Страница 25 из 74
She held them out to me, and when I took one she said, with a deliberate effort at jollity, “I see you kept up the bad habit I got you started on.” She might have remembered that I was not a child anymore and I did not have to be in her house and that there was no point in making an enemy of me. And I wasn’t going to argue-I did not care what Alfrida thought about Te
“I guess it’s your own business,” Alfrida said. “You can go where you want to go.” And she added, “After all-you’ll pretty soon be a married woman.”
By her tone, this could mean either “I have to allow that you’re grown up now” or “Pretty soon you’ll have to toe the line.”
We got up and started to collect the dishes. Working close to each other in the small space between the kitchen table and counter and the refrigerator, we soon developed without speaking about it a certain order and harmony of scraping and stacking and putting the leftover food into smaller containers for storage and filling the sink with hot, soapy water and pouncing on any piece of cutlery that hadn’t been touched and slipping it into the baize-lined drawer in the dining-room buffet. We brought the ashtray out to the kitchen and stopped every now and then to take a restorative, businesslike drag on our cigarettes. There are things women agree on or don’t agree on when they work together in this way-whether it is all right to smoke, for instance, or preferable not to smoke because some migratory ash might find its way onto a clean dish, or whether every single thing that has been on the table has to be washed even if it has not been used-and it turned out that Alfrida and I agreed. Also, the thought that I could get away, once the dishes were done, made me feel more relaxed and generous. I had already said that I had to meet a friend that afternoon.
“These are pretty dishes,” I said. They were creamy-colored, slightly yellowish, with a rim of blue flowers.
“Well-they were my mother’s wedding dishes,” Alfrida said. “That was one other good thing your grandma did for me. She packed up all my mother’s dishes and put them away until the time came when I could use them. Jeanie never knew they existed. They wouldn’t have lasted long, with that bunch.”
Jeanie. That bunch. Her stepmother and the half brothers and sisters.
“You know about that, don’t you?” Alfrida said. “You know what happened to my mother? “
Of course I knew. Alfrida’s mother had died when a lamp exploded in her hands-that is, she died of burns she got when a lamp exploded in her hands-and my aunts and my mother had spoken of this regularly. Nothing could be said about Alfrida’s mother or about Alfrida’s father, and very little about Alfrida herself-without that death being dragged in and tacked onto it. It was the reason that Alfrida’s father left the farm (always somewhat of a downward step morally if not financially). It was a reason to be desperately careful with coal oil, and a reason to be grateful for electricity, whatever the cost. And it was a dreadful thing for a child of Alfrida’s age, whatever. (That is-whatever she had done with herself since.)
If it hadn’t’ve been for the thunderstorm she wouldn’t ever have been lighting a lamp in the middle of the afternoon.
She lived all that night and the next day and the next night and it would have been the best thing in the world for her if she hadn’t’ve.
And just the year after that the Hydro came down their road, and they didn’t have need of the lamps anymore.
The aunts and my mother seldom felt the same way about anything, but they shared a feeling about this story. The feeling was in their voices whenever they said Alfrida’s mother’s name. The story seemed to be a horrible treasure to them, something our family could claim that nobody else could, a distinction that would never be let go. To listen to them had always made me feel as if there was some obscene co
Men were not like this, in my experience. Men looked away from frightful happenings as soon as they could and behaved as if there was no use, once things were over with, in mentioning them or thinking about them ever again. They didn’t want to stir themselves up, or stir other people up.
So if Alfrida was going to talk about it, I thought, it was a good thing that my fiancé had not come. A good thing that he didn’t have to hear about Alfrida’s mother, on top of finding out about my mother and my family’s relative or maybe considerable poverty. He admired opera and Laurence Olivier’s Hamlet, but he had no time for tragedy-for the squalor of tragedy-in ordinary life. His parents were healthy and good-looking and prosperous (though he said of course that they were dull), and it seemed he had not had to know anybody who did not live in fairly su
“They wouldn’t let me in to see her, at the hospital,” Alfrida said, and at least she was saying this in her normal voice, not preparing the way with any special piety, or greasy excitement. “Well, I probably wouldn’t have let me in either, if I’d been in their shoes. I’ve no idea what she looked like. Probably all bound up like a mummy. Or if she wasn’t she should have been. I wasn’t there when it happened, I was at school. It got very dark and the teacher turned the lights on-we had the lights, at school-and we all had to stay till the thunderstorm was over. Then my aunt Lily-well, your grandmother-she came to meet me and took me to her place. And I never got to see my mother again.”
I thought that was all she was going to say but in a moment she continued, in a voice that had actually brightened up a bit, as if she was preparing for a laugh.
“I yelled and yelled my fool head off that I wanted to see her. I carried on and carried on, and finally when they couldn’t shut me up your grandmother said to me, ‘You’re just better off not to see her. You would not want to see her, if you knew what she looks like now. You wouldn’t want to remember her this way.’
“But you know what I said? I remember saying it. I said, But she would want to see me. She would want to see me.”
Then she really did laugh, or make a snorting sound that was evasive and scornful.
“I must’ve thought I was a pretty big cheese, mustn’t I? She would want to see me.”
This was a part of the story I had never heard.
And the minute that I heard it, something happened. It was as if a trap had snapped shut, to hold these words in my head. I did not exactly understand what use I would have for them. I only knew how they jolted me and released me, right away, to breathe a different kind of air, available only to myself,
She would want to see me.
The story I wrote, with this in it, would not be written till years later, not until it had become quite unimportant to think about who had put the idea into my head in the first place.
I thanked Alfrida and said that I had to go. Alfrida went to call Bill to say good-bye to me, but came back to report that he had fallen asleep.
“He’ll be kicking himself when he wakes up,” she said. “He enjoyed meeting you.”
She took off her apron and accompanied me all the way down the outside steps. At the bottom of the steps was a gravel path leading around to the sidewalk. The gravel crunched under our feet and she stumbled in her thin-soled house shoes.
She said, “Ouch! Goldarn it,” and caught hold of my shoulder.
“How’s your dad?” she said.
“He’s all right.”
“He works too hard.”
I said, “He has to.”
“Oh, I know. And how’s your mother?”