KATE BATTISTA WAS gardening out back when she heard the telephone ring in the kitchen. She straightened up and listened. Her sister was in the house, although she might not be awake yet. But then there was another ring, and two more after that, and when she finally heard her sister’s voice it was only the announcement on the answering machine. “Hi-yee! It’s us? We’re not home, looks like? So leave a—”
By that time Kate was striding toward the back steps, tossing her hair off her shoulders with an exasperated “Tcch!” She wiped her hands on her jeans and yanked the screen door open. “Kate,” her father was saying, “pick up.”
She lifted the receiver. “What,” she said.
“I forgot my lunch.”
Her eyes went to the counter beside the fridge where, sure enough, his lunch sat precisely where she had set it the night before. She always used those clear plastic bags that supermarket produce came in, and the contents were plainly visible: a Tupperware sandwich box and an apple. “Huh,” she said.
“Can you bring it?”
“Bring it now?”
“Right.”
“Jesus, Father. I’m not the Pony Express,” she said.
“What else have you got to do?” he asked her.
“It’s Sunday! I’m weeding the hellebores.”
“Ah, Kate, don’t be like that. Just hop in the car and zip over; there’s a good girl.”
“Sheesh,” she said, and she slammed the receiver down and took the lunch bag from the counter.
There were several strange things about this conversation. The first was that it had happened at all; her father distrusted the telephone. In fact his lab didn’t even have a telephone, so he must have called on his cell phone. And that was unusual too, because his only reason for owning a cell phone was that his daughters had insisted. He had gone into a brief flurry of app purchases when he first acquired it—scientific calculators of various types, for the most part—and after that had lost all interest, and avoided it now altogether.
Then there was the fact that he forgot his lunch about twice a week, but had never before seemed to notice. The man did not eat, basically. Kate would get home from work and find his lunch still sitting on the counter, and yet even so she would have to shout for him three or four times that evening before he would come to dinner. Always he had something better to do, some journal to read or notes to go over. He would probably starve to death if he were living alone.
And supposing he did feel a bit peckish, he could have just stepped out and bought something. His lab was near the Johns Hopkins campus, and there were sandwich shops and convenience stores everywhere you looked.
Not to mention that it wasn’t even noon yet.
But the day was sunny and breezy, if cool—the first semi-decent weather after a long, hard, bitter winter—and she didn’t actually mind an excuse to get out in the world. She wouldn’t take the car, though; she would walk. Let him wait. (He himself never took the car, unless he had some sort of equipment to ferry. He was something of a health fiend.)
She stepped out the front door, shutting it extra hard behind her because it irked her that Bunny was sleeping so late. The ground cover along the front walk had a twiggy, littered look, and she made a mental note to spruce it up after she finished with the hellebores.
Swinging the lunch bag by its twist-tied neck, she passed the Mintzes’ house and the Gordons’ house—stately brick center-hall Colonials like the Battistas’ own, although better maintained—and turned the corner. Mrs. Gordon was kneeling among her azalea bushes, spreading mulch around their roots. “Why, hello there, Kate!” she sang out.
“Hi.”
“Looks like spring might be thinking of coming!”
“Yup.”
Kate strode on without slowing, her buckskin jacket flying out behind her. A pair of young women—most likely Hopkins students—drifted at a snail’s pace ahead of her. “I could tell he wanted to ask me,” one was saying, “because he kept clearing his throat in that way they do, you know? But then not speaking.”
“I love when they’re so shy,” the other one said.
Kate veered around them and kept going.
At the next street she took a left, heading toward a more mixed-and-mingled neighborhood of apartments and small cafés and houses partitioned into offices, and eventually she turned in at yet another brick Colonial. This one had a smaller front yard than the Battistas’ but a larger, grander portico. Six or eight plaques beside the front door spelled out the names of various offbeat organizations and obscure little magazines. There was no plaque for Louis Battista, though. He had been shunted around to so many different buildings over the years, landing finally in this orphan location near the university but miles from the medical complex, that he’d probably decided it just wasn’t worth the effort.
In the foyer an array of mailboxes lined one wall, and sliding heaps of flyers and takeout menus covered the rickety bench beneath them. Kate walked past several offices, but only the Christians for Buddha door stood open. Inside she glimpsed a trio of women grouped around a desk where a fourth woman sat dabbing her eyes with a tissue. (Always something going on.) Kate opened another door at the far end of the hall and descended a flight of steep wooden stairs. At the bottom she paused to punch in the code: 1957, the date Witebsky first defined the criteria for autoimmune disorders.
The room she entered was tiny, furnished only by a card table and two metal folding chairs. A brown paper bag sat on the table; another lunch, it looked like. She set her father’s lunch next to it and then went over to a door and gave a couple of brisk knocks. After a moment, her father poked his head out—his satiny bald scalp bordered by a narrow band of black hair, his olive-skinned face punctuated by a black mustache and round-lensed, rimless spectacles. “Ah, Kate,” he said. “Come in.”
“No, thanks,” she said. She never could abide the smells of the place—the thin, stinging smell of the lab itself and the dry-paper smell of the mouse room. “Your lunch is on the table,” she said. “Bye.”
“No, wait!”
He turned from her to speak to someone in the room behind him. “Pyoder? Come out and say hello to my daughter.”
“I’ve got to go,” Kate said.
“I don’t think you’ve ever met my research assistant,” her father said.
“That’s okay.”
But the door opened wider, and a solid, muscular man with straight yellow hair stepped up to stand next to her father. His white lab coat was so dingy that it very nearly matched Dr. Battista’s pale-gray coveralls. “Vwouwv!” he said. Or that was what it sounded like, at least. He was gazing at Kate admiringly. Men often wore that look when they first saw her. It was due to a bunch of dead cells: her hair, which was blue-black and billowy and extended below her waist.
“This is Pyoder Cherbakov,” her father told her.
“Pyotr,” the man corrected him, allowing no space at all between the sharp-pointed t and the ruffly, rolling r. And “Shcherbakov,” explosively spitting out the mishmash of consonants.
“Pyoder, meet Kate.”
“Hi,” Kate said. “See you later,” she told her father.
“I thought you might stay a moment.”
“What for?”
“Well, you’ll need to take back my sandwich box, will you not?”
“Well, you can bring it back yourself, can you not?”
A sudden hooting sound made both of them glance in Pyotr’s direction. “Just like the girls in my country,” he said, beaming. “So rude-spoken.”
“Just like the women,” Kate said reprovingly.
“Yes, they also. The grandmothers and the aunties.”
She gave up on him. “Father,” she said, “will you tell Bunny she has to stop leaving such a mess when she has her friends in? Did you see the TV room this morning?”
“Yes, yes,” her father said, but he was heading back into the lab as he spoke. He returned, pushing a high stool on wheels. He parked it next to the table. “Have a seat,” he told her.
“I need to get back to my gardening.”
“Please, Kate,” he said. “You never keep me company.”
She stared at him. “Keep you company?”
“Sit, sit,” he said, motioning toward the stool. “You can have part of my sandwich.”
“I’m not hungry,” she said. But she perched awkwardly on the stool, still staring at him.
“Pyoder, sit. You can share my sandwich too, if you want. Kate made it especially. Peanut butter honey on whole-wheat.”
“You know I do not eat peanut butter,” Pyotr told him severely. He pulled out one of the folding chairs and settled catty-corner to Kate. His chair was considerably lower than her stool, and she could see how the hair was starting to thin across the top of his head. “In my country, peanuts are pigs’ food.”
“Ha, ha,” Dr. Battista said. “He’s very humorous, isn’t he, Kate?”
“What?”
“They eat them with the shells on,” Pyotr said.
He had trouble with th sounds, Kate noticed. And his vowels didn’t seem to last long enough. She had no patience with foreign accents.
“Were you surprised that I used my cell phone?” her father asked her. He was still standing, for some reason. He pulled his phone from a pocket in his coveralls. “You girls were right; it comes in handy,” he said. “I’m going to start using it more often now.” He frowned down at it a moment, as if he were trying to remember what it was. Then he punched a button and held it in front of his face. Squinting, he took several steps backward. There was a mechanical clicking sound. “See? It takes photographs,” he said.
“Erase it,” Kate ordered.
“I don’t know how,” he said, and the phone clicked again.
“Damn it, Father, sit down and eat. I need to get back to my gardening.”
“All right, all right.”
He tucked the phone away and sat down. Pyotr, meanwhile, was opening his lunch bag. He pulled out two eggs and then a banana and placed them on the flattened paper bag in front of him. “Pyoder believes in bananas,” Dr. Battista confided. “I keep telling him about apples, but does he listen?” He was opening his own lunch bag, taking out his apple. “Pectin! Pectin!” he told Pyotr, shaking the apple under Pyotr’s nose.
“Bananas are miracle food,” Pyotr said calmly, and he picked his up and started peeling it. He had a face that was almost hexagonal, Kate noticed—his cheekbones widening to two sharp points, the angles of his jaw two more points slanting to the point of his chin, and the long strands of his hair separating over his forehead to form the topmost point. “Also eggs,” he was saying. “The egg of the hen! So cleverly self-contained.”
“Kate makes my sandwich for me every single night before she goes to bed,” Dr. Battista said. “She’s very domestic.”
Kate blinked.
“Peanut butter, though,” Pyotr said.
“Well, yes.”
“Yes,” Pyotr said with a sigh. He sent her a look of regret. “But is certainly pretty enough.”
“You should see her sister.”
Kate said, “Oh! Father!”
“What?”
“This sister is where?” Pyotr asked.
“Well, Bunny is only fifteen. She’s still in high school.”
“Okay,” Pyotr said. He returned his gaze to Kate.
Kate wheeled her stool back sharply and stood up. “Don’t forget your Tupperware,” she told her father.
“What! You’re leaving? Why so soon?”
But Kate just said, “Bye”—mostly addressing Pyotr, who was watching her with a measuring look—and she marched to the door and flung it open.
“Katherine, dearest, don’t rush off!” Her father stood up. “Oh, dear, this isn’t going well at all. It’s just that she’s so busy, Pyoder. I can never get her to sit down and take a little break. Did I tell you she runs our whole house? She’s very domestic. Oh, I already said that. And she has a full-time job besides. Did I tell you she teaches preschool? She’s wonderful with small children.”
“Why are you talking this way?” Kate demanded, turning on him. “What’s come over you? I hate small children; you know that.”
There was another hooting sound from Pyotr. He was grinning up at her. “Why you hate small children?” he asked her.
“Well, they’re not very bright, if you’ve noticed.”
He hooted again. What with his hooting and the banana he held, he reminded her of a chimpanzee. She spun away and stalked out, letting the door slam shut, and climbed the stairs two at a time.
Behind her, she heard the door open again. Her father called, “Kate?” She heard his steps on the stairs, but she strode on toward the front of the building.
His steps softened as he arrived on the carpet. “I’ll just see you out, why don’t I?” he called after her.
See her out?
But she paused when she reached the front door. She turned to watch him approach.
“I’ve handled things badly,” he said. He smoothed his scalp with one palm. His coveralls were one-size-fits-all and they ballooned in the middle, giving him the look of a Teletubby. “I didn’t mean to make you angry,” he said.
“I’m not angry; I’m …”
But she couldn’t say the word “hurt.” It might bring tears to her eyes. “I’m fed up,” she said instead.
“I don’t understand.”
She could believe that, actually. Face it: he was clueless.
“And what were you trying to do back there?” she asked him, setting her fists on her hips. “Why were you acting so … peculiar with that assistant?”
“He’s not ‘that assistant;’ he’s Pyoder Cherbakov, whom I’m very lucky to have. Just look: he came in on a Sunday! He does that often. And he’s been with me nearly three years, by the way, so I would think you would at least be familiar with his name.”
“Three years? What happened to Ennis?”
“Good Lord! Ennis! Ennis was two assistants back.”
“Oh,” she said.
She didn’t know why he was acting so irritable. It wasn’t as if he ever talked about his assistants—or about anything, in fact.
“I seem to have a little trouble keeping them,” he said. “It may be that to outsiders, my project is not looking very promising.”
This wasn’t something he had admitted before, although from time to time Kate had wondered. It made her feel sorry for him, suddenly. She let her hands drop to her sides.
“I went to a great deal of effort to bring Pyoder to this country,” he said. “I don’t know if you realize. He was only twenty-five at the time, but everybody who’s anybody in autoimmunity had heard of him. He’s brilliant. He qualified for an O-1 visa, and that’s not something you often see these days.”
“Well, good, Father.”
“An extraordinary-ability visa; that’s what an O-1 is. It means that he possesses some extraordinary skill or knowledge that no one here in this country has, and that I am involved in some extraordinary research that justifies my needing him.”
“Good for you.”
“O-1 visas last three years.”
She reached out to touch his forearm. “Of course you’re anxious about your project,” she said, in what she hoped was an encouraging tone. “But I bet things will be fine.”
“You really think so?” he asked.
She nodded and gave his arm a couple of clumsy pats, which he must not have been expecting because he looked startled. “I’m sure of it,” she told him. “Don’t forget to bring your sandwich box home.”
Then she opened the front door and walked out into the sunshine. Two of the Christians for Buddha women were sitting on the steps with their heads together. They were laughing so hard about something that it took them a moment to notice her, but then they drew apart to let her pass.
Contents
Cover
About the Book
About the Author
Also by Anne Tyler
Title Page
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Read on for an extract from Vinegar Girl
Copyright
Having sacked her handyman, newly-widowed Mrs Emerson finds a replacement in Elizabeth, a lanky, awkward girl. The Emersons – there are seven grown-up children – have a reputation for craziness and Elizabeth finds herself drawn into their disorderly lives against her will. But in the end it is hard to tell whether she is a victim of the needy Emersons, or the de facto ruler of the family.
Anne Tyler was born in Minneapolis in 1941. She is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Breathing Lessons and other bestselling novels, including The Accidental Tourist, Saint Maybe, Ladder of Years, A Patchwork Planet, The Amateur Marriage, and, most recently, Digging to America. In 1994 she was nominated by Roddy Doyle and Nick Hornby as ‘the greatest novelist writing in English’. She has lived for many years with her family in Baltimore, where her novels are set.
If Morning Ever Comes
The Tin Can Tree
A Slipping-Down Life
Celestial Navigation
Searching for Caleb
Earthly Possessions
Morgan’s Passing
Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant
The Accidental Tourist
Breathing Lessons
Saint Maybe
Ladder of Years
A Patchwork Planet
Back When We Were Grownups
The Amateur Marriage
Digging to America
THE HOUSE HAD outlived its usefulness. It sat hooded and silent, a brown shingleboard monstrosity close to the road but backed by woods, far enough from downtown Baltimore to escape the ashy smell of the factories. The uppermost windows were shuttered; the wrap-around veranda, with its shiny gray floorboards and sky-blue ceiling, remained empty even when neighbours’ porches filled up with children and dogs and drop-in visitors. Yet clearly someone still lived there. A pile of raked leaves sat by the walk. A loaded bird-feeder hung in the dogwood tree. And in the side yard, Richard the handyman stood peeing against a rosebush with his profile to the house and his long black face dreamy and distant.
Now out popped Mrs Emerson, skin and bones in a shimmery gray dress that matched the floorboards. Her face was carefully made up, although it was not yet ten in the morning. Whatever she planned to say was already stirring her pink, pursed lips. She crossed the veranda rapidly on clicking heels. She descended the steps gingerly, sideways, holding tight to the railing. ‘Richard?’ she said. ‘What is that I see you doing?’
‘Just cutting back the roses is all,’ Richard said. His back was turned to her. He waved a pair of pruning shears behind him, hip-high.
‘I meant what you’re doing at this moment, Richard.’
‘Oh, why, nothing,’ Richard said.
It was true. He was zipped up by now, free to turn and beam and click his shears on thin air. Mrs Emerson stopped in front of him and folded her arms.
‘Don’t try to get around me, Richard. I looked out my window and saw you. I thought, Richard? Is that Richard?’
‘I was preparing to cut back the roses,’ Richard said.
‘Is that what you call it?’
Richard had a special set of gestures he made when embarrassed – pivoting on his heels with his head hanging down, working something over in his hands. He twisted the rubber grips on his shears and said, ‘It’s getting time, now. Fall is coming on.’
‘That house you are standing by is Mrs Walter Bell’s,’ said Mrs Emerson. ‘In full clear view of her dining room window. Don’t think that I won’t hear about this.’
‘I wasn’t doing nothing, Mrs Emerson.’
‘Oh, hush.’
‘I was only cutting back the roses.’
‘Just hush. I don’t know, I really don’t know,’ said Mrs Emerson.
‘You’re just distraught nowadays, that’s all.’
‘Distraught? Why would I be distraught?’ said Mrs Emerson. ‘Oh, give me those shears, hand them over. You’re fired.’
Richard stopped twisting the shears. He looked up at her with his mouth open, his face jutting forward as if he had trouble seeing her. ‘Ah, now,’ he said.
‘I’ll cut back my own damn roses.’
‘Now Mrs Emerson, you know you don’t mean that. You’d never just fire me. Why, I been working here twenty-five years, not counting the war. Planted them roses myself, watered them daily. Do I have to tell you that?’
‘I don’t know what kind of watering you’re talking about,’ said Mrs Emerson. ‘but you’re leaving anyway. Don’t expect wages, either. It’s only Monday, and you were paid Friday. You’ve been here not half an hour yet and most of that time ill-spent. Oh, I looked out that window and thought I was seeing things. I thought, What have we come to, after all? What’s it going to be next? First Emmeline, letting my transistor radio run down, and then no sooner do I let her go than you start in. Well, you can send your new employers to me for a reference but don’t expect me to cover up for you. “Works well,” I’ll say, “but tinkles on the flowers.” Maybe some won’t mind.’
‘Couldn’t you just take a little longer over this?’
Mrs Emerson raised her chin and looked past him, twiddling with the empty sleeves of her sweater. She said, ‘Longer? Why should I take longer? I’ve made up my mind.’
‘But if you gave it your thought, some. Who could you find that would work as good as me?’
‘Whole multitudes,’ said Mrs Emerson, ‘but I won’t be looking. I’m too disappointed. Everywhere I turn there is someone failing me. Well, that’s the end of that. From now on I’ll do it all myself.’
‘Paint the shutters? Keep that creaky old plumbing fixed? Climb up to clean the gutters in them little spiky shoes?’
Mrs Emerson had already turned to go. She paused, lifting one hand to test a curl. It was a sign of uncertainty and Richard knew it, but then he had to go and ruin it for himself. ‘You’ll be calling me back, Mrs E.,’ he said. ‘You’ll call.’
‘Never,’ said Mrs Emerson.
Then she went off on tiptoe, to keep from sinking into the lawn.
She kept a pack of playing cards on her dining room table. She sat down on the edge of a chair, smoothing her skirt beneath her, and reached for the cards and began laying out a game of solitaire with sharp little snaps. Her breathing was too rapid. She made a point of slowing it, sitting erect, aligning the cards carefully before she started playing. But unfinished questions kept running through her head. Should she have –? How could he –? Why had she –?
The sun from the bay window fuzzed the edges of the sweater draping her shoulders, lit the flecks of powder across the bridge of her nose. She had once been very pretty. She still was, but now that her children were grown there was something brave about the prettiness. She had started having to work for it. She had to fight the urge to spend her days in comfortable shoes and forget her chin-strap and let herself go. Mornings, patting a pearly base coat over her cheekbones, she noticed how she seemed to be falling into separate pieces. Her face was a series of pouches tenuously joined by transparent skin, reminding her of the tissue-covered frames of model airplanes that her sons used to make. Her close-set blue eyes were divided by minute cracks. Her mouth had bunched in upon itself so that she permanently wore the sulky look she had once had as a child. All she had left was color – pink, white, blond, most of it false. Weekly she went to the hairdresser and returned newly gilded, with her scalp feeling tight as if it were drawing away from her face. She dressed up for everything, even breakfast. She owned no slacks. Her thin, sharp legs were always in ultra-sheer stockings, and her closet was full of those spike-heeled shoes that made her arches ache. But when her children visited and she stood at the door to meet them, wearing pastels, holding out smooth white hands with polished nails, she had seen how relieved they looked. Relieved and a little disappointed: she had survived their desertion, she had not become a broken old lady after all.
She put the red seven on the black eight. Now the six could go up. She looked across the table, out the bay window, and saw Richard standing exactly where she had left him. His shoulders were slumped. The pruning shears were dangling from one hand. Would still more be expected of her? But as she watched he dropped the shears and started off toward the toolshed behind the house. She would have to put the shears away herself, then. She had no idea where they went.
She turned an ace up. Then another. Along came Richard, carrying an old suit jacket, a brown paper bag, a thermos bottle. He was plodding, that was the only word for it. Thinking she was watching. Well, she wasn’t. She snapped the last card down, checked for possibilities one more time, and then hitched her bracelets back and gathered the cards into a deck again. When she next looked out the window, Richard was gone.
This house was full of clocks, one to a room – eight-day pendulum clocks that struck the hour and half-hour. Their striking was beautifully synchronized, but the winding was not. Some were due to be wound one day, some another. Only her husband had understood the system. (If there was a system.) When he died, three months ago, she considered letting all the clocks run down and then restarting them simultaneously, so that she could stop puzzling over which day to wind which one. But the symbolism involved – the tick, pause, tock, the pause and the final tick of the grandfather clock in the hall, the first to go – made her so nervous that she abandoned the plan. Anyone else would have just wound them all tightly on a given day, and carried on from there. Mrs Emerson didn’t. (Wasn’t there something about overtight mainsprings? Wouldn’t her husband have done that years ago, otherwise? Oh, what was in his mind? What was the meaning of these endless rooms of clocks, efficiently going about their business while she twisted her hands in front of them?) Evenings she wandered through the house bewildered, opening the little glass or wooden doors and reaching for the keys and then pausing, her fingertips to her lips, her eyes round and vague as she counted back over the days of the week. She was not a stupid woman, but she was used to being taken care of. She had passed almost without a jolt from the hands of her father to the hands of her husband, an unnoticeable sort of man who since his death had begun to seem much wiser and more mysterious. He knew answers to questions she had never thought of asking, and kept them to himself. He had wound the clocks absentmindedly, on his way to other places; he had synchronized their striking apparently without effort, without even mentioning it to her – but how? The grandfather clock in the hall was now a quarter-minute ahead of the others, and that was as close as she could get it after half a morning spent irritably shoving the hands back and forth, waiting for the whir of the little hammer as it prepared to strike.
It struck now. Then after a pause the others began: ten o’clock. And here she was with nothing to do, no one to talk to, alone in a sealed house with the last of her supports sent away. She rose from the table, touching a hand to her hair, and went to the front hall. On the bureau was a vase of marigolds which she spent minutes rearranging, changing nothing. She smoothed the linen runner beneath the vase. Then she opened the front door, intending to stir the dim, dust-flecked air. She was about to close it again when she caught sight of the outdoor furniture, which spilled in an uneven line down the veranda and on around the corner of the house. It would stay there year-round; it always had. No wonder this house was so depressing. She remembered how dismal the wicker loveseats looked in winter, the seams of their soggy cushions harboring wisps of snow; how the aluminum chairs dripped icicles and the rattan ones darkened and split and overturned in the wind. The picture came to her like an answer: everything would change for the better, if she moved the furniture before fall set in.
She rushed out with her skirt swirling around her, picked up the round metal tea-table and clicked down the front steps with it. Then around to the back yard – more forest than yard, slanting downward as steeply as a mountainside all the way to the garage, which was out of view. She passed two empty trellises, a toolshed, a rotting gazebo, a stone bench, countless frayed, cut-off, cruel-looking ropes her children had once climbed and swung by. Spongy moss gave way beneath her heels, and brambles snagged her stockings. Birds started up from bushes as if she had no right to come this way. When she reached the garage she found that the side door was stuck. She gave it a kick with the pointed toe of her shoe. Then she heaved the table inside and started back up the hill. Already she was out of breath.
Next came a loveseat, bulky and awkward. She flung the sleeves of her sweater behind her and bent to tug at one wicker arm, but the legs kept catching on the floorboards. When she had pulled it to the steps she stopped to rest. Then someone on the street said, ‘Need a hand?’
She turned. A tall girl in dungarees was watching her. ‘I could take the other end,’ she was saying.
‘Oh, would you?’ said Mrs Emerson.
She stepped to the side, and the girl moved past her to scoop up one end of the loveseat. ‘It’s not heavy but it’s clumsy,’ Mrs Emerson told her. The girl nodded, and followed her down around the house with the base of the love-seat resting easily in her hands. She certainly didn’t believe in wasting words. Every time Mrs Emerson looked back at her to smile apologetically (she really should have warned her about the distance they had to cover), all she saw was the top of a bent head – dark yellow hair hanging straight to her shoulders, a style Mrs Emerson considered drab. The girl didn’t comment on the steepness, or the brambles, or the fact that it seemed ludicrous to cart furniture through an apparently endless forest. When they reached the garage she disappeared inside, righted the tea-table, and reached out for the loveseat. ‘Any more going in?’ she asked.
‘Yes,’ Mrs Emerson said.
‘Well, then,’ said the girl, and she moved the two pieces of furniture down to the far end, opposite the car, making more space. Mrs Emerson waited outside with her arms folded. She could use this breathing spell. Now, should she offer a tip? But that might be an insult. And there was always the question of how much to offer. Oh, where was her husband, with his desk-size checkbook and his bills on a spindle and his wallet that unfolded so smartly whenever she was sad, offering her money for a new outfit or a trip to Washington?
The girl emerged from the garage, wiping her hands on the seat of her dungarees. ‘I certainly do appreciate this,’ Mrs Emerson told her. ‘I hope I haven’t held you up too much.’
‘Didn’t you say there was more?’
‘Oh, yes, all that’s left on the veranda.’
‘I’ll stay and help you finish, then.’
‘Well, goodness,’ said Mrs Emerson. She was glad of the help, but she wondered what kind of person would let herself get so sidetracked. Weren’t there any fixed destinations in her life? As they climbed back up the slope she kept glancing sideways at the girl’s face, which was pretty enough but Mrs Emerson thought it would take a good eye like her own to notice. Not a trace of make-up. What a nice bright lipstick could have done! She wore brown moccasins, shapeless and soft-soled. Ruining her arches. Her white shirt was painstakingly ironed, the creases knife-sharp across the shoulders and down the sleeves. A mother’s work, for certain – some poor mother wondering right this minute where her daughter had got to. But she hadn’t the strength of character to send her on her way. The girl looked so capable, hoisting up two chairs at once when they reached the veranda and swinging through the side yard with them. ‘Any time you get tired, now,’ said Mrs Emerson, compromising, ‘or have to be somewhere, or meet someone –’ The girl was already too far down the path to hear her.
When they were climbing the slope again Mrs Emerson said, ‘I used to have a handyman. Did until this morning. He would have made short work of this. Then I caught him mistaking the nearest rosebush for the men’s room.’ The girl laughed – a single, low note that made Mrs Emerson look up at her, started. ‘Well, I fired him,’ she said. ‘I can’t have that.’
The girl said nothing. They rounded the house, climbed the front steps side by side. There seemed to be more furniture now than before; they hadn’t made a dent in it. ‘Where did they all come from?’ Mrs Emerson said, poking a chair with her foot. ‘I can’t remember ever buying any of this.’
‘Outdoor furniture is capable of reproducing,’ said the girl. Which made Mrs Emerson pause for a moment before she went on with her own train of thought.
‘Our family was once so big, you know,’ she said. ‘Seven children, all grown now. One married. And a grandchild. When they were still home these chairs got filled soon enough, believe me. Children and friends and boyfriends and neighbors, all just having a grand time.’ She was staring vaguely at a wooden rocker, although the girl was already halfway down the steps with her own load. ‘Ask anyone in these parts, they all know my children,’ she said. ‘It’s the Emersons,’ they’d tell each other, when we’d go sailing past in the car with everybody sitting in everybody’s lap. I am Pamela Emerson, by the way.’
‘I’m Elizabeth Abbott,’ said the girl.
She had stopped on the grass. She waited while Mrs Emerson dragged the rocker down the steps. Mrs Emerson said, ‘Abbott? It’s funny, I can’t remember seeing you here before.’
‘I haven’t been here. I come from North Carolina.’
‘Oh, I have cousins in North Carolina,’ said Mrs Emerson. ‘Not to know personally, of course. Are you just visiting?’
‘I’m going to see these people about a job.’
‘A job. Goodness,’ Mrs Emerson said, ‘and here you are moving furniture. Do you usually go at things in such a roundabout way?’
Elizabeth smiled. The whole of her face smiled. ‘Always,’ she said.
‘I just hope you won’t arrive late, that’s why I asked. The last thing I’d do is interfere but I have daughters, working daughters, and I can’t help telling you: first impressions are all-important. Promptness. Neatness.’
She was looking at Elizabeth’s shirt-tails, but Elizabeth didn’t notice; she had moved off now with her chairs. ‘They don’t know to expect me, anyway,’ she called back. ‘I saw their ad on a bulletin board in a thrift shop. I like getting jobs from bulletin boards. What they want is a mother’s helper, and I need to find out if that means housework or babysitting. Babysitting wouldn’t be good at all. I don’t like children.’
‘Is that right?’ Mrs Emerson said. She was trying to remember if she had ever heard anyone else admit to such a thing. She puffed along with the rocker, taking short rapid steps to keep up. ‘Now, I would have thought you were still in school.’
‘I am. I’m earning money for my senior year at college.’
‘In September?’
‘I’m taking a year off.’
‘Oh, that’s terrible!’ said Mrs Emerson. They had reached the garage by now. She set down the rocker to stare at Elizabeth, who seemed undisturbed. ‘Interrupting like that! It’s terrible. Why, one thing may lead to another and you may never get back. I’ve known that to happen.’
‘It’s true,’ Elizabeth agreed.
‘Couldn’t you get a scholarship? Or a loan?’
‘Oh, my grades were rotten,’ she said cheerfully.
‘Still, though. It’s no good to have to stop something in the middle. What does your father do, dear?’
‘He’s a minister.’
‘Nothing wrong with that. Although a lot depends on the denomination. What denomination is he?’
‘Baptist.’
‘Oh.’
‘If this job is babysitting,’ Elizabeth said, ‘I’ll just have to find me another bulletin board. But the friend that dropped me here said Roland Park was the likeliest neighborhood.’
She stacked her chairs inside the garage and reached for the rocker. Mrs Emerson said, ‘Do you know the people’s name? The ones you’re going to see?’
‘O’Donnell.’
‘O’Donnell. Well, I’ve never heard of them before. If it’s people I don’t know they’re generally young. New young people buying up these old houses for a song and moving in with children. But children aren’t so bad. What is it you have against them?’
‘I don’t like people you can have so much effect on,’ Elizabeth said.
‘What? Goodness,’ said Mrs Emerson.
They climbed back up the hill. It seemed to have grown steeper. Mrs Emerson’s palms were sore, and two fingernails had broken, and her stockings were in shreds. ‘If only my boys were home,’ she said. ‘If only I’d thought of this sometime when they were visiting. They’d have been glad to help. But I just never did, and then I asked myself, Why wait until they come? Why not do it myself, while the weather’s still warm and the sun so nice?’
She paused to catch her breath, one hand clamped to the small of her back. Elizabeth stopped too. ‘Would you like me to finish up for you?’ she asked.
‘No, no, I wouldn’t hear of it.’
‘It’ll only take a minute.’
‘I’m all right.’
They gathered up the next load and started back down. Mrs Emerson’s heels kept slipping on dead leaves. This was all Richard’s fault. He couldn’t even rake properly. Slick brown leaves were scattered here and there, with moss or smooth earth beneath them instead of the grass he should have been growing. The chair she carried was knocking against her knees. Mean little tangled bramble bushes kept snatching her sweater off her shoulders. What would her husband say, if he could look down now and see how her life was turning out? She sighed raggedly, hitched the chair higher, wiped her forehead on her upper arm.
Then when they were just descending the steps to the garage, Mrs Emerson caught her heel and fell. She landed on top of the overturned chair, scraping both knees and the palm of one hand. ‘Ooops, there!’ she said, and gave a little tinkling laugh. Tears were stinging her eyelids. She reached for Elizabeth’s hand and struggled to her feet. ‘Oh, how ridiculous,’ she said.
‘Are you all right?’
‘Of course I am.’ She jerked her hand away and began brushing her skirt. ‘I just caught my heel,’ she said.
‘Maybe you should rest a while.’
‘No, I’m fine. Really.’
She lifted the chair again and one of its legs fell off – a white metal tube, rust specks seeping through a sloppy paint job. It clattered down the rest of the steps. She felt the tears pressing harder. ‘It’s broken,’ she said. ‘Isn’t that ridiculous? It’s just not my day. And Richard gone, too.’ She fixed her eyes on the chair leg, which Elizabeth had picked up and was examining. ‘If I had fired him tomorrow, now. Stayed in bed where I should have and kept my head under the covers and fired him tomorrow instead. Some days just anything I do is certain to bring ruin.’
‘It can easily be mended,’ Elizabeth said.
‘What? Oh.’
‘The screw must be somewhere around. I can fix it.’
‘Yes, but – why did I fire him? What got into me?’
‘You said –’ Elizabeth began.
‘Oh, that. He’s been tinkling on the roses for twenty-five years, not counting the war. Everybody knows that. It was just his flaw, something we avoided mentioning. Well, I would have, but I was uncertain how to bring it up, you see. What phraseology to use.’
‘Now, was there a washer to this, I wonder?’ Elizabeth said. ‘Or just the screw.’
‘I certainly never meant to fire him for it!’ said Mrs Emerson. ‘I didn’t even know I was going to.’
She dropped to the steps, pulling a flowered handkerchief from her belt with shaky hands. By now the tears had spilled over, but she smiled steadily and kept a tight rein on her voice. ‘Well, I’m being very silly,’ she said.
‘Could you move your feet a minute?’ said Elizabeth. She was patting the ground in search of the screw. Her face was turned slightly away; possibly she had not even noticed the tears. Mrs Emerson straightened her back and blew her nose, silently. ‘All help is difficult, I suppose,’ she said.
Elizabeth’s hands were square and brown, badly cared for, the nails chopped-looking and the knuckles scraped. But their competence, as they located the screw and fitted it into the chair, was comforting to watch. Mrs Emerson blinked to clear her blurred eyes. ‘Emmeline was another one,’ she said. ‘The maid. Now I’m having to make do with a girl from State Employment, a shiftless sort that chews tobacco. Half the time I can’t even count on her to come. And the house! I’m ashamed to look at it too closely. Oh, it seems I’ve just been left all alone suddenly. No one stayed with me.’ She laughed. ‘I must be hard to get along with,’ she said.
Elizabeth had pulled a red pocketknife from her dungarees. She opened out a screwdriver blade and began tightening the screw. ‘My,’ said Mrs Emerson, making an effort to lighten her voice. ‘Is that the kind with all the different blades? Corkscrew? Can opener?’
Elizabeth nodded. ‘It’s Swiss,’ she said.
‘Oh, a Swiss Army knife!’ Mrs Emerson blew her nose once more and then folded the handkerchief and blotted her eyes. ‘Matthew wanted one of those for Christmas once,’ she said. ‘My oldest son. He asked for one.’
‘They come in handy,’ said Elizabeth.
‘I’m sure they do.’
But she had given him, instead, a violin and a record player and a complete set of Beethoven’s symphonies. Remembering that made her start crying all over again. ‘I’m sorry about this,’ she said, although Elizabeth still had not looked up at her. ‘It must be bereavement. The aftermath of bereavement. I just lost my husband three months ago. At first, you know, things are very busy and there are always people calling. It’s only later you notice what’s happened. After the people have left again.’
She watched the pocketknife being folded, the chair being set in the garage. ‘Goodness, that didn’t take long,’ she said.
Elizabeth returned, dusting off her hands. ‘I’m sorry about your husband,’ she told Mrs Emerson.
‘Oh, well. Thank you.’
Mrs Emerson rose from the steps. All her joints ached, and her knees felt tight and stiff where they had been scraped. They started together up the hill. ‘My friends say it’s often this way,’ she told Elizabeth. ‘The delayed reaction, I mean. But I never expected it now, three months after. I thought I had felt bad enough at the time. Sometimes this terrible idea comes to my mind. I think, if he was going to die, then couldn’t he have done it earlier? Before I was all used up and worn out? I could have started some sort of new life, back then. I would have had some hope. Well, that’s a stupid thing to say.’
‘Oh, I don’t know,’ Elizabeth said.
It was this girl’s silence that made Mrs Emerson rattle on so. Mrs Emerson had a compulsion to fill all silences. In an hour she would be wincing over what she had spilled out to a stranger, but now, flushed with the feeling of finally having someone stay still and listen, she said, ‘And I can’t go for comfort to my children. They’re not that kind, not at all. Oh, I always try to look on the bright side, especially when I’m talking to people. That makes me tend to exaggerate a little. But I never fool myself: I know I’d have to attend my own funeral before I see them lined up on this veranda again talking the way they used to. They are always moving away from me; I feel like the center of an asterisk. They work at moving away. If I waited for my sons to come carry this furniture it would rot first, they never come. They find me difficult.’ She climbed the front steps and turned to flash a very bright smile at Elizabeth, who was looking at her blankly. ‘Those auto rides,’ she said, ‘with all of us crammed inside. “There go the Emersons,” people would say, and never guess for an instant that behind the glass it was all bickering, arguing, scenes, constant crisis –’
‘Oh, well,’ Elizabeth said comfortably, ‘I reckon most families work that way.’
Mrs Emerson paused; her thoughts snagged for a second. Then she said, ‘They live on crisis. It’s the only time they’re happy. No, they’re never happy. They lead such complicated lives I can’t keep up with them any more. All I’ve seen of my grandchild is one minute little black-and-white photo of a bunch of total strangers, one of them holding the baby. A lady I’d never seen before. Elderly. The last time we were all together was by necessity, for the funeral – and they left the baby with his other grandmother. Two of my boys live right in this area, but do I see them? Well, Matthew, when he can get away. Timothy never. The only one just dying to come is Andrew, and him I’m supposed to discourage because he’s a little bit unbalanced. He’s not supposed to leave his psychiatrist. He’s not supposed to come home and expose himself to upset. It’s unhealthy of him to want to.’
‘It sounds,’ Elizabeth said unexpectedly, ‘as if he’s in somebody’s clutches.’
For a moment Mrs Emerson, who had already opened her mouth to begin a new sentence, had trouble following her. She looked up, startled, at Elizabeth’s earnest, scowling face. Then she laughed. ‘Oh, my,’ she said, and reached for her handkerchief. ‘Oh, my, well . . .’
Elizabeth straightened up from the railing she had been leaning against. ‘Anyway,’ she said, ‘I’ll just take this last load of furniture down.’
‘Oh, will this be the last?’ Mrs Emerson said. She had suddenly stopped laughing.
‘There’s only these two.’
‘Wait, don’t hurry. Wouldn’t you like to rest a minute? Have some milk and cookies? You said you hadn’t made an appointment. You could finish up any time.’
‘I just did have breakfast,’ Elizabeth said.
‘Please. Just a glass of milk?’
‘Well, all right.’
Mrs Emerson led her into the house, through the ticking hallway toward the kitchen at the rear. ‘My, it’s so dark in here,’ she said, although she was used to the darkness herself. As she passed various pieces of furniture – the grandfather clock, a ladderback chair, the chintz-covered armchair in the kitchen, all of them scuffed and worn down around the edges from a lifetime with children – she reached out to give them little pats, as if protecting them from a stranger’s eyes. But Elizabeth didn’t even glance at them. She seemed totally unobservant. She pulled an enamelled stepstool toward the table and sat down on it, doubling her knees so as to set her feet on the top step. ‘I just don’t want to hit the O’Donnells at lunch,’ she said.
‘No, no, you have plenty of time,’ said Mrs Emerson.
She poured out a tall glass of milk. Elizabeth said, ‘Aren’t you having any?’
‘Oh. I suppose so.’
Ordinarily she never touched milk. She only kept it for cooking. When she settled herself at the table and took the first sip she had the sudden sense of being back in her mother’s house, where she used to have milk and cookies to ease all the minor tragedies. The taste of milk after tears, washing away the gluey feeling in the back of her throat, was the same then as now; she stared dreamily at a kitchen cabinet, keeping the taste in her memory a long time before taking another sip. Then she set the glass down and said, ‘I hope you don’t think I’m one of those people that gives notice all the time.’
‘Notice?’
‘Firing people.’
‘Why should I think that?’ Elizabeth said.
‘Well, all this talk about Richard. And then Emmeline. But those two have been with me half a lifetime; it’s only lately that all this unpleasantness came up. They took advantage, knowing the state I was in. Oh, I don’t blame them entirely, I know I haven’t been myself. But how could they expect me to be? Ordinarily I’m a marvelous employer, people can’t do enough for me. You can tell by their name that family will have too many children.’
‘Um –’
‘The O’Donnells. Babies and toddlers and little ones in diapers, I’m just sure of it. I believe I know them. Don’t I?’
‘I thought –’
‘They’ll run you off your feet over there.’
Elizabeth finished her milk and set her empty glass down. She wiped the back of her hand across her mouth. ‘I think you must be offering me a job,’ she said.
‘A job,’ said Mrs Emerson. She sat straighter and placed her palms together. ‘That is something to consider.’
‘Are you asking if I’d like to work for you?’
‘Well, would you?’ Mrs Emerson said.
‘Sure. I’d make a better handyman than babysitter.’
‘Handyman!’ said Mrs Emerson. ‘No, I meant housework. Taking over for Emmeline.’
‘Why not a handyman? It’s what you need most. You already have a maid, you said.’
‘But gardening. Painting. Climbing ladders.’
‘I can do that.’
‘Well, I never heard of such a thing.’
‘Why? What’s so strange about it?’ Elizabeth said. She had a habit of rarely bothering to look at people, Mrs Emerson noticed. She concentrated on objects – pulling threads from a seam of her dungarees or untangling the toaster cord or examining the loose knob on the pepper-mill, so that when she did look up there was something startling, almost a flash, in the gray of her eyes. ‘You wouldn’t have to pay me much,’ she said, looking straight at Mrs Emerson. ‘If you let me live in I could get by on next to nothing.’