I ran the chamois through the wringer and picked out gravel in the bristles of the brush.
Not much talking between us unless I asked, and I didn’t ask but came to conclusions from the way things looked. The way things looked made me think Arthur was sad, and I was sad for him. No immediate family, no friends, poor Arthur in overalls, smelling of oil and earth. His lace-up shoes had a bulbous toe, and the empty crown of his baseball cap stuck up stupidly. He swooped off the cap, saying, “Yes, Mister, Yes, Miss, Yes, Miss Frances” to the orders from the boss, to Uncle Billy or his wife. Arthur’s hair was sweated flat, his forehead grooved. Poor Arthur, left to do what I couldn’t do, he looked tired.
“Can’t I help?” I asked.
“No, stay where you are. You’re help just watching.”
“Can I come along then?”
“Okay,” Arthur said, and Uncle Billy said, too, but more often, “No, Alice, you stay here. …” And if I didn’t ride quietly, didn’t obey, what happened then? Banished to the backseat, obliged to sit and watch as they loaded Mother’s house on the U-Hauclass="underline" her bed, a chest of drawers, six dining chairs, stacked. Arthur and his helpers were doing the work; Uncle Billy only bossed.
Shame, I felt, confusion, wonder, ease, the impression of a fire, a reddening light pulsed the shelter of leaves that branched across the road to Uncle Billy’s house. Arthur drove. Arthur was almost always driving or waiting and waiting, often for Uncle Billy, and with only a knife to pare his nails.
“Aren’t you bored?” I asked, yet another day, waiting in the Emerald Gem with Arthur and shivering despite the heat it hoarded. “Aren’t you bored? Because I am.” Hips passed and hems and scarf fringe and gloves, and I couldn’t see past the doors to the building, the one my Uncle Billy was in, the building with the doors revolving: not him, not him.
A Monday afternoon, a Thursday afternoon — any afternoon — it might be. Uncle Billy liked surprises and he liked to surprise, and he could! “An adventure!” he said, off to find gold or sausage or slot machines (really!) whatever he could find. Every day was his own, and Uncle Billy could be late.
“You must be patient,” Arthur said, which was fine, I thought, for a man dressed to wait in another man’s car, but I didn’t want to sit here without music. I didn’t want to wait with Arthur, and I was rude. I said, “Wait for me, too,” and I took off down the block on my own somewhere. Five minutes, ten, I wasn’t very long away — but still. …
“Has Alice been good?” Uncle Billy asked, returned and turned around to look at me while Arthur drove the three of us to someplace special where Uncle Billy flashed a card at a carpeted booth that let us in for free — for free the festooned aisles of giveaways and samples, tubs, birdbaths, rug shampoos, a new and faster way to cut up food. Big girls packed in dirndls held out dips and toothpicked weenies. Raffles, contests, questionnaires, there were baskets of possibilities only waiting to be signed, and Uncle Billy was smiling broadly. “A year’s worth of anything was something,” he was saying, but what would he have to buy?
“The chance to go to Orlando,” was what the nearest clipboard said, and Uncle Billy bought it. He was rich!
He bought Mexico City, too, and raffles for instant-retirement cash, a bird, a goat, a car called Windlass. A trip with my mother’s rich brother was never entirely boring. Brochures, calling cards, glo-pink logos, Uncle Billy bought guesses and drawings, and carelessly fetched for me whatever was free — for a pet I didn’t have or an ailment; but the cure spilled in the trunk and there were rolling pellets. “No more adventures, I think,” Arthur was saying to me, sponging off the dashboard and the armrests. “No more or we’re going to get in trouble with Aunt Frances. …”
The wet wind of Arthur’s seriousness, that could make me shiver; and Aunt Frances … and Arlette, too. They spoke in unison to me: “We know what you’ve been doing.” Then they put up what treasures I had from my mother’s, put up too high for me to reach. “Just ask,” Aunt Frances said. “You won’t even remember what’s here, I bet.” But I remembered, and I recognized Mother’s plates and glasses, the felt bags of silver Mother wrote to me about, “Don’t sell the silver. We can afford it.”
Mother wrote me at the beginning. “This is where I am,” and x’d on a card she had drawn was a beachfront high-rise, palm trees dashed in front of it.
Flowers in the folds of letters, “Smell these!”
Locks of new blond hair, “Wish you could see!”
I scorned what seemed flimsy for the cold we knew, what scant clothes Mother sent me. “Love, love, love, love,” Uncle Billy read, and he held out the package with its friable contents, its hankies of printed cloth.
“I’m not wearing this,” I said. “Whatever made her think I would?”
I was a prude then; I was easily embarrassed by my body and by my mother’s body and how she had exposed it — remember? When the yard was under snow? Mother, sunbathing on a bed of foil Arthur had built for her, a sun-box, Arthur’s homemade Florida, and Mother on her knees, waving to me — waving to the neighborhood! — her legs glossy and oiled and white, the sun invisibled in murk. “Look where I am!” Florida, Florida, no matter that we lived in the land-of-lakes state where spring was slow to come.
Arthur said to me, “No one could be happy the way she was.” He said, “No one in the family was as generous … remember that,” but I forgot.
ARTHUR
SOMETIMES WAITING IN THE car with Arthur, I was a loving child — or my idea of loving — and I told him that I wanted to stay at his house, not Uncle Billy’s, but Arthur’s house, above Uncle Billy’s garage. I wanted to stay for early supper when late light shot through water glasses to show up rims of dust we put our lips to. Disuse and absence, I saw it scumming unwashed jars full of greasy house-parts, and I felt sorry for Arthur when I visited him, and I believed that, left to stay over, I could make his evening easier, happier, less dingy — a child’s conceit.
Arthur’s house, although small, was oddly just as cold as Uncle Billy’s — even colder, I think — four rooms he warmed with the stove set to high and left open. The space heater he carried everywhere to plug near his feet. His feet! — those shapeless stockinged bags of stones, somehow Arthur walked on them.
“Is it time to go already?” I was anxiously asking because I did and I didn’t want to leave. No one was there to think he was my father, so I could love him as I might a father. I wanted Arthur to feel loved. I asked, “Is it time already? I want to stay.”
This much was true: I often wanted to visit Arthur, but Uncle Billy said no; and only sometimes, as when Uncle Billy and his wife were gone, could I spend afternoons with Arthur. (The nights were that nosy Arlette’s.) Then Arthur and I could forget Uncle Billy’s car — that jewel, that gem — and drive the truck around Uncle Billy’s estate or slosh the thaws in clattery galoshes: “Cold?” Arthur asking, and me saying, “Yes,” but walking on.
My hands were red and wet and cold that time we broke through dish-thin ice in our walk along the cornfield. Arthur was wearing his ear-flapped cap, of course, and a leathery coat with a quilted lining bright enough to see by when he asked, “Do you want me to give you a ride?” It was his tired body that he was offering, yet I took it. I rode him out beyond the breakage, beyond the tangle of flagged stalks and splintered ice. The sky lifted, turned black, grew stars. At his door, slipped off in the shape that I had been, I lifted my arms to him and said, “Again?”
I could be thoughtless.