THAT WAS HER LIFE there, in town. She stayed so busy and tired that it seemed like time didn’t matter anymore. Didn’t so much pass as disappear, like memories neglected and forgotten. Years can slip away in such manner, in such a life.
Somehow, even as the thirties wore on and things worsened, Grace held on to her business by cutting costs, undercutting competitors’ prices, shamelessly complimenting the women who came in, whether they were beautiful, plain, or just plain ugly, flirting furtively with the men (and sometimes more than flirting, Jane strongly suspected—from long lunch hours when Grace made her tend the counter, or sent her off to lunch at the house and when Jane came back she would see Grace turning the door sign to Open again).
Jane had wanted to put in a vegetable garden, and after first saying no, Grace changed her mind and practically ordered her to do it. At least she helped a bit with the canning. They pretty much gave up meat aside from a small cut of pot roast on Sundays. That was fine with Jane, who’d never eaten much meat, anyway. It made certain odors stronger.
She learned how to get along with Grace by holding her own in an argument and by getting out every now and then on a Saturday, for the whole day, wandering town, window-shopping, and having a modest meal such as a Chik Steak at the Triangle, only a nickel in those days—they used breaded pork loin but it tasted so good she couldn’t resist—and then going home. She would practice the fasting and dehydrating before an outing, as she had when she was a girl, so generally she was back home at Grace’s before the possibility of an accident, and well before the possibility of a “serious” one. She wrote home every week, and received in return the occasional postcard from her mother: the blank manila ones with nothing printed on them, not even a vertical line on the side where you wrote the address, the back side filled with her mother’s scrawl that read like a diary she might have written for herself or posterity: There’s no ice because the iceman’s truck broke down. One of the breeding cows died and your father does not yet know why it happened. Had rain most of last week, couldn’t dry a stitch of clothing on the line. Mister Chisolm (as she had always formally called her husband) had to shoot a fox that was getting into the henhouse, gave it to the Harrises for the skin although for all I know they ate it too. Your father is not up to hog killing anymore and had to hire Harris and his boys to do it, he knew it needed done but he didn’t really care one way or other, gave them half the hog for the job, a sunny winter day, thank the Lord. He is not exactly behaving himself, she would occasionally say, which Jane took to mean he was drinking too much more often.
They were just hanging on through these times, she wrote.
One ended with the odd mentioning, Crows flocking into the pines at dusk. I find it frightening, hard to sleep.
At least once a month, when the weather was good, she badgered Grace into driving them up to their parents’ place for Sunday dinner. When Grace tired enough of that, she taught Jane to drive her automobile in a flat field on the south side of town and after that Jane would visit her mother and father by herself when she could. Sometimes she went up early enough to stop for coffee with Dr. Thompson before going on to the home place. She always drove back to town before dark. Her father seemed to be in decline. She would come upon him standing at the edge of the pasture, looking at his cows as if he hardly knew what they were. Or he would sit on the front porch by himself, smoking. He drank before breakfast, and then periodically throughout the day.
“Papa?” she’d say.
“Yes.”
And sometimes they would say no more than that, as if that were enough, or all there was, a generic reply to her all-but--unspoken query into his condition. She sat and looked at his lean, hard profile, now bearing the wire-rimmed spectacles, and wondered what he was seeing as he stared straight ahead into the yard beyond the porch, seeming deep in thought but saying nothing.
Suitors
Sometimes when one of Grace’s gentleman friends came over Jane crept out and walked the mostly empty evening sidewalks downtown. She liked the evening air, the slow and scarce traffic that rolled or clopped through town at that hour. The smells of the bakery baking on the night shift. The coal smoke from the trains. But she was lonelier than ever, and many a night such as this she longed just to be back on the farm, alone in that way. It seemed to her to be the place she belonged.
Occasionally one of the “friends” came over for supper, and sometimes he stayed later, when Jane had already gone up to her room, and she could hear him and Grace partly from the stairwell, their murmuring talk, and partly from the outside, where their voices drifted from the windows and into the air and back into Jane’s windows above them. On some of those nights, though they kept the radio on to cover their sounds, she heard the faint whine of the bad hinge on Grace’s bedroom door, the light metallic click of the door closing. And she might drift over to that side of the house, to the little sitting room she had arranged across from her bedroom, and sit beside the open window looking out over downtown below and listen to the sounds of their lovemaking, so carefully quietened they were, like the whispers of a lover in Jane’s own ears, burning with the shame of her eavesdropping.
One of Grace’s suitors was a man named Louis Fontleroy. He was a shoe salesman for one of the two ladies’ shoe stores downtown. He dressed as if he were more than that, and was handsome, although somewhat in the way of a handsome housecat, and younger than Grace. He wore engraved tie clasps on his silk ties, and ankle boots that to Jane seemed oddly effeminate, and smoked cigarettes he kept in a silver case. He was infinitely polite to Jane, even bending to kiss the top of her hand sometimes when she entered the room. Jane felt he was patronizing, yet she was polite in return. When they dined, he would make pleasant small talk, making sure to address questions to Jane as well as Grace. Once, when Grace had left the room for a moment, Jane was fairly certain that after remarking what a good cook she was, how excellent was the pot roast, he had winked at her. She blushed but when she looked back at Mr. Fontleroy he seemed to be examining his manicured fingernails as if to search for some flaw he might attend to when he returned home. She thought him a dandy.
One evening when Grace had said Mr. Fontleroy was coming for dinner and asked Jane to join them, Jane came downstairs and entered the parlor to find not just Grace and Mr. Fontleroy, but another man as well. She froze in the doorway to the parlor, her heart thumping and anger flashing into her mind, at the same time that both gentlemen stood, setting their coffee cups into their saucers on the coffee table with a little clatter.
“Won’t you join us, Miss Jane?” Fontleroy said.
“Come have a seat, Jane,” Grace said in a wry voice. “This is Mr. Fontleroy’s friend Gabe Satchel.”
“Miss Chisolm,” Satchel said, nodding, and then he took a step toward her on his long legs and extended his hand. She reached out and shook it, her palm damp, and then sat in the chair next to her sister, her cheeks burning, and rested the damp palm on her skirt to dry it. She hoped she wouldn’t have to rush off, embarrassing herself and Grace alike.
This Mr. Satchel was older, looked almost middle-aged, though what looked older in his features was mostly facial, and she sensed that some burden had made them lined in that way. There was also a kind of serenity in the way he listened when someone spoke, looked at them and seemed to absorb what they were saying as if it had kindled his deepest, most intimate interest. It warmed her and made her flush a bit, and she couldn’t help but feel drawn to him for this, if not for his looks. But what were looks? How long could anyone stay beautiful, if it came to that?
But then what would he see in her, no doubt still just a country girl, even if she had lived in town with Grace now for a good five years? And why should she even think about such a thing, given the realities of her situation? She’d come a long way toward coming to terms with that.
And yet she sensed in this Gabe Satchel some kind of sadness borne along by a natural kindness. It made her heart leap a bit, and made her feel, at the same time, as miserable as she felt the day she’d said good-bye to Elijah Key.
So now she knew why Grace had insisted that she cook an entire pot roast and more potatoes and carrots than usual, and why Grace herself had put together a salad of lettuce, tomatoes, and onions. And now she had little appetite, and her emotions were building inside her so as to make it impossible even to swallow without difficulty.
As they ate, Jane said little but was courteous. Mr. Satchel was tall, several inches taller than Jane, and slim but not nearly as bone-thin as her father, and as she was becoming. In the brighter light of the dining room (which she hated, preferring a lower light at meals), she realized that for all its almost enchanting kindness, his face was a little bit cockeyed, his ears a bit crooked. Even so, he had good table manners and was not overly loud in conversation. In fact, he was on the quiet side.
“Mr. Satchel was in the Great War,” Grace said at one point, to which Mr. Satchel said nothing but smiled faintly at his dinner plate as he cut himself another bite of the roast.
“Did you serve in France, Mr. Satchel?” Jane asked.
“That he did,” Mr. Fontleroy said. “He was in battle.”
“Well, I’m happy that you came home.”
“Mostly, ma’am,” Mr. Satchel said then in an odd way. “I was wounded, but thankful I’m alive and in good health. I was never gassed like a lot of fellows I knew.”
“Mr. Satchel’s family is from up around Tupelo,” Grace said, going around and filling everyone’s glass with more tea.
“What brought you down here?” Jane said.
“Work,” Satchel said. “I’ve been with the railroad since the war, and they transferred me to here a couple of years ago. I’m hoping what seniority I have holds me through these times.”
“Anybody’s lucky to be working or running a business in these times,” Fontleroy said. “I’m afraid the only way I’m holding on in the shoe business is by wearing the hell out of my own,” he said, laughing at his own joke.
“And you are doing well in your business, Miss Grace?” Satchel said.
“Well, if it wasn’t for Jane getting so good at repairing worn-out clothing and making it look new, and making new things for such a good price, I’m afraid we’d be in trouble ourselves,” Grace said.
“Don’t forget the practically-working-for-free part,” Jane said.
The evening went that way. Jane had little or no appetite but managed to eat a few bites from her plate. The whole situation was making her feel increasingly uncomfortable, though, as it couldn’t be anything other than what it seemed to be, a baffling bit of matchmaking on Grace’s part. Her discomfort was slowly turning into anger that Grace would put her in such a spot, and she grew silent. Mr. Satchel asked if she was all right. “I’m fine,” she said. Then she felt an accident coming on and started to get up and hurry upstairs but stopped, thought, Just let it happen. See what the matchmakers think of that. And after a minute, during which the unmistakable odor of bodily waste began to rise into the air around the table, she could sense the discomfort, see the awkward feeling creep into them, note their averted eyes. All but Grace’s, that is. Hers bored into Jane’s with unmistakable fury and disbelief.
The men stood to leave, thanking Grace, and Satchel thanking her, shaking her hand, making a valiant effort at normalcy. They’d skipped dessert and coffee. And as soon as she shut the door on their departure Grace spun around and came up to her, face distorted in disgust and anger.
“What the hell, sister?” she said. “What the hell was that all about?”
“Indeed,” Jane said right back. “What was it about?”
“I don’t doubt even Louis won’t come back here, after that little incident.”
“Too bad. Such a catch.” She thought Grace might slap her, but instead she banged into the kitchen through the swinging door. Jane followed, banging through herself.
“Seriously, you tell me, sister,” she said. “Were you really trying to set me up with a man? Never mind how humiliating to me—what about him? He’s a nice man, and a kind man, I can tell. What was he supposed to think when I just outright rejected him and couldn’t even tell him why?”
Grace started to speak, stopped herself, then kind of slumped in on herself, crossing her arms.
“Don’t get so damn mad,” she said. “Louis insisted that this man wanted to meet you.”
Jane stared at her for a minute.
“And why is that?”
“Says he’s lonely and hasn’t had a girl since the war, that he was wounded pretty bad. I get the idea, you know, it was something awful.”
“He doesn’t look wounded. I mean, he’s got two arms and two legs, his face is a little cattywampus but it isn’t scarred.”
Grace just looked at her.
“Maybe it left him like you, in a way. Unable to be intimate with somebody. I’m just guessing.”
To Jane it felt as if she could feel the color leave her complexion. If you could feel an almost mortal paling.
“Guessing,” she said. “You’d already told this Mr. Fontleroy about me? And I suppose he told Mr. Satchel?”
Grace worked her mouth, twisting a dishrag in her hands. Then she cut her eyes away. “Not everything,” she said. “You certainly surprised him on that front.”
Jane said, “How could you do that? Grace.”
“Well, goddamn!” Grace said, throwing the dishrag onto the counter. “Damn me if I bother to do anything to help you, sister. Maybe that man would be a good companion to you, what you think about that? Or is it that you just want to be an old maid your whole life?”
“Well, it’s what I already am, ‘old’ or not, isn’t it?” Jane said.
“Yes,” Grace said, settling just a bit, ears going from pink back to fleshy translucence in the kitchen light.
“So you think because this man cannot have normal relations with a woman he would want to be with me. You tell him I’m ‘deformed’ or something but I suppose you leave off the part about inability to control my bodily functions. That he would be the companion of a woman around whom he would so often enjoy the stink of the privy. That it would be like living with a grown infant always needing her ‘goddamn’ diaper changed. I don’t suppose you told him that, judging by his reaction at the table, poor man.”
“Poor man! Why did you let it happen that way? Why didn’t you excuse yourself and go upstairs, the way you’ve always done?”
After a long moment so quiet the air began to hiss like a tiny steam valve in another room, Jane said, “To make a point, I suppose. To not take part in a lie.” Grace said nothing. “I am twenty-two years old, Grace. That was old maid age, in the old days. And pretty much is for me now. If I have to accept it, you might as well, too. I imagine I am boring you to death, after all this time living here like that, like an old maid. So if you want me to leave, find my own place, you just say so.”
“I didn’t say that and I don’t mean that. You’re my little sister. I’ve tried to take care of you.”
“And I appreciate that, Grace. But if you want me to leave, want your privacy back, you say so. All right?”
Grace nodded.
“You’re not getting any younger, either, Grace,” she said, in a softer voice, not unkind. “I don’t want to be in your way.”
Grace seemed then on the verge of tears.
Jane left the kitchen and went straight up to her room, sat on her bed looking out the window at downtown, not hearing the sounds of it or smelling the smells of it nor even herself. Only seeing the city’s nightscape, and some part of her seeming to float out into it, undetectable by others, no more than a little pocket of warm breeze in the shade of a tree during summer, so subtle as to make one wonder at whether it was really there, passed, or was just a moment of one’s own disembodied dreaming. That ghost self that now so often seemed to be with her when she was alone.