“Alleen McCandless,” Mr. Tanner said again, this time a bit louder. “The new schoolteacher your husband hired.”
Mrs. Price looked at her with a confusion that had behind it a skeptical tint. “I didn’t know Ansel had hired anyone,” Mrs. Price said, and seemed to be studying Aldine. “It’s nice to meet you.”
Aldine still sat on the wagon under a beating sun. Mr. Tanner shifted and held the reins like he was anxious to turn his team around. The crazed sloshing, grinding noise kept on, hurling unseen clothes together in the drum on the back porch. An overgrown teenage girl, almost a woman, came strolling out the back door and reached down to rub her hands lovingly all over the head of the ribby black-faced dog that rose to her arrival and nosed her at every step. The girl was fleshier than Mrs. Price and unrestrained-looking, like a rampant hollyhock too big for the yard, and Aldine imagined the girl might be frolicsome with the boys, an idea that she would later reflect on because of its stark wrongness. When the greeting with the dog was finally done, she said, “So how’re Ed and Billy?”
Mr. Tanner nodded and said, “Good as ever.”
Then the girl looked at Aldine and said sunnily, “This your new hired hand, Mr. Tanner?”
The girl laughed at her own joke, though no one else did. In fact, Mr. Tanner didn’t seem even to regard it as one. “I’ve brought her here for you folks,” he said. “New teacher your father hired.”
The whole party sank back into silence, and Aldine felt like a package no one wanted to pay for. She sat stiffly, back straight, as if posture was the answer. Finally she cleared her throat. “I have a letter,” she said, and when she brought it out, she noticed that her hand trembled. “Did you not get mine then?”
Mrs. Price shielded her eyes again and reached up for the letter, studying first the envelope and then the contents. Aldine wanted a bath. She wanted dinner. She wanted to close her eyes and open them again on the rose-papered ceiling of the attic in Ayr, where she would hear Leenie’s muffled breathing beside her and know they had not left home.
“Well, you better come in,” Mrs. Price said when she had stuffed the letter back into the envelope. “Come in and we’ll get this sorted out when Ansel gets back from planting.”
“You came here from New York?” the older girl said, taking her turn with the letter, still rubbing the wriggly black-faced dog with her left hand.
“Not New York. Scotland,” Mr. Tanner said, unbending stiffly and descending to offer his hand to Aldine. “It’s why she talks the way she does.”
There was nothing to be done now but climb out of his wagon.
“Scotland,” Aldine said, accepting Mr. Tanner’s hand, which was rough and rootlike. “Scotland, then New York.”
“Can’t think why you’d leave either of those places for here!” the girl said cheerfully, taking Aldine’s suitcase for her. “But now you’re here, so come on in. My name’s Charlotte. And that’s”—she nodded at the dog—“Artemis.”
“The Goddess of the Hunt,” Aldine said, but not very loudly, and no one seemed to hear.
Aldine called a thank-you to Mr. Tanner but he was already maneuvering his mules and gave no acknowledgment. Inside, the house was hot like the train compartment, but its neatness was undeniable. She hadn’t been expected, yet every surface was clean, every object in perfect order. There was a front parlor with two floral-print chairs and a sofa set around a braided rug and a cathedral radio on legs (so they did have electricity), and there was a wooden telephone box on the wall as well. The man on the train said there might not be electricity or telephones or running water. Sheer curtains gave the room a yellowish color, not unpleasant, like it was already the jack-o’-lantern hour of dusk. A mahogany-framed photograph of a stiff, unfriendly man startled Aldine—what if that were Ansel Price? His clothes were old-fashioned, though, and he wore a monocle, so she hoped it was someone else.
“You came from New York City, you said?”
The question gave her a start, and she turned around to find Mrs. Price standing in the doorway. Aldine wondered how long she’d been standing like that. “Aye. New York City.”
“Do you smoke cigarettes?”
“No.” This was not quite the truth. “Well, I have naw for a long while. My sister would naw allow it.”
Mrs. Price enunciated, “Your sister would not allow it?”
Aldine nodded.
Mrs. Price said, “Well we don’t, either. Not inside or outside or anywhere. Our youngest one, it closes up her passages.”
Aldine was nodding again. “That’s fine then,” she said.
“Also it’s vulgar for a woman.”
“Aye,” Aldine said. She let her eyes drift away from Mrs. Price. The truth of it was that if ever she had loads of money her first purchase would be tarries and a good supply at that.
Charlotte came out of the kitchen with a little plate of pickled beets and carrots. She was already chewing one of them. “Mom doesn’t think smoking is ladylike,” she said, offering Aldine the platter. “She thinks only city vixens smoke.”
Mrs. Price was looking at her stiffly but Charlotte kept smiling. Her lips were somehow moist, her hair somehow buoyant. Aldine declined the pickled vegetables—she did not want to pluck them up with her fingers as was evidently the custom. Charlotte slipped two more beet slices into her mouth, then took up Aldine’s luggage and turned to her mother. “Attic room?”
Mrs. Price nodded.
Aldine was conscious of her heels on the hollow wood, of the plainness of the house’s sounds. A lack of carpets, she supposed.
“Neva might be up there,” Mrs. Price said. “I don’t know why she didn’t come running to see who was here.”
“In the barn, is my guess. She said Krazy Kat had kittens.”
Charlotte went clomping up the stairs with Aldine’s suitcase, and Aldine followed, smelling Charlotte’s talcum powder and her own gritty sweat soaked into the armpits of her best black dress. They reached the landing with its view of a hallway and three doors, then started to climb again. “It’s a good thing you’re so small,” Charlotte said. “I barely fit in this room.”
In fact, Aldine could only stand up in the center of the stifling hot attic, which was not papered or painted or, for that matter, clean. Dust lay on everything and in everything and formed a shifting, unsheddable skin. She could see particles on the windowsills, on the unpainted floorboards, hovering in the air by the dirty yellowed sheers that hung by the attic’s small single window. Aldine stared at an iron bed that looked as if it had been sifted all over with flour.
“Ugh,” Charlotte said, and reached a finger to the bed. She drew a line in the dust on the coverlet. “Sweet mother of God, if the Mother saw this, she’d throw a royal fit. Tolerate no uncleanliness, and all that.”