They said, “The socks, the heat, that bossy woman!” Afterward they stole from her whatever they could carry.
On such a night when I was swimming, I saw them both — those nameless unreliables, those live-ins, shouldering a lumpy bindle of embroidered cloth, saw them driving off with Aunt Frances’s TV in Uncle Billy’s jeep, heard them laughing. “We would take you,” they called out to me, “but we can’t wait.”
Aunt Frances was tapping my head with a spoon to say, You’re sailing, Alice.
But I insisted I hadn’t seen those unhappy unreliables back out; I knew nothing about it, their plan.
“Oh, come on,” Aunt Frances glared, “I’m not blind. I saw you talking to them. I can guess what was said.”
Aunt Frances was cruel, I thought, very rich but cruel, and Uncle Billy only sometimes took me with him on his jaunts and was forgetful and abrupt — as when he would not share his water in the desert on the trek. “Let that be a lesson to you, sweetie,” he had said, while Aunt Frances had said, “Don’t be so dramatic, Alice!”—when what did she know about thirsty?
“The reason we are rich,” Aunt Frances said, “is because I am frugal.”
Uncle Billy disagreed. He said, “The reason we are rich is because we are rich.”
I was poor and tangled.
“All the more reason to cut your hair very short,” Aunt Frances was saying. “You can walk through a dust devil and come out looking combed.”
It dried quickly, this hair, even in the cooler, nighttime air I walked through after swimming. I was almost always dry by the time I went to bed; and only a few strands, still wet and queerly bent against the pillow, would in the morning come out kinky. Nobody noticed. Aunt Frances was checking socks — was I wearing them?
“Why?”
Spring, spring, I was dreaming, dillydallying it was spring when Aunt Frances scolded, “We are back! This isn’t the desert! Put your shoes on!” She said, “We are back, and it is not spring here, not yet — maybe never. There’s still snow on the ground. Look and see.”
Dirty trails of snow were what I saw outside and the lawn, a thinning head of grass, a combed scalp — very muddy. Defeat was everywhere: dark shrubs, leathery and broken, and straw-dry plants on the shelves of the rocks, in shock, on end. The rocks were dripping tears yet nothing caught the light. Even the Emerald Gem was dulled: The mudflaps were muddy; the fender bumped up dust. Arthur was sick. His curtains above the garage were drawn; Aunt Frances sent Arlette with soup and sour bread.
“Why can’t I see him?” I wanted to know.
“Because you can’t,” was the reply.
Arthur was sick, recovering from something serious that they said was his heart.
His heart — I thought of how it beat behind its black hatch of threads, slow or fast, depending on the orders he was given.
“I have never been late,” Arthur had once told me. “I have never broken the law.”
Never broken a bone either or buried a wife. No children, no hobbies, but driving, driving well, knowing cars and roads and the town we lived in and agreeing every winter to plow the roads, deliver mail, play Santa at the firehouse for the firemen’s children.
“I get tired easy,” he had said to me — how many times? “I just want my feet up,” and in his house above the garage, I had seen him prop his feet on the ottoman and itch off his socks. His feet again! His feet were misshapen and shoe-marked, and I wondered had he stood on them when his heart attack happened, or was he found in the car, the car pulled over, the turn signal blinking—his heart, his heart. To think I had once let him carry me across the field with that heart!
Was it the size of him, was it that he was fat? Did ugliness have to do with it? Was his poor heart like the rest of him and poor, doing poorly, yet yielding to it, the crack in the wall that could bring down the house? Now that he knew where his death might come from would he run to it as Father had done?
FATHER
SURELY HAVING ASKED AS much of others, I must have asked this of my father, “Then can I go with you?” But my father, I was told, drove off alone, and he never came back, which is all the story I got, and no more from Arthur, who had said the field where my father was buried was farther north of where we lived.
My Aunt Frances said to me, “You were five years old when he died. You don’t know the man buried there. Even your Uncle Billy didn’t know him — and they were childhood friends!”
She said, “You can’t remember very much.”
But I remembered riding Father’s shoulders and fearing he would throw me off to feed whatever growled on the other side of the fence. I remembered being sick in his top-down car, the same he died in, stalled, adrift, moving off in rising waters broken up in spring; or that was what they told me: The waters took him. Those waters, rushed from the river that ran under Main Street, waters dark and skinny and mean, had swept away my father. Frantic waters moving out beyond the houses, the river was aflood whenever I was at the railing looking over, as my father had once helped me to do, lifting me to see the swell in spring. There was probably no way to guess how unhappy a man could be in the company of a child — and she, his daughter. There was no way of knowing what a man might yield to.
FATHER
I KNOW THIS: MY father loved my mother—a truth—and she went on loving him in a sentimental manner, polishing their wedding gifts and proffering me ashtrays initialed JCM. “You might enjoy this…,” Mother was saying and saying and handing me initials — his — on his silver napkin ring, a tumbler, highball glasses. Etchings of ducks, grasses, northern lakes, scenes done by an old family friend. I knew my father well this way, and I knew he was a dreamer, a capricious man shamefully departed. Mother took her old name back, making me one of them — Uncle Billy, Aunt Frances, we had the same last name: Fivey. I was my mother all over again. Alice Fivey.
ARTHUR
WAITING, WAITING, WAITING FOR an answer to Can I? “Can I see Arthur now that he’s come home?”
Time went by in the window where I waited for an answer and saw Arthur’s curtains move now that Arlette had gone to visit. Arlette, with unsalted soup and crackers, would she show him what the day was like now that the snow was melting? Could he hear the water rushing off the roof or the icicles in heavy falling, ice shards and scattered birds, a day of drastic reappraisals: Arthur is hot and he is cold; I cannot visit him and then I can, and later still, I cannot — he is only just recovering. He is sick.
“Besides, who said you could go outside in just those clothes?” Aunt Frances was roughing my feet with a towel, repeating, “Arthur will be tired for a long time,” and so sounding herself very tired. He would drive again, yes, she said, but the heavy work was done. The plow, the truck, the drywall rocks he liked to haul and lift and balance, work to outlast a man, such work, as had satisfied, was behind him. Gone the snow-night crossing when he carried me; Arthur was sick and would never be entirely well again.
Aunt Frances said, “Be quiet. That’s how you can help.”
ARTHUR
THE MUSIC, THE RUSHED-hush of cars passing, passing us on a dark road, cars speeding, making a noise as if to call out, “What’s the matter — you drunk?”
In a county full of straightaways, Arthur was too slow for where he lived. The cars passed by loudly, wrong speed. Arthur was amazed. Good citizen that he was, he did not drive over the limit while the other cars were sudden in their turns, wagging over gravel lots to get there faster. It might have been to home the cars were turning or to Friday-night fish fry when the cars bumped up behind us. The lights, swagged across the street and blinking, affected me like noise. The windshield was a rainbow, and I worried. “Can you see?” I asked. Snow was falling and the wipers streaked the glass. “Are you all right?” The way Arthur, now recovered, wore his good clothes carefully, ready to be buried, prompted me to ask, “Do you want to pull over and rest?” And we did; we parked near the school, on a dead-end street, and we slept in the car, and no one — no one in the long time we slept — passed by. I would have heard them; my ears were very sharp then. I could hear Arthur breathing in the half sleep to be had in the car, the one we both woke tired from and hungry. “But can you eat this?” I asked, breaking off squares of chocolate. “Could you have a reaction?”