Читать книгу The Ice Garden - Moira Crone - Страница 9

That season—it was late summer—starting with Sweetie’s debut, we set up a separate world at our end of the hall.

For all the windows on the sleeping porch, Aunt C bought shades on sale at Woolworth’s. Then she sewed canvas curtains and coaxed Daniel La Fever, a handyman Sidney knew, to come to the house to hang them. He put the curtain poles in brackets he made with a jigsaw. When he was done, the place was romantic, like the inside of a tent.

There was no air conditioning in that old house, except one big noisy thing in my parents’ bedroom. Aunt C didn’t want another. We used sturdy window fans to pull the air through our rooms, which we started calling “our camp.”

Over the next few weeks, she showed me how to crochet, how to pick tomatoes at the store, how to thump melons to test for ripeness, how to know when to flip a pancake, how to really change a baby. We took turns reading Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass out loud. I insisted Sweetie didn’t get these, but Aunt C said you never knew.

She prepared a day in advance for something as simple as going to a farmers’ market in a downtown parking lot or for our trekking to the park.

Walking was for poor people, it was thought. Neighbors in cars were always stopping us to see if we needed a ride. Aunt C told them we could use the air and exercise, thanks so much. It was seven blocks down to Center Street, four over to the Terminal Hotel, where sometimes we’d stop for lunch, or what she called “tea.” In the dining room on the mezzanine, we would order crustless sandwiches and little cupcakes, asking for them to be put all on one big plate. It was an English habit she got in Kenya. From that spot we could look down on the whole lobby, with its grand piano in the middle and towns-people and travelers coming and going.

Once, on a Saturday when I came in from playing, Daniel La Fever was sitting on a painted chair, his shoulders cradled by its back. He was relaxed, left leg crossed over the other at the knee, so I could see his big splattered work boots, which he wore without socks. His expression was kind of hard to me, too serious—I was a little afraid of him.

“The lions, they come into town? Now and then or all the time? Or never?”

“Almost never,” Aunt C said.

“And, the streets, are the streets like ours? Or are they dirt?”

“In Nairobi, like ours, it’s a big city—”

“I’m going there before I die,” he said.

She leaned toward him, said, “Mr. La Fever, you are too young to think about dying.”

He threw his head back and laughed.

I loved the sound, had never heard anything quite like it.

He was in the kitchen a lot by late September. He started giving Sidney a ride home every day in his old, dilapidated car.

My mother praised Aunt C, said she was a godsend—finally the family could get some rest. About a week after my aunt arrived, my mother started dressing up again. My father insisted she had no excuse now, she should go downtown with him, be seen in places like church, or the buffet at the Terminal Hotel, or out at the Fayton Country Club. He always liked taking her on his arm and opening the door for her, driving off in his dark Mercury, to places where people could see her. Going out improved her mood—at least the part about being dressed up, about being admired from afar. In church, with C and Sweetie and my father, we took up a whole pew. My mother sat stiff, her lipstick perfect and her hair in a French twist, lacquered. She liked to be a little late, so she could make an entrance.

Two territories formed in the house. My parents lived in their blue wing with the satin quilt on the bed, the chaise lounge, and the air conditioner. They still had muffled arguments—but they weren’t fighting the way they were before, when Sweetie had just come home.

In our camp, we had our schedules and our projects, our plans for the baby. We kept a book about her milestones, designed our days around her naps.

I started back to school, so I had a life outside of the house, but I missed my sister all day. In the morning I always checked with Aunt C to see what we were doing with her when I got home.

Sidney was the neutral party, in charge of downstairs. She did the meals and ran the vacuum. Out on the laundry porch, she spent hours resurrecting my father’s shirts. She used powdered starch, which she mixed with water in a Coke bottle with a perforated stopper. She sprinkled the solution and then slammed down the iron for steam. When she was done with all that, she cooled off with a quart of iced tea in the kitchen by the fan, her hair and forehead dripping. Then she jumped up again and went into the dining room, which was dark and cool, to polish the silver.

Sidney did go away for a week to Philadelphia, to see her brother’s family. This was in late September. She took the Trailways bus. We got along okay without her for five days. My mother complained, and my father did the dishes. Aunt C made a roast with potatoes.

We even started eating in shifts. Aunt C and I went to the table around five-thirty with Sweetie. More and more, Sidney and Daniel lingered, talking. My mother roused herself late in the day and dressed carefully. She and my father had dinner alone.

When I arrived home from school, we’d all go see my mother. This was Aunt C’s rule.

Almost every time we came in, she looked surprised to see us, as if her mind had been a thousand miles away. “Well, how is she today?” she’d ask.

She’d have her mystery novel, or a fashion magazine. Slowly, she’d put it down, say, “And what have you all been up to?”

If we said, “Nothing,” she refused to believe us.

So we would start to tell her how we’d gone for a walk, or to the hotel, and Aunt C would hand the baby to her. But before we’d gotten too far, my mother would change the subject and say something like, “What are we going to do about this heat?” and then she’d hand Sweetie back, sort of so we wouldn’t notice.

One day in late October, she was on a “jag” (as she called them when she was not on them) in the second parlor. She hadn’t played piano in a while—except for that first day we went to Thornton Park. I liked to see it. She was messier and happier when she was playing.

We came in quietly and sat in the two slipper chairs near the door. Sweetie was in the pram. I listened and loved it. The baby closed her lids and opened them, moving her lips slightly as if she were about to sing. Her fingers made a trill. I was sure of it. I pointed this out to C.

But my aunt didn’t notice. She interrupted the song, said, “Diana, Diana, we’re here. Odile’s waiting.”

My mother eyed her and me and the baby from across the room. Her fingers did not rise from the keyboard, though. I didn’t see why they should. My left hand was waving back and forth, keeping time, conducting.

Aunt C didn’t understand.

Finally, it was over, the last chord. “All right, C, all right,” my mother said as she turned round to us. She was breathing through her mouth, her chest heaving like someone who had been running a race.

Aunt C said, “So glad you can.” Then she lifted my baby sister up and held her out for my mother to take her.

My mother did not do it. She thrust her face forward and pecked Sweetie on the cheek.

Aunt C stood there, did not move, holding Sweetie under my mother’s chin.

“That’s enough,” my mother repeated. “Take her, C. Didn’t you hear me? I said that’s enough for now.”

Aunt C didn’t react, as if she were deaf.

“C?” my mother said, irritated. “C? What did I say?”

By the beginning of November, my mother had gotten her figure back entirely, something I would never have noticed, but my father remarked on it every time he saw her because it was of great importance to him—fat women horrified him.

Once, she abandoned her music and drove off to Rocky Mount, a town where, she said, people “had a prayer.” She came home with booklets and a mound of pamphlets in bright colors: orange, purple, red, and burgundy. There were pictures of women dancing with baskets of fruit on their heads and photos of black men in white jackets with gold braid and short pants, large oval diagrams. We saw these on her nightstand when we went into her room at four to give her Sweetie.

On a night when they were having dinner alone, she proposed a cruise to the Bahamas and other islands to my father. Take the train down to Miami and sail from there. “The Bahamas?” my father asked. “The Bahamas? Now?”

“What is wrong with the idea? Winter is the best time to go.”

In our camp, we had our own concerns. Sweetie grew and grew, so much the tiny pink-and-white hat I’d crocheted under Aunt C’s eye didn’t fit anymore, and her old booties no longer could be stretched around on her feet. Her wrists had creases like bracelets. Her hands had doubled in size, and her caramel skin filled in. Her eyes had morphed into great marbles. She was so soft she was shocking.

Before Thanksgiving, on a Monday afternoon, I walked home from school to discover Daniel’s spattered, ancient car under the porte cochere. The front of the thing was mean-looking to me with its hooked chrome beak—a hawk’s. It was two colors, the top part orange and the bottom brown, with a silver strip between. The back door was open: Sidney, Daniel, Aunt C, Sweetie, and Cleo were inside already, waiting for me. “Get in,” Aunt C said, pointing to the backseat. “Come on, darling.”

The interior was completely unknown to me at that point. I poked my head in and saw pieces of burgundy carpet on the seats and, below that, through the big rusted holes in the floor, the gleaming, bleached pea gravel of our driveway. At that, I stopped.

Aunt C turned, laughing, color in her cheeks, “Claire, Mr. La Fever doesn’t have all day.” She was the only one who called Daniel “Mr. La Fever.” “What’s the matter? You can’t fall through.”

Sweetie was already on the bench seat in her basket. Cleo was in Aunt C’s lap, with her paws hooked over the edge of the open window. Before I could change my mind, Daniel said, “Let’s go.” Reaching back, he pulled my door shut, locked it.

Suddenly, we were rolling, Cleo sipping air at the crack in the open window, pebbles in the asphalt of the road becoming zooming streaks beneath my feet. I could not look down—but it was an adventure.

“Left your mother a note, dear,” C said in a monotone. “Nothing to worry about.”

In the front, they started listing recipes: sandies, pralines, rumballs, nougat logs, brittle, sherried nuts, dream bars, ordinary pecan pie, coconut pecan pie, chocolate pecan pie, Waldorf salad, cranberry orange pecan relish, spiced cocktail pecans, pecan fudge, stuffed dates, divinity.

The dash of the car was of bird’s-eye wood, shiny and smooth with large chrome-ringed pools for the dials. The odometer showed all zeroes—I asked why. Daniel said that was because he’d broken it by driving so far. He had bought this thing years before, when he got out of the service in California, drove it all the way back across the country. It had survived several engines, he said.

After a while, Cleo got tired of hanging out the front window and turned around to see Sweetie and me. She came down close with her hot breath that smelled like beans, so I shielded my sister. But she laughed at the dog.

The conversation in the front moved on. Daniel said, “One hundred sixty-one pounds.”

“Not me, not me,” Sidney chimed in, her voice high-pitched, silly.

“Well, you can try,” Aunt C said to Daniel. “You get half.”

“We will see about that,” he said.

We drove slowly past the old parts of town and then, leaving Fayton’s limits, turned onto Mt. Ararat Road, which led to the house we called Mam’s. It was the original McKenzie place, where my ancestors had a farm a long time ago.

Aunt C mentioned she had lived there early in her marriage, something I had never known. When I said so, she told me more: In the 1930s, her father, my grandfather, fell right over the counter at his store, McKenzie Seed and Feed. Everyone found the fact that he’d had a heart attack ironic since his wife, my grandmother, had angina: she’d spent half her time in bed since she was forty. Not long after my grandfather died, the business folded. It was the Depression—within a year, they lost the house in town. My father was a teenager then, thirteen years younger than his sister, C. He was the closest to Mam of any of the children. When he was finishing high school, Aunt C left her job to come down to look after her mother. For a while, her husband joined her, but then he had to leave because of the war. Aunt C said, “Somebody had to rescue your daddy.”

“Rescue him?” I asked.

“I don’t mean he was in danger. But he could go to college on the money from the Veterans when Daddy died. He didn’t want to. He wanted to stay with Mam. I had to talk him into it.”

“Why?” I asked.

“Your father has a loyal soul.”

She started to say something else then she stopped and started again: “It’s a good trait. A very good trait. Really. Really.” She clicked her tongue, looked out the window. I saw her eyes reflected in the mirror. Downcast.

All of the siblings—my father, Aunt C, the two older brothers—owned the country house in common, so it was Aunt C’s as much as my father’s, though it was his responsibility. He still lived in Fayton while the rest had left for lives in the North. “We had to go,” she explained. “Nobody had anything back then. Not a decent job in Fayton County in those days. I can testify to it. I looked and looked, took all the Civil Service tests. People along this road used to get a mule to haul their Model T into town.”

“Why?” I asked.

“Nobody could afford gas.”

“Gas is twenty-seven cents a gallon,” I said. I had just seen a sign for it.

“That’s what she’s saying,” Daniel chimed in, nodding.

Mam’s few fields had always been in tobacco, except for the pecan grove. My father rented the land to other farmers. We had an allotment, that was why he could, she said. There was a ramshackle house with many doors to the outside. Once white, it was now a mink gray, hardly enough paint left to tell it was peeling.

“Anybody living there?” Daniel asked as we approached.

“Not now, Connor told me. Vacant.” Aunt C said.

“Sure?” he asked. “People out here have a shotgun.”

“I’m sure,” Aunt C said.

We turned from the highway onto the road that led to the house—really now just two tracks where grass was barely peeping up from the sandy soil. Aunt C was talking about how she’d tried to renovate the place a bit when she moved in with Mam. “I see it’s falling apart again,” she said, but it didn’t seem to bother her.

We rolled past the complicated house, snoozing on its old plot of ground, a fancy overgrown flower garden on one side with tall boxwoods and camellias surrounding it.

Our nuts were special, not the common ones, papershells or Stuarts. The McKenzie trees produced a bronze, lightly speckled pecan, and the meats were skinny and golden, not brown. They were also sweet and very oily as if buttered inside their shells, as well. Like the nuts, most of the trees were narrow, elongated. This was true of all but the queen of the grove, which unwound in every direction, a majestic spiral in the midst of a bare circular section of shade where little would grow. A thicket of slick-leaved, low trees and a stand of bushes that defined the end of the garden rimmed this great tree on the side near the house. The fields and the rest of the grove were beyond the queen, spreading out all the way down to the creek. We parked far from the house. The sky was cold powder blue. There was one of those day moons that came in late fall and early winter.

For half an hour we picked up the nuts on the ground, and then Aunt C started eyeing the trees. “You ready?” she asked Daniel.

He nodded, said, “All right.” He took a high jump to pull up onto the lowest branch.

“You look out now,” Sidney called to him.

We all stood there except Sweetie, who was still snoozing in her basket. I looked down and noticed she was getting too big for it.

“We’ll have to move her,” Aunt C said. “Out of range of the fall.”

I followed her instructions. I set the shallow basket down some distance away, on the other side of the border of bushes, nearer to the house.

“Okay, that one, go out—” Aunt C told him.

We knew Daniel had to get up on roofs from time to time, to paint dormers and metal gutters, but Sidney was fearful, said, “You be careful, you are no climber!” He grabbed a higher, narrower limb for balance and then did a sideways step out on the first big branch. Halfway along, he began to bounce. Sidney called, “Well, you really up there good now,” and just as she did so, the crack hit us like a pop of thunder. His balance branch gave way. He bowed backward. We all whooped, shouted, Sidney the loudest. But then another Daniel took over. He caught himself, crouched, doubled in half, and gripped the big limb under his feet. In a second, he was swinging, leaping the last three yards to the ground. He landed on two feet like a trained trapeze man. All the jostling produced a fusillade of pecans. First we clapped, and then we picked up half a bushel.

After a while he went off looking around the grove for another tree, then he came back and announced, “The big one’s got the most. The others are not bearing this year. But the real crop on this one is up high—I saw it.”

He leaned down and pointed to the top of the queen, then he bent over and produced a Kool cigarette from the knee pocket of his spattered pants. He struck a long wooden kitchen match on his cracked, spotted brogan shoes and waved the flame around like a magic wand as he began a long speech about how to know when a pecan tree would deliver, why it wasn’t every year, how they got in the mood. Moisture, cold snaps, winds in spring, the temperatures, and rainfall the week of the full moon—not to mention hope—were all factors. When he was done with his speech, he touched the end of his Kool, and then his eyes settled on me. After taking a long drag and exhaling a volume of smoke, he asked, “What you weigh?” as one would ask an ally.

I was standing there in a pleated skirt. Underneath were my underpants. Only my underpants. This ruled out my climbing any tree. “Fifty-three,” I said, truthfully and boldly, but ashamed. My friend Lily Stark weighed forty-seven and she was an inch taller, so I thought there was something wrong with me.

“Just about right,” Daniel said, with a narrow wink.

“No! No!” I said, still thinking of my skirt, though climbing had its attraction.

“We will stand back here, darling, nothing we can see, honest,” Sidney said, grabbing Daniel’s hand and pulling him back even with her, farther away from the trunk.

“No, she cannot,” Aunt C said, with a shake of her head, the one teachers gave us when we were breaking a big rule.

“Please,” I said, my hands together as if in a prayer. In a second, I had forgotten about my underwear. Perhaps it was that she forbade me.

“Climb that tree, fall down, and your daddy will never forgive me. I’ll never forgive myself.”

“Please,” I said.

Her mouth was suspended, open. She was trying to figure out how to put her foot down with me. She had never done it—the both of us knew it. She’d been with the family since late June. It was November—five months of “yes.”

“I can climb,” I said.

She sighed and said, “Just the branch opposite the one Daniel went out. Then come down.”

A few minutes later, I was shimmying along that limb, making pecans plop. I watched the others spreading out below me, picking them up, but after a while looking down made me anxious. I discovered that if you kept looking up or straight ahead, there was a great thrill to being twenty feet in the air. It was really the easiest thing in the world as long as you kept your confidence. I decided to try higher.

“That’s far enough!” Aunt C shouted from below.

Something came over me. I didn’t do what she said. I kept going up. Soon, I could see the Fayton Bank and Trust Building, the Terminal Hotel, and the steeple on the Methodist Church. These buildings were miles away—the plain was that flat. From up a little higher, I could fit the whole of the town in the yoke between my thumb and index finger. When I pinched, it disappeared. This thrilled me. Its importance might be swallowed up by the rest of the world, or by the sky. The idea also felt dangerous. I had never left home. I’d never been anywhere except Raleigh. Even thinking of leaving made me feel like I was cheating.

I had the strangest idea. I would run off with Aunt C and Sweetie, Sidney, and Daniel. We could stay in his jalopy; we’d already come this far. From up in the tree, it was easy.

I saw the life I did have as one led under a dark enchantment. I could see this because of the height, and the distance from gravity. We just weren’t going to stay. We weren’t going home. We would keep driving.

Then, as I was scanning the ground below, I saw Sweetie’s basket was turned over. I could see it clearly—I thought Cleo had done it.

“Get her!” I said. “She might be underneath, caught!”

Cleo started making a great racket, but nowhere near the baby.

I had put her down in the wrong place. I had stopped thinking of her.

Aunt C was at the other end of the circle, below, from my vantage, a little blade-shaped figure with broad shoulders and narrow legs, heaving underneath the disk of her cloth cap. I yelled, “Get her. Help her! She turned over the basket! She’s under it!”

Daniel called to me, “What?”

Then, at the end of the dirt road, my father’s Mercury speeding toward the old house, going way too fast. As it cleared Mam’s garden, I saw my mother’s pale, determined profile behind the wheel, her blonde hair tight in a French twist.

At the same instant, I saw a little dark head, rounded, bobbing up and down, moving a few feet from the basket, on the grass. I screamed down to Aunt C and all of them. “Car! Sweetie!”

Daniel was the first on the ground to see what was coming and the first to move through the bushes, the first to scream at my mother to stop. I didn’t know a person could yell as loud as he did right then.

But she didn’t stop. She kept going, full speed. Daniel and now me and Aunt C were yelling at the tops of our lungs, but she didn’t stop.

At the last second, he dove down to cover the baby. Aunt C came through the bushes an instant later. When my mother finally braked, her tire missed Daniel’s head, and Sweetie in his arms, by less than a yard.

It was over, but Aunt C could not stop screaming.

My mother paused and then opened the car door. Daniel stood. It wasn’t until that second that we saw Sweetie was all right.

My mother got out and stood behind the car door for a second, as if it were her shield. Her pale, flared yellow skirt stuck out in the opening, her two hands on the frame on the top of the glass. She had been in town, I could tell because she had a short-waisted jacket over her dress.

“Why on earth didn’t you stop?” Aunt C screamed.

“Well, what is Odile doing in the dirt?”

“She rolled out of the basket. Turned it over! We didn’t see it. She inched along!” As she said this, Aunt C cupped Sweetie’s face in her hands, took a look at her. “Daniel saved her,” her voice hoarse.

With his free arm, Daniel took Aunt C’s hand and walked her over to a stump, where she could sit and receive my sister.

My mother remained as she was, behind the car door, accusing.

“And you haul her out here without telling me and then ignore her?” she said.

“It is my fault,” Aunt C said, “But—”

“And where the hell is Claire?”

I scooted down two levels. But she saw me anyway. She said, “Up a goddamn tree? Down this instant! My lands! Have you lost your minds?”

“Here!” I called out, from the lowest branch.

Aunt C stood.

“And Connor says I don’t attend to the baby. Connor says!”

“Why didn’t you stop?” Aunt C said. “Why were you going so fast?” She cradled Sweetie against her shoulder, shielded her head.

“I stopped when I saw that, when I saw Daniel,” she pulled in her chin.

“You heard us, didn’t you?”

“Car windows were closed. You know it’s like an isolation chamber inside,” she said, patting the glass in front of her, turning to me. “Like on the Sixty-Four Thousand Dollar Question?”

She meant the TV show where the man had to go into a soundproof booth to think about the answers. There had been some cheating in that booth, which was a scandal in the news.

“Isn’t it, Claire, soundproof in this car? They advertise it.” She looked up to get my agreement.

“It’s quiet,” I yelled down.

“When the hell are you getting out of that tree?”

I was crouched, ready to jump from the last branch.

“Well, Sidney, go over there and catch her. What are you people doing out here, turning her into a tomboy?”

I landed on the bare sandy loam right near the trunk on my own before Sidney could get to me. My arches hurt terribly when I hit the earth, but I wouldn’t mention it.

“Claire, don’t you dare ever do that again! Don’t you dare ever—and barelegged? Connor is going to have a fit.”

Even on the ground, I kept up my other life, the one I dreamed: we had three bushel baskets picked. We would take our bounty to the farmer’s market and make enough cash to leave Fayton. The only thing left was to decide where to go—

But we weren’t going anywhere.

“You come right here by me,” she said. “Claire! Right here by me.”

“Oh Diana, it was harmless as an idea. We were going to do some baking. Harvest the nuts before they rot. I was going to show Claire how to bake,” Aunt C said.

“Don’t you oh Diana me. Don’t you see the harm being done? Before you even got out here and started this.” She eyed Daniel. “I’m driving you home, Claire, Odile too.”

Aunt C stood then. Her face was red. She would not answer.

“Come on, Claire,” she said. “Come on, get the basket. Sidney, get Odile and put her in it, come on.”

Aunt C relinquished Sweetie reluctantly, and Sidney put the baby in the back of the Mercury. I took the front passenger seat. The car was full of my mother’s perfume. Roses. I liked that. I was rather thrilled she’d come out here to find us, even though it had been a disaster.

She turned to me as soon as I was alone with her. “Why did you go off with the colored man driving? In that death trap of a car? I would have thought you would know better. How old are you now?” I was a curiosity to her, an oddity, a stranger. She was using her Charleston voice.

“I am fixing to be eleven,” I said.

“Where is your sense of right and wrong? What has got into you with that woman? You climbing trees? I was downtown ordering some clothes. Come home to find that stupid note from C. No explanation.”

The window on my side was wide open.

As we crept backward and turned around to make it to the county highway, she said, “You gonna catch a death of cold now on top of everything? Roll up that window the way it was. Hear me? We have got to get home and see what Connor’s going to do about C. Who does she think she is? What else has she made you do with that man, that Negro?”

I was confused. Maybe I did something I didn’t know I had done. I was thinking hard. Sometimes I walked into a room and didn’t remember what I had come for. I slid away from the window in the car, as if the glass itself was a liar, or some magic thing. I got closer to my mother. Maybe I had left part of me up in the sky, where we could fly. Here on the ground, nothing was making sense.“What is the matter with you, Claire? What is it?” she asked me. “What’s wrong with your side of the car?”

“Sweetie is rolling over and creeping,” I said. “Isn’t she smart to save up and keep it a surprise?” I was doing my best to change the subject. My mother couldn’t have been wrong, I must have been.

“You would think she was the queen of England the way you go on about that poor thing with that muddy face. You and C and the lot of you.” She was nodding her head. There was something too high in her voice. The sound of it hurt me.

Later, when my father heard from my mother about the “awful thing” C went and did with Sidney and Daniel and myself and Sweetie, he chuckled, said, “Well if I talk to her, what do you want me to say?”

This enraged her further. She said, “I am going to get somebody to listen to me.”

“What is it, Diana? What?”

A few nights later I had a dream I still remember.

I was holding onto Sweetie and we were entering a dark cavern. There were stalactites and stalagmites, and a blue-green pool in the distance under a great, gleaming ceiling. I moved toward it, thinking of diving in. But then, when I got close, I was afraid that if I dove in with Sweetie, she could not swim. There was no one around to ask. I was alone in this place, far underground, with her, her only.

I dove in anyway. She rode on my back. I didn’t care that we were alone. We were too happy for it to matter. Her hands were around my neck; she was laughing.

If it were Sweetie and I and nobody else in the world, we were safe, we were fine, we were swimming.

When I woke, I wanted to go back to the dream, the beautiful water.