A Stranger's House (8 page)

The adrenalin was fading in me, and I couldn't help but give a smile. Janet, whom I'd met at a Christmas party a couple of years ago, was small and nervous and talked a lot and, I knew, was still in love with her ex-husband; at the party she'd shown me his picture in her wallet, a Sears portrait that made the man look too happy, too clean to be the louse she made him out to be. Still, she kept the picture with her, even though they'd been divorced for three years by that time.

I smiled, too, for my husband, for his attempt to cheer me, though I didn't want it this morning. But I felt obliged in a way to speak to him, to acknowledge his attempt. I said, “You didn't let her print it—”

“No, no,” he cut in, smiling and shaking his head again. “We just circulated her copy around the office. Everyone down there knows about her and her ex. She just let it float around the office.”

I nodded, still smiling, and then he lowered his head again, a hand to his mouth, his fingers in a fist.

I said, “What?”

He glanced up at me.

“Go ahead,” I said, waiting for this obvious change in topic.

“Oh,” he said, and gave a little wave with his hand. “Nothing. Just nothing.” He started to move through the doorway, but stopped again.

“It's just that...” he started, and paused. He looked at me, then at the bedspread bunched around me. “Just that, well, Mr. Gadsen's called. He's called three times so far this morning.” He took in a deep breath and smiled at the bedspread. “I'm surprised the phone ringing didn't wake you up.”

He sat on the bed again and ran his hand across the mound of bedspread. He still wasn't looking at me. “He says he's sorry, and that he wants to talk to you. Mainly that he wants to talk to you.”

Finally he looked at me. His hand was resting on my knee now, my knee buried beneath bedspread, blanket, sheet.

He was looking at me, waiting, but I turned away. I said, “I know he's sorry. But he'll have to wait. I'm not ready to talk to him. Not now.” I paused. “Maybe not ever.” The words left me in barely a whisper, and I wished I hadn't let them out. For a moment I thought of taking them back, of apologizing right then for having those feelings, and I thought of calling Mr. Gadsen and just listening to him fall all over himself to apologize. But the image of the rabbit came back, that pregnant animal hanging from my arm, and the snap and squeals, and I thought, No; even if it was an accident, it was his fault. Accidents happened, certainly, but I hated that word. Accident was a fake word, an excuse, I felt: things were traceable to a source, whether it be rain on an oil-slicked road or a gun left loaded in a hall closet. Or too much whiskey and dozens of rabbits to keep track of.

I said, “Let's just go. Let's get out of here. I don't want to talk to him.”

The room was silent a moment, and I could hear the two of us breathing. Then Tom took a short, quick breath, said, “Okay.” He patted my knee, and stood. He looked at me. “But he's sorry. That's what he wanted you to know.” He turned and headed through the bathroom. A moment later I heard him in the kitchen, plates being pulled down from the cupboard.

I lay there, unable to move. I thought of my dream, of three children that never were, that might never be. I thought of my hands gone, those stumps, and of Mr. Gadsen.

With everything I had I pushed back the covers, swung my feet around, and sat up. I felt dizzy for a moment, the blood falling from my brain down to my heart. It took a moment before the room became steady, the floor a place where I could put my feet and trust it would not move beneath me.

 

We drove through town, the mid-morning September sunlight brilliant and cutting. For some reason the streets seemed filled with mainstreamers from the state hospital, men and women with nervous twitches and shambling feet and layers and layers of clothing. People who, when walking through town, might bump into you, call you by someone else's name and look at you as if there were something wrong with you. There was, of course, the short, stocky Suntan Man in front of the bank at King and Main, his shirt already off, his bald head and chest and arms greased up for the light. In front of the county courthouse strolled the black man with the carved wooden cane and high boots and wool cap, the man I'd accidentally brushed up against one summer morning when I was heading out the door of the Laundromat on Market, both arms hugging a basketful of fresh, clean clothes. His odor had stayed on the hand that had touched him longer than any formaldehyde ever had, though I scrubbed and scrubbed that hand when I got home, scrubbed it in hot water until the hand was nearly scalded, the skin nearly raw.

We moved through town toward Smith, perched at the top of the hill, that gray stone tower looking down at us all, and it seemed that the streets were suddenly taken over by Smith girls in long pre-winter coats belted or loose, some with colorful earmuffs, some with scarves, all with leather gloves or mittens. They traveled in packs, three or four or five at a time, stopping to read the menu outside the French restaurant, pushing open the glass door into the bank, looking through the tables full of used books in front of another
shop. All adult, their cheeks flushed with the cold, their eyes bright, alive.

Of course I was bitter. I had always wanted to be one of them. I'd seen them all my life, watched them as I grew up, hoping that some day I'd end up there somehow, in one of those dorm-palace dining rooms you could see from the street, rooms filled with golden light at night, only the corners and top edges of oil paintings hung on the walls visible from the sidewalk. On spring and autumn nights the sound of crystal and silver and laughter resounded through open windows onto the street, where I walked when I was a girl for just that purpose: for sound and company and beautiful lights, my mother at home, closed up in the house the death of my father had left even more empty.

On those spring and autumn nights I walked around Smith, my hands deep in my coat pockets, my shoulders up in the cold. I always stopped and looked in those windows, watched for the faces of students, but from the street it was nearly impossible, the old dorm houses so high atop their basements that I could only see the lights of chandeliers, those pieces of portraits. I longed to go inside, to see those paintings in full, to stand back from them and take in the portraits of people long dead, and to know who they were and why their likenesses hung there. I wanted to touch the linen, the service, to eat dinner with those girls. To be there.

But inevitably I had to leave, to head down the hill and through the main street and beyond the bend in Route 9 to where my mother and I lived in a small old home, two stories with only two bedrooms. The house I'd grown up in, the house my mother had holed up in, afraid of the world.

Unlike every other friend I had when I was a child, it had been my father who had taken me to my first day of school. It had been my father who carried me from the car to the administration office of the elementary school, carrying me because, I insisted, my legs wouldn't work, Mother back at home, afraid already of what might happen to her only child. It had been my father who, me sitting on his hip, had said in his granite voice
This is Claire Shaw, my daughter, who will be starting school here today,
my name at once important and forever.

It had been my father, too, who had signed my grade reports after that, who'd helped me with my homework, who'd taken me for walks down to the river or to the playground, protecting me from cars racing past on Route 9 as we crossed, his judgment impeccable, always knowing precisely when to cross and when not. And it had been my father who'd taught me to tie my shoes, his big arms around me as I sat on his lap, his slender, rough fingers nimble with those clumsy shoelaces, and I was convinced he was some sort of magician.

So that, when the officer arrived on our front porch one November afternoon, my mother and I were irreconcilable strangers, not knowing one another: me, a sixth-grader, a grown-up, I believed; my mother, a child in my eyes, only someone to keep house, prepare meals, and wait with me for my father's return from work.

A freak accident, the officer said. He stood before us in our front room, the room decorated as it would be until my mother died: my father's chocolate Naugahyde recliner facing the trees and sky out the front window; the sofa covered with a wedding-ring quilt; thick, brown drapes; framed photos of the three of us on the walls. In any one of those pictures—from the pale, tinted colors of their engagement picture, my mother's head tilted to the right just enough, her chin held high, my father's face just above her shoulder, his cheek nearly touching hers, to the last picture before his death, a picture in which we three stand stark against bare, black trees, coats on, all of us smiling, my mother's hand up to block the setting sun—it is easy to see her fear, the wariness that signaled some hiding on her part, the startled shine in her eyes. It was easy to see.

The officer stood before us, snow that had collected on his shoulders and boots melting away, dripping off the parka and down his sleeves as he turned his hat in his hands, snow melting off the brim and crown, dripping to the rug beneath him. A freak accident, he said again, and told us of how my father had apparently taken his eyes off the road for a moment and, of course, off the truck in front of him, that truck loaded with soft, white pine two-by-fours and weaving its way along old Route 2. Perhaps my father had turned to light a cigarette; perhaps he flipped through some of his tally sheets on the seat next to him, rechecking how many cases of what food supplies he would send to the last restaurant he'd visited on
his route; or perhaps he just looked at his watch, wondering how long it might be before he would pull into the driveway at home. But the look away gave him just enough time to miss seeing the red brake lights of the truck rear up at him, those boards sliding back at him, the road dusted with a fine, new snow as the boards slid backward across the hood of his car and through the windshield, the glass exploding into small green jewels splashed across my father, the boards sinking into him.

The officer, of course, did not use this language to describe what happened. Green jewels and soft, white pine and the look at the watch were only images I played in my head again and again while growing up here in the Pioneer Valley, my mother from that day on staying indoors even more, turning down invitations from neighbors to dinner or lunch, PTA meetings; those invitations growing fewer and fewer until they disappeared entirely. Not long after his death my mother moved his recliner away from the window, turned its back to that view, and pulled closed the drapes.

No, the officer's words had been only a report as he stood before us while a young woman, my mother, sobbed into her hands, me with one arm around her waist, the waist of a stranger, my other hand covering my own face as he said,
Failed to negotiate
and
Hazardous road conditions
and
Sincere regrets.
Those words.

A week later I was out on the blacktop at school, playing dodgeball, when suddenly one of us looked up to the sharp blue sky, and pointed. Most of us turned to the sight, a lone B-52 bomber banking across the sky as if it were some huge black bird drifting on currents of air. I heard some of the children talk of how bomb shelters honeycombed the hills between South Hadley and Amherst, a fortress where the military would hide when war broke out.
When
was the word they used, uttered without fear by children. Play resumed, but I still watched the sky, watched the big airplane until it disappeared behind hills to the south, and I began to know then the fear my mother felt, the world closing down around us, my father gone with the simple act of glancing at a watch and the gift from God of a light blanket of snow.

Though I was only eleven—only, I saw that day, a little girl—my mother began to make sense to me, her fear sinking into my chest like so many pine boards. Her fear was clear to me, suddenly, like
the change in weather from the day of the funeral to that day with the plane. The day of the funeral the snow was still coming down, and the handful of flowers I tossed onto the casket sent the snow-flakes that had gathered there up and away like white ash in a light breeze. Now all that snow had melted, the sky open and clean.

She was right to fear, I thought, and I moved from the circle of kids still playing dodgeball to the chain-link fence encircling the playground. Her life came to me then, and pieces of it seemed to fit somehow: her own father had died, I knew, when she was only four. It had been in the spring, I remembered my mother telling me one time, and he and some friends had gone up to Sunderland for the first swim of the year in the Connecticut. He'd climbed a low-hanging tree just north of the bridge up there, and dived in head first, breaking his neck on a submerged log that hadn't been there the year before. So there was that loss, that vacancy with which to begin her life. When she had been a senior in high school—two weeks, in fact, before she was to graduate—her mother had been found to have cancer. Before summer was over she had died in a hospital room in Springfield, having lost fifty-six pounds—that number important enough to my mother to have been passed on to me—and leaving my mother to the care of an aunt and uncle in Newton. She moved to a town she'd been to only once before, a town at the other end of the state, where she knew no one, loved no one.