The Uncanny Reader (48 page)

The building was three stories tall and U-shaped. In the center was a spacious garden, with a large eucalyptus tree for shade when the sun was too bright. Mrs. J grew tomatoes, carrots, eggplants, green beans, and peppers, which she shared with her favorite tenants, I assumed.

Her apartment was directly across the courtyard from mine. A single curtain hung in her window; the other was missing and she seemed to be in no hurry to replace it. Whenever I looked up from my desk, I would see that orphaned curtain.

From what I could tell, Mrs. J led a quiet, monotonous life. As I was getting up each day, I could see her through the window sitting down in front of her TV, wearily eating her lunch. If she happened to spill something, she would wipe it up with the tablecloth or her sleeve. After lunch, she would pass the time knitting or polishing pots or simply napping on the couch. And by the evening, when I was at last beginning to get down to work, I would see her changing into a worn-out nightgown and crawling into bed.

I wondered how old she was. Well past eighty, I imagined. She was unsteady on her feet and was constantly bumping into chairs or knocking over something on the table. In the garden, however, she was a different woman; she seemed years younger and much more at ease when she was watering or staking the plants, or plucking insects with her tweezers. The clicking of her shears as she harvested her crop echoed pleasantly through the courtyard.

*   *   *

A stray cat turned out to be the reason for my first gift of vegetables from Mrs. J.

“Nasty thing!” she screamed, brandishing a shovel. I spotted a cat slinking off toward the orchard. It looked nearly as old as Mrs. J and seemed to be suffering from a skin disease.

I opened the window and called out that she should spread pine needles around the beds, but in response she just turned and walked toward me, apparently still quite angry.

“I can't stand them!” she said. “They dig up the seeds I've just planted, leave their smelly mess in the garden, and then have the nerve to make that terrible racket.”

“Pine needles around the beds would keep them away,” I repeated.

“Why do you suppose they insist on coming here and ignore all the other yards? I'm allergic to the hair. It gives me sneezing fits.”

“Cats hate prickly things,” I persisted. “So pine needles—”

“Someone must be feeding them on the sly. If you see anyone leaving food out, would you mind telling them to stop?” As she made this last request, she came marching into my apartment through the kitchen door. Having finished her diatribe against cats, she looked around with poorly disguised curiosity, studying my desk and the cupboard and the glass figurines on the windowsill. “So, you're a ‘writer,'” she said, as though she found the word difficult to pronounce.

“That's right.”

“Nothing wrong with writing,” she said. “It's nice and quiet. A sculptor used to live in this apartment. That was awful. I nearly went deaf from all the pounding.” She tapped on her ear and then went over to the bookcase and began reading out titles as she traced the spines with her finger. Yet she got them all wrong—perhaps she was losing her eyesight, or simply did not know how to read.

Mrs. J was extremely slender. Her face was narrow and her chin long and pointed. She had a flat nose, and her eyes were set widely apart in a way that gave the middle of her face a strange blankness. When she spoke, her bones seemed to grind together with each word, and I feared that her dentures might drop out of her head.

“What did your husband do?” I asked.

“My husband? He was nothing but a lousy drunk. I've had to manage for myself, living off the rents from the building, and the money I earn giving massages.” Bored with the bookcase, she next went to my word processor and tapped gingerly at a key or two, as though it were a dangerous object. “He gambled away everything I made and didn't even have the decency to die properly. He was drunk and went missing down at the beach.”

“I'd love to get a massage when you have time,” I said, eager to change the subject for fear she would go on forever about her husband. “I sit all day and my neck gets terribly stiff.”

“Of course,” she said. “Whenever you like. There's some strength left in these old hands.” Then she cracked her knuckles so loudly I thought she might have broken her fingers. As she left, she gave me five peppers she had just picked from her garden.

*   *   *

When I got up the next day, the whole courtyard was covered with pine needles. They were scattered from the trunk of the eucalyptus to the storage shed—everywhere except in the vegetable beds themselves.

I overheard from my window one of the tenants ask about the needles, and Mrs. J explained that they were to keep the cats away. “Cats hate pine tar,” she said. “My grandmother taught me that years ago when I was a girl.” I wondered whether she had ever been a girl; somehow I felt she had been an old woman from the day she was born.

One evening, Mrs. J had a visitor—apparently a rare occasion. A large, middle-aged man appeared at her apartment. The moon, full and orange, lit up her window more brightly than ever. The man lay down on the bed, and she sat on top of him.

At first I thought she was strangling him. She appeared to have much greater strength than I had realized; she had pinned him down with her weight, and gripped the back of his neck with her powerful hands. It seemed as though he were withering away while she grew more powerful, wringing the life from his body.

The massage lasted quite a long time. The darkness between our two windows was filled with the smell of pine needles.

Mrs. J began to come to my apartment quite often. She would have a cup of tea and chatter on about something—the pain in her knee, the high price of gas, the terrible heat—and then go home again. In the interest of preserving good relations with my landlady, I did my best to be polite. And with each visit she brought more vegetables.

She also began receiving letters and packages for me when I was out.

“This came for you,” she'd say, arriving at my door almost before I'd had time to put down my purse. Just as I could see everything that went on in her apartment, she missed nothing that happened in mine. “A delivery truck brought it this afternoon,” she added.

“Thank you,” I said. “It looks like a friend has sent me some scallops. If you like, I'll bring some over for you later.”

“How kind of you! They're my favorite.”

But I nearly became ill when I opened the package: the scallops were badly spoiled. The ice pack had long since melted, and they were quite warm. When I pried open a shell with a knife, the scallop and viscera poured out in a liquid mass.

I checked the packing slip and found that they had been sent more than two weeks earlier.

*   *   *

“Look at this!” Mrs. J called as she came barging into my apartment one day.

“What is it?” I asked. I was in the kitchen making potato salad for dinner.

“A carrot,” she said, holding it up with obvious pride.

“But what a strange shape,” I said, pausing over the potatoes. It was indeed odd: a carrot in the shape of a hand.

It was plump, like a baby's hand, and perfectly formed: five fingers, with a thick thumb and a longer finger in the middle. The greens looked like a scrap of lace decorating the wrist.

“I'd like you to have it,” Mrs. J said.

“Are you sure?” I said. “Something this rare?”

“Of course,” she said, and put her lips close to my ear to whisper: “I've already found three of them. This one is for you. But don't mention it to anyone; some people might be jealous.” I could feel her moist breath. “Is that potato salad?” she added. “Then my timing is perfect: a carrot is just the thing!” She laughed with delight.

I sensed the lingering warmth of the sun as I washed the flesh of the carrot. Scrubbing turned it bright red. I had no idea where to insert the knife, but I decided it would be best to begin by cutting off the five fingers. One by one, they rolled across the cutting board. That evening, my potato salad had bits of the pinkie and the index finger.

*   *   *

The next day, a strong wind blew all through the afternoon and deep into the night. Whirlwinds swept down the hillside and through the orchard. I could sense the trembling of the kiwis.

I was in the kitchen, reading over a manuscript I had recently completed. Whenever I finish a piece, I always read it aloud one last time. But that night I was probably reading to muffle the howl of wind blowing through the branches of the fruit trees.

When I looked up at the window over the sink, I caught sight of a figure in the orchard. Someone was running down the steep slope in the dark. I could see only the back, but I could tell that the person was carrying a large box. When the wind died for a moment, I could even hear the sound of footsteps on the grass. At the bottom of the hill, the figure emerged into the circle of light under a streetlamp and I could see that it was Mrs. J.

Her hair was standing on end. A towel she had tucked into her belt fluttered in the wind, threatening to blow away at any moment. The bottom of the carton she carried was bulging from the weight of its contents. The load was clearly too heavy for a woman of Mrs. J's size, but she seemed to manage it without much difficulty. Eyes front, back straight, she balanced the load with amazing skill—almost as if the box had become a part of her.

I went to the window and stared out. A stronger gust of wind blew through the trees and for a moment Mrs. J lost her footing, but she quickly recovered and moved on. The rustling of the kiwis grew louder.

Mrs. J went into the abandoned post office at the foot of the hill. I had passed it from time to time when I was out for a walk, but I had no idea what it was being used for now or that it belonged to my landlady.

When she finally came back to her apartment, the sea was beginning to brighten in the east. She got undressed with apparent relief, gargled, pulled a comb through her hair, and put on her old nightgown.

She was once again the Mrs. J I knew—the one who bumped into furniture on the way from the bathroom to her bed, who had trouble simply buttoning her dress. I returned to my reading, the manuscript damp now from the sweat on my palms.

Many more hand-shaped carrots appeared in the days that followed. Even after everyone in the building had received one, there were several left over. Some were long and slender, like the hands of a pianist; others were sturdier, like those of a lumberjack. There were all sorts: swollen hands, hairy hands, blotchy hands …

Mrs. J harvested them with great care, digging around each carrot and pulling gently on the top to extract it, as though the loss of a single finger would have been a great tragedy. Then she would brush away the soil and hold the carrot up in the sunlight to admire it.

*   *   *

“You're terribly stiff,” Mrs. J said. I tried to reply, but she had me so completely in her grip that I could manage nothing more than a groan.

I lay down on the bed, as she had instructed, my face buried in a pillow, naked except for a towel around my waist. Then she climbed on my back and pinned me down with tremendous force.

“You sit all day. It's not good for you.” She jabbed her thumb into the base of my neck, boring into the flesh. “Look here, it's knotted up like a ball.” I tried to move, to squirm free of the pain, but she had me clamped down tight with her legs, completely immobilized.

Her fingers were cold and hard, and seemed to have no trace of skin or flesh on them. It was as though she were massaging me with her bones.

“We've got to get this loosened up,” she said. The bed creaked and the towel began to slide down my hips. Her dentures clattered. I was afraid that if she went on much longer, her fingers would scrape away my skin, rip my flesh, crush my bones. The pillow was damp with saliva, and I wanted to scream.

*   *   *

“That's right. Stand just a little closer together. Now, big smile!”

The reporter's voice echoed through the courtyard as he focused his camera. Perhaps he thought Mrs. J was hard of hearing. “Hold the carrot just a bit higher … by the greens so we can see all five fingers. That's it, now don't move.”

We were posing right in the middle of the vegetable bed, the reporter trampling on pine needles as he positioned himself for the shot. The other tenants peered curiously from their windows.

I tried to smile, but I couldn't. It was all I could do to keep my eyes open in the blinding sunlight. My mouth, my arms, my eyes—everything seemed to be coming apart and I felt terribly awkward. And thanks to the massage, I hurt all over.

“Pretend you're saying something to each other. Just relax … and turn the carrot this way … It's all about the carrot!”

Mrs. J had done her best to dress up for the occasion. She had put on lipstick and wrapped a scarf over her head. The hem of her dress came almost to her ankles, and she wore a pair of old-fashioned high heels instead of her usual sandals.

But the scarf only emphasized her narrow face, the lipstick had smeared, and somehow her formal dress and heels seemed to clash with the carrots.

“Make us look good,” she told the reporter. “In all my years, I've never once been in the newspaper.” She let out a husky laugh, and her smile pinched up the wrinkles around her eyes.

The article ran in the regional section of the paper the next morning: CURIOUS CARROTS! HAND-SHAPED AND FRESH FROM GRANNY'S GARDEN!

Chest thrust forward to compensate for her slight frame, Mrs. J stood, listing a bit to the right as her high heel dug into the earth; and though she had laughed during much of the photo session, in the picture she looked almost frightened. But the carrot cradled in her hands was perfect.

I stood next to her, holding a carrot of my own. In the end, I had managed a smile of sorts, but my eyes looked off in a random direction and I was clearly tense and uncomfortable.