The Maid's Version (7 page)

A
t least twice a night little brother pissed into a milk bottle and I marked the yellow-depth on the glass with a green crayon. He’d wake me when he had to go, and it was my job to then block him from the bathroom, holding him, threatening, sitting on his back if called for, until I could hear a convincing trill of pain in his voice, then hand him the milk bottle. We were trying to stretch his bladder so he’d have no more accidents. We slept three boys to a room, triple bunk beds with one lowered, but older brother was busy with his increasingly adult dreams (this was not quite a full year before he married at seventeen and moved to the basement with his younger bride), so I’d take the warmed bottle out to empty it in the toilet. Dad would often be at the kitchen table, beer cans beside his textbooks, a smoky cloud of scholarship hung between the table and the light. He used a church key as a bookmark and always wore white shirts (such attire meant something deep to him that I never needed to ask about), dress shirts for work, old dress shirts for daily life around the house, mowing the lawn, leaning over a fence to joke with neighbors, chasing the bums who stole milk off our porch. Dad was a drinking man who worked all day selling metal in St. Louis, came home, had a couple of beers (Mom’s greatest domestic victory was when she convinced him to forgo scotch whisky except for the most special of occasions and stick to beer otherwise) and a ham sandwich, then drove back across the river to attend Washington University on the G.I. Bill. He was a dedicated student at night and never missed a day of work.

He’d look up at me carrying that piss bottle in the wee hours and say something like, “Had economics class tonight, Alek—I learned that if you’re going to steal, you should steal a lot.” Or, “Have to read a whole goddam novel about baseball, only it’s not really about baseball, see, it’s about sad-assed stuff I already know all I need to know about, but there will be a test.”

The house was a dinky box on a street of dinky boxes, with two bedrooms, one small, the other smaller. When visiting from West Table, which she began to do after the summer I had with her, Alma slept at the far end of the kitchen on an army surplus folding cot. The reconciliation with my dad seemed to have dismissed her focus, and she began to float languidly among her own pliant thoughts. Alma was almost hourly becoming less anchored to the day she was living and twirled into and out of days gone by or days she’d imagined. She often addressed us boys by the wrong names and I would answer to any of them, but the others wouldn’t, and an expression of agonized confusion would slacken her features as the correct names bounded into the summer weeds and hid from her.

The house was mostly a riot by day. Mom worked till noon answering phones at St. Joe’s Hospital, and with Mom gone we boys ran amok—blasted the Animals, Chuck Berry,
Hot Rod Hootenanny
—bounced fat rubber balls off the ceiling, interrupted others on our party line to call grocery stores that had Prince Albert in a can, stuck darts in windowsills, closet doors, upholstery or flesh, brought in neighbor kids and beat hell out of each other for practice—while Alma would go into Mom’s kitchen and demonstrate her superior domestic expertise; put the pots and pans here instead of there, move the plates higher on the shelves, set the skillets under the sink, stack the canned goods differently, rethink the entire knife, fork, spoon drawer. Mom would come home and again spend an hour of her day mumbling and putting everything back into place, then lie on the front room floor with a wet cloth over her eyes. For two or three days Alma would overlook the disorder in the kitchen, the poor strategy employed by her silly daughter-in-law, then fix it all once more.

Dad was in a rough spot between Alma and Mom, and it was made rougher by Alma’s deep suspicion that strange men came to the kitchen window and looked in on her at night as she changed for bed. These men were usually silent, but she could hear them breathing when the wind was right, and see beams from their flashlights lashing the walls. She would throw grumpy little tantrums in the evenings, vent her fear through the early TV programs, and Dad would on several occasions finally have to go out back and watch for perverts so she could get into her sleeping gown. I would sit with him. Two metal lawn chairs were set in a good vantage point, and Dad and me would watch and snicker, then catch ourselves and say it wasn’t funny. Or at least not the kind of funny we should be laughing about.

Headlights cresting the slope on the next street over played briefly on the window nearest to the cot and bled through slits between the curtains. She’d sometimes part a curtain suddenly and stare about for culprits, then withdraw. A big twin-trunked cottonwood tree blocked the moon. The houses had been built so cheek-by-jowl that in warm weather we could hear conversations, snores, sometimes farts or lovemaking from inside houses in two directions.

“Why won’t you talk about Ruby?”

“When you’re older.”

“But something wrong happened, Dad—don’t you care?”

He’d light a cigarette, raise a beer can, mutter scraps of sentences he avoided pulling together. He’d watch smoke trickle toward the sky until the muttering ceased and he spoke coherently again: “She sent me home a little agitator, didn’t she? A goddam protester. If it isn’t Ruby with you, it’s taking up for those bums sleeping by the river who steal our milk. Why is that?”

“I know them, is all.”

“She got hold of you too young and gave you a hard twist in the head, got you facing the wrong way. That’s my fault.”

“All I do is ask questions.”

“Look, Fidel, listen to me good—you’ve got to learn you can’t go around being angry at everybody out there who has a swimming pool or a shiny car—that attitude won’t work very well in this ol’ world. Takes you nowhere. Those fancy-pants sorts are the people have to hire you someday—they can tell if you hate them in general.”

Alma’s sad furtive undressing continued, with a few peeks between curtains, then the light went out. Fireflies signified all around our yard. There was the scent of cut grass, a slight stench of motor oil and gasoline, honeysuckle. Somebody’s mother called impatiently across the dark to bring in the children from the street behind. Dad smelled of beer and the warm smell of beer has always made me feel hugged and home.

“I will say this much; if it wasn’t for him, I’d’ve never gotten to here, gotten to someplace that didn’t know who I’d been born as and would give me a goddam chance, let me fight for some of the pie, at least. I lived through the war for this, son. A chance. We needed help getting away from home the year you were born, you know,
sick
, and I needed to leave to find a decent-paying job, and Harlan wouldn’t offer. Not a dime, not a dollar. You know how he is about his money. Glencross gave it, though, without me even asking. I bet she never told you that.”

H
e didn’t know what he truly liked between the sheets until she showed him. She saw inklings of his desires in his eyes, sifted through his bashful talk and long silences and deciphered what wasn’t said, then delivered those mute cravings onto his novice body. He had spasms he thought holy in nature and in her embrace could have them again more quickly than he’d ever believed possible. She knew all the worthwhile crevices and wrinkles and bulbous places that made the body entire sing and sing of release, and the more release he experienced the more he sought. Her lips were fine on his, so learned, and her hands moved over him like those of a necromancer delivering a resurrection, for she raised him up with fingertip touches and her fragrant breath and pink caresses. She probed him while lying on quickly spotted sheets in ways he tried to halt, but didn’t quite, then didn’t try, then asked for again. She took him to places inside a shaded room that he’d only dimly imagined might exist, and while there in sweaty reality he reclined like a pasha of lust, a man lost to squirts, sighs, fresh angles of entry and the enveloping stink, and to find this carnal enchantment for the first time at his age was to welcome a streaking of madness into his life—madness he prayed had no end now that it had begun.

T
he Burton family brought the very first piano to West Table in 1883, ordered out of Cincinnati and delivered from the railway station by ox-drawn wagon, but no one in town knew how to play it until their youngest daughter was born and taught herself the rudiments. In time she had her own daughter, a sweetheart named Lucille Johnston, who was by age eleven a local prodigy, a little blond girl bent reverently over the keys releasing waves of grace with her tiny fingertips. By seventh grade Lucille began spending a fortnight of her summers studying with the best available pianists in Springfield, usually, but upon graduation she did also experience an eye-opening month in Chicago. Back home again she supplied chaste and stately music at church affairs and civic affairs, but at house parties attended by quite different flocks would let her hair down and bang those eighty-eights until the girls danced barefoot and the men had to go sit on the porch to cool down.

At age nineteen she said, “I swan, I swan,” at a so-so joke and realized she had fallen in love with Ollie Guthrie. Her parents approved. She and Ollie both beamed during those dreamy weeks of engagement as if permanently amazed at the repeated wonders that took place daily between two hearts so opened and well matched. He gave her a ring and a necklace with a heavy brooch that she wore more than she did the ring, because the ring was too valuable to risk losing and she had to remove it to play. The couple were to visit his mother’s people out at Rover, but the regular Arbor pianist had been stranded in Cape Girardeau, and Lucille reluctantly agreed to sit in with the house band so the dance could proceed and her friends could frolic. Ollie sat on a windowsill watching her with a smile that never wilted. The explosion sent them in different directions, and three days later he identified Lucille by the brooch that had burned deeply into her chest.

S
he has washed his shirts clean of her sister for months now, scrutinized collars, cuffs, taken a hard block of lye soap to lipstick smudges, and scrubbed away that smell the girl splashed on and the smell of him and her rutted into a smell that could not be mistaken by any wife for another.

(“You need to stop puttin’ on that perfume.”

“But he bought it for me. They like you to wear things they bought you.”

“It catches on his shirts and lays a high smell in there.”

“He likes it.”

“I have to wash the stink out, though, and it ain’t easy.”

“That fragrance is imported!”)

In the wind of every season she aired his jackets on the line, ofttimes for two days or more. She washed his shirts clean of her sister and aired his jackets pure and turned a blind eye toward intimate caresses in the backseat of a rackety Ford pulled to the curb out front and the scarlet joy that on some nights set Ruby dancing merrily in the shack. It was a mess of wrongness she just had to take, she knew her place, and had three sons with stomachs pinging. Glencross eventually noticed how discreet and effective she was in keeping knowledge of the affair from reaching his wife through sight or scent, and began to covertly press dollar bills on her almost weekly. He never stated a reason for the increase in pay and didn’t need to, either—she caught his drift plain and clear and accepted the bonus dollars with a quick twisting of two or three confusions inside her chest.

(“Are the both of you in love now?”

“We’re somethin’, sister.”

“Somethin’ what, though?”

“Somethin’ that’s the berries, sis, call it any name you want, but it’s runnin’ mighty sweet, and I can’t see where it’ll stop.”

“It had ought to stop now.”

“He has this way of layin’ there eyein’ me all sleepy with just a tiny bit of his tongue poked out that reaches to my toes and curls ’em back … and … you see what I’m sayin’?”

“Oh, I hope you never do make her know.”) On days spaced two weeks apart she would accompany Mrs. Glencross to the office of Dr. Thomason on Jefferson Avenue and sit in the shadowed waiting room while treatment was received. He was perhaps the oldest doctor in town and continued to apply remedies to women that most doctors had in recent years phased out of their practices. Noises that Alma could not associate with the practice of medicine did many times reach her ears through the walls as she sat and tried not to hear the intimate whimpers and grunts or comprehend too clearly when she did. Mrs. Glencross required the administration of rejuvenating paroxysms every fortnight and drank elixirs in tiny sips on all other days, rain or shine, but still she was wan and routinely lacked pep. The lady required Alma at her side to brace her upright as she sagged from the relief afforded by medically induced shudderings of the pelvis and remained loosened in her limbs on the return walk home.

“I’ll hold your umbrella up, ma’am.”

“Thank you, dear. My health, it’s as it has ever been.”

“Did the doctorin’ treatment go good?”

“I prefer you not pry, Mrs. Dunahew. I do appreciate your arm to lean on, always, but don’t pry.”

T
he congregated silhouettes of ruin attracted steady visitors who arrived most evenings around sunset to stand and behold in the everyday wonder of sinking light just what contortions tragedy had wrought and left in view. Remains of wall torn to fractions still somehow stood here and there to make partial and keening shapes in the gloaming. Dogs had for a time gathered on the spot in snorting packs, but the siren stench of rot from the pit had finally wavered and blown away. Burned wood, sprung wires, shanks of cloth, bits from scarves and hats and handbags and crushed shoes were sifted among the tumbled bricks and blackened debris. Rainwater stagnated at the bottom of the pit and made muck beneath returned chunks of the scattered building.

Sheriff Shot Adderly did his rounds there at that hour whenever he could and observed. There were regulars in grief and tourist connoisseurs of the tragic and regulars again. Some knelt in prayer, some recounted news of their day on this earth in an intimate babble of words directed to the crater, and others stood at the edge and gazed upward, seeking a flashed revelation in the twilight. Arthur Glencross now and then arrived in finery to stand at the edge and look down and only down toward the dank and jumbled mess. He seldom stood there for long, but might arrive in any weather and ignore it, foul or fair, and stare always with such emphasis that his presence was felt and eyes were drawn toward his figure.