5
the next morning Ted took Webster on a trip to Wachusett Mountain. He said it was “just because,” but we decided between us that he was either going to propose or he was going to call the whole thing off. I hoped he would propose. She’d been so sad that he hadn’t proposed on Valentine’s Day. She’d asked me if I thought some women just weren’t meant to be married. I said: “Yes. But not you.” I meant it too.
She swung between hope and despair. She rehashed old conversations with Ted until I told her she had to stop it before she made herself ill or something. She was hopeful because she’d caught Arturo Whitman looking thoughtfully at her fingers, sizing them up, as it were. She despaired because long ago Ted had told her he didn’t believe in marriage. She’d asked him how he could say that when there were so many real, live married people walking around, and he’d called her a wise guy. I told her she was born wife material whether Ted Murray realized it or not. She smiled at that. “And what about you?” she asked.
“Oh, I’m nothing but a pack of cards.” I echoed Mia to protect myself. Not that it was necessary. Webster asked questions only out of politeness. Pursuing answers wasn’t her style.
She knocked on my door just before Ted picked her up. It was six in the morning.
“Just wanted to say good-bye,” she said, sitting on my feet. (When had we become friends?) “This could be the last time I speak to you as an unengaged woman.”
I muttered, “Try not to break your neck on the slopes, Webster. I’ve gotten used to you,” and I waved good-bye from my bedroom window as Ted drove away with all their ski apparatus clattering away on top of his car. I even crossed my fingers for her.
—
a couple of hours later I emptied my purse out onto the windowsill and counted up my coins. I had bus fare, but only one way if I also wanted to eat lunch. I figured I’d take the bus back and began walking along Ivorydown, taking the route I’d so gladly abandoned a few weeks before when I’d changed jobs. It was a windy morning, and the wind pushed me, and the road dragged me, and the tree branches flew forward and peeled back and broke away, and their scrawny trunks hugged each other. I glimpsed—or more became aware of—someone walking on the other side of the saplings. She wasn’t there at the beginning of the walk; I don’t know when she caught up with me. This person was my height, her stride more or less the length of mine, smooth locks of her hair (blond) and flashes of her coat (navy blue) showing through the leaves. I was wearing a navy blue coat too. She had her hands in her pockets and I didn’t want to speak to her, I’m not sure why, maybe because she was walking so close to me but didn’t seem to notice that I was there. Or if she did, she didn’t find it odd that we stayed neck and neck all the way down the hill. I tried to get a little ahead of her so that I could look back through the branches and see her face, but she chose the exact same moment to speed up and I began to feel as if we were running from somebody. Then she spoke. She said: “Hello? Hello? Is that you?”
My lungs kicked my ribcage, just once. I’ve never heard my own voice recorded, but at that moment I was sure it’d sound like that. It was me, but me played back out of some kind of machine, that was the only way I could understand what I was hearing.
“Hello? Hello? Is that you?”
We stopped walking. “I’m here, I’m here.”
Shards of her face emerged through brown bark and greenish shadows. Her left eye was aligned with mine; we raised our left hands at the same time, and hers was bloody. She said: “I don’t know what to do.”
“Show your other hand,” I said. She didn’t move. “Show me!” She wouldn’t until I raised my right hand too. There was a lot of blood. Dark, dark, red. She had done something, or something had been done to her. “I don’t know what to do,” she said, and took a step back, silently asking me to go to her there on the other side of the hill, but it wasn’t clear what she was or what she’d done and I said, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” and I walked faster than I had before, but with a weak feeling in my knees that almost threw me into the road with the motorcars and buses. A man with a ragged beard honked his horn and yelled that I ought to be ashamed of myself, drunk at eight in the morning. He couldn’t see the other woman; she was well hidden from him. “Come here, come here and I’ll tell you everything,” she laughed, right beside me, not at all out of breath. I wasn’t as scared as I could have been—the main thing was to get away from her—but my thoughts ran with me.
What could you be, what could you be
Some future vision, will I go home this week, next week, the week after, strike suddenly, get the rat catcher back at last
What have you done Boy
Am I going to do the same, do I deserve her, whatever she is, did I call her to me somehow
Please go, go away
The view through the saplings was so calm—miles and miles of crushed green-velvet valley behind her, and a line of telegraph poles marching out as far as the eye could see. And the wires ran between the poles, three lines, direct, direct. I became painfully conscious of my heels tapping the sidewalk a moment before I noticed she’d disappeared, a deafening solo drum roll, and at the bottom of that hilly road I placed both hands on the top of my head, to check, in all seriousness, if my head was still there. Then I buried my face in a handkerchief because my nose was running. I had that feeling that comes after days of fever—the beginning of recovery, the memory of how things worked before the cold flame ate away at you. The solution seemed simple to me. Forget this road. Don’t come here again. I never did like it.
“You okay?” Arturo asked. He was sprawled out on a bench a few steps away, huffing from his run. I wondered what he’d seen, but not enough to ask him. I said I was fine and sat down next to him. He had a knife, a napkin, and a pear, and he was dropping peel for the birds, whose reaction seemed to be that he could keep it.
“Well, White Rabbit,” he said. “Where do you lead me?”
“Who are you calling a white rabbit?”
“You can take offense or you can take it as a reference to your hair.”
“I’ll reference your hair,” I said. Then I got mad at myself. I mean, I was two seconds away from fainting and “I’ll reference your hair” was the best I could come up with. Meaningless. If you’re about to fall to the ground like a frail creature in need of smelling salts, you owe it to yourself to at least say something fantastically vicious beforehand. But all I did was make him laugh. I pinched my temples, seeing the blood on her hands again. “Look—I’m going to have to ask you for a bite of that pear. I’m . . . dizzy. Think I’d better eat something.”
“You didn’t eat yet?”
I didn’t have the money for breakfast, but I’d rather have died than admit it. I said I was slimming. “Hmm . . . let’s see . . .” He cut a slice of pear, the longest, thinnest shaving, near transparency, and he fed it to me bit by sweet, grainy bit, his thumb brushing tiny, wary circles across my cheek. I cut the next piece for him, and I held the knife until he’d eaten all the fruit off the tip of the blade. He licked the juice away afterward, and I kissed his mouth because of the way he drank down that one drop.
—
i was an hour late to the bookstore, and as soon as I stepped inside, Mrs. Fletcher jumped up from her seat behind the till with her hair all standing on end and yelled at me to get out. I didn’t waste any time arguing and was halfway down the street when she bawled after me: “Just where do you think you’re going?”
She prowled around the shop floor, slapping price stickers onto books, and I trailed her, removing duplicate stickers. Her prices looked very high to me and I didn’t see how she made any money, but I quickly learned that there was no real point to her pricing her books—she preferred to haggle. Popular paperbacks and required reading for college classes were sold out front, but her main business was in the back room, where she dealt in antique books and first editions. She sent out catalogues and people drove cross-country to take a closer look, and even then she wouldn’t let customers go home with the goods they’d paid for until they demonstrated an ability to open a book in the correct and proper way.
Three colored teenagers, two girls and a boy, came in just after lunch and stayed for hours, just sitting by the bookshelves, reading. After they spent four hours without a purchase, I was ready to kick them out and went to ask Mrs. Fletcher’s advice, but she said: “Don’t you bother those kids.”
She didn’t seem to care that they weren’t buying anything, so I said: “They ought to be in school.”
“That’s your opinion,” she said. “That’s what you think.”
“Don’t blame me when it turns out some of your stock has been stolen.”
She stared at me as if I had three heads and she was curious about which one was boss. “Just don’t let the youngest eat apples around my books, that’s all.”
“How am I supposed to tell which one’s the youngest?”
“Don’t annoy me, Boy.”
I thought she was terrific, and hoped she liked me, but she was clearly very precise in the allocation of her affections, so she probably didn’t. At six-thirty, an hour after the store was supposed to close and only half an hour after the kids had put their books back on the shelves and sauntered out, I heard her hooting with laughter and put my head around the door of the back room, thinking I’d better take advantage of her good mood and ask if she wanted me to come back the next day. She was leafing through the obituaries section of the newspaper and wouldn’t let me in on the joke, but said: “See you tomorrow.”
I took a magazine quiz on the bus home, but I knew the result before I added the figures up. I wasn’t in love with Arturo, and I wasn’t going to be. You don’t need a quiz to tell you these things; they don’t escape your notice. The flag stuffed into the back of my wardrobe was there because someone had once draped it around my shoulders in such a way that the touch of his fingers made me feel like a million bucks. That’s not how it was with Arturo. He held me so tightly that numbness stretched all the way down my arms and only let go a few minutes after he did. It wasn’t as nice a feeling as the flag around my shoulders. But I felt more certain of it because it lasted longer.