Читать книгу Only the Women Are Burning - Nancy Burke - Страница 14

“The world’s flattery and hypocrisy is a sweet morsel:

eat less of it, for it is full of fire.

Its fire is hidden while its taste is manifest,

but its smoke becomes visible in the end.”

- Jalaluddin Rumi

Chapter 6

I left the library. I worried about my re-entry to home and if Pete was doing okay with the kids and if they were doing okay with him. I told myself the cell phone in my pocket would ring if things weren’t going well. And, just as my hand touched my cell phone, it vibrated. It was my sister, not Grace, but Lou.

“Hi,” she said. As a ten-year-old tomboy Mary Lou had insisted we call her Lou. We still did even though she was in her late thirties. “Are you busy?”

“I’m out running errands. Is everything okay?”

“I’m having a garage sale. I wondered if you want to go through some of this stuff, see if you want anything.”

“What stuff?”

“Old stuff. From childhood. Some of Mom’s.”

“When?”

“Now.”

“Grace there too?”

“Yes. She helped me organize everything. I would have called you during the week but you work.”

“I could have helped. The schools are doing standardized tests so we only had a few visitors.”

“Wish I had known. Can you come?”

“You would know if you had tried earlier,” I said. “I don’t want you giving away stuff without me seeing it...”

“Yes, well, okay. Come over. I’ve got to hang up. People are arriving...” and she clicked off and I took off in the car.

Grace and Lou, that old familiar twinge of my otherness fired up as I drove. Saw horses blocked the sidewalk in front of our childhood home, the one Lou bought from the estate when Mom died. A Victorian, tall with a narrow driveway between it and the mirror image of it next door. Parking was already difficult, SUVs and Volvo station wagons at the curb all the way down past the bend in the narrow street. The bend separated two towns, Glen Brook and Hillston. Lou’s house was just this side of the town line. Lou was at the sawhorses explaining the sale would not open for another twenty minutes. Grace was lugging a carton of books across the garage to a folding table covered with a plastic green tablecloth. I had been too hastily called to this. I rapidly took in the display tables, the rack full of clothing that looked familiar, and small end tables, chairs, and lamps Lou must have stored in her basement for these last five years.

Grace said, “Cassandra, can you lift this? My back is bothering me. I took an Advil but I can’t do this kind of physical work.”

“I can’t believe you didn’t cancel this,” I said.

“What, the sale?”

“Yes, considering the danger. You do realize three women died yesterday. All outdoors.”

“Once it’s in the paper it’s impossible to cancel. That’s what Lou said.”

“But they’re telling women to stay indoors.”

“I am indoors,” she said, indicating the garage roof.

“But what about the customers? Isn’t this putting them in danger?”

“That’s their choice, Cassie,” she didn’t look at me when she spoke. “The mayor advised it, but it’s not like an order.”

“Do you have the garden hose hooked up yet?” I heard myself saying this, but I knew it might be futile if something happened again.

“Cassie,” Grace said. “Stop. There won’t be any self-immolating women here. There won’t be any snipers with flame-throwers. We’re safe.”

But I noticed she would not leave the garage. Lou was doing all the work in the yard, uncovered and vulnerable.

I reached down and lifted the box for her and the flimsy table tipped and the box spilled at my feet.

“Well, at least this wasn’t the tea pot collection,” Grace said. “Or it would be in fragments...or what would you anthropologists call them, shards?”

“Where are the teapots?”

“Really, Cassandra, don’t be so much in a hurry. Lou and I have been at this for days. Help me pick this up first.”

I ignored her. I went over to Lou, “I want the teapots. They were my gifts to Mom. Where are they?”

She pointed. “On a table in there. There’s a box and tissue for wrapping under the table.”

I worked quickly. The crowd at the sawhorse barrier was growing. While I wrapped and gently packed up the collection, my eyes wandered to another table. Jewelry. “Everything must go,” read a tent card with $5.00 each in parentheses.

Strewn on the table lay not only Mother’s jewelry, but the jade, opal, and lapiz lazuli I had sent from India to my sisters for the holidays I’d missed. The gifts for Lou’s wedding. The special piece of blue for her. All for sale. A heavy woman in a flowery peasant skirt was heading in my direction. With a sweep of my arm, I gathered all of it into my purse, letting the pieces tangle and fall to the bottom, into a dark pocket-like abyss, and grinned at her. “I’m one of the sisters who owns this stuff. I just changed my mind. Sorry.” The crowd was now stepping quickly up the driveway, descending upon all these tables, in a mad frenzy. I went back to the tea set, finished the final cup, and slid the box under the table.

I needed to calm down. I felt hot despite the early morning cool air. Here was the collection of books Lou and I had shared, swapping mysteries in this very back yard on summer afternoons, reading in the shade before restlessness took over and we hopped on bicycles to the nearby park. Grace had just lifted the last one to the table and I saw them evenly distributed so the flimsy table would not tip again. My twins were just the age Lou and I had been when we read them.

A woman from the used bookstore on Glen Brook Avenue appeared and with a wave of her hand she told Grace, “I’ll take this entire table. How much?”

And it was done. I wished for a clap of thunder, a sudden spring storm, torrents of rain, lightning, to appear, to wash this entire operation into an utter failure.

“There’s another box,” Grace said. “Want to see it?”

“I’ve already bought them,” I said. I turned on my heel. There, under the old picnic table bench, was a plastic bin like the one in my attic with my dissertation notes. These were the bulk of the Nancy Drew mysteries and the Mary Stewart novels that inspired my anthropology path. The Moon Spinners, once a Disney movie, a novel about a woman who traveled and collected folk music from cultures around the world. There too was The Source, by James Michener, which fired my first choice of graduate work at the stone circles in England. The roots of it all, right here. No, these would come with me. And there, amid them, was something else. Something I had tossed in the trash decades ago. What on earth was it doing here?

I studied Grace from a safe distance, watching her charm a woman into taking a set of chairs in need of refinishing. I didn’t recognize the chairs. They were veneer and could not be dipped or stripped of old finish without melting the glue holding the coating to the cheap plywood underneath. I said nothing. Just watched.

Here were the fragments of pages I had torn to shreds and tossed in the wastebasket in our kitchen years before. The cover of a black and white marble notebook, inked with pink doodles and my name and the words “do not read.” There had been comments made with a thick marker in the margins and across the tops of pages, stick figures on the blank unused pages with balloons over their heads containing insults and mocking words. Ugly, pimple face, freak, and worse. Clearly Grace had read it and done this. I had torn it to shreds and dumped it in the trash basket. My journal. There it was, in with the books of my coming of age, in a plastic zip bag, bringing back painful remnants of my childhood. How had it got out of the trash and into this bag? I couldn’t be there any longer. I’d been out here long enough. I lifted the box, hid the journal under the other books, and carried it to my car. I returned twice more for the teapots and a vase I had sent to Mother from England. I said, “Goodbye,” and left.

I did not want to ask Grace why and how it had come to be among our books. Talking about it would give her a power I would not give. I was feeling enough throbbing of scar tissue already. I drove off, past the park where it had once been Lou and me riding bikes along those paths, Lou and me reading the books I now carried in my trunk. Lou and me, playing checkers and chess, swapping books, riding to the library together. Grace pre-occupied with her friend down the street, Lou and me collecting soda bottles for deposit pennies and saving enough to buy bottles of root beer and sipping them slowly as we read in the shade of our front porch, a contest to see who could make their root beer last the longest and finish her book fastest. Lou and me ended at age thirteen.

Lou, twelve at the time, was suddenly no longer my best friend but instead followed fourteen-year-old Grace everywhere. Grace refused to let me join their twosome. Mom had stated with firmness I couldn’t challenge, “Go find friends of your own. They’re different from you.” I spent so much time after that in my tiny bedroom, my books, Natural History magazine, Smithsonian, National Geographic filling my mind and my time. That was perhaps when the roots of my dream of becoming an anthropologist took hold.

Sheffield was my Mecca, after that high school estrangement from my sisters that lasted through my bachelor’s degree as a commuter from home. Sheffield was my landing after a turbulent flight, one of those experiences I describe as suddenly discovering that I was from another planet and here were others from my same home planet and here we all were. It was a sudden collective recognition of how we had come from elsewhere and now were reunited in a common cause. Fellow aliens as graduate students.

As I fled from Lou’s house, my early flight from home was mimicked in the speed at which I drove through the streets with the bounty I had saved. My girls would love the teapots, they would adore the books and the jewelry. I felt a bit of guilt at my theft, but that was what hurt me the most. It was the thumbing of their noses at my kindness, my sharing of my world with them. These jewels had not cost $5 even in India where prices were low. There were mythologies associated with crystals and I chose for each sister with precision, for Mother also.

I wanted to be home. No matter what kind of pouting I might get from Pete, no matter if we launched into a fight, I wanted to tell him what I needed to say. This was my own home, my own safe haven, away from my sisters and their oblivious indifference, even now, so many years later. I suppose if it had been only one sister who was this way, it wouldn’t be so bad, but with two, it was something so foreign to what one could expect from family. I had never really revealed the extent of this to Pete. I hadn’t known how to talk about it to him. I had never told him how I needed closeness with him and what the void was that I wanted him to fill and how his always being gone left this emptiness more hollow that it should. Maybe now I could find the words to explain to him how much I needed him to be a different kind of partner for me.

The architecture of each neighborhood in Hillston reflected the town’s growth through the century since the first railway station was erected to take bankers from their homes to their offices in New York City. I paid attention to all of it right now, in a way I could not when the kids were in the car. My sister’s home was built in the 1890s. The gas lines for lighting were still in the walls and ceilings when my parents bought it in 1973. Small houses with front porches. The fashion had called for stained glass windows next to the main entry. The neighborhood seemed to belong to Glen Brook, not Hillston, due to Third River Park on Glen Brook Avenue. As I drove between the park’s two sections of green, crossed over the river, I understood why Lou wanted to stay there. It was a secret little enclave, not yet discovered by the new people. The new people lived where the homes reflected growth in the years after the World Wars, larger properties, larger homes with center halls in the colonial style on wide avenues. More breathing room, more money and charm, each house uniquely different. I passed the park and the village where several storefronts were vacant, past one of Hillston’s smaller train stations, this one with no station house, merely a platform and a few steps up to it. I came, to my surprise, to concrete barricades along the left. Backhoes and other earth moving equipment, still, like mechanized dinosaurs, were strewn about on the lawns of several homes. I hadn’t passed this on my way from the library and, while I waited at a red light, I remembered the digs I had worked at Stonehenge. The roped off area seemed to be an entire block. Lawns were brown and lumpy, sidewalks looked as though they’d been lifted then replaced haphazardly. A once pretty block ruined, temporarily, I hoped. Whatever was being excavated, it surely was creating a disaster, just as May was bringing its blossoms and warmth. HPW, printed on the sides of sawhorses, told me this was not a private matter. I drove on while music filled the car. Folk rock, a good Saturday morning song. I let the song finish before I shut off the engine in my driveway. Before I turned the key and silenced the engine, a shadow moved near the back door in my peripheral vision. It was Pete. He was about to get into his car but hesitated as I pulled up. I wondered if he was waiting for me, worrying about me, hoping I was safe, considering the fires and the mayor’s warnings. As I met his gaze in the side view mirror, he approached the car and I opened the door.

“Welcome back,” he said. My study of his face was deliberate. My thanks were hovering there in the chasm between the real and my imagined next steps. My heart was literally holding up a yardstick and secretly, what demonstration of pleasure at my return registered on it was bound to steer us either further into conflict or back toward a sense of where we were on the continuum of our shared lives. I desperately needed him to be aware of the importance to me of what he said or did next. It was the most loaded minute I could remember and my fear was that it might be lost on him, the small fraction of responsibility he held in his hands for my happiness. I can’t say now what might have been enough for me in that moment, what constituted a passing grade in the subject of marital love. I do know that after his rejection last night and the lack of regard for me by my sisters just now I needed a show of love. The newly open wound of that old diary incident had heightened my need for a gesture of contrition and conciliation. How deeply I needed this; it surely was visible to him in the smile I gave him, in the lightness of my step as I moved to the trunk.

“Can you help me with these boxes?” I asked, lifting the trunk to reveal the treasures from my past I had whisked away. I expected him to at least look at what I’d brought home. And I wanted something from him for which I could feel gratitude. From gratitude love is born and reborn in the long years of togetherness.

“Can you move the car?” he asked. “I’ve got to get to the bank and the cleaners before they close.”

“Did you hear me?” I asked.

“Did you hear me?” he asked. “You’ve been gone. Lila took off. I need to get my shirts.”

“I need help with this box. What did you do all morning?”

“Not much. Read the paper, breakfast.”

“Where are the twins?”

“Still watching cartoons.”

I lifted the box and carried it to him. “Here. Thanks. It’s for them.”

He took it, lowered it to the ground and straightened.

“Pete,” I said. “You could have gone. You could have taken the girls with you.”

“I wouldn’t have to if you were home.”

“That is precisely what I was hoping you would notice,” I said. “That is exactly what I wanted you to say.”

“Okay, well, I said it. So now, let’s move the car so I can pull out.”

“No.”

“What is up with you Cassandra?”

“A lot.”

“So are you going to tell me?”

“I did tell you,” I said.

“If this is about last night...”

“Last night is only an example of what is wrong, Pete.”

“I’m sorry Cassandra.”

“Then why not say so?”

“I just did.”

“No, you greeted me with ‘move your car’.”

“I didn’t think you would still be mad at me since I let you go off by yourself.”

“Let me?” I felt the inner tears threaten. A shiver of indignation. I turned and entered the kitchen and let the door slam.

Milk, orange juice, and three cereal bowls with a few floating Cheerios still on the table; coffee pot empty, but the red light glowing ‘on’; a burnt piece of toast in the toaster. I marched past it all. Mia and Allie were still in pajamas, TV on; upstairs I dropped the novel and the remnants of my journal on my unmade bed and flopped down, fluffing a pillow under my head, rolling to my side, curling my legs so I was like a ball.

“I’m sorry, Cassandra.” He was in the doorway.

“Do you know what you are sorry for?”

“No.”

I waited. Surely he would ask.

“Give me your car keys,” he said.

I reached into my pocket, found the cold metal, and let them fly to the wall where they made a huge sound and crashed to the floor. He took them and left.