house and she said that she wasn’t allowed to have company and closed the door in my face. Stunned, I walked home and found my father unpacking a brand new Kenmore clothes dryer from a cardboard box. The folding machine hadn’t worked, and it seemed to me that my father’s reluctant concession was an admission of failure. But being the half-full kind of person I was, my own failure did not deter me. I went back to the Parkers’ house the next day. And the next. But each time, Betsy said simply that she wasn’t allowed to have guests and closed the door. By the end of the week, I began to worry. It was as if our friendship, like summer, had only been seasonal. As ephemeral and fleeting as Vermont sunshine.

  At school, Betsy was careful to avoid me. She wasn’t unkind, but she did make sure to sit across the room from me in homeroom, and she only spoke to me when necessary. By November, I’d forced myself to accept her indifference. I started to hang out with Brooder and Ray again, chucking dirt clods at first graders and chewing tobacco behind the school. In a way, it was as if Betsy had only been a dream.

  But just before Thanksgiving, when an early snowstorm brought our first snow day of the year, I felt optimistic. And I missed her. After going back to bed for another hour, I decided to give Betsy one more chance. I thought that the prospect of pristine snow, just wet enough to make snowballs, might bring her back to me.

  What I noticed first was the loose board on the front steps. It surprised me. Then I saw that the paint on the porch was peeling, that the roses, blooms long gone, had not been tended to. The bushes were skeletal, snarled.

  Mrs. Parker answered the door wearing her slip, and I felt myself blushing. She looked exactly like Elizabeth Taylor now—in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (which Brooder and I had snuck into the theater to see). Her hair was messy, and she was barefoot. She stepped out onto the porch and looked past me down the street.