Читать книгу Butterfly Soup - Nancy Pinard - Страница 11

R ose drives home in a daze, choosing to take the long way around. She can feel Joey’s plump calf in the hollow of her palm and his hot breath on her neck. His body had grown weightier as he’d relaxed, like in Valley’s infancy when the two of them had napped together. Valley nursed, then dropped off to sleep in Rose’s arms. Rose dozed, too, in a blissful half sleep, wakened by Valley’s slightest movement. Those were the days. She knew exactly where Valley was every minute.

Farmland stretches out for miles on either side of the roadway. The fields, usually nappy with soybean plants by the second week in June, are bogs of puddles. Rose wonders if the seeds have rotted in the ground. Her tires zhush through a puddle, throwing water onto the wild grapevine growing over the roadside fence posts. The stench of hen manure from Gabriel’s turkey farm is stronger downwind. The sky arches overhead in a blue dome, its clouds unaffected by the humidity that rises from the swampy earth like bad breath.

The summer Valley was conceived was different—hot but not humid. The water in Kaiser Lake was silky and warm; the perfume of lilac and honeysuckle hung in the air. Dishes clinked on screen porches around the lake as people lingered late over coffee and dessert, listening to the hiss of locusts. On such a night, Rose thinks, no one should be held responsible for what happened. And though she’d been terrified at the time, Valley was a keeper. If a baby was the punishment for her sin, she should sin more often. It was no wonder she couldn’t confess it.

Rose sees a woman standing in the road ahead, waving her arms frantically. She knows it’s Helen from the long legs and hair even before she’s close enough to see her features. Rose brakes and pulls up next to her friend. “I thought you’d be at work.”

“My car’s in the garage, so I’m walking home for lunch. Bethany’s home alone.”

Rose has never seen Helen eat anything but yogurt, standing at the fridge in the Laundromat office—unless you count the sunflower seeds she bakes to chew on when she can’t smoke. To Rose, yogurt isn’t lunch. Certainly nothing to walk home for. But that’s why Helen has pretty thighs and hers are all mottled.

“Get in. I’ll drive you. I meant to call you anyway. I may be gone for a few days—on a church retreat—so don’t worry if you can’t reach me.” She’s not really leaving home, but if she admits to secluding herself, Helen will think she’s as crazy as the old woman robbing the church Dumpster.

Helen plants her tidy hips on the seat. “Oh, too bad. Just when Rob’s arrived. Have you seen him yet? He stopped into the laundry with his stuff for me to wash, and guess what? He recognized me!” Rose glances at her. Helen looks great in the sleeveless black tank she’s wearing with her jeans. At times like this, Rose can’t think what she likes about Helen. They wouldn’t be friends if they hadn’t been sitting together pregnant in Dr. Burns’s office that year. Eleven months after she married Carl, Helen delivered Bethany and left the hospital wearing her jeans—which, at the moment, seems like a pretty good reason to hate her.

“He said he’d know my hair anywhere,” Helen brags. Her hair really is pretty, but it’s sickening how she relishes every little detail like Joanie Cranford. Helen wastes what little money she has on fancy botanical shampoos so her hair smells of windfall apples one day, ripe peaches the next.

“He called me Helen Dudley,” Helen prattles on. “Maybe I should have changed my name back when Carl left, but after all those years of being called Milk Dud and Dudley-Do-Wrong, I was glad enough to be rid of it. He hadn’t heard I’d married. He says he remembers the name Slezac, but only the name—he couldn’t put a face to Carl. When you’re not in the same class you don’t really know each other. Anyway, he was sorry to hear about my divorce.”

“Is he married?” The question comes out in a little half voice, and Rose clears her throat to cover, as if she’s fighting a frog.

“He didn’t say so.” Helen prides herself on being the first to know the town gossip, and Rose eggs her on with a few more questions. “There’s nobody with him,” Helen says. “No woman, I mean. He’s got some kid along, though.”

Rose lets that sink in. “What do you mean kid?”

“Just some boy.” To Helen it’s a toss-off. “You know. Sixteen, maybe.”

“Oooh, Bethany’s age,” Rose says, filling her voice with innuendo. Really she’s worried that Valley has a half brother. What if he looks like Valley?

“You don’t really think—” Helen says, though she’s obviously conjuring a romance for Bethany. “Maybe I should invite them over. You know, for a friendly dinner.”

Rose pictures the TV dinners she’s seen Helen stack neatly in her grocery cart, filing each item as if she’s lining up decimal points after counting the Laundromat’s change. “It might be kind of obvious,” Rose says, but when has Helen ever been afraid of being obvious?

Helen lights a cigarette and dangles her right hand out the open window. “If I’m not obvious, Bethany won’t get it. I’ve never seen such a backward child. She never brings a soul home with her.”

“Maybe she needs time alone. Some people do.”

Rose turns off the main road and pulls over at the end of Helen’s dirt driveway. The tree branches hang so low in Helen’s front yard it’s hard to see the brown bungalow Helen’s grandfather left her. Her sunflowers and zinnias are spiking up already in the one sunny spot in the yard, the planter box over the septic tank. Gopher, Helen’s chocolate Lab, comes bounding out to the car, tail wagging so hard his body wriggles all over.

Helen gets out of the car, patting Gopher with the hand holding her cigarette. “Flim Flannigan died last night. Did you know?”

“I knew someone had. He’s suffered so long. And he had to be lonely after Louise died.”

The dog’s tail beats a knocking rhythm against the car door, and Rose fears dents. She wishes Helen would discipline her dog. Helen bends over to look in the window. “It’s too bad you have to go right now. Rob asked for you.”

Rose waits anxiously by the window for the deliveryman. She has cleaned the little room off the den that stores miscellaneous items: the boxed-up Mr. Coffee, albums of old photographs, a file box of bank statements and insurance records, a noisy window fan, two antique chairs with broken-out cane seats and three boxes of Christmas decorations. It took ten minutes to move the stuff to one side. Then she hung a picture of Our Lady with a mother-of-pearl rosary draped over the frame and a photo of Valley and herself stuck in its bottom corner.

The truck turns in, crunching gravel. Two men come to the door carrying the frame and spring between them. She leads them to the storage room and points to the corner where she wants it set up. They hand her the Mary Theresa tag, lay the metal spring between the head and foot frames and screw it together. They make a second trip to the truck and return with a thin mattress. This they lay in place, performing their duties solemnly, as if part of a ritual. Rose wonders where such men come from—men who don’t roll their eyes at a woman’s faith. Such a man would sit beside her in church. He would lead her up to Communion. Pray aloud at the dinner table. She can’t imagine how that would be. It’s not marriage as she knows it. She’s not sure what it is. First Communion practice maybe, at age six. The boys and girls processed up the aisle, and the priest putting Necco wafers on their tongues so they could practice holding the host in their mouths without chewing.

Rose watches the men leave, then makes the sign of the cross over the bed.

She looks at the tag. Under Sister Mary Theresa’s name is a quote in cramped handwriting: True love grows by sacrifice, and the more thoroughly the soul rejects natural satisfaction, the stronger and more detached its tenderness becomes—St. Theresa, the Little Flower. It’s uncanny—exactly why she bought the bed. It even came with directions, in case she didn’t understand.

This room, the simple bed, feels removed from her doubts about a God she cannot see. She covers the mattress with line-dried white sheets and smooths the rumples. She covers the sheets with a white-on-white quilt from her hope chest. It’s one she made in Home Ec before she learned how to piece. Never before has she used it. The stitches are big and clumsy, but there’s an innocence to them that helps her begin again. She tucks the overhanging edges under the mattress with perfect hospital corners. A clean envelope it is, and she the letter that will fit inside. A petition. To Jesus.

Rose kneels down and runs her hands over the quilt top. The fabric is soft like the batiste of her First Communion dress. After the service, her parents gave a party with a cake covered in white frosting roses. A photographer followed her around that afternoon, telling her to smile and snapping her picture in her white dress and lace veil. The veil was gathered on a plastic headband that pinched over her ears and made her head ache.

When she and Everett eloped, her only veil was the lace curtain she’d swiped from her mother’s linen closet to wrap herself in for their first night at Beetley’s Hotel on Indian Lake. She wore it wrapped sari-style and flung over her shoulder. Everett had unwrapped her gently, handling her like fragile lace, as if she, too, needed to be returned, untorn. Everett was different from Rob.

Oh, Rob. Only her head had been above water when they got to kissing. She had hardly noticed when the straps of her two-piece slid from her shoulders. They never found her bathing suit top, and she’d worn Rob’s T-shirt home, her beach towel wrapped around her shoulders so her mother wouldn’t notice.

Rose shakes her head. This is why she bought the bed—to purge those memories. She’ll stay in this room and pray to the Holy Mother who bore a child and yet was without sin. She’ll persevere until her heart is pure, not divided. Until her flesh is subdued. Maybe Rob will leave town meanwhile so she’s not tempted. That would be a mercy as great as Everett’s having left town for the day. That in itself was a miracle.

She ticks off the items she’ll need for her retreat and rises obediently to collect them. Her missal is in the drawer of her bedside stand, dog-eared and stuffed full of the holy cards her mother collected at funeral homes and tucked into her birthday cards. They spill out on the floor—haloed images of Mary in blue drapery, Jesus with a lamb slung over his shoulders, Saint Francis feeding the birds and Saint Clare, barefoot and wearing sackcloth, placing the Blessed Sacrament between a soldier and the convent wall. Rose puts Clare on top to keep her marauder away.

The screen door bangs shut down in the kitchen.

“Valley? Is that you, lamb?” she calls down the stairs.

“Hi, Mom.”

“How’d you make out with Joey?”

Valley appears in the doorway, pulling her fingers through her sweaty hair. “He puked all over me. I’ve got to take a shower.”

“Babies spit up all the time. Especially formula-fed babies. That’s why breast feeding is best.” She likes to talk about these things with Valley, to pass on the womanly arts.

“Mom? How long can a person survive without oxygen?”

“How would I know that, lamb? I’m not a doctor.”

“I just thought you might have read it somewhere. You’re always telling me stories about kids getting shut up in old refrigerators or car trunks.”

“Were you thinking of hiding in the trunk?”

There’s silence for a moment, then Valley giggles a bit too loudly. “Bach didn’t know that flutists need air. I wondered how long I can play without breathing. You know, without brain damage.”

“I told you to take the summer off, lamb. You need a break sometimes.”

Joey’s mucous is all over the front of Rose’s dress. She puts it in with the dry cleaning, removes her slip and looks down at the bulge of flesh pooching from the waistband of her satin panties. They’re not exactly nun’s underpants. As she peels them down her body, her belly protrudes with its silvery stretch marks, as if she’s swallowed a winter squash. She pokes through the snarl of undies in her drawer, burrowing beneath the skimpy nighties Everett buys, and picks out a modest white cotton bra, panties and a plain half-slip. She stands behind the door to put them on, in case Valley should come barging in with more silly questions, then chooses a shirt and denim skirt as closest to what the nun’s wear now that they’ve shed their habits. She likes skirts anyway. It’s not that she thinks it’s wrong to dress like a man, though her mother didn’t own a pair of pants. It’s that jeans dig into her waist and hug her thighs when she sits down. She’s cooler and more comfortable in a skirt.

Her best rosary is under her pillow, one her mother kept draped over the radio through the fifties when Bishop Sheen came on every day to address the faithful. It was made by a monk in Normandy after World War II and feels like a piece of history. The beads are made of melted-down bullets, and large iron nails form the cross. The contorted Body is hammered from brass and welded to the nails at the hands and feet. As a child she liked to finger it, to peer through the tiny space between the Body and the cross.

Downstairs, she lays her supplies down on the table, next to the fabric she’d been cutting for a Jacob’s ladder quilt. Planning it seems long ago, though it was really only a day. She had been excited about the project, so excited she’d forgotten to eat lunch while she’d graphed it out. Then she made a cutting mistake on a flocked purple remnant she had been saving for just the right quilt. She won’t get the ladder out of it now, and she feels like throwing it all away. She takes up her kaleidoscope, hoping another color combination will capture her. But every time the purple falls in with the blues she feels complete. There’s nothing else she likes as well. It’s all ruined. Tears spring to her eyes, and she swallows again and again. She’d been tired when she made the mistake, too tired to think straight and distracted by the boy who’d come for Valley.

She hopes Valley stays upstairs, because it’s stupid to cry over a quilt. She’s thankful Everett’s gone. Neither of them understands that it’s not just a quilt to Rose. It’s the death of a perfect idea. Now, no matter who raves about the quilt—even if it takes another first at the county fair—it will always look second-rate to Rose.

She hears water rushing through the pipes. Valley is in the shower. Rose goes into the kitchen to get sandwich bags for her little piles of triangles and squares but forgets what she’s after and opens the refrigerator. The sliced turkey will only go bad if she doesn’t eat it. Everett isn’t coming home and Valley doesn’t like it.

She makes herself a turkey sandwich with cheese and lettuce, spreading mayonnaise to the edges of the rye bread with her favorite spreader. A bite at a time, she savors each mouthful as if it’s her last. Rob asked for her. Helen said so. She washes her sandwich plate and pictures his backlit figure walking toward her down the sidewalk. A gold chain glints at the neck of his green T. His jeans bulge slightly at the zipper. But it’s that moment when their eyes met she wants to capture. Her insides flutter as they had in junior high—before a test, when a cute boy walked by or whenever she saw Mary Sue Horton come toward her. “Stop it!” Rose says aloud to the dish brush. She dries the plate, puts it back on the shelf and hurries to her cell as if Rob is in hot pursuit. The air is close in the little room. That’s okay. It’s part of the discipline.

Kneeling beside her bed, Rose bows over her rosary. She says the Apostle’s Creed on the crucifix—fingering the sharp angle of Christ’s knees, the prickly points of the thorns on his brow—a Hail Mary on each of the little beads and an Our Father and Glory Be on each of the larger beads. She repeats them for Mr. Flannigan’s soul. All of it is exhausting, her crying, her praying. She wonders if it’s wrong to pray lying down. What did sick people do? Stroke patients? Mr. Flannigan? He certainly hadn’t knelt. She lies flat on her back, her palms together, upright over her ribs. Her shirt absorbs the sweat on her back. She recites the questions and answers of the Baltimore Catechism, drilled into her by Sister Mary Thomas beginning in second grade. “Who made the world? God made the world. Who is God? God is the Creator of heaven and earth and of all things.” When she’s repeated all of lesson one, she repeats the Ten Commandments, the seven sacraments, the seven virtues and the seven deadly sins. She intends to confess on each one, beginning with gluttony and citing the box of chocolates, but before she gets to lust, Rose dozes.

In the dim light of consciousness she sees bicycle wheels turning, turning, revolving so fast the spokes become a blur and disappear. Valley is a baby, strapped into a child seat fixed to the rear fender. Rose is naked, perched on the seat, steering. She rounds a corner, bicycle leaning until it tips over and the curb reaches for the two of them, smacks her in the jaw and dislodges her teeth. She wriggles each tooth in turn, finds she can remove it, looks at the disgusting V-shaped root, then fits it back into its socket. Valley is sprawling on a lawn overgrown with enormous dandelions that make soft yellow pillows for her head. “Poor baby,” Rose says, picking Valley up, but Valley cannot hear her. Rose looks in her ear. There’s a dandelion inside. Rose plucks at it with her fingers first, then with tweezers, but only manages to shred it. Fragile yellow fibers stick to the tweezer tips like duck fluff. She digs deeper into Valley’s ear, gouging at yellow, tweaking, pulling. But the dandelion is stubborn. It gives up its nap, but it will not budge.