Can you show me where the old houseplace was?
I can’t today, he said, glancing at a wristwatch. I’ve got to show another place on Sinking Creek. But I can tell you good enough so’s you can find it.
All right. Will you ask her about the lease?
I sure will, Mr. Binder. I’ll do what I can. You sure you want it, ghosts and all?
He called the motel the next afternoon. The place was Binder’s for six months. A bird in the hand, he figured.
Jesus, a mall, Binder said, still not quite believing it. Beale Station with a Walmart and a McDonald’s and JCPenneys, a mall, everything.
Cheer up, Corrie told him, laughing, opening the car door. It’s probably haunted too.
Fairy Queen of the Haunted Mall, Binder said crossing the parking lot, Stephie skipping along before them, Corrie swinging on his arm.
There was a brief magic to the day. They bought living-room drapes and kitchen curtains and a bedspread and curtains for Stephie’s room. Stephie begged for not one but two videocassettes of Disney’s Adventures of Winnie the Pooh. Binder splurged on a pair of aviator sunglasses.
To Corrie time seemed to accelerate, to move at a different pace than the time the homeplace ran on. They ate at McDonald’s and saw a movie at the multiplex and suddenly the day was gone and it was time to go home.
They fell silent on the road ascending through the cedars. The house rose before them somber and still silent and imbued with the quality of patient waiting.
Everybody out, Binder said. Home sweet home.
Corrie gave him a swift callid look, as if to see was he serious or not.
Corrie had been fighting nervousness all day by staying busy. Unpacking, replacing the faded curtains with her own, trying to force her mind blank, free of anything that would make her think of her father. Alone in the house, the afternoon seemed endless. She caught herself listening for footsteps. Once she thought she heard voices that led her from room to room, listening, but ultimately there was only the moribund silence of the July day.
What could David be doing out there? she wondered. All there is is woods, how long does it take to look at a tree? She had a sudden image of David dying of snakebite. Hadn’t the real estate agent specifically warned them about snakes? Copperheads always been bad on Sinking Creek, he’d said. I wouldn’t feel right about my job if I didn’t warn you. Specially with this little blondheaded gal here.
I could finish unpacking, she thought, seeing the cardboard boxes still stacked in the hall. But she hated the thought of it; anyway, what would she do with it? And it would just have to be repacked when they left.
David had said he would help her, and she guessed he figured he had. He had unpacked his books and put them on shelves, cleaned his typewriter and changed the ribbon and arranged it on a makeshift desk he’d constructed of two filing cabinets and an old door he found in the toolshed. With his books shelved and his workspace prepared, David felt at home anywhere.
The remaining boxes were all David’s as well, except for one or two belonging to their daughter, Stephanie. Magazines. David had a peculiar reverence for the printed word that apparently forbade him throwing away anything it was printed on, so that during their marriage they had moved from apartment to apartment an ever-increasing number of boxes filled with old Esquire, Playboy, Harper’s, battered old copies of Ramparts and Rolling Stone.
She smiled wryly at one box marked STEPHANIE.
He had apparently communicated this trait to his daughter; she was five years old and she already had her own twinebound box containing back numbers of Children’s Digest and Humpty Dumpty.
The thought of Stephanie drew Corrie to the screen door. She heard the slow creak of the swing chains, saw Stephanie rocking listlessly. Stephie, as she was called, had her mother’s fair skin and hair, but temperamentally she seemed closer to David: she already showed signs of being as imaginative as he was. Corrie might have said over-imaginative. Sometimes David and Stephie seemed attuned to a wider spectrum of sensory impulses than Corrie knew existed.
David taught her to read early. Her kindergarten teacher in Chicago had suspected she was gifted, and a series of tests administered to her bore this out. David reacted to the news as if he had been personally and entirely responsible. I told you so, he kept telling Corrie, as if she had maintained that the child was a congenital idiot. Or as if his genes had been transmuted to Stephie pristine and untainted by Corrie’s. Though she guessed that wasn’t fair; after all, it had been David who had read to her from the time he had gotten the child’s attention, and at a period in his life when time had been at a premium.
She opened the door and went out onto the porch. Stephie sat idly turning the pages of a book about gnomes, but she was no longer looking at them with any semblance of interest.
She looked up at Corrie. Can we watch TV?
No, we can’t. Sorry.
Why not?
Daddy didn’t hook it up to the antenna yet.
David had said that he would, but Corrie had turned it on a little past noon and there was only the blank white screen, the white noise of static emanating from the speaker. The lead wire wasn’t even hooked to the little screws on the back of the set, and when she finally found a screwdriver and leant over the set to fix it she had seen through the window the antenna itself leaned against the back porch wall, still in its cardboard carton. Maybe he would tomorrow. Or tonight, if he came in in time.
Corrie had left the sound on anyway, turned all the way up. At least it was something out of this century. Nothing else in the house seemed to be.
Don’t you want to play in the playhouse Daddy fixed you?
She closed the book. I suppose so, she said. She arose and went somewhat grudgingly down the flagstone steps toward the playhouse under the elm. She played as if it were work she was forced to do, Corrie thought, thinking of herself. Today she had felt like a child forced to play grownup in a cavernous nineteenth-century house with someone else’s furniture, someone else’s past.
Though not forced, she thought hastily. David had been scrupulously fair about that. It had been a joint decision. Except that David had thought of it, David had been the one enthused about it, and David had a way of leading you along on the ragged edge of his enthusiasm until you were someplace you hadn’t planned to be, wondering how you got there. She could have gone to Orlando and stayed with her older sister Ruthie and her husband Vern; she could have stayed in Chicago. But she knew that David would have done it anyway. He would have come alone, and that would have been worse.
David had been a drifter when he married her, and though he had made an enormous effort to change or at least convince her he had changed, there was still a lot of drifter in him: a refusal to put down roots, to think of any one place as home, a disinclination to do for very long anything he didn’t want to do. He just wouldn’t be bored. There was no pretense of politeness about him. She had heard him kill a hundred boring conversations just by shutting up.
A goddamned hippie, her father (her father: the word fell through her mind like a stone settling slowly through deep water) had called him contemptuously. Among other things, a lot worse. Those had been hard times, when she and her father had both said ugly unforgivable things to each other, things that still rang in her ears. She had always been her father’s favorite, and suddenly a gulf had opened between them she couldn’t close. She hadn’t had an excuse for the things she had said, though her father had the best one in the world: he was dying of an undiagnosed brain tumor, was already dying the moment she accused him of just going crazy and mean.