Breathing Water (20 page)
“Look what the headline is,” she said. “âQuimby to Hold First Annual Fourth of July Parade.' Damn. When was the last time you saw something like that?”
“I guess bad things didn't happen so much then,” I said, sitting down next to her at the table. “Either that or nobody wanted to read about them.”
“Bugs called last night,” Maggie said, closing the paper and looking at me.
“Are you serious?” I asked.
“He wants to see Alice,” she said.
“What did you say?” I asked.
“I said over my dead and rotting body.”
“Good. Where is he?”
“Still in Florida somewhere, I imagine,” Maggie said. She smoothed the crinkly paper down flat, her fingers stopping at the woman's small waist. Her careful nail polish had chipped away a little, leaving her pink nails exposed. I felt like I had seen something I wasn't supposed to. “Where's Alice?” she asked.
We found Alice sitting in a purple beanbag chair in the children's room. Her baby dolls were tucked around her, and she was holding a book close to her face. I could see her lips moving silently as she read.
“Hey, baby,” Maggie said, dragging a big orange beanbag chair from across the room, putting it next to her chair.
“I've got to get some books for Magoo,” I said.
Maggie sunk into the chair and leaned her head back. As Alice continued reading, Maggie stroked her hair.
I loved that there was still a card catalog in this library. I pulled the long drawer out and looked for the books that Magoo had requested. Each card had been typed, the letters not always even or clear. I imagined the person who organized things here. I imagined her sore back and eyes straining in the dim light of the library. I imagined the way the metal keys must have felt under her fingers and the quick rhythms of typing.
After I had scratched down the call numbers with the stubby yellow pencil tied to the card catalog with a string, I browsed through the catalog for something to bring Devin. I found Magoo's books easily. The library's history shelves were as familiar to me now as my grandfather's. I had to search a little for a book for Devin. I wanted to find something perfect. Finally I found one in the shelves for oversized books. I knelt down, the bare skin of my knees pressing into the ornate black grate in the floor.
The photos inside were deceiving. At first, the rooms didn't look out of the ordinary at all. Kitchens with gingham curtains, loaves of bread on wooden cutting boards. Beds with lace canopies and books tossed carelessly on blue nightstands. But then, in the corner, you could see the giant's hand, reaching in toward the Christmas tree laced with tiny white candles. Miniature palaces with marble floors and chandeliers with pinpricks of light. I thought about his boxes, the small worlds inside.
I carried the books to Mrs. LaCroix. She stamped each book, and I signed the dog-eared card. No computer magnets or anonymity. The list of names on the sign-out card revealed the books' histories, the names of the hands that had held them were there for anyone to see in careful cursive.
I found Maggie and Alice in their respective beanbag chairs, both asleep. I sat down with my books and read three paragraphs about Alexander Hamilton before my eyes grew heavy too.
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I dropped Maggie and Alice and the Radio Flyer full of babies off at Maggie's house and headed around to the other side of the lake to drop off the tapes with Mrs. LaCroix's aunt. I pulled into the driveway and noticed for the first time that the yard was not only littered with inanimate plastic critters, but with live and frantic chickens as well. I closed the door to the Bug loudly to let Mrs. LaCroix's aunt know that I was there.
I walked tentatively toward the camp, watching my feet so that I didn't step on any of the squawking birds. I knocked on the screen door, which was hanging by one rusty hinge. The storm door was shut tightly, curtains drawn.
“Who is it?” A voice cracked loudly, startling me.
“It's Effie Greer.” I struggled to remember Mrs. LaCroix's first name. “Evelyn, your niece, asked me to stop by with some books on tape from the library.”
“Evelyn?”
“No, this is Effie Greer. Gussy McInnes's granddaughter.” I stepped back from the door. A chicken ruffled its feathers at my audacity.
“Don't know her,” the voice said definitively.
“Evelyn, your niece, sent me with books on tape for you. From the library.”
“Books on tape?” The door opened slowly. “You got Grisham?”
“I do.” I smiled at the sliver of a face behind the door. “His newest one.”
She opened the door and looked toward me suspiciously. Her eyes were milky, like a newborn kitten's instead of a woman's. Her hair was wrapped up in elaborate silver braids. She was wearing a loose green floral housedress and leather men's shoes with nylon stockings.
“Well, come in then,” she said angrily and motioned vaguely to the center of the kitchen.
I walked into the kitchen, following her slow and blind lead. Immediately, I recoiled at the smell and sight of the kitchen. There were cats everywhere, crawling across the filthy countertops, crouching in the corners retching and scratching. I covered my mouth with my hand and squeezed my eyes shut against the ammonia smell.
“You want something to drink?” she asked, shuffling toward an old refrigerator.
“No,” I said. “I really need to be going. I'm dropping some books at Mr. Tucker's place as well.”
“Blind as a bat, that Tucker.” She laughed and opened the refrigerator door. The light was out.
“It was nice meeting you.” I stumbled, realizing that I had no idea what her name was.
“Mrs. Olsen,” she answered me, turning on her heel. “Can you help me with something before you go?”
“Sure,” I said, trying hard not to gag as a dingy white cat retched in the corner.
She reached for me with a thin cold hand riddled with liver spots and touched my bare shoulder. She was waiting for me to lead her now.
“In the living room is my tape recorder.”
I walked in front of her through her house, looking for what might be the living room. I stopped when I saw a battered couch and a coffee table with a bouquet of dusty plastic tulips in the center. She eased herself down onto the couch and motioned toward an end table where I found a bulky tape recorder with sticky buttons.
“Can you put it in please?” she asked, reaching for a nylon stocking that had slipped like transparent skin down to her ankle.
I slipped the cassette into the tape deck and listened as the story began. I sat with her until the voice on the tape became part of the room, as at home in this dirty room as the cat gently purring beneath her fingers and the giant fan in the window spinning the stench of all these cats. I sat with her, waiting for her to motion again for me to leave. I waited for her to become lost in the story before I slowly left the room and went back into the yard filled with chickens and futile ornaments.
As I opened the door to the car, she poked her head out the window and said, “I'll be done with these by next Wednesday.”
“I'll see you next week then, Mrs. Olsen.”
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“Do you know Mrs. Olsen?” I asked Gussy and Magoo as Magoo double-checked to make sure I had gotten all of his books.
“Bethany?” Magoo asked. “Sure. Crazy old bat.”
“Tucker,” Gussy reprimanded.
“I brought her some tapes from the library today.”
“That's sweet, honey,” Gussy said. “Evelyn ask you?”
I nodded. “Why do you say she's crazy, Tuck?”
“Killed her husband.”
“Shush,” Gussy said, gently hitting his arm. “Everyone knows it was a heart attack.”
“She killed her husband?” I asked in disbelief.
“Effie, really. It's ancient history. And it was a
heart attack.”
Gussy stood over Magoo's sink as comfortable as if it were her own, peeling carrots. She can do this, make a home in anyone's kitchen.
heart attack.”
Gussy stood over Magoo's sink as comfortable as if it were her own, peeling carrots. She can do this, make a home in anyone's kitchen.
“Rat poison,” Magoo insisted. “Arsenic. Put it in his tea.”
“Why?” I asked. Gussy stopped peeling, frowned at us both, and then resumed peeling the thin slivers of orange.
“He was a lady's man. Had six or seven girlfriends from what I understand. Of course, they were the girls that nobody else wanted or knew what to do with, but he didn't seem to mind. One for every day of the week. One of each: blonde, brunette, redhead, fat, skinny, short, and tall. Story goes that when Bethany lost her sightâit happened real quick, when she was only forty or soâthat he started bringing them around the house, right up underneath her nose.”
“I'm sure she couldn't have smelled them in that house.” I laughed.
“Story is that he'd invite them to dinner, dinner that Bethany spent all day making, let them sit on his lap the whole time. It was like a game to him or somethin'. Your grampa used to deliver the paper there. He always showed up around dinnertime with the Olsens' paper. Anyways, one night Mr. Olsen brings over his Tuesday girl, what was her name, Gussy?” Magoo scratched his head and Gussy shook hers. “Doesn't matter. She was the short redhead. Terrible skin, I remember.
“So, he brings her to the house, and she's not so bright and she thinks that Bethany is deaf too and sits there on Olsen's lap during dinner, giggling. He keeps trying to shut her up, putting his hand over her mouth, whispering in her ear.
“That's when Bethany does it. Stares right at the girl as she pours her husband a cup of tea. Doesn't spill a drop.”
“What did the girl do?” I asked.
“Some say she was so spooked just by that that she ran out of the house before he keeled over. But your grampa told me that she stayed there on his lap, his hand halfway up her skirt when he started to pitchâ”
“Enough, Tucker,” Gussy said, slamming down the peeler.
“That the rigor mortis set in and she couldn't get her panties loose from his fingers.”
I started to laugh, and Magoo shrugged. “That's what your grampa told me, anyway.”
Gussy grinned a little and handed me a peeler from the drawer. “Help me out here, Effie.”
“Here is little Effie's head, whose brains are made of gingerbread.” Magoo smiled, lighting his pipe.
Before Grampa died, he used to read me an e.e. cummings poem, tapping his fingers gently on my head, “. . . God will find six crumbs. . . .”
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Devin came for me just as the sun had gone down. I hadn't been to the drive-in since I was in high school. I didn't think it was even open anymore, but Devin showed me the newspaper advertising the double feature: two movies I didn't recognize the names of.
He came to the door as I was pouring the hot popcorn into a brown paper grocery bag. The metal foil from the popper was hot on my fingers. “Ow!”
“Need some help?” he asked, as I struggled to shake the burn away.
He held open the bag and I managed to get all of the popped kernels in without burning myself again. “Thanks,” I said. “Is it cold outside?”
“Um-hum.” He nodded. He was wearing a thick corduroy barn jacket the color of chocolate. The inside was lined with flannel.
“Let me get some warm clothes,” I said. I went to the closet to look for something warm to wear. All I could find was Grampa's black wool coat. I found a pair of gray mittens and a moth-eaten scarf. “July, huh?”
“You got any boots in there?”
“Shush,” I said and threw the coat over my shoulders.
“Ready?”
“Uh-huh.” I nodded.
In the truck, he pulled his pipe out of one of his deep pockets. “Do you mind?” he asked.
I shook my head. I didn't tell him the way the thick sweet smell of his pipe made me dizzy with remembrance and longing. I leaned my head back when he lit the pipe and puffed. When he rolled his window down and the smoke escaped, my heart plunged just a bit.
The sign for the Moonlight Drive-In Theatre was the original one, from a time when girls swooned and boys' hair was thick and hopeful with grease. Thigh-high weeds sprouted up through the entrance. We paid the bored teenage girl in the fluorescent booth and drove into the empty lot. It looked like a graveyard, the microphone stands like silent silver monuments.
“Where do you want to park?” he asked, scanning the rows seriously.
“How about that one?” I said, selecting a spot in the center of the dirt lot.
“Are you sure?” He looked at me, intent.
“Positive.” I nodded.
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