The Wintering (23 page)

Slowing the car, Almoner asked, “Is this place worthy of those others?”

They glanced up from the road at a slope of eroding ground, once a driveway, leading to an abandoned Negro schoolhouse. He turned the car that way when Amy nodded. Though it was only midday, the sun had the pale look of late afternoon. With its edges diffusing, it seemed to be helplessly swallowed by the widening winter sky. Everything was whitening, and Amy felt that at any moment the world about her might give way, to be blotted out entirely. Lengthily, off the tin roof's ragged edges, like rain, the pale winter glow fell. Touching their faces, highlighting their cheeks, it turned their noses redder in the November air. They went about the dry deadened yard gathering twigs and branches to fill what remained of a pot-bellied stove. The vine-trailing outhouse yielded a plank, easily broken into firewood. Inside, the fire was eventually fed paper and scraps from Jessie's lunch. They sat like schoolchildren themselves, the blanket drawn over their knees, whispering in conspiring tones. Supposedly, he had left home to inspect roads into a deer camp and wore rough clothes and had brought whiskey. They passed the bottle between them, as if it might warm their hands; wind stole in through glassless windowpanes and cracks in the walls. Without more fuel, the fire grew steadily weaker. Shivering and returning the bottle again, Amy said, “I'm glad you brought that instead of beer.” Momentarily warmed by the whiskey, growing both sleepy and melancholy, she put her head on her knees.

“Blue Monday?” he asked, turning from staring into the deadened fire.

“Just thinking about going away,” she said, lifting her head. “I just can't stay here, Jeff.” She had drunk more than she had realized. The iron feet of the bloated stove seemed to lift and fall when she moved her head. They seemed the forepaws of some great animal. At Jeff's look, she thought things had been different for him back in his day, or he would understand her situation more clearly. Today, two girls had invited her to the movies, and that was the kind of thing people she knew did with their afternoons. Her nose sank down with a little abrupt bump against her knees, while she snickered to think where she was instead and how surprised those girls would be.

Jeff stretched out on his back, his hands behind his head. Wasn't he cold? Amy drew the blanket he had abandoned back over his knees and stretched out alongside him. The ceiling, as she lay down, receded and then came slowly down into place, which seemed funny. In their winter coats, she thought them like two cumbersome bears settled side by side for their winter's sleep. Against the stove's warm sides, the soles of her feet had begun to burn uncomfortably, though the floor beneath her was hard and cold. The two inconveniences loomed large in her mind, and Jeff's hand touching her was bothersome. He seemed trembly and shaky, like an old man. This time: she repeated that to herself over and over. But the room was all the barish-brown Sunday-school rooms she had ever sat in with her mind skittering away from the lessons in large-printed, colorful Biblical pamphlets. Must she blame herself that when she tried to return his kiss, she felt nothing at all? Reserve, part of her, tightened her like a rein. Coldly, she removed his hand from her leg. She said all the things she always said: she was sorry but she couldn't and she just didn't feel that way. Her longing, however, was for abandonment.

Jeff walked to the window with the whiskey bottle and tilted it to his mouth. Having recapped it, he said, turning, “Poor baby.” That struck Amy as being condescending, and she looked at him, a little less sorry for having refused.

“—who can't melt,” he had concluded.

Against the edgeless sun visible at the window, he seemed all the same color, hard to distinguish. “You may think too highly of your body, Amy,” he said. “It's, after all, flesh and blood. And, I worry that you're never going to be able to love anyone.”

How ridiculous, she thought, running over in her mind the people she already loved, her family despite all the things they had done to her, and she loved him, though not in the way he wanted. Could she help that? Old shame filled her as she stood and drew up her pants, uncomfortable that he did not look away. Not speaking, she gathered things to take to the car. She waited for him then at the door. He put the last scrap into the stove and came on, bringing the lunch basket. Still silent, they crossed the schoolyard, passing left-over sad playground equipment, a tire hanging lopsidedly by a frayed rope, a huge tractor tire on which the children had climbed.

“I thought I could help,” he said. “I know you're not frigid. You only need to have something frozen inside you melted. Something your past did to you. But I guess I'm the wrong one.”

Miserable, she said, “I'm sorry.”

“It's not fatal,” he said. “It's a momentary sadness like a star falling. But we've put so much time into this, it seems a shame it's ended.”

They spoke little on the trip back to town. But Amy was surprised that he stopped at the bus stop for her to get out, though the bus had not come. They said hardly goodbye, and he drove away. She had felt so disgruntled on the drive that she had argued with him even when he mentioned that it was going to rain. But he had been right. Rain was coming down torrentially by the time the bus reached Delton. She was drenched in the moment it took her to run inside the station. She was so cold that she had difficulty opening a locker where she had stored inconsequential packages, to pretend that, having gone to the movies, she had done a little shopping. With these few things, she felt homeless, that they were all her possessions, and she started from the bus station.

She went home in a taxi, and got out a block away, hoping to dash up the driveway and enter the house through the back way, not to be seen. Her father was standing on the back steps waiting for a lull in the rain before going out to the garage. When she rounded a corner, he stared at her so strangely that Amy wondered, too, whether she were in the wrong place.

This was his daughter? his face asked. His eyes strayed to where a button was missing from her coat, and her hands, without gloves, were wet and red as a scrubwoman's. He would offer no advice, not to be an old fogey like most parents. Standing convivially, jiggling change in his pockets, he observed Amy's small packages. He remarked how glad he was she had been out shopping again. Spend all the money she wanted! Offering, he thought that she had never looked worse. Her hair that could be pretty hung around her face like wet mop strings. And with an observant look on his face, he said, “I ought to get you a car of your own.”

Amy, hesitating at the bottom step when he spoke, started toward the porch's shelter.

“I don't need a car,” she said. “I'd like the money, instead, to go away.”

Amy, I can't bear the silence. I can't. Will you take me back into your experience? I had thought I could stand it, but I can't. I know that now. Naturally, it hurts when you say no. You had said you wanted to be free, and I wanted to help you become so. I may be the wrong one. But until you find someone else, let me keep trying. You need someone so much. Your past has made you so vulnerable to hurt, I can't help but worry about you. Once before I told you, I'll he anything to you you want me to be. I only think now there's confusion on both our parts about what you want from me. There were questions when I got home that day. I had been needed to go for a prescription. The night before, Jessie had made a mess of dinner and that day had burned Amelia's birthday cake. I've been appointed to find out what's wrong with her. Neither liquor nor pills will help me. One of the things we had between us was truth. I think we still have that. So will you tell me truthfully if you really do want to be free of me completely. If so, then I'll quit this. I promise
.

Jeff

She wouldn't eat lunch, Edith had thought, but feeling tired must mean that she needed food, and having set down her grocery bag, she opened a package of cookies. The chocolate taste set up inside her a feeling of starvation, for food, excitement, sex, something, and one cookie led to another. Having no name for what she wanted, Edith continued to cram cookies into her mouth until, at least, hunger was sated. Afterward, she could have cried over the cellophane bag, emptied. Instead of asking Mallory if she were too fat, which obviously she was, she now asked him frequently how much too fat she was, considering her age? He muttered something always about looking healthy, neither telling the truth nor avoiding it. This avoidance made her eat more, as if to force him to say what he really thought.

Whistling, the postman went down the other side of the street, his breath smoking O's, as fragile as the sky. That morning, tree limbs had been perfectly preserved in ice, which now melted in unrelenting drips against the house. Edith, holding a letter toward the light, thought, if only Amy had stayed here and married and been like the other girls, I wouldn't be in this dilemma!

The letter against the light, she could make out only that it had been scrawled in red pencil, but it did reveal that Amy had not told Mr. Almoner she was leaving. What did that mean? If Amy had run away from him, perhaps she cared enough to come back if he asked. Edith's heart set up a rhythmic thumping, only partially because she was walking upstairs. Would Amy come back? Edith wondered where the years had gone when she had complained about being exhausted from running after Amy, keeping her from moving knickknacks about the house. How she longed to be exhausted in that way again.

She did not glance at stack after stack of numbered canvases in her closet, having given up painting. Now, in her tufted pink chair and confronting her life, she thought that, Yes, she would give in and eventually buy expensive silk slacks and a silk shirt to be worn out covering her stomach, and she would go with Mallory to some semitropical place and there attempt native dances, further ruining her skin with martinis and sun and catch a fish and pose, or in a flower lei, for a picture to be sent back to the hometown paper. At night, wearing a flowery dress with a matching cashmere sweater similar to the other ladies', she would pose again behind an exotic rum drink, or on deck behind a life preserver bearing some cruise ship's name. This is my life, Edith thought, dialing the phone.

“Hello. I understand you have a ceramic class. I'm interested in taking it three mornings a week.”

Enrolled, she went downstairs to a house filled with ceramic ashtrays and bunnies and urns presented by friends. Now she could give ceramic presents in return. The letter on the kitchen table, the water boiling, reminded Edith again of her dilemma.
One thing we had between us was truth
. The envelope when it was resealed did not seem steamed. She would make Mallory a big white ashtray for his office, and he would say, “Honey, you're just as artistic and talented as you can be,” though it would be a replica of all the ashtrays taken out of the kiln that day. She was tired of pretense and wished Amy had told her what she was looking for. Gaiety was a covering up for fools, pretensive and easy. She was wrong then to have despaired of Amy's mournful face. Only how did you make sense of truth and honesty? Edith wondered. It was by dishonesty she had learned of her failures and more about her daughter. While the cycles of her life revolved still with the moon, Amy saw her only as her mother, which was natural. Though, touched by the right person, Edith knew she might abandon even Amy. Who was to touch her?

Opening a box of crackers and eating, Edith began to clean pantry shelves. The work would take up most of the day. Something else might happen tomorrow. She finished a cracker, dried her hands, and put Almoner's letter into an envelope addressed to Amy before taking from her desk a sheet of plain stationery.

Never would it occur to Amy her mother had had a lover. Amy was too young to appreciate one, having never done without love. Knowing how much she could bring to an affair, Edith yearned with Mr. Almoner, addressing an envelope to him.

About the letter, he thought, a beldame straining toward vicarious intrigue and no longer protecting her only chick. What had changed her? Maybe she thought he might lure Amy home again, though he did not think he had that power. Though she had written the letter, the composition teacher at Miss Somebody's finishing school might well have been looking over her shoulder; however, she had been cagey enough not to use her feminine blue stationery.

Dear Mr. Almoner
:

May I take this opportunity to tell you that my daughter, Amy, has gone to New York City for an indefinite stay. I have forwarded her your recent letter. Her address is as follows: No. 2 Beverly Place
.

Sincerely yours
,

Edith Howard

Mister Jeff had sayed, Come here, Jessie. I want to talk to you. Then Miss Amelia come from choir practice and had the mail. He read his letter and it taken a time for him to understand, seem like. Then he so pale, I ast if he needed a pill. He sayed “No” and something about his last cast, but not fishing talk. Probably about that girl and none of my nevermind, unless he told me. My dough was ready. I let it set and finally had to get him some water. He taken a pill quick. Sho do worry me about Mister Jeff's heart.

Then Vern come. I had done seed his car at the end of the drive and thought, this one time he could wait. But young folks don't expect to for nothing. Think old folks here to hop toad to they biddin', shoot. I thought Mister Jeff and me done been here together long time 'fore Vern got hisself born by mistake. Mister Jeff sayed, “Jessie, guess this the spring I'll finally make that garden I always been going to make.” I sayed I sho would be glad. I was telling him about where to set out the 'matoes when Vern come up the back steps. He seen Mister Jeff and me setting there. His eyes pop out asting me, Why? Honey, I could have told him. Evening was coming on and Vern stood in the shadows. He ain't going to come in, mad enough at having to come to the back do'. I had done tole him, “Come on to the front. Mister Jeff, he don't care. It his house even if Miss Amelia act like it hers.” Vern had did told me he'd wait till didn't nobody have to go to the back. “Time going to come, Aun-tee,” he say; and I sayed, “Let it.”