Sometimes, when Rochelle went to bed before her, Sally had watched her roommate sleep. She had a peculiar position she always found her way to, no matter what position she started in: hands together and wedged between her knees, as if she needed to fold and lock herself in place to stay asleep until morning. There she breathed, her eyes jittering beneath their lids as Sally looked and thought.
Then it was over. Rochelle announced that she’d be mentoring or advising or something during the summer high school program, and when the subject of continuing as roommates was raised (by Sally, obviously), Rochelle had asked her advice about going to a single in one of the Collegetown dorms or maybe in one of the cooperative houses, where a woman she knew from Hillel apparently lived. “I don’t know,” she’d said to Sally, who was struggling to keep control over her face. “I don’t know if I’m the ‘cooperative’ type. I’m not that great at reaching consensus, I don’t think.”
“You and I reached consensus,” said Sally feebly.
“Well, that wasn’t hard. It was a pleasure living with you, Sally.”
That—the finality of that—had been a very terrible blow.
“What have you decided?” Rochelle asked then.
Sally, of course, had not decided anything. Sally had thought the two of them would be continuing their quiet tunnel through the university. Now, not having taken the precaution of making any other friends, she was suddenly alone and without prospects.
By then, Sally had been going to visit Harriet Greene for months, working her way through the furniture, piece by piece. There was so much of everything that Sally couldn’t help beginning to understand what was indifferent, good, and better than good, which wasn’t always a matter of value, though value was important to Harriet. To extract a fine object from a barn full of rusting cars or a basement of criminal dampness was to do good in the world. Harriet believed that. Sally came to believe it, too.
“Can I come with you?” she’d asked that very first day over the orange donuts, and she asked it every time Harriet disappeared to Elmira or Watertown on a picking trip. Somebody just north of Albany wanted her to look at a table he said was Shaker. (Yeah right, Harriet told Sally, but you had to go, for the slightest chance of something Shaker.) The brother-in-law of a woman she’d bought a cupboard from back in ’92 had a set of chairs he thought might be old, though two (he admitted) were in pieces. She wanted to go back to a farm near Alfred where an old man had once turned her away, threatening to call the cops on her for trespassing, but not before she’d managed to spot a tantalizing green paint surface in the parlor behind him. Maybe the guy was dead by now, or incapacitated. Maybe he’d be more open to the notion of trading an unadmired sideboard for cash, or maybe he’d have a kid or a caregiver who would. Maybe a lot of things. But Harriet had a large and silent employee named Drew who drove for her and did the loading, and there wasn’t really room in the front of the pickup. And besides, “You got your schoolwork,” Harriet said, always with obvious mirth, still so entertained that a college girl, a city girl, would want to spend her days hauling all over the state’s various backs of beyond, just for a few old boards of furniture.
So she had stayed in class and done her work and continued to visit 78 East Seneca. She told Rochelle that she’d met an older woman who was a bit of a shut-in and who appreciated the company, and Rochelle said something about how it was a mitzvah and an act of Tikkun olam and that was the only time either of them mentioned it.
Those are nice rooms up there, Harriet said.
What have you decided? Rochelle said.
Then, as if to close the circle, she was finally allowed to drive Harriet’s car to a place called Horseheads, near Elmira, where a job that was apparently meant to last a few hours now looked likely to stretch to another day. Drew could stay over but Harriet wanted to come home, so Sally was asked if she would take the key to the old Ford from its dedicated nail in the garage and drive down and bring her back, which was not quite the same as being invited to come along on a picking jaunt, but it wasn’t being told to stay behind, either. Sally spent a good long while letting the engine wake up and going over all of the knobs and switches. Like her brothers, she had learned to drive in her parents’ Volvo on the sandy summer roads of the Vineyard, and she was the proud owner of a barely used Massachusetts driver’s license. This machine, at least, didn’t have a manual transmission, but it felt primitive. At last she pulled out of the drive and set off along Route 34 with the windows down, self-consciously aware of the privilege this represented, and hoping she wouldn’t do anything to screw it up.
She found Drew’s silver pickup in front of a barn that listed gently, and the massive Federal farmhouse behind it looked as if it might cave in at the next puff of wind. Beside these, however, a clean and bright-blue mobile home sat sparkling in the afternoon sun, a folksy WELCOME FRIENDS! sign on its front door and a couple of garden art cows faux-grazing in the yard.
“Good,” Harriet said simply when she reached the car. Sally was still taking it in.
“There’s furniture in the barn?” she asked.
“And the farmhouse, though I’m not real happy about going in there. Feels like it’s only the junk holding it up.”
“What junk?” said Sally.
“Come see,” Harriet said. “And don’t breathe.”
The front of the house had once been meant to invoke the classical. Now its Grecian columns were cracked and even shattered in spots, and the fanlight window was entirely without its glass. The old door was open, but its swing had been impeded by some object or objects unseen, inside. And a thick carpet, or what looked like a carpet, on the floor.
She stepped cautiously inside. She didn’t get far.
The thick carpet was not a carpet at all but an impacted layer of something she couldn’t immediately make sense of. It was deep, pliable, and soft, but it contained multitudes of harder objects, some with sharp edges, and individually dense items that looked ominously moist, as well as papers, cans (opened, their lids pried up), cloth, more papers, and scatterings of unopened mailers and boxes that looked weirdly recent.
Also, the smell. It had passed beyond the outright foul to something darkly rich and loamy, but also horrible.
“Like I said,” said Harriet, at her elbow, “don’t breathe.”
“There’s an alternative?” said Sally. “What is that?”
“That is at least two generations of people losing their way in the world,” said Harriet, and Sally, even amid the sensory assault she was undergoing on multiple fronts, had to pause to admire the metaphor. “I stopped by her granddaughter’s place in the village this morning. She said, if I wanted to come out here to her grandmother’s home it’d be a blessing. House was full. Barn was full. These people don’t want to be paid, they just want all this erased.”
“But you can’t clean it up,” said Sally, dumbstruck. Harriet could not be trusted to clean her own house, which compared to this poor specimen was a minimalist and antiseptic dwelling.
“No, but I can help get things sorted out with the county. These structures need to be formally condemned before they can get taken down. It’s what these folks want, and they don’t have wherewithal to do it themselves. They just want to live in that new house out there, with everything new.”
Sally looked over at the shiny mobile home. “You’ve been inside?” she asked.
“In and out, most of the afternoon. Everything is spic and span in there. This mess is something they don’t want to even think about.”
Sally shook her head. “So, you’re going to be like their social worker?”