Things Withered (27 page)

Terry shook her head. “Marguerite,” she said seriously. “You need to get some iron.”

“Iron?”

“You look deficient.” Marguerite stared. Terry added helpfully, “You can get it in tablets. People take it too. Not just dogs.”

By then Julie was up. They both heard her call, their two heads turning in tandem to look at the trailer.

Just before she turned to leave, Terry thought she heard Marguerite groan.

The kids weren’t so bad later. Probably the two younger ones were having their own naps. But then around five, the Mister came home. The truck pulled into the driveway, the children started. The older boy revved his mini bike and roared up the street.

The dogs barked. Terry heard the Mister curse them.

Don’t those goddamn dogs ever shut up
—or words like it. It was hard to tell exactly what he said, with the wind, and the other noise.

At six they barbecued across the road. Marguerite’s husband could be seen through Terry’s kitchen window, flipping things, fussing at the barbecue in the way only men did.

The slow tender charring of ribs and ground beef wafted across the street, setting Julie off.

“I want steak today,” she said when she finished her milk.

Terry ate her cornbread, chewing silently. Julie wouldn’t eat. She wanted something else. Something
nice
. She was
older,
Terry had to
mind
. She wanted steak.

“There’s no steak,” Terry told her.

It was a perfectly nice supper. The cornbread was fresh, made by hand, by Terry after Julie had woken from her nap. Elton used to love her cornbread, it was light and golden. She had a knack. Terry said as much, patiently.
It’s good Julie, eat some.
Smiling at Julie without making eye contact.

Look, Julie, there are peas from the garden
, along with Terry’s tomatoes and she’d cooked up some egg noodles with butter. It was perfectly nice.

When she was done Terry pushed back her chair to rest. They could have tea if she wanted. It was a quarter of seven. Normally, or before everything changed, Elton would be coming around and they might watch
Law & Order
or just walk through Terry’s garden and putter about. But not since.

What’s this? She’s your sister? Your aunt. No. I can’t see this. Nope. Nope.

Good Christ, Ter, put her in a home
.

There were hours yet before bed, although Terry was exhausted. Hours before bed.

Julie’s moaning during her seizures was frightening Marguerite’s children. The sound carried on the wind across to their house, in through their windows. She said she had to turn up the TV when it got bad.

The middle one, Tristan wanted to know first if Julie was dying. Then if she was some kind of monster.

It had to stop. Marguerite had not wanted Terry to be mad, she’d said. It was just that the sound carried all the way across the street and into their windows.
It was the kids you know, they got scared
, she’d said.

She understood. The sound did carry, very clearly sometimes. Just the other night Marguerite and her husband had guests and they were all sitting around in the yard. And Terry heard everything they said.

She’s crazy,
the Mister told his guests.
First there was just one of them, now there’s two. Two old crazy ladies, screaming and moaning. And about a thousand dogs.

Just four of her own. Just four I think,
Marguerite said.

The other’s out of hand though,
Marguerite said.
She scares the kids.

But she hearts dogs,
an unfamiliar voice said.
Like the t-shirts, get it?

And then they all laughed.

Around 11:30
P.M.
Julie woke up and shrieked, one sharp, unpleasant sound. Terry was lying in her own bed, the door to her room open so she could hear Andy, should he need her. She imagined lights going on in the house across the street.

She imagined them snarling.
What the hell was that? Goddamn—

From the side room she heard the dogs shifting, could hear the scratch of claws on tile. The wet snuffle of Amos’s troubled sinuses.

Terry had tried to read. Beside the bed was a worn
Fodor’s Travel Europe
. It was spine down on the bedside table, open to Spain. At one time she had wanted to go to Spain. Elton had been there in 1988. The book, in fact, was Elton’s. They’d teased, somewhat, about going. In the front on the flyleaf, he had written his name in careful, almost feminine script. He had lovely handwriting. Terry felt it was a sign that a man was a gentleman. She’d read somewhere that if you could read a person’s signature, it meant they had nothing to hide.

You could easily read his. Elton D. Balfour. The D was for Dennis. An uncle on his father’s side. She knew that. That was hers to keep.

The light was out. She’d crawled into bed tired, she’d read four or five pages tired, she’d turned out the light tired, almost too tired to set the alarm. And yet when she turned out the light and laid her head on her pillow, she had been utterly unable to sleep. Her eyes had felt so dry while she tried to read her book, and yet when she closed them they had no relief, and in fact, she opened them within minutes to the dark. Then they’d adjusted to the minimal light in the room, to the fair glow of the single streetlight that she shared with the family across the street, the last two houses on the block.

Her ears adjusted to the silence and she could hear Amos and Andy shuffle and curl up over each other. She heard poor Andy’s tummy rumbling, again. Heard him pass gas. There was no cause for it, still, that she could see. Except a nervous stomach. For the morning she would put drops into his water, the ones Dr. Bertrand had given her for Daisy, an old Border Collie that stayed at the kennel months before. Daisy had a nervous stomach.

If that failed, she would take him to the vet, but the vet was a last resort. She’d just had them all in for their shots and she hadn’t even had a season yet. There just wasn’t the money. Julie had her meds and the kennel licenses were due.

The click and tap of nails on tile came into her room. She turned on her side and peered into the dark. She could tell by the head that it was Amos. The dog came right to the bed and poked her snout into Terry’s shoulder. She reached out a hand and scratched the top of Amos’s head.

In the dark Terry whispered, “Who’s my girl?” And the dog flopped down on the small, thin mat beside the bed, dropping her head with a snort and a sigh. Terry rolled over on to her stomach so she could put her hand on Amos’s head. At intervals, without knowledge, she stroked the soft, sleek fur of Amos’s forehead.

The two girls slept.

They woke like that, the two of them waking with the alarm, Terry a half second before it sounded, Amos on the first buzz. She reached over and slapped it off.

“Up, up, Amy,” Terry said; she sat up in bed, resigned to the dark. She reached over and petted the girl on the head. Made her noises:
rumm-rumm-rummm.
Amos shuffled up, her bulky chest causing her to roll a couple of times before she made it up onto clicking toes. She snorted and hacked in her snout, sounding as much like an old man as a still-baby Rottie. Terry grinned into the room, still dark. She was thinking—
Try those drops on Andy.

And she was thinking that when she turned the corner between her room and the dog run. By then Amos was already ahead of her, already in the dog run. When Terry turned the corner Amos looked up at her, her ears back, and she whined deep in the back of her throat.

I told you.

Andy was lying so still on his oversized foam bed.

There was a medicinal smell in the room, or something she associated with medicine; under that was a fainter smell of dog shit. From her boots.

Amos dropped her head and dug her nose into Andy’s side.

“Amy, Amy,” Terry said quietly, holding her breath. Amos whined.

Across the street a car door slammed and an engine gunned. They both jumped. Then Marguerite screamed from a window or maybe the stoop, “Damon stop that right goddamn now,”
and then she called out to Mister, “Good bye,” and “Don’t forget—”

Something. The sound was drowned out by Amos’s wail, sudden and loud, into the dark room, the still-dark morning. Amos dropped to the floor on her front legs and howled.

No god—please—

Terry buried her face in her hands for a silent second or two before she fell to her knees and crawled over to Andy, her own wail trapped inside her body too hard and solid to come out, her face twisting up, tears running down her cheeks even as she couldn’t make a sound. Not until she reached his cooling body and leaned her head against his still chest. She pressed her face into his fur and then she howled. A gulping choked sound that lasted just a second; Amos too, one last wail. The two of them like that, Amos licking and nudging at Andy’s body, Terry just stroking then weeping, but quietly, trying not to wake Julie, who wouldn’t understand.

It was warmer earlier in the morning and part of Terry marvelled at how warm it was, even though when she carried Andy’s limp and dead-weighted body out into the yard, it was still only after six.

Somewhere behind her she could hear Julie, disturbed by either Amos or Terry’s crying or maybe just awakened by the free-floating trauma in the small trailer. Either way, behind her as she stumbled and lurched to the kennel with Andy heavy in her arms, his big black head bouncing against her arm, she could hear Julie, screaming. She was crying, Terry thought, because she thought maybe Terry wasn’t in the house.

She would be afraid, Terry guessed. She was prone to fears, most particularly the fear of being left behind, alone.
Leaving Julie!
She would question every time Terry left the house.

The old woman called her name, like a child might, in two syllables: “
Terrrrr-rreeeee!
” The name catching in her throat halfway as her angry tears became more acute.

At the gate while Terry fumbled trying to unlatch it, Amos at her heels, running around the back of her legs and then around again in confusion and heartbreak, she heard the neighbours’ door open across the street. The screen door slammed on its spring right after that.

She didn’t have to look to know that Marguerite would be standing there, her arms holding her robe closed around her body, looking. Behind her on the step would maybe be Damon. Maybe the little girl and Tristan the boy, would be on the step with her, the little one’s arms wrapped around his mother’s legs.

“
Terrrrrr-rrreeeee!
”

She didn’t have to look. Beside her, Amos stopped and stiffened.

“Terry?” Marguerite called into the morning. Into the mourning.

Terry got the latch lifted and was struggling to keep it up while pushing the gate open. Perspiration dripped on her upper lip from the strain of carrying the dog. Andy had been healthy; he’d weighed an even, consistent 160. She pushed at the gate.

“Terry!? I don’t know what’s going on but I thought that yesterday we came to an—” Marguerite shouted from across the street even as she walked over, crossing the gravel lane, fast. Terry barely glanced over her shoulder as she manoeuvred Andy’s sad bulk through the gate.

I’m so sorry my baby, my love, good dog.

By then the other dogs were awake and there was a cacophony of barking. Terry was still crying. She hadn’t noticed, except that she couldn’t breathe through her nose, and was instead breathing through her mouth, a catch in her breath that matched the intermittent wail from inside the house. “
Terrrrr-reeee!
”

No. Hers was different.

Marguerite stopped just inside the edge of the property. Terry couldn’t turn to look at her, didn’t want her to see her crying, didn’t want her ugly neighbour eyes on her poor Andy. Instead, she shoved her way and Andy’s bulk through the gate suddenly and it caught on holding wire against the inside fence. By accident. It happened by accident. The gate was open wide, but her arms were full of her Andy and for a moment she hovered between two choices, at six in the morning, forgetting one for the other.

Gate. Gate. It was always imperative, of course, that you close the gate, locking up the sometimes angry and unpredictable animals, and her hand wriggled out from under Andy and she slapped at the gate, stuck to the fence. It loosed and swung shut. She heard the latch close her in, with the other dogs and (poor) Andy.

“Terry, do we have to talk about this again—I thought I’d made it clear—”

The rest she didn’t hear.

It was only a moment before she realized that the gate had locked—
click click
—before she had called Amos in—

Come

Her mind had been elsewhere on Julie crying and neighbours and the single streetlight joining them and the drops and the vet and Elton, Elton and—

And only a moment more before she turned her head, Andy’s heavy body already stiffening
oh god please
and saw Marguerite’s mouth open without speech. Only a moment more before she wished it all back even as Amos, her body elegant and slender, elongated, in flight, landed on Marguerite’s chest.

Under her breath, hardly meaning to, she might have said
git her
honestly meaning
come here
.

Julie’s screams were drowned out by Marguerite’s even though it was only a moment more before Terry was able to put Andy down and get to the gate, locking it behind her, before the other dogs got out.

Only a moment when she thought a nasty, cruel thought.

I heart dogs.

Everything was just moments, right up until you died. Just moments.

I don’t remember when it was I started hating Hazel Kummel, but I do remember the moment I realized that I did. It had been a beautiful, sunny day, the sort of day that always reminded me of being a little girl, the way the sun would shine through wherever you were, through windows, through tents, through screen doors and wind breakers. I was sitting on the bench that my son, Kerry, had parked in the sun beside my rock garden, just to prove I did sometimes. If he’d had his way, it would have gone in the back, in the shade, where I would never see the street.
You’ll never use it in front, Ma.
So now I did. At what point did children decide they were the boss of you?

I was enjoying the stark sun, when I heard Hazel raising her voice across the road where she’s lived for fifty years, right across from my house, where I have lived for forty. All of us, me, my boys Todd and Kerry, and my now-dead husband, loved Burlington Avenue, the whole neighbourhood, very much. We had wonderful neighbours. Oddly, most of the neighbours who had kept me on Burlington for so long were now dead or had moved away. Except for Hazel, whom at the moment I realized I truly hated, and who was standing in the middle of her lawn with a shovel raised about waist level, shaking it at Josie Tubman’s granddaughter, the one with the unusual name.

Keeheisha?

She was shrieking something at the child that I couldn’t hear. The poor girl was riveted to the spot, her tiny feet bare and brown against the brilliant green of Hazel’s lawn. She always kept a nice lawn.

I hurried across the street, and as I got closer, I heard Hazel:

“—no respect for other people. You keep your goddamn ass out of my yard, off this lawn—”

I shouted at her, “Hazel! For goodness sakes,
language
!” Twenty years earlier I would have been shocked; it would have been cause for conversation all over the block, but times had changed and even my mailman had mentioned the
goddamn potheads
.

“Lower that spade, Hazel Kummel.
Really
.”

I crouched down beside Keeheisha and took her hand. I asked her if she was okay. Hazel interrupted with her side of the story, even as Keeheisha was telling me hers. The child wasn’t hurt and that was the main thing.

“For crying out loud, Hazel,” I said. “You can’t scare a little girl like that! What were you planning to do? Hit her over the head with the shovel? The child is seven years old—”

“
The devil will take the child!
”

In retrospect, I was surprised by my reaction, which was to get angry.

“I don’t want children in my yard,” Hazel said, more quietly. “It’s not safe.” She stuck her chin out.

Once, years before she and I had had an argument about my husband’s truck. She said it blocked her view. What it had blocked was her view of what was going on in
my
house. She’d known she was wrong to bring it up, but still she’d stood there in the front street with her chin sticking out, just like that. Wrong and she knew it. Doing it anyway.

“The devil will take them,” she added one more time.

That’s when I decided I hated Hazel Kummel.

Instead of feeding the anger, the realization seemed to deflate me, to dim my lights so to speak, and I found I didn’t have the energy to keep talking to her about it.

“Don’t scare the kids, Hazel,” I said. “They’ve got parents who will come over and
give you
the devil, if you don’t watch it.” I said it all very patiently and calmly, managing to keep contempt and—somehow—pity out of my voice. Maybe I’m a good woman. My Dan always used to say so.

But that day I crossed the street back to my own house and I could feel small doors in my head smashing shut, and a couple—salaciously—staying open: the door to judgement, self-satisfaction, smugness. Sorry to say, but as the years had passed, those doors had been hung, and by the time I got to be the age I am now—a healthy, happy, active sixty-seven—those doors had been in use more often than I would like to admit. I struggled with the changing world around me. When Dan and I first moved to Burlington Street, we didn’t know anyone, but nearly everyone on the block looked just like us: young, poor, ambitious, and the colour of an unfinished pine cupboard. Now the neighbourhood looks more like the rest of the world. I have Indira, up at the end of the block, Lanelle on the other side of the next door neighbour, Jack Gillam, who back in the day we might have called “glamorous” as a euphemism. There was Fia and her family, behind me. They were Portuguese. And Josie Tubman, Keeheisha’s grandma. Josie’s been living on the other side of Hazel for eight years.

One thing never changed: Hazel was a recognizable commodity. There was one on every block. We would have had all sorts of idioms for it—witch, hag, cow, biddy, crank—back in the day, but what we meant was, Hazel was just an old bitch. Never liked anybody, always suspicious.

The neighbourhood had changed slowly. People, friends my kids had gone to school with, grew up and moved out. Their parents started to follow when we were all hitting fifty.

When I turned fifty, Dan and I went down to Mexico for two weeks, my first real holiday ever. We had growing boys for a lot of our lives together, and trips were family affairs involving the outdoors. We went camping, paddling in canoes with Todd and Kerry for miles, sitting around the fire at night, at first talking about animals and how we fit in with the beasts, then school and friends and how complicated it was to be a kid, then things got quiet for a couple of years. After that there was maybe one more year before they scattered off to school, girls, their own lives. In the winter we skied. They came skiing every year. Would still go, frankly, if they thought I’d pay for it.

But we went off to Mexico the year I turned fifty, a kind of birthday present to us both. We had a grand time. We made more love on that trip, I think, than we had trying to make Kerry—a most reluctant human being. We got to talk, sleep late, read on the beach until the sun was dropping low enough that we couldn’t read. We did crossword puzzles while we drank coffee for hours in the little cantina in the mercado and I picked up just enough Spanish to embarrass myself.

Thing was, we felt like kids on that trip, not having brought any of our own to compare ourselves to, we got to feeling pretty darn good about ourselves. We had managed, in those two weeks, to put all thoughts of mortality behind us. It was a beautiful trip.

And when we came home, Dan up and died. Just like that.

His heart popped. We’d been home from Mexico for just over a month. It killed him, that trip.

Fifty changes you. Just like fifteen.

I still hate thinking about that.

To look at it now, you would never know that Burlington Street used to be the busiest street in the neighbourhood. There was a little family store at the end of the block—not there anymore. Cars, however, were rare in the daytime unless someone’s husband was working shifts or you were having guests from out of town. When my two were little the neighbourhood was deserted from nine-to-five, except for women and children. There were lots of those.

Next door to us on one side were the Carraways, Bob and Wanda, kids Lindsey and Janet; on the other side was the Johnsons, with four girls, Betty, Janie, Carolyn, and Angela the youngest—all a year or so apart. Can you believe that, four girls right next door and not one of them married to any of the boys on the block? Not a looker among them, either. Smart as pigs, but those were the days when a boy wanted looks first and brains second, if at all. I like to think things have changed.

Across from us, was Hazel with her boy Cuthbert. Cuth. They called him Cootie when parents were out of earshot, even my two and it wasn’t because there was anything wrong with him, just because his name nearly sounded like cootie. Hazel tried to ruin that boy but never managed it. Sports saved him from a miserable existence. He’s on the coast now.

One over from Hazel’s on the east side were the Arlingtons and like us, they had two boys around the same ages, and their claim to fame is that their oldest is a doctor. Big whoop. My oldest is an engineer, but talking to Linda Arlington you’d have thought I said my Todd was washing dishes at the Y.
Oh that’s so nice for you dear, did I tell you what Sean has been doing? He’s been teaching at the—

Big whoop. Didn’t see Sean down on the weekend, but I made sure to stand and talk to Todd while he sat in the car getting impatient, for a good fifteen minutes. Todd could’ve killed me, and I know he was thinking that I was getting old and senile, but he would’ve been more upset if he knew I had been using him to get Linda Arlington’s goat. Ha ha.

But the Arlingtons, and Hazel, are the only ones left who know any of the history of the block. The only ones, if I think about it now, who knew anything about Tommy.

Poor Tommy.

Our very best friends on Burlington were Rita and Mac, and they lived on the east side of Hazel. Their boys, Tommy and Darren, were so close to ours in age and looks they were almost interchangeable. They were precious to us, the whole lot of them. I meant that then, and I mean it now.

Rita and Mac were what you called a “fun couple.” It was a rare thing back then, to just let your hair down. In those days people were concerned with appearances and doing what looked like the right thing. People went to work, kept their houses clean, (clean enough to annoy, Rita used to say), kids were always groomed and quiet, the lawn tidy and dandelion free.

I’m both saddened and amused when I think about how gorgeously young we were, only playing at being grown up, playing house. We were in our twenties, with little babies. Mortgages and car payments before we were thirty. Tax worries, loans, marriage problems brought on by frustration and overwork, stupidity (and a touching lack of experience with each other, in spite of the babies). We were the generation carrying the flag for our parents who had lived through the Depression. We expressed that guilt by being serious about our mortgages and lawns. We made our lives as clean and beautiful as possible, in deference to them. The Depression was the North American Holocaust and we never stopped hearing about it, trying to make up for it.

Fewer couples than you would imagine had the nerve to drink a beer on the front lawn while supervising the shingling of their roof. But that was the sort of thing Rita and Mac did. Wickedly, some would have thought.

Rita was a redhead, Susan Hayward style, in spite of her naturally straight hair, and so she spent a lot of time in curlers. In those days I was going for more of a Sandra Dee kind of thing, so my curlers came out sooner, but my hair looked odder. I always thought it looked like that high swing ride at the exhibition, especially if I was disagreeing with something and got to shaking my head. When I mentioned that to Rita, how I thought they looked like the ride at the exhibition, she made me shake my head
no
all the while humming a kind of calliope music. She was a ball of laughs, that one.

Red-haired Rita could have been bald as a cue ball for all men looked at her head. She was one of those women with enough on top to give men whiplash. She called them her “guns.”

Ellen
, she’d say to me,
I can get a man’s wallet faster with my guns than a stick-up man can with his gun!

When she got a little drunk, which we all did sometimes on Saturday nights in the summer playing cards, she’d tell my Dan to stick-em-up. She thought it was pretty funny. Especially after a couple-three beers.

Hey Dan! Stick ’em up!
And Dan would laugh and laugh. Funny.

—
Old Vienna Lager Beer!
I can still hear the commercial playing in my head. Seems to me that commercial played every hour for years. I think of those nights when I think of that commercial. Rita and her guns. Funny stuff.

But poor Rita, Mac and Tommy. Even poor Darren, their other one. Poor all of them.

The summer I’m thinking of, they were re-shingling their roof. Rita had taken out her curlers, because the roofers were coming and they were men. She didn’t mind having her hair in curlers when it was just the kids and the neighbours, but not in front of strangers or men. If she got caught out she would cover her head with her hands—
oh you caught me in my curlers!—
and run for a scarf. I’ve also seen her put her hair to right in seconds flat if she had to. A real gal, that Rita.

A real friend. This one time I had been trapped in the house with two sick babies for a full week. They were finally better and back in school. I had spent that day cleaning the house from top to bottom and thinking of some kind of decent meal I could serve my poor husband that night, to make up for a week of canned soup and flat soda pop. They’d had the flu and I didn’t think I would ever get the smell of vomit out of the house, but I was trying.

By the time the boys got home from school, I was beat. I still had to think about supper and at that point I was thinking one more night of canned surprise was going to be it, when who shows up at my door, twenty minutes after five? Rita.

She rings the doorbell and when I answer, there she stands, in full Rita-glory: bright green shift dress clinging a little close, hair done, a scarf that matched the dress threaded through her hair like we’d seen Brigitte Bardot do in a magazine, high heels, and a clutch tucked under her arm.

Oh my god
, I said, and I’m still proud of this line,
did Hugh Hefner die?

She laughed and said we were going out for dinner.

At any other time I would have been running to the bedroom and making myself decent, but I was just exhausted and so when she said that, I was annoyed. She knew how my week had gone.

Rita,
I’m just not up for dinner out.

Not you
, she said
. I’m taking the boys out for dinner with us. You do whatever you like, because after dinner we’re taking them to movies. There’s a cowboy picture at the Park.