“If I have to be,” Harriet grinned. “I got an old highboy in the barn that’s one of the best I’ve ever seen. I got three tables at least that my friend in Deposit will want for his shop, and I’m only halfway in. They have no idea what’s in there because they don’t care about any of it. If I told them something they’ve got might be worth a fortune, I don’t think they’d believe me.”
Sally was having trouble breathing. There seemed to be a path of sorts, further into the hallway, but it ended at a staircase that tipped upward and disappeared. She wanted to go there, but she wasn’t at all sure she could get there. Another moment and she had to reach for the doorframe to steady herself. “Can you…” Sally felt backward. Harriet took her by the wrist and pulled her back out onto the doorstep.
“Uh-oh,” she heard Harriet say. “I shouldn’t have let you stay in there. We’ll need boots and masks when we come back.”
Sally was breathing deeply, hands on her knees, concentrating on getting the air in. “Back?” she managed, finally.
“It’s a three-day job, minimum. Drew’ll keep working as long as there’s light, and he’ll stay over at the Quality Inn in Horseheads, but this is enough for me. I can come back tomorrow. You can, too, if you like.”
Tomorrow was Sunday. Of course she wanted to come back. With boots, this time, and rubber gloves. And her hair in braids, under a bandana.
In the end, she spent nearly a week on the site, missing two meetings of her Writing and Sexual Politics seminar and a precept for her English lit survey, and helping to excavate a veritable catalog of eighteenth-and nineteenth-century American furniture, much of it (not surprisingly) in pieces and all of it in need of TLC in one form or another. But even Sally, by now, could see the many forms of value contained in these things. Bringing a seven-foot-long harvest table into the light, taking a rag to its surface, and showing its pale limbs to the sun for the first time in many decades—that felt like a form of spiritual midwifery. There was an early wing chair some animal (or generations of animals) had nested in, but when Drew cut away the fabric and webbing the skeleton of it was beautiful. Inside a high chest so dark it wasn’t immediately clear its surface had been japanned, Harriet showed her the ghost of a signature (Eliphalet Chapin) and a date, 1787.
The woman in the mobile home was named Mary Willit, but she asked them to call her Merry because everyone did. She came out every couple of hours with mugs of coffee, sweetened with some pumpkin-flavored concoction Sally found vile, and something newly baked on a tray, which she left on the hood of the car. At first, Sally had wanted to cover up whatever treasure had just emerged from the barn, worried that the glory and the value must be obvious to anyone, in or out of the profession. Certainly the Chapin chest or the harvest table would give anyone pause, no matter how anxious they were to get the buildings cleared out and possibly even demolished. But no: to Mary/Merry Willit, every single object not already transferred to her sparkling mobile home was ancient junk, and Sally, Drew, and Harriet were angels from the planet Ithaca, come to remove a hundred shades of eyesore from her property—all for free. One day, when asked how she’d managed to unpack her massive barn and clear out her foul-smelling old house, she would offer up the name and number of Harriet Greene, that pleasant and hardworking lady who hadn’t charged her a cent. And so it would continue, farm to homestead to crumbling manor house, all through the valleys and canal towns and farmlands of the Empire State.
Except that Sally already knew “one day” wouldn’t reach all that far into the future. Harriet, not the type to indulge discomfort (Sally had seen her bang her thumb with a hammer and respond with a “Crap” and a rinse of her bleeding nailbed under the tap), was not a healthy woman. She took, with her morning orange juice, a fistful of mysterious medications, and at the end of a list of numbers taped by the kitchen’s wall phone (the friend in Rochester, a cousin in Plattsburgh, Drew, and half a dozen dealers and restorers) was the ominously scribbled entry: Upstate Cancer Care. And she was losing weight. The dense round person Sally had met over a Shaker chair at the Johnson Museum of Art was slowly diminishing, as if someone had punched a tiny hole in her foot and let the life force begin to drain. She did not seem to be in pain, or even in distress, but that didn’t stop Sally from wondering whether Harriet might need some help.
Those are nice rooms up there, she’d said.
What have you decided? said Rochelle.
She’d found, all that spring, that she was back in 213 Balch earlier and earlier at night, sometimes even in the afternoon with no plans to go out again. Whole evenings in the small room with the window cracked open, sitting cross-legged on her bed with her homework at the ready, waiting for the doorknob to turn and Rochelle to enter. Which, she now understood, was happening later and later, sometimes very late indeed. Sally began to understand that this was not simply a case of general attrition, a peeling away of their friendship in a sad but noneventful way. No. Something had happened, something she’d missed, something of significance. Because she had been distracted by her excursions to East Seneca? Because she was selfish and myopic and hadn’t been paying attention? No. Because it was being deliberately hidden from her.
But why hide? They were friends, weren’t they? And until that bad mistake she’d made, foisting herself on Rochelle at her mysterious and sad home, they had been the kind of roommates who might say, for example, I met somebody or I might be in love, for surely that was the something, the deliberately hidden something, that was happening in Rochelle’s life. Night after night, with the relentless party room down the corridor in perpetual jamboree and the stubborn stink of bulimia nervosa (multiple cases) in the shared bathroom across the hall, Sally studied for her English lit final and drafted her passionless women’s studies term paper and tried not to think about the thing that was happening in Rochelle’s life, and why that mattered to her so much.
What have you decided?
She had decided nothing. This had been decided for her.
She began to move well before the end of the term, clearing out the largest of Harriet’s third-floor rooms to leave for herself only an epic four-poster, a highboy, and a Victorian marble-topped table by the bed, and scrubbing the bathroom back to its porcelain basins and tile. (The shower ran brown water for nearly an hour at first but righted itself in time.) Each day, she walked an item or two—a few books or a change of clothing—across the campus from Balch Hall and up the hill to East Seneca, and it was so gradual that even with what little remained in the room after the common room purges and giveaways, Rochelle didn’t seem to notice any transition was underway. Finally, a week before finals ended, she packed up her sheets and her computer and left for good.
What’s up? Rochelle wrote in an email late that night. She must have only just arrived back at the room. Are you ok?
Got a place off campus, Sally wrote back. Lease started on the first so I thought, might as well go now.
I would have helped you move!
Sally was ensconced in her new four-poster. It was massive with a dark carved headboard and twisted pillars, and she felt tiny in the middle of it with her laptop open.
That’s ok. You’ve been busy.
Studying for finals, Rochelle wrote. She wrote it quickly. Too quickly. So worried about my law seminar. I’m sorry, Sally. Can we meet up for coffee?
Sure. Just say when.