Still Life with Bread Crumbs (16 page)

It was like a foster house, passed from person to person without any love, maintenance, or decoration, a brown wood box with rattling windows and a toilet whose handle needed to be held down to flush. If Jim Bates owned it, he thought each time he pulled up at the door, he’d put a long porch on the front and a screened one on the back, put in bigger windows and add a kind of sunroom that would get light through the trees. Then he’d hang a bird feeder outside the sunroom, although he knew the bears would be inclined to tear it down.

As it was, it wasn’t the right house for Rebecca Winter. It was too insubstantial, too unmarked. Jim liked objects that were what they seemed—a cookie jar that said
COOKIES
, not one designed to look like a bulldog, or a fat French chef. He thought Rebecca Winter looked like what she was. Maybe it was the dark clothes with no ruffles or fancy buttons, the shortish nails with no polish. Maybe it was her hair. He liked that it was plain, that she didn’t do anything to it except stick it behind her ears when she was busy. As far as he could tell she didn’t wear any makeup, although every once in a while she put stuff from a little round tin with roses on it on her lips, and when she did Jim always looked away, as though he was seeing something private.

“You always think that,” Laura used to tell him, in the laughing voice that sounded a little too much like it was laughing at him. “You think women aren’t wearing any makeup when the truth is that we just wear makeup in a way that looks like we’re not wearing any makeup at all. That’s the point.”

If that was the point Laura had missed it. She wore stuff that turned her lashes navy blue and her eyelids lavender and her cheeks pink and her mouth pinker. Still, when he first met her he’d honestly believed she was a natural blonde.

If his theory about houses was correct, he should have known
it wasn’t going to work out, even though she brought him pancakes in bed and then did things with syrup she’d read about in a magazine, even though she took Polly to the nail parlor for her first pedicure and bought her a flowered bikini from a surf shop. Laura wanted one of those new houses that looked like nobody had ever lived there because nobody had, a two-story foyer with a big showy brass light fixture on a chain, and a kitchen that was part of a dining area that was part of a family room. She took him to tour a model once, and he kept thinking of a sci-fi film he’d seen when he was a kid, a guy in a room where the walls and the ceiling were closing in on him in a way that was meant to be scary. Jim actually wanted a house where the walls and ceiling closed in a little bit more, like the house where he grew up, with a kind of black scratchy mark in one corner of the living room that showed the spot where the top of the Christmas tree always grazed the ceiling and left a tattoo of evergreen gum.

When they’d wound up in that house after his father died, Laura’s beloved velvet sectional in the small square living room had looked like a fat man in a shrunken suit. She’d tried, she said, she’d really tried. But she wasn’t cut out for

Having his sister around had put a bit of a damper on the stuff with the syrup, which had accounted for a fair amount of the basis of their marriage, Jim discovered. Sometimes that was the trouble, that Polly was there. And sometimes it was that Polly was nowhere to be found and Jim had to go roust her from some bar where she was using an ID she’d bought for twenty bucks and dancing in a corner in a sports bra, whipping her shirt around over her head. And that was on a good night.

Sometimes now it was like his marriage to Laura had never
even happened at all, and he thanked God for the invention of the birth control pill, which meant neither of them had wound up enmeshed in the kind of petty warfare over the hearts and minds of little kids Jim saw all around him: Mom says we can’t have candy, Dad bought us Oreos, Mom says you didn’t send the check, Dad says your boyfriend is an idiot. He’d been waiting in line at Arby’s one day and he’d heard a little boy with a voice like a cartoon kitten say to the girl in cutoffs holding the hand of the man across the table from him, her chin in her hand, her foot tapping the vinyl tile floor, “My mommy says you’re a hoochie.”

He was sorry he’d never had kids. He was more than sorry; he was pretty brokenhearted about it, when he thought about it hard, which he tried not to do. But he was glad he hadn’t had kids like that. It had been surprisingly easy; Laura had gone to see her mother in Nags Head and never come back. He’d packed up her stuff. “You can keep the sectional,” she’d said. He hadn’t, although it had been a bitch getting it out of the house, and he finally used a chain saw, which somehow made him feel better about things.

He got a Christmas card every year, first week in December like clockwork. Long blond hair (long fake-blond hair), serious tan, four authentically blond kids, balding husband with a gut in a golf shirt, big house, all in Orlando. The whole family, ranged along an aggressively ceremonial staircase in the two-story foyer with a tree in the curve of the stairs at the bottom. He wondered whether they put the tree up in October so they could take the picture, then put it away, then put it up again, like a dress rehearsal. No sap on the ceiling; the tree was silver, not even a second cousin of anything that grew in the forest. Laura looked like someone he’d never even met. He bet she’d say the same about him.

Oscar Winter and his neighbor, Levine from 6F—which is what he always called him, Levine from 6F—got a car service to take them three blocks to the movie theater to see the new James Bond. Then they went to the McDonald’s for dinner. Levine had the Filet-O-Fish sandwich; Oscar had the Big Mac. “I never got the fuss about this special sauce,” Oscar said, with special sauce on his chin. “It’s French dressing, am I right?”

Sonya returned from dinner at her sister’s house in Queens with a tin of homemade sugar cookies. “You’re a saint!” Oscar said as he watched
How the Grinch Stole Christmas
and dunked the cookies into a glass of tea.

Ben went to a buffet supper at Amanda’s parents’ apartment. There were three trees: one with white lights in the living room,
one with colored lights in the den, one covered with origami animals in the foyer. All had been done by a florist.

“I believe I know your father,” Amanda’s mother said a little stiffly, which made Ben wonder.

Sarah made bûche de noël for Kevin’s family while Kevin, his brother, and his father watched sports on the TV in the paneled basement. After dinner they ate the entire bûche de noël, then went back downstairs, leaving the women to do the dishes. “You look like you’ve lost some weight, honey,” Kevin’s stepmother told Sarah.

Tad did a party in the children’s wing of the cancer center in Nasserville. One little girl drew a picture of him with crayons and he put it on the refrigerator when he got home. “They should pay you!” his aunt said indignantly, taking his plate of baked ham and macaroni and cheese from the oven.

Jim Bates gave his sister, Polly, a white angora sweater. “It’s a cloud,” she said, holding it up. Then she put it on over her nightgown. “I’m tired,” she said. “Yeah, I know, Pol,” her brother said, putting the teakettle on.

Rebecca almost missed the day entirely. She lost track of time constantly these days, knew it was the weekend only because Jim Bates would fetch her in his truck, knew night was beginning to fall when the edges of the trees and the hem of the horizon blurred. She discovered it was Christmas because she went to Tea for Two first thing and found it closed. Closed, dark, silent, along with the hair salon, the insurance-travel-accounting agency, and all the other businesses downtown. The streets were deserted except for a young woman with a baby peeking quizzically from a front pack.

“The Gas-and-Go is open,” the young woman said, holding up a cardboard cup of coffee. When she paused, the baby began to wail, so she started walking again, fast, slewing from side to side as though she was ice-skating on the sidewalk. All was calm as the young mother skated off toward the Methodist church.

The church bells began to play “O Holy Night.” In her jeans pocket Rebecca’s phone vibrated. There was a text from Ben: “Happy whatever we call it.”

At the Jewish Home for the Aged and Infirm, Bebe Winter sat in the visitors’ room and played all day. For whatever reason, she played the piano part of Handel’s
Messiah.

Rebecca had printed out the cross pictures, which looked better and better to her each time she worked with them, and she had split a tuna melt with the dog, whom she was embarrassed to admit she called Dog when she called him at all. Giving him a name implied permanence and ownership, and she wasn’t prepared to embrace either. Her building in New York forbids dogs over forty pounds, and while this dog looked half-starved when he arrived and is now still lanky, she can tell just by looking him over that he is heavier than that. He has eyes like black glass beads, and one ear that stands up like a cowlick after the other has fallen. He follows her everywhere, into the forest, around the house, but he doesn’t like the idea of getting in the car. Twice that morning he had laid his head in her lap and looked up at her, and it was then that she thought about naming him, and
realized that doing so made him one more brick in a wall that stood between her and her former existence.

“Don’t become too attached,” she said aloud, to one or the other of them.

It was too late; the dog had become attached. Perhaps it was the low even voice, the absence of screaming and hitting, the warm bedroom and the full food dish. Sometimes his ears would stiffen and Rebecca would imagine he was hearing something far away. This was correct; from the trailer at the bottom of the hill he could hear a quavering voice, its tremolo equal parts paranoia, distress, and medication, calling, “Jack! Jack, come back! Come home!” When Rebecca heard any of this at all she assumed it was the wind, which had picked up sharply since morning. The dog walked to the living room, turned in a circle, sank to the floor. A cold finger ran up his feathered spine, a sudden gust under the warped front door.

It had started snowing at midday, downy snow that picked up volume until the tree line was obscured by pale gray-white. Rebecca went out into it for about an hour, circling the woods and then walking down the drive to look in the mailbox. She had been looking for her latest check from the state, which was late or lost or merely tormenting her by keeping her waiting. The dog lifted his head to sniff the open mailbox. “Nothing,” Rebecca said aloud.

When they turned back, flakes heavy on her lashes and the dog’s muzzle, she saw that their tracks were being filled in swiftly. She had little experience of snow like this, that seized and overwhelmed its surroundings, wiping out all the sharp edges and landmarks. Snow in the city was a passing thing even when it was substantial, Central Park’s peaks and gullies muted by a silvery glow at 5:00
A.M.
and then slowly reappearing as the runners thumped the snow off the roads, the dog walkers tamped it down on the paths. In the city snow was as transient as a tourist. Here it stuck. Twice she heard a skittering noise that took her
back to that night with the raccoon in the trap, then realized it was snow barreling down the slope of the roof.

It was a good day to stay inside, get some work done, throw the frozen turkey carcass from Thanksgiving in a big dented pot, the only really sizable pot in the house. The architect and the book editor had bought it one summer and brought it up from the city for a lobster feast that had gone awry because of too much Chardonnay, sun, and a certain sexual overlap between and among their friends of which they’d been unaware. Rebecca let the pot simmer bones into stock all day long, perfuming the house with something comforting and substantial. She defrosted some of the ground venison, too. Jim Bates had brought her a dozen packages of frozen meat and a bag of bones for the dog. “He seems like a good dog,” he had said, looking him over while the dog sat at attention next to his truck, wagging his tail hard.

“He seems to like you,” Rebecca had said, which was true.

She had been a little dispirited by the size of the venison portions; they were so conspicuously designed for a person alone, two small chops in some, a half pound of ground meat in others. And then she realized that that was how it had been packaged for Jim, that he would sit in the evening in that yellow kitchen and she at the dining room table here, each eating the solitary meal of a single person. She wondered if she should invite him to dinner, then dismissed it as too much. Lunch someday, perhaps.

She went to sleep early, slept long and heavily. When she finally woke, the dog was whimpering in the bedroom doorway, and the room had turned dull pewter. It was just after eight in the morning by her watch, and she jumped out of bed, the wood floor frosty on her feet. The dog was used to going out by six.

She pushed at the front door, but nothing happened. Again and again she tried, while the dog whimpered and then finally barked sharply. He’d peed on the floor in other houses, not wanting to but having no choice, and what happened after was painful
and memorable. This woman seemed disinclined to hit him, but you never knew.

When Rebecca gave up and looked out the window, she saw a moonscape around her, the path, the steps, even the car wiped out by enormous drifts of snow. Several breached the bottoms of the windows, and a light powdering inside showed where the sills fit ill.

In the back bedroom she found a window that opened. When she shoved it up the snow blew in, and the dog heaved up and hopped out. He was instantly buried to his shoulders, and Rebecca stood and watched as he weaved around the deeper drifts over to the tree line and into the forest, where the canopy was weighed down low and white and the ground was a bit clearer. He tried to lift a leg, put it down, satisfied himself with squatting, went a little farther until he was just a sandy back and neck, then returned. It was still snowing hard, and what was already on the ground was blowing fitfully in a steady series of strong gusts.