The girl was noticing the rug now, and Muriel’s sodden slippers. She looked baffled, perhaps even a little frightened. And young. So young. Muriel had had a young friend once, a girl from the community college who used to come to the house before Monty got sick. She had a tape recorder, and she would ask them questions about their childhood, about the days when the San Fernando Valley was dirt roads and orange groves. Oral history, she called it. “It’s all right,” Muriel said, trying to reassure her.
“I just — is it a plumbing problem?” the girl said, backing away from the door. “Sonny…” she said, but didn’t finish the thought. She ducked her head and retreated down the steps, but when she reached the walk she wheeled around. “I mean you really ought to see about the sprinklers,” she blurted, “the whole place is soaked, my sunroom and everything—”
“It’s all right,” Muriel repeated, and then the girl was gone and she shut the door.
“She’s nuts, she is. Really. I mean she’s out of her gourd.”
Meg was searing chunks of thresher shark in a pan with green chilies, sweet red pepper, onion, and cilantro. Sonny, who was twenty-eight and so intoxicated by real estate he had to forgo the morning paper till he got home at night, was slumped in the breakfast nook with a vodka tonic and the sports pages. His white-blond hair was cut fashionably, in what might once have been called a flattop, though it was thinning, and his open, appealing face, with its boyish look, had begun to show signs of wear, particularly around the eyes, where years of escrow had taken their toll. Tiffany was in her room, playing quietly with a pair of six-inch dolls that had cost sixty-five dollars each.
“Who?” Sonny murmured, tugging unconsciously at the gold chain he wore around his neck.
“Muriel. The old lady next door. Haven’t you heard a thing I’ve been saying?” With an angry snap of her wrist, Meg cut the heat beneath the saucepan and clapped a lid over it. “The floor in the sunroom is flooded, for god’s sake,” she said, stalking across the kitchen in her bare feet till she stood poised over him. “The rug is ruined. Or almost is. And the yard—”
Sonny slapped the paper down on the table. “All right! Just let me relax a minute, will you?”
She put on her pleading look. It was a look compounded of pouty lips, tousled hair, and those inevitable eyes, and it always had its effect on him. “One minute,” she murmured. “That’s all it’ll take. I just want you to see the backyard.”
She took him by the hand and led him through the living room to the sunroom, where he stood a moment contemplating the damp spot on the concrete floor. She was surprised herself at how the spot had grown — it was three times what it had been that afternoon, and it seemed to have sprouted wings and legs like an enormous Rorschach. She pictured a butterfly. Or no, a hovering crow or bat. She wondered what Muriel would have made of it.
Outside, she let out a little yelp of disgust — all the earthworms in the yard had crawled up on the step to die. And the lawn wasn’t merely spongy now, it was soaked through, puddled like a swamp. “Jesus Christ,” Sonny muttered, sinking in his wing-tips. He cakewalked across the yard to where the fence had begun to sag, the post leaning drunkenly, the slats bowed. “Will you look at this?” he shouted over his shoulder. Squeamish about the worms, Meg stood at the door to the sunroom. “The goddam fence is falling down!”
He stood there a moment, water seeping into his shoes, a look of stupefaction on his face. Meg recognized the look. It stole over his features in moments of extremity, as when he tore open the phone bill to discover mysterious twenty-dollar calls to Billings, Montana, and Greenleaf, Mississippi, or when his buyer called on the day escrow was to close to tell him he’d assaulted the seller and wondered if Sonny had five hundred dollars for bail. These occasions always took him by surprise. He was shocked anew each time the crisply surveyed, neatly kept world he so cherished rose up to confront him with all its essential sloppiness, irrationality, and bad business sense. Meg watched the look of disbelief turn to one of injured rage, She followed him through the house, up the walk, and into Muriel’s yard, where he stalked up to the front door and pounded like the Gestapo.
There was no response.
“Son of a bitch,” he spat, turning to glare over his shoulder at her as if it were her fault or something. From inside they could hear the drama of running water, a drip and gurgle, a sough and hiss. Sonny turned back to the door, hammering his fist against it till Meg swore she could see the panels jump.
It frightened her, this sudden rage. Sure, there was a problem here and she was glad he was taking care of it, but did he have to get violent, did he have to get crazy? “You don’t have to beat her door down,” she called, focusing on the swell of his shoulder and the hammer of his fist as it rose and fell in savage rhythm. “Sonny, come on. It’s only water, for god’s sake.”
“Only?” he snarled, spinning round to face her. “You saw the fence — next thing you know the foundation’ll shift on us. The whole damn house—” He never finished. The look on her face told him that Muriel had opened the door.
Muriel was wearing the same faded blue housecoat she’d had on earlier, and the same wet slippers. Short, heavyset, so big in front it seemed as if she were about to topple over, she clung to the doorframe and peered up at Sonny out of a stony face. Meg watched as Sonny jerked round to confront her and then stopped cold when he got a look at the interior of the house. The plaster walls were stained now, drinking up the wet in long jagged fingers that clawed toward the ceiling, and a dribble of coffee-colored liquid began to seep across the doorstep and puddle at Sonny’s feet. The sound of rushing water was unmistakable, even from where Meg was standing. “Yes?” Muriel said, the voice withered in her throat. “Can I help you?”
It took Sonny a minute — Meg could see it in his eyes: this was more than he could handle, willful destruction of a domicile, every tap in the place on full, the floors warped, plaster ruined — but then he recovered himself. “The water,” he said. “You — our fence — I mean you can’t, you’ve got to stop this—”
The old woman drew herself up, clutching the belt of her housedress till her knuckles bulged with the tension. She looked first at Meg, still planted in the corner of the yard, and then turned to Sonny. “Water?” she said. “What water?”
The young man at the door reminded her, in a way, of Monty. Something about the eyes or the set of the ears — or maybe it was the crisp high cut of the sideburns…Of course, most young men reminded her of Monty. The Monty of fifty years ago, that is. The Monty who’d opened up the world to her over the shift lever of his Model-A Ford, not the crabbed and abrasive old man who called her bonehead and dildo and cuffed her like a dog. Monty. When the stroke brought him down, she was almost glad. She saw him pinned beneath his tubes in the hospital and something stirred in her; she brought him home and changed his bedpan, peered into the vaults of his eyes, fed him Gerber’s like the baby she’d never had, and she knew it was over. Fifty years. No more drunken rages, no more pans flung against the wall, never again his sour flesh pressed to hers. She was on top now.
The second young man — he was a Mexican, short, stocky, with a mustache so thin it could have been penciled on and wicked little red-flecked eyes — also reminded her of Monty. Not so much in the way he looked as in the way he held himself, the way he swaggered and puffed out his chest. And the uniform too, of course. Monty had worn a uniform during the war.
“Mrs. Burgess?” the Mexican asked.
Muriel stood at the open door. It was dusk, the heat cut as if there were a thermostat in the sky. She’d been sitting in the dark. The electricity had gone out on her — something to do with the water and the wires. She nodded her head in response to the policeman’s question.