Duet for Three (33 page)

June is lifting out more delicate items: scarves and undies. “What's all this? These don't look as if they were ever used.”

“Ah, that's part of my trousseau; hope chest,” but Aggie immediately regrets the irony, damaging the atmosphere.

Here is also the vanity set her brothers gave her as their wedding gift: bone-colored comb and brush and hand mirror, a shoe horn and manicure set, all in a case. Pooling their small resources to buy something nice for their big sister who was getting married. Once again her eyes fill — how teary she is tonight. She hardly knew those boys, who were little, and then big, red, rough-handed men, and out of touch. She's the only one left, and she barely knew them at all.

A tiny box also in the top tray contains the heart-shaped locket Edith gave her: not real silver, but silver-looking. Aggie wore it at her wedding, pleasing Edith.

She tells this, in an absent sort of way, to June, who asks, “What did your parents give you?”

Aggie has to think for a minute to remember, visualizes the buggy being loaded up as she and the teacher got ready to leave. “Oh yes, that table over there.”

This is a piece of furniture against the far wall that has been there for years, pretty much unnoticed except for having to be dusted. Short-legged and oval, it has no obvious purpose. Mainly they're in the habit of laying things on it temporarily, like unfinished books or mending. “My father made it,” Aggie says, and suddenly sees the curves of the legs, and how it is put together without nails. All the shaping and carving and sanding he must have done, out in the barn, to please his daughter. A gift of his own efforts, a speech he couldn't make. And at the time she hadn't heard.

“Oh,” she says, dismayed, weighed down, “there is a lot of past here.”

“Do you want to stop?”

“No, never mind. Let's keep going.”

June lifts out the top tray. On the one below rest all the supplies for a marriage. “Heavens,” says June, shaking out a pillowcase, “look at the embroidery on this, look at the work!”

Pink and yellow flowers are twined on green stems, at the edges of what at the time was white cotton, now yellowed. Hundreds and hundreds of tiny stitches. Likewise, hundreds of hours sitting around the kitchen table with embroidery hoops and coils of thread, needles and concentration and talk.

“Even the towels are decorated,” June exclaims, removing other items, “and washcloths, sheets, everything. Didn't you ever use any of this?”

“Doesn't look as if I even unpacked it.”

“But why?”

Why indeed. “I must have thought they were too nice to use, I guess.” Or more precisely that the hope and care that went into them would be unsuitable in that marriage of discord and dislike. June may know that without being told.

June is struck by yet another picture of her mother, this one just a girl, stitching away at all this.

“We liked pretty things, you know,” Aggie explains. “People can buy patterned sheets now, but we had to make our own.” It's not exactly that these things are frivolous, but they do remind Aggie that not everything back then was grim and geared only to survival. “It was a custom, too, something women did together.”

June is now lifting out a quilt, unfolding it, holding it up. “Did you do this, too?”

“No, I believe that was done by the church women. They had quilting bees, and made one for each bride as the weddings came along. The designs were supposed to mean certain things, but I don't remember if I ever did know what this one's about.”

It is mainly yellow and blue, in different materials, with different patterns, flowered and plain and striped. It's the intricacy and the care that astonish.

“Frances would like it, I expect,” Aggie says finally. “Unless,” she remembers too late, “you would.”

June might have, if her mother's first thought had been for her and not for Frances. “No, she can have it. She'd probably like the rest of this as well,” indicating the towels and pillowcases and sheets. “Not to use them, but to have.”

“She might. I can't see giving them away, at any rate.” When it comes down to it, Aggie can't feel any real attachment to the things themselves. They're only recollections and reminders, and beyond that only towels and sheets and a quilt, taking up room.

June carefully folds each item and sets it all back in the tray. “There's one more layer, I guess,” peering into the trunk. “What's all this, wrapped up in tissue paper?”

At a glance, Aggie remembers. She remembers them stitching it, with more intricacy and care than any pillowcase, and she remembers wearing it. She sees the teacher's pale, strained face waiting at the end of the aisle, as she approached on her father's arm.

“My wedding dress,” she says shortly. This is more than a small sting of impending tears. She feels that if she allowed it, she might break right down and bawl her heart out.

The dress looks like a museum piece, as if it could be worn by a mannequin, with a label beneath it bearing a date. The collar is higher than Aggie would have remembered, the shoulders are puffed, and the sleeves are straight and narrow to the wrists. There are tiny fake pearls sewn into the embroidery around the throat and sleeves and waist.

Her mother would have done this, Aggie thinks: taking the dress from her and folding and wrapping it so carefully that after sixty years it has merely yellowed, but not crumpled.

Clear as a bell, June can see Aggie in this dress. Getting married to him, her father, the teacher. Why, she thinks, they must have had hopes. They must have had all kinds of private moments. Maybe even love.

So this is what Aggie has been saying all this time: that June's memories of them are only childish ones. The woman, after all, who put all this into a dress, all those tiny pearls and stitches, evidently had higher hopes than June ever would have dreamed.

All this time, perhaps, Aggie's been saying, in her way, “Look at me, it wasn't only him, I was disappointed too.” And maybe hurt. Also, of course, all those times she has said angrily, “But I cared about you too, it wasn't only him,” and all June heard was the past tense.

She looks at her mother's great sagging body, the face with its expressions camouflaged by flesh, and sees it young and slender, buttoned into this dress, leaping happily into a new and different life, getting away, eager. Aggie flings herself into things; she must have been flinging herself into this, too.

“I'll put it away again, shall I?” she asks, preparing to refold and rewrap it with preserving care.

Aggie, however, reaches out to touch it, drawing it away from June. She regards it for a moment with an expression June can't interpret. Then she begins folding it again, but roughly, without care.

“Here, Mother, let me do it, it'll get all wrinkled that way.” June pulls at it, and the seam of a sleeve, weakened by time, tears. They stare at hanging threads.

“That figures,” Aggie says finally. “Just throw the damn thing away, for God's sake.” These sudden sinkings of her spirit, these abrupt sadnesses, make her angry.

June doesn't argue, but has no intention of throwing out the dress. She doesn't quite know what to do with it; thinks maybe if she hung it in her room and stared at it for a time, it might reveal something to her she has never understood. The thing to do at the moment is fold it again, ignoring the rip for the time being, and remove it from Aggie's view, since it seems to have upset her.

They are surrounded now by a litter of boxes, things to be saved and things to be thrown out. It looks, Aggie thinks, as if they've been packing up to move.

Well, though, maybe they have.

Oh, but she's tired, so tired. She would like to sleep now for a while; maybe until the weekend's over, whatever is going to happen. “I get frightened, you know,” she hears herself saying. Did she actually say that? Must have, June's looking at her so surprised.

“I'm sorry. I didn't mean you to be afraid.” This is not quite true, but truth is not necessarily the best thing at the moment. “I don't know. I really don't,” June adds, sounding neither angry nor despairing; just speaking a flat fact.

Aggie thinks, “She's tired too.” Well, June has every reason to be tired. “We'll think of something, June. I know we'll have to do something.”

June stands. “I'll make tea, shall I, while we wait for Frances?”

In the kitchen, putting on water to boil and warming the teapot, setting up the tray with milk and sugar and little spoons to take into the front room, June wonders what came over Aggie, admitting fear, so unlike her. Although she is no longer so sure of precisely what is like Aggie, and what is unlike.

There are all those faces, without much resemblance to one another: the girl sitting in a farmhouse kitchen, stitching pillowcases; the young woman in that family photograph, who made that dress; the mother who apparently danced and sang with her child, although the child cannot remember; the widow who sat staring out of windows after her husband died; the woman who punched holes in walls, and rose before dawn, and sat with her feet up on the kitchen counter in the mornings, laughing with the dairy man; the one kneading dough and hitting cash register keys; the one with her nose buried in a book; the one sipping her first drink, laughing about how it tickled; the one who stitched a nightgown for her daughter, and took that daughter back, along with a grandchild, even though she didn't want to; the one whose eyes were rimmed with redness on a few occasions, although she would not weep in front of June: when her granddaughter finally left home, when her friend finally moved away; the one defying June and God with irritating, blasphemous questions.

The one who sometimes in the mornings looks up despairing from wet sheets. And also the dead one with the secret, from the dream last night.

TWENTY-FIVE

They wait together at the front room window, Aggie watching from her sunken chair, June standing, leaning forward, hands propped on the windowsill, looking out into the darkness. They are watching for the sweep of headlights around the corner down the block, a car with a lighted sign on the top that will say “Bert's Taxi”.

Aggie is alert, sharp-eyed, uneasy. June, glancing down at her, thinks, “Look at her, so excited, waiting for that wretched girl.” Except of course it's a particular sort of excitement this time: not the pure pleased expectation of an ordinary visit, but tinged with tension, and apparently fear.

June herself feels a little of that, too, and it makes her cross and snappish. “Wretched girl,” she thinks again.

Aggie thinks how stupid she was to have a cup of that tea June made; what a fool, to drink it down without thinking, until she tipped it up to drain the last of it and realized too late what she'd done. In just a few minutes' heedlessness, she has vastly increased the odds against herself, in the circumstances that may arise tomorrow morning.

The other question is whether June did it on purpose.

But she has never known June to be downright vicious.

Aggie also wishes she'd thought to suggest a bath after the sorting was finished. It would have been better to present Frances, surely, with skin smelling of soap; let her first impression be of cleanness and freshness. She wonders if she may not smell a little musty, like a closed-up room. “I should have had a bath,” she says.

“You can have one tomorrow.”

Unspoken is, “You may need one tomorrow.” Or maybe she reads too much into words. June may not be thinking any such thing. What makes her think she has any idea what goes on in June's head, now pressed against the window, looking out? She sighs.

June, thinking the sigh is impatience or concern, says, “The train may have been a bit late. It often is.”

Aggie nods, although June is turned away from her. How thin June is, especially from the back. It's almost possible to make out her shoulder blades and the stepping stones of her spine, not to mention her ribs, beneath her dress. She even seems shorter than she used to be. Aggie is startled once more to realize that June is also getting old. “She's shrivelling,” she thinks. “Poor child.” It does not seem inconsistent, from Aggie's point of view, to see June as both an aging woman and a child.

Why not reach out for once then and place a hand on her daughter's narrow back and say something tender? Except, what? Anyway, they obviously don't use words well between them. Original meanings tend to disintegrate into awful misunderstandings. So then why not reach out and place a hand on her daughter and not say anything at all? Just that it's such a straight back, formidable and uninviting.

One way and another, bodies block people's views. Aggie has difficulty seeing past her own flesh to the slender hopeful young girl who didn't know words, much less stories, and married a teacher in ignorance. At some point she must have decided to choose between appearances and cravings, and come down on the side of banana cake and bread.

Just that now, things are collapsing in there. She pictures organs like balloons, losing their air, deflating with slow leaks.

Columbus had such trouble with his sailors because they thought the earth was flat, and were sure they would fall over the edge if he insisted they keep going. People laugh at that now, but it seems a perfectly reasonable fear for the time. Aggie is in a similar position now: sailing to the edge and slipping over into nothing. Maybe later, knowing better, she will laugh; that would be a good joke on her.

June can see her mother's reflection in the glass, a pale circle like the moon, featureless and indistinct. She has a sudden painful vision of Aggie in that nursing home, nightgown rucked up around the waist, a stranger's busy hands. Being diapered at nightfall. Diapered! That's what they do, isn't it, with the incontinent? The vision stabs her with pity, a wound in that region she thought had been anaesthetized long ago, below the breasts.

If she were dreaming this up, she would have conjured a sense of triumph: victory over oppression. She leans her forehead once more against the cool glass, so that she can see the darkness outside, and not her mother's moon-face.

Aggie has made a promise of sorts, but only a vague one: that something must be done. The words might have been only an effort to buy time, bribe June beyond this weekend. At the moment June doesn't have the energy to unravel such complexities as her mother's intentions. Things will fall into place. She still has no clear idea how, but it will be soon. This weekend. She feels a clutching in her stomach, and thinks of making more tea, to soothe. It occurs to her to wonder what possessed Aggie to have that cup of tea. June made it and as always offered it, but certainly did not expect Aggie to accept. Self-sabotage is not something her mother has ever gone in for. Self-preservation, always. She closes her eyes but sees again those remote adept hands, busy with pins — do they use pins? — and cloth, dealing briskly with Aggie's warm, soft body.

Aggie has made a promise of sorts and now wonders what on earth she meant by it. Well, then, she thinks, shape up or ship out. Could she shape up, and how could it be done? For one thing, obviously, by remembering not to drink tea so late at night. But maybe also to let June be, test her, if she must be tested, a bit more kindly? What harm does it do if June wants a small, safe existence? Who is Aggie to insist on something else? Well, she is a mother; but then, if she demands that June stop looking at her with a child's-eye view, she must surely stop, herself, looking at June with a mother's eye. Which, it appears, has been after all an insistent, punishing one.

All very well, except it seems to be the habit of a lifetime, just taking occasional new twists, as in recent weeks.

So, then, she could ship out. But there's only one way of doing that, and she's not about to take it, voluntarily.

If they had more time. If Frances weren't coming so soon.

If they had more time what? She might say to June, “Sit down, let's talk this over without our grudges.” By “this” she would not mean only the future.

June thinks, “I'm not ready,” and wishes for more time. She feels unprepared for Frances. Inaction, after all, has a comforting sort of rhythm. It's the process of indecision that has kept her going these past few weeks, or maybe even a good deal longer. It might be another case of hopes and expectations failing to live up to reality.

How far might she go to maintain hopes and expectations?

“I think she's here,” Aggie says, and June's eyes flare open. She has missed the headlights rounding the corner, but here indeed is the car with the yellow roof light, slowing and stopping.

“Help me up,” Aggie requests, reaching out. Ordinarily, she can get out of a chair, at least, on her own. June feels the trembling in the grip, but can't tell which of them is causing it.

A rear door opens in the taxi, the interior light flashes on, and they can make out a woman's figure turning and lifting and stepping out.

Aggie, her arm still linked with June's, begins, “You know ...” but then can't think what. An appeal of some sort? Maybe just that: You know.

“What?”

“Never mind.”

The figure on the sidewalk leans to the window of the taxi and hands the driver money. She picks up her suitcase and briefcase from the sidewalk, turns toward the house, and pauses — looking at what? She straightens her shoulders, tightening her grip on her cases, and strides briskly up the walk, toward the porch and the front door.

Aggie and June move toward the hall to meet her. As Aggie lets go of June's arm so that she can walk ahead, June drops back a step. They do this automatically, so that if Aggie wavers or trips, June will be right there behind her, ready to steady her, or catch her.