Читать книгу Butterfly Soup - Nancy Pinard - Страница 9

T he phone rings so early on Saturday morning, Rose Forrester tears herself from sleep and runs to the kitchen, the dread of dire illness or accidents propelling her down the stairs to the rhythm of the Hail Mary repeating in her head. “Yes?” she pants into the receiver.

“Rosie? You’ll never guess what!” Helen Slezac’s voice is squeaky with excitement. Rose hears the swoosh of washing machines in the background.

“Helen? It’s only six-fifty. We’re sleeping in,” Rose whispers. She hopes her descent didn’t waken the household. Everett has been looking tired. And Valley came in late from her date.

“I know. I know. But this one can’t wait. I had to tell you.”

Rose tries to chase the edge from her voice. Poor Helen has been divorced so long, she’s forgotten the pleasure of drowsing in bed. “Tell me what?”

“I got in early and was waiting for the dryer to quit tumbling to yank Jed Peterson’s stuff before it wrinkled—you know how picky he is—when I looked up to see an old friend walking into Millie’s.”

Rose’s heart has slowed to match the glub-dub of the washers. She pictures Helen at her usual post—at the pay phone by the Laundromat’s front window, spying on the donut shop. “Who, Helen? Tell me.”

“Rob MacIntyre.”

Rose mouths the syllables. Her third finger finds her mouth, and her teeth search for loose cuticles. Rob’s is the one name she’d hoped never to hear again when he disappeared from town seventeen years ago.

“Rosie? Are you still there? Is something wrong?”

“Everett’s calling,” Rose says so softly she can barely hear herself. “I’ve got to go.” She hangs the receiver on the hook and lingers a moment, as though still connected to Rob by Helen’s voice. Her mouth tastes metallic, as if she’s been sucking on nickels. She tiptoes into the bedroom, looks to make sure Everett is still sleeping, slips a dress from its hanger, and hurries to the bathroom.

She must have brushed her teeth, combed her hair and zipped the dress, but she only remembers turning the car key and wanting to hush the engine.

Her Galaxy heads toward town, slowing abruptly where the speed limit drops from fifty to twenty-five. Chief Dudley waits in his cruiser behind the same bush every day, clocking all the residents. She salutes as she passes him, then coasts toward the three downtown blocks of Eden proper, lurching from one corner to the next. It’s silly to have so many stop signs in a one-bank town.

In the middle of one block she pauses for old Mr. Cockburn to cross to Millie’s Dunk ’n’ Sip from the loading dock at the Feed and Seed. She forces a smile and tells herself to nod and act normal, though stopping directly in front of the donut shop is last on her list. Mr. Cockburn dodders in front of her car, his left hand trailing across her hood for balance. Rose oh-so-casually glances to her left. The hunched backs of the Saturday-morning regulars show through the window, middle-aged men straddling counter stools in their John Deere caps, chugging hot coffee as if June temperatures didn’t faze them. She can hear them in her head, chewing on predictable topics between swallows—whether Reagan’s new agriculture secretary will favor Ohio or if the plate ump in last night’s Reds game was on the take. But even squinting she can’t make out one back from the next. Can’t tell if one of them belongs to Rob. Helen sounded certain, but Rose needs to see for herself.

At the corner one of Eden’s single mothers leaves Duds-In-Suds with a laundry basket balanced on one hip. The woman brushes the hair off her brow, and two raggedy kids with green mouths come straggling behind her, sucking on lollipops. Rose slows, remembering the days when Valley was small and wakened early, when Rose, too, had finished her housework before 8:00 a.m. The woman steps into the road, then stops to make eye contact with Rose. The children bump into their mother’s back. Rose takes note of the kids’ health, as though she’s assigned to watch over fatherless children everywhere. Welfare brats, Everett calls them. Rose winces every time he says it, his judgment slashing at her insides.

There’s a parking spot one block up where she’ll have a good view of Main Street but Helen can’t see her. She turns around in the alley next to the theater and parallel parks facing Millie’s. Then she pulls her checkbook and a pen from her purse, so if anyone wonders why she’s sitting there, she can pretend to be balancing her account. But no one is outside except for the single mom, who piles the kids into her rusty boat of a Chevy. Rose strains to see if she can make out car seats through the windshield, though maybe the kids are too old for that. The Chevy cruises by, the kids standing behind the broad bench seat while their mother flips through radio channels. “Seat belts!” Rose hollers, but then is instantly ashamed. Everett regularly reminds her what’s none of her business. Luckily the Chevy radio is blaring, so no one heard.

The street is quiet for long minutes afterward, and Rose considers where Rob might stay if he were really back in town. His mother’s house sold—she saw the sign—so if he’s there, he can’t stay long. She once heard Phil Langston mention Rob’s name in Millie’s. She can’t remember that they buddied around in school, but those things changed, judging from herself and Helen anyway. The two of them had hardly spoken until after graduation. Helen had smoked in the woods behind the school with the fast crowd, while Rose, who didn’t own her own clarinet, had stayed after school to practice in the band room. Everett had hung out in that hallway, so she hadn’t really been by herself. Rob had always been on a ball field of one shape or another, with all the girls going gaga from the stands. Since Rose hadn’t been one of them, their night together was all the more miraculous.

Just then Millie’s screen door swings open. A bunch of the regulars ramble out, turning and talking to the person holding the door, jostling each other and laughing. Then Rob steps onto the stoop in jeans and a tucked-in T-shirt. “Sweet Jesus,” comes from Rose’s lips unbidden, and she fingers the rayon of her dress, rubbing its silky softness over her bare thighs. Rob stands with his hands in his hip pockets, rocking slightly from heels to toes. She’d know that stance anywhere—a man version of the boy who, in the warm water of Kaiser Lake, first freed her body from more than her bathing suit. Rob’s a little broader for all these years, but so is she. Still, gravity’s been kind. His hair is shorter now, freshly washed and combed, and he’s grown a mustache. He turns from the doorway, waves to the guys going the other way and heads up the street toward her. Her first instinct is to duck, and Rose finds herself sprawling across the front seat, wishing the hot-pink flowers on her dress would die. The plastic upholstery grabs at her legs, and the titillating mix of exhilaration and danger that kept her awake those long-ago summer nights grips her once again. Never mind she’s thirty-five and runs a household. Her schoolgirl foolishness is back. He still has that power.

She hears his boots on the sidewalk and can’t resist opening her eyes. He glances down. Valley’s smile flits across his mouth and eyes. Dimples pinpoint his cheeks. If she looks familiar, he doesn’t let on. He walks on by. She blows the bangs off her forehead and assures herself he didn’t miss a step. He smiled, yes, but anyone would smile at the sight of a woman lying on a car seat. She needn’t feel foolish. It made perfect sense to lie down in your car when you didn’t feel well.

But that’s nonsense, and Rose knows it.

When enough time has passed that Rose is certain Rob is farther down the street, she sits up and searches her rearview mirror. She can’t help noting how Rob’s shoulders preside over his narrow waist and firm buttocks. Her hands cup as if around his bottom. Her palms remember.

Rob disappears around a corner, and Rose checks her reflection. She sees crow’s feet, but her brow is still smooth. It’s the one advantage of carrying a little extra weight. Her skin is young-looking, even if her hips and thighs make it hard to find a bathing suit. She stretches her mouth in a grimace to exercise her neck muscles, then relaxes again. Her chin looks tighter for it, she’s sure, and she does the exercise a few more times. A double chin would spoil her looks.

Two car doors slam behind her. She watches Woody Mansfield and his son get out of the Mansfield Plumbing truck and jaywalk to Millie’s, Woody catching the sleeve of Billy’s Little League shirt to hurry him across. Everett has been working on a new house with Woody this week, making sure Rose has a good life and she wonders when she’ll realize that Rob’s good looks are no match for Everett’s hard work. Whatever brought Rob back to Eden, concern for her welfare wasn’t it. He probably doesn’t even know Valley is a girl—except that he’s been in touch with Phil. She wonders what Phil knows and if he has ever talked to Everett. They’ve never been close, she’s certain of that, but there was no controlling who sat down on the next stool at Millie’s. At least Everett isn’t in there this morning. She needs to get home before he realizes she’s been gone.

Rose starts the engine and pulls out of the parking space.

In her bathrobe once again, Rose busies herself in the stuffy kitchen, parting the café curtains, then working to raise swollen windows. “Who needs him anyway?” she mutters, giving the wooden frame a whack. “Everett’s the better man.” She lifts in vain, then gives the frame another good thunk—as if, energetic enough, she might not only raise the window but send Rob back where he came from. By the time she’s ratcheted the second window up, she’s broken a sweat. The morning breeze feels fresh on her skin, though it holds the telltale heaviness of another humid day.

On her way by the drawer, Rose chooses a chocolate from the box of Fanny Farmer she keeps hidden under the silverware tray. Chocolate and mint mingle on her tongue as she runs cold water into her mother’s old aluminum coffeepot, measures grounds into the basket and adds tiny pieces of broken eggshell to cut the bitterness. A whiff of propane wafts up before the burner poofs into flame. She centers the pot. Everett gave her an automatic coffeemaker on Mother’s Day—the one with the timer so she could wake up to fresh coffee—but a month has passed and she hasn’t unboxed it. She can’t think why she should change when the old way works fine.

Rose tiptoes to the stairs to listen for bedroom sounds. It’s nearly eight o’clock, but Everett isn’t stirring. Valley’s room is silent. She climbs to the second floor, stops at her daughter’s door and pushes it open. She can’t see Valley’s head past the enormous jar on the bedside stand where Valley farms butterflies. The current resident is a green caterpillar with a pink underbelly, nothing but a worm to Rose, but at least it’s in a jar. It hangs from its twig by a silken thread so invisible, it might be floating in air.

Valley lies facing the wall, her body curled up. She’s still dressed in the shirt she wore on her date and the sapphire pendant Rose passed down for Valley’s sixteenth birthday. Rose cranes her neck to see the narrow chin with the wide brow that has always reminded her of the Flemish Madonna that hung in her childhood church. Instead she sees black mascara streaked down Valley’s cheeks. “Mother of God, have mercy,” Rose murmurs, wondering that she had fallen asleep before her daughter came in. Sex does that to Rose—makes her relaxed and irresponsible. She should have behaved herself.

She fingers the scapular she’s kept in her bathrobe pocket since Everett insisted she take it off. The tiny picture of the Virgin is sweat-stained and talcum-furry, still attached to the shoelace she’d worn around her neck through childhood. Rose tucks the scapular in the zipper pouch of Valley’s purse and puts it back on the dresser. Valley’s stuffed animals sit lined up facing her music stand. Rose chooses a lamb with a tattered pink bow and tucks it in the nook of Valley’s chin.

At her own bedroom door Rose sees the slope of Everett’s bare shoulder peeking out from the quilt. She pictures him propped over her, broad and strong on straight elbows. But in the morning light his pectorals look flabbier than she remembered, and her mother’s voice plays in her head: Control yourself. Pleasure doesn’t last. Eat only enough to know you’ve eaten. It’s the only tone Rose remembers now—since the night she was orphaned by a heart attack. She presses her thumbs into the pudge around her midriff, tattling, tattling on her. She used to be thin.

She kneels on the new waterbed and bounces. The mattress sloshes with the movement, and Everett’s body teeters back and forth. The musk of his skin—heightened by his effort the night before—is slightly sour. His eyes are closed, but a smile plays across his lips. His hand sneaks toward her and tugs on her bathrobe tie.

“Not now, Everett. We have to talk.”

He opens one eye.

“Were you awake when Valley came in last night?”

“I woke at one-ten and checked her room. She was asleep.”

“Her mascara’s streaked all down her face. I knew that boy was no good.”

Everett closes the eye again. “When she cried last month you blamed her hormones. Why is it suddenly the boy’s fault?”

Rose rolls onto her bottom. The mattress water cuddles her hips. “When he picked her up, he wouldn’t look me in the face.”

“Rosie, you never had to go into a strange house and meet a girl’s parents.” He tries to pull her over next to him, to comfort her.

Rose resists. Someone has to get upset about these things.

Everett gives up with a sigh. “She’s sixteen, Rosie. Nearly grown. You can’t run her life or choose her friends.”

You never did care about Valley, Rose thinks for the umpteenth time. She scoots to the edge of the bed. The mattress undulates, and she wonders what silly whim made him buy a waterbed—one of those midlife things, she suspects. At least it’s not some overpriced coffin, a motorcycle or a race car. Still. It has to be a sin to be so comfortable. “It will serve you right if she gets pregnant,” Rose sputters.

“For god’s sake, Rosie. She’s not a tramp.”

Rose hugs herself to hide her cringing. How’s she supposed to tell him the truth when he says things like that?

Everett tickles her upper arm, then reaches for her breast. Rose pushes his hand off. “I do trust her. It’s you boys I don’t trust.” She purposely bounces the bed and escapes his reach. “My mother was right. Men only want one thing.”

Rose drives past the brick elementary school and adjacent park, then crosses the bridge over the Miami River. The Catholic church, Our Lady of the Rosary, squats on the other side, a brick fortress facing east, bordered on three sides with blacktop, then graves, before the farmland picks up once again. She doesn’t know where else to go. Her conscience—an entity so real Rose expects to see it on a diagram of the human body—rants in her head: This is what happens when you fornicate and lie. You should have told Everett the truth before he married you. Of course she should have. And she didn’t. She’s certain of one thing now: Rob and Everett in a town this small is one man too many. Maybe the priest can tell her what to do.

There are no cars in the parking lot, only an old woman with long gray hair—a Chippewa Indian (crazy, some say) who keeps to herself on Esther Dalrymple’s land. The woman is picking through the church’s Dumpster as if she’s lost something. Stubby white disks lie around her feet. They look to Rose like burned votive candles, but surely the church wouldn’t throw prayers for people’s loved ones in the trash. They must be leftover biscuits from a church supper. The woman is hungry. All Rose knows is that Esther claims the Indian healed her roan calf and Joe Harper took his mother’s sick dog to her after it was too late.

Rose parks away from the Dumpster and squeezes through the church’s heavy oak-and-iron door. The smell of tallow hangs over the narthex, and she pauses there, inhaling deeply, as if wax has the power to sanctify her worldly thoughts. Instead it reminds her of crayons. She fumbles around in her purse for her grocery money, finds a five, folds it in fourths and fits it through the slot in the donation box. Then she lights a candle on the tiered table and asks Our Lady to watch over her confession. Her statue is adorned today with white roses. Someone in town has died. Still, she finds peace in the Virgin’s sweet face, as she had in the months after Rob’s desertion when only the Holy Mother knew and appreciated how she felt.

The sanctuary lies beyond a carved archway. Rose pulls a scarf from her purse to cover her hair. Father Andrew is at the altar, tidying up the morning Mass. He is old and stooped, as if burdened by the weight of the crucifix hanging over his head. Rose hides her face with the scarf, stands before the confessional, coughs. He motions for her to enter the booth, then joins her, on the other side of the partition. The rote learned in childhood pours forth. “Bless me Father, for I have sinned. It has been one week since my last confession.”

“Go on.” His voice is thin and hollow and makes Rose’s voice sound shrill in her head. Her stomach gurgles and she remembers the chocolate she shouldn’t have eaten if she wants Communion.

“There’s something I haven’t told you.”

“Yes—”

“It happened some time back.”

“Go on.”

“I was seventeen.”

“Yes—”

“In love.”

“Yes—”

She can’t bring herself to go on. How could a priest, being male and celibate, understand her terror?

“And you…?” He’s starting to sound impatient.

“You have to understand. I was so afraid after it happened. I didn’t tell anyone.”

“That you…?”

Why must he make her say it? What other sin do you commit with someone you love? “I did it, okay? But it wasn’t just that,” she hurries on, afraid he’ll get angry if she doesn’t spit it out fast. “One thing led to another.” Through the screen she smells the wine on his breath. There’s a greater sin involved. “Oh, God.” Her throat tightens. She can barely speak. “I’ve received Communion anyway. Every week.”

She hears him shift in the booth and begins to babble. “I had to or my mother would have known. No one caught me and nothing happened, so I just, you know, forgot it was wrong, I guess.” It sounds lame, but it just about sums up how she’s been married so long—seventeen years almost—without telling Everett. If no one found out, she had reasoned, and nothing happened, telling the truth did nothing but hurt people. Even now she is only hurting herself with all this confessing. If she had any sense, she’d walk out this minute. She pulls the scarf down over her face, afraid the priest can see through walls, even in darkness.

The bench on the priest’s side creaks. “Let’s adjourn to the room next door. An open discussion, face-to-face, might help you more.”

Rose’s fingers press the backs of her clasped hands. Face-to-face indeed. Father Andrew is supposed to pronounce her penance and administer absolution, not insist she confess the new way. To risk an open discussion, she’d have to leave town. She hasn’t even mentioned deceiving Everett. She can’t imagine saying it in broad daylight.

“And if that’s not possible?”

“Then your priorities are wrong. Nothing is more important than your immortal soul.”

Rose struggles up from flattened knees, steadying herself on the walls of the confessional. She pulls the scarf closer. “Thank you, Father,” she says, but she is anything but thankful. She is on to his game. He wants to see her face so he can deny her Communion. On her way out she wonders why she thought to tell this man anything. If she tells anyone, it should be Everett.

Rose drives back through town to the Safeway market, accelerating through the yellow light at the new plaza. Confession is needless. If she had been born Protestant, she wouldn’t have to confess to anyone but God. Everett’s probably right about the Pope. God didn’t make him infallible, her mother did.

The plaza parking lot is full of people. Summer Saturdays are like this. Little Leaguers, Girl Scouts, Rotarians—all out raising funds. Rose checks the supply of quarters in her ashtray and tucks them in her pocket. She’s searching for a parking place and scanning the lot for Rob, when a toddler appears out of nowhere, in front of her car. Her brakes squeal. The car shimmies, skids. A woman shrieks. The tires grab. The car settles back into itself. The boy stands inches from her bumper, a wisp of blond hair visible over her hood. His mother stands in a puddle of groceries and torn bags, her face frozen in the scream. A broken bottle of apple juice is soaking the paper bag.

Rose slumps over her steering wheel. His mother steps from the rubble of groceries and snatches the child up. The child wails. Blessed, blessed sound. Rose exhales her anxiety. “Thank you, Jude, glorious apostle, faithful servant and friend of Jesus.” She pockets her hands in the opposite underarm to stop the prickling sensation. The mother is sobbing now. Rose watches her rock the boy, holding that precious head in her palm and kissing his hair, as Rose herself might have held Valley this morning if her daughter were younger.

The woman carries her son to a station wagon nearby. Rose parks. She fetches a coffee can that’s rolled under a fender and sets it near the jumble of groceries. She picks the boxes of macaroni and cheese from the puddle of apple juice and stacks them in a pile next to the instant oatmeal, the English muffins and the Peter Pan. She has to do something to make up for scaring them. If she had hit the child— But Rose refuses that thought. She’s told Valley never, ever to speed in a school zone. If Rose ever hit a child, she would never recover.

But why wasn’t the child up in the cart seat, where drivers could see him?

Rose heads for the store, breasts cradled in her arms as if she were cold. Inside she finds the cereal aisle and wanders up and down, her heart drubbing hard as she is alternately the driver and the mother of the crying child. She can’t find the Shredded Wheat. It’s always a maze, this aisle—the store brand’s look-alike boxes mixed in with the real thing—but today it’s impossible. The priest’s voice mingles with the woman’s shriek: Your priorities are wrong. Nothing is more important than your immortal soul. Rose takes down one box, puts it back and takes another, finally settling for Cheerios. On her way to the cashier she adds a package of pink, yellow and brown sugar wafers—the ones Valley reached for when she was a toddler in the cart seat—and a palm-size red-yellow-and-blue rubber ball for the toddling boy. She breezes through the express lane, forgetting that she needs coffee cream, and takes off with her bagged stash.

Rose is searching the parking lot for the mother’s station wagon when she’s caught by a singsong refrain rising and falling over the rattle of carts on the blacktop. She traces the chant to the end of the plaza where the band parents usually hold their bake sales and raffles. It’s some kind of auction. The auctioneer is gobbling away, badgering his crowd to bid higher. She hears him calling names. Sister Mary Theresa. That has to be a nun. Rose feels as though he has hollered her name. In a way, he has. Once upon a time, Theresa of the Little Flower was her favorite saint.

At the outer edge of the group she peers between heads. Steel bed frames stand in the back of a truck, bound into units—two metal end pieces with legs and a metal spring in each package—each labeled with the name of a nun. The auctioneer’s assistant steps through the crowd to hand Rose a flyer.

Buy a bed slept in by a Sister of Charity

to benefit

Dayton’s own

St. Agnes Women’s Shelter

The Sisters of Charity, the flyer says in small print, have donated their old beds to raise funds. The St. Agnes Shelter will provide home delivery to anyone donating over twenty dollars per bed.

Only five frames remain in the back of the pickup. The auctioneer begins the bidding on Sister Mary Theresa’s bed at twenty dollars. A woman in shorts and red canvas Keds raises her hand.

“Twenty, I hear twenty. Who’ll give me twenty-five?”

A woman in jeans and a Notre Dame T-shirt raises her hand.

There’s a hush and Rose feels the mounting excitement. Perhaps it’s a sign, she thinks, the direction she’d wanted from the priest, delivered by an alternate means. How else can she explain it? It’s not every day you find a nun’s bed at the grocery. Everett would call it coincidence, but then Everett believes the earth came about after an explosion, which makes as much sense to Rose as throwing calico squares up in the air and expecting them to land in a quilting pattern.

Rose rummages in her purse. She finds the plastic grain of her checkbook. Thanks to Rob’s appearance this morning, she knows just how much she has.

“Thirty,” says the woman in red Keds.

The auctioneer looks left. “Will you go thirty-five?”

Rose raises her hand high before the Notre Dame woman can answer, recalling the details of a bedtime story her mother read to her often—a story about St. Clare protecting herself and her convent by holding the blessed host before a band of marauding soldiers.

The auctioneer asks for forty. Notre Dame raises her hand.

Rose looks at the woman to get some idea how high she might go. Her jeans are clean but frayed. Her hair is flat against her head. She is not the beauty-parlor kind.

“Fifty,” Rose says defiantly.

The auctioneer turns right. “Will you go sixty?” Red Keds bows her head. Left. Notre Dame turns away. Rose has won. She puts her groceries down and fishes for her checkbook.

“Going once. Going twice. Sold to the lady in the flowered dress for fifty dollars,” the auctioneer proclaims. “God bless you, dear.”

Rose smiles at him. He is not a priest, but it will have to do.