Still Life with Bread Crumbs (3 page)

“My husband said, well, hell, Sarah, you call it Tea for Two, people are gonna think you can’t have more than two people,” the dimpled woman said, putting a pot, two scones, and a sugar bowl in front of Rebecca. “I still don’t know whether I made the right call. But Kevin’s the kind of guy—that’s my husband, Kevin—Kevin’s the kind of guy who wouldn’t have left it alone. Every day it would have been, you know, don’t come if there are five of you because it’s tea for two. Don’t bring four or you can’t get a seat. Or maybe you can get a seat but you can’t get tea, that kind of thing. And I would have had to say, oh, stop, don’t listen, he’s just kidding, he’s always saying stuff like that. He’s the kind of guy, he gets on something like that, he just doesn’t quit. Like more to love? Every time he talks about me, he says ‘more to love.’ I say, ‘Kevin, I don’t appreciate that,’ and he says, ‘oh, hell, don’t be so sensitive.’ So he would have gone on about Tea for Two forever. I figured adding that at the end was one less thing to think about, right? But I still don’t know whether I made the right call.”

“Yo, Sarah,” someone said. Rebecca wasn’t sure how long the woman would have gone on talking otherwise. A long time, she suspected. She seemed like one of those women who couldn’t bear to leave a silent space unfilled. She looked like a Botero painting, all big curves, wavy hair, pink skin, round eyes, the kind of woman who must have spent her entire life hearing about how pretty she’d be if only she lost a little weight, which always meant a lot of weight. More to love.

There were two men at the counter. The younger one turned and looked at Rebecca until the older one elbowed him. They left with a tray of take-out coffee cups and a big bag spotted with grease. Rebecca leafed through the local weekly paper. A senior at the high school had won a 4-H scholarship to the state university. She was posed next to a black-and-white cow, holding
a blue ribbon. The cow appeared to be looking at her sideways, fondly. Rebecca had never been really close to a cow. They always seemed a little frightening, like farm machinery with an unpredictable personality. Maybe now was the time.

Sarah collapsed into the chair opposite her.

“Another scone? I have cheddar dill in the back. Or some buttermilk, I think.” She leaned in close. “I didn’t have buttermilk so I used yogurt, which in my opinion is better. Better taste, better loft. Texture, you know? But you can’t tell these guys you’re putting yogurt in the scones or they will be down at the Gas-and-Go getting bacon, egg, and cheese on a roll so fast it will spin you around.”

Rebecca looked at her plate. Both scones were gone—raspberry, maple pumpkin. She could not remember eating them. She could not remember the last time she had eaten.

The roofer had returned at 8:00
A.M.
She had already been up for hours. The roofer had looked as though he had, too, but in a good way: damp fair hair like a cornfield with its comb tracks, T-shirt with a hint of fold marks and the smell of fabric softener, dark green windbreaker with the words
BATES ROOFING
in gold embroidery. He must have a good wife, Rebecca had thought, picturing a woman folding his T-shirts, smoothing them with her hand, handing him the windbreaker from a hook in the hall. The rented house reeked of smells Rebecca preferred not to parse too closely, and from time to time there was a halfhearted clanking noise from above. She wondered if the raccoon would die of exertion. She hoped so.

She had heard the staccato drumming of the truck engine climbing the hill and she went out front, where the air was fresh and lovely, grass and flowers and a suggestion of wet soil. Why did the forest out back smell of rot and the sunny front lawn like the signature scent of springtime? A glint of light crossed her face from below, like some mysterious signal, and she raised her hand to shade her eyes, and the roofer raised his to return what he clearly thought was a greeting.

“I don’t even need to ask,” the roofer had said when he got out of the truck, although she wasn’t sure if he meant the circles under her eyes or the smell from the house.

“How on earth will you get that creature out of the attic?” she said wearily.

“First the coon, then the cage,” he said, and from the passenger’s seat of the car he took a long gun.

“You’re going to shoot it?”

“Unless you had another idea,” he’d said.

“When I saw the trap I assumed you would release it.”

He held the gun by the barrel. It was carved with a hunting scene, a man and a deer, both stiff and unconvincing but made beautiful by the gloss of the wood and the faint blur to the figures and the finish that Rebecca thought meant the gun was old, and well-used. Grandfather, father, son. A family gun.

“Here’s the thing about raccoons. They’re creatures of habit. If you catch a coon and spray-paint an
X
on his butt, then let him go, a week later you’ll be catching the same coon. The
X
on his butt will be laughing at you. So yeah, if you want I can let him go. But unless I drive him to Maine he’ll be back and trying to find a way into your attic. You’ll be starting all over again.”

Rebecca closed her eyes. “No thank you,” she said.

“Good decision,” he said, opening the flimsy screen door. “Sometimes I think city people wind up watching too many Disney films. They confuse real animals with cartoon animals.”

“Can I take a look first?” she asked.

“At the coon?”

“I’m a photographer,” she said.

“Be my guest.”

She’d climbed the ladder in the narrow hallway, thrust her head and shoulders through the hatch, and rested her elbows on the edge of the filthy attic floor. The cage was wedged into the corner over the kitchen, up against a pile of old screens and a cardboard box. The raccoon looked over its shoulder at her, its pinpoint eyes wild with fear and rage. It did look like a cartoon
character, but a cartoon character in one of those avant-garde cartoons young artists were always making and Ben was always praising. Sven, the Possessed Raccoon, it would be called. She thought she heard a hiss. An overhead bulb in the center of the triangular space cast deep shadows. The scent of waste and desperation was too much to take for long. She shot a few fast photographs as the coon hurtled toward her, clinging to the bars of the cage and somersaulting as though he could spin free. He stopped not far from the hatch, and she shot a few more of his pointed face in close-up.

“He ate the banana,” she said after she came down the ladder.

“I think that’s a she,” the roofer said. “A male raccoon is pretty mellow. He’d probably be half asleep right now. A female raccoon’ll tear you to pieces if you give her half a chance.”

He made Rebecca wait outside, although she was not sure why. The cage and the crashing were still, then: boom. Boom. “It’s a pretty big coon,” he said as he carried a bundle of tarp with a bulge at its center out to the truck. “That crawl space is going to need some Lysol.”

“Can I take a look?” she said again.

He’d shrugged and put the tarp on the ground, unwrapping it. Its blue plastic was streaked with blood, although not as much as Rebecca had expected. The raccoon’s front paws were surprisingly small, black and shiny, and had fallen into an attitude of prayer that was belied by the picket fence of sharp yellowed teeth just above. The morning light gilded the tips of his fur. Her fur. Rebecca raised the camera again.

The sound of a nail gun was interspersed with the faintest click of the camera. She’d liked it better when she was young and the camera made more noise. Or maybe it was simply that she’d liked it better when she was young. She knelt next to the coon and the smell almost sent her reeling back. “Don’t get too close,” the roofer called from atop a ladder. “It’s probably got fleas or lice or something.” Rebecca started to itch. She was afraid she would spend the next twelve months itching, stopping only when
she was back home on West Seventy-Sixth Street. She could not think too much of her apartment or she would be undone.

The roofer hoisted a flag on one corner of the roof, a small flag that was a solid field of white. “What’s that for?” she said as the flies, humming, started to land on the coon’s pointed snout.

“Low-flying airplanes,” he said, in a tone of voice that ended the conversation. She shot the snout and the flies for a few minutes but she could already see that she wouldn’t be happy with the result. She’d been much more willing than some of her colleagues to switch to digital photography, but with film the optimism lasted longer, until the outlines began to emerge beneath the iridescent surface of the liquid in the developing trays. Now she can see instantly when she’s wasting her time. Some of the shots of the raccoon might work, especially the close-ups of his padded paws.

“I hear you have a critter in your crawl space,” said Sarah Ashby, bringing over the buttermilk (really yogurt) scones. “Lord, that sounds dirty, doesn’t it? Sorry, I’m one of those people who say the first thing that comes into my head. My husband says there’s hardly a day I don’t say something I shouldn’t. Never mind saying something I shouldn’t to Rebecca Winter. Wait’ll I tell my mom. She will die.”

Rebecca reached into her big bag and took out a notebook. “Could you direct me to the nearest supermarket?” she asked.

“Oh gosh, I figured you’d asked Jim Bates all that stuff. He’s the one with the sense of direction, and he knows this area like nobody else. You ask him where to find a blackberry bramble in the middle of nowhere, he’ll get you to it in half an hour. I know, because in July I make blackberry scones from a bramble nobody else knows about, and it’s all because he told me where to find it when I first opened this place. During hunting season there’re guys who follow his truck to see where Jim’s gonna set up because then they know that’s where the deer will be. Hold on, let me wash my hands and we’ll make a list.”

“Jim?”

“Bates? The roofer who found the critter in your crawl space?” she said as she sniffed the air and then hurried into the back. “Sorry, caramel rolls,” she cried over her shoulder.

“Jim Bates,” Rebecca wrote in her notebook. Why did she have such a hard time remembering such an ordinary name? Jim Bates. She underlined it twice. She wondered how much he would charge for getting rid of the raccoon and repairing the roof. She wondered if she could charge it to the man who owned the cottage. She had a moment of panic and looked in her wallet. Two twenties and a few singles. At least she could pay for the scones.

“Oh, heck no!” Sarah said when she asked for the check. “Not your first time in! It’s my policy—first visit is free. Well, not so much for people who just stop by for a pit stop, you know, the ones who come off the highway for something to eat and to use the bathroom, I can spot them a mile away, which I guess is what it is, right, a mile from the highway to here. But a new person here in town always gets the first meal free no matter what, no matter how much they eat, not that I think you ate a lot because you look like you could stand to put on some weight, honestly. Kevin says I say that to everybody because I could stand to lose some, but he’s just being mean.” She stopped to take a breath, and Rebecca did, too. She’d been trying for some time to compliment the scones, which were wonderful, but she couldn’t find an opening. “But I will tell you this,” Sarah added, leaning toward her. “Someday you can autograph your poster for me. Or for my mom. Oh my God, she will freak out. It’s her absolute favorite piece of art of all time, I swear. I’m going to do it. I’m going to get a copy and have you sign it!”

Rebecca didn’t have a copy of the poster herself. She hadn’t even seen one for years, unless you counted a glimpse of it on a wall in a movie about a bunch of women sharing a house and discovering their own self-worth through yoga and sex. (In her defense, she had seen the movie on a plane, and hadn’t been paying much attention.) But for years she had lived off it and its satellites, the reprints and licensing, as well as its free-floating reputation. It had paid for Ben’s boarding school tuition, paid for the roomy apartment she’d moved them into after the divorce and had just sublet, paid for trips to Paris (for the Musée d’Orsay) and London (for the Tate Modern). It had paid her restaurant bills and her hairdresser tips and she hadn’t even really noticed how much money it brought in until it started to dry up and then disappeared.

Her second show of photographs had been called the Kitchen Counter series, and it was seen as an iconic moment in women’s art. But in fact at the time she took those photographs Rebecca had just been tired, tired in that way a woman with a child and a husband and a house and a job and a life gets tired, so that it feels like a mild chronic illness. She had been thirty-six years old and had a toddler and a husband who was contemptuous of husbands who helped around the house. “Peter is so European,” women would say, and later Rebecca wondered if that was their way of telling her that he slept around. But that was later.

One evening Benjamin had had an ear infection, and by the time she had gotten him dosed with bubble-gum-flavored antibiotic and settled down in his crib Peter had shown up with two assistant professors and their spouses. That had been one of his favorite tricks, to show up with dinner guests unannounced, the guests apologetic, Peter not a bit, as though it was a test for her, to see what she could manage. “I’m surely not expected to ask if I can bring guests to my own home?” he had said one night when she had complained.

After everyone had staggered away tipsy into the night, calling compliments on the osso buco (in the freezer for exactly this purpose) and the flourless chocolate cake (ditto) over their tweedy shoulders, Peter had gone right to bed, once again confident that a kitchen magically cleaned itself sometime in the witching hours between brandy and breakfast. Rebecca had needed a moment before she started on the dishes and had lain down on their new modern couch, with its tubular frame and clean square lines, so uncomfortable that only a person as weary as she was could fall asleep there. At dawn a thin needle of sunlight through the living room window woke her even before Benjamin was screaming to be set free, and she had picked up her new Hasselblad, a gift from her father, and started to take pictures.