Читать книгу Lucky Strike - Nancy Zafris - Страница 14

Jean lay in bed, holding her daughter. Through the screened window she heard the strains of Miss Dazzle’s phonograph. She recognized Doris Day’s voice. Miss Dazzle’s loud enthusiastic harmony almost drowned her out. Beth was mostly asleep but still humming along.

Miss Dazzle was that friendly, ebullient type, the kind someone like Jean might like to have along to fill out her own personality: those dark holes where the bright colors of congeniality had somehow been dug out. She could come up with justifications for it: the mothers in the hospital who panted sweetly and obediently for the staff got adored by the head-patting nurses but got nowhere as far as procuring real services for their child. But she knew, really, this was an excuse. Something of her true nature had been released, not changed, by Charlie’s illness.

She remembered visiting the house of the widow who had sold her their tent. She would have sent her mother on the errand had her mother not been so opposed to this adventure, since it required the fluid charms of someone who loved etiquette. The widow, Jean could tell over the phone, was another etiquette-lover.

The widow’s house was strangely designed. As soon as Jean walked through the front door she was on the staircase. It was as if the house itself were an aggressive salesman—Up or Down! it immediately demanded. On the coffee table where the widow put their cups of tea were photographs framed in velvet. The people in the pictures were too dated: none could have been the husband who had died of a heart attack in Yellowstone Park. She smelled that the widow’s oven was on. Its heat had loosed other smells. When they went upstairs to the husband’s closet to retrieve the tent, there drifted in the empty air a seasoned perfume, and Jean instinctively knew this was not the widow’s perfume. Even though the closet had been vacated of suits and ties and shoes, the perfume had remained, finally to have its say, one traitor turning upon another.

The tent was made by the Camel Company. The pickax a hunter had given her was a U.S. Forest Service brand, such a tempting item although nothing she was ever likely to use. As she lay in bed, she began to list the names of Geiger counters, the ones she could remember, the 1-Eleven Scintillator, the Price Ranger. She had researched the different types of detection instruments but had never considered purchasing one. The Lucky Strike was the cheapest Geiger counter by far and the name she liked best. The others vied for dullest: the Babbel Counter, the Gordon, the Winford-Bunce, all descendants of the Geiger-Mueller tube. It must have been a type of infidelity that she could remember pieces of equipment better than she could her own husband, for the Geiger counters were named after men she was sure.

In the morning they enjoyed breakfast by the pool. Eggs and bacon and raisin toast with icing for them; pastries for the three elderly ladies. Miss Dazzle served coffee on a tray, then sat down with Jean. Miss Dazzle was a talker who didn’t always need to talk. There was some comfort in that. There was a lot of comfort in that. Jean leaned back and breathed in the early morning. The air was still sleepy and unbroken, yet the sun sharp as midafternoon. No clouds. Never a cloud. On the chair between them was a stack of clean, folded clothes that Miss Dazzle had put there. Catching their aroma gave Jean a physical pleasure that traveled through her body.

Miss Dazzle refilled the silver pot of coffee for the three ladies and then took Jean and the children to the post office, where Jean collected the mail that had arrived for her. A lot of mail had arrived, but every single bit of it was from the children’s grandmother. Jean tried to view her mother this way—the children’s grandmother—to neutralize the pain, but it didn’t work. Upon seeing the handwriting she felt herself a daughter again. She was paralyzed. But of course her mother had anticipated this very reaction. Foreseeing that any sealed envelopes would never be opened, her mother had sent only postcards. At least a dozen of them. Brief messages popped out like ad campaigns, one after the other, until a letter’s full contents were equaled.

High school graduations caused such a traffic jam some of the graduates didn’t graduate, they were stuck in traffic. Ha!

Strawberries will come in early because of the heat and rain.

The Millers called. Surprised you left town.

Lucky you, your driveway’s been blacktopped—wonder who???

Bing Crosby NOT coming to Vets Memorial after all. Boo!

All normal stuff about everyday life—but it caused in Jean an intense ache. Everyday life was a feeble joke, but her mother insisted upon living it, and sharing it.

The kids bought stamps. Back at the pool Beth wrote a letter with alarming untrue facts, principal among them that they would be going broke soon because water was not free here you had to buy it and the stores overcharged and pretty soon they’d have to live like the two dusty children they had passed living in a field, but don’t worry Grandma we’re having lots of fun. The stamp affixed to this proclamation of looming poverty said ATOMS FOR PEACE, which was, Jean thought, just as hysterically misleading as Beth’s letter.

Charlie didn’t wait for Beth to finish her letter. He pulled on his borrowed swim trunks and jumped in the pool. His skinny stomach looked hard as a rock. Harry would be here any minute and they would be leaving, but in the desert air the swim trunks would dry in ten minutes. On the chair next to her still sat the stack of clothes Miss Dazzle had washed for them. The clothes folded thick, thicker, thickest, a cozy cottage of clothes, deep in an enchanted forest.