PRO. Everyone I know is an unusual individual. Aunt Minnie does jigsaws for a living. She enters the most difficult contests under the stiffest rules: you cannot look at the completed picture or even learn its title; the edge must be completed first, not omitting the last, lost, little one; the fitting of forms must rise like flooding water from bottom to top, puddling is prohibited, etc.
CON. Harriet Hoff’s time of fourteen minutes fifty-nine seconds, during the 1995 finals, was better than Minnie’s by two minutes thirteen seconds. Women have won for the sixth straight year. Among the men, Frank Link had the best time but he still finished eighth.
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31
There were three sharp knocks, and Marjorie slipped in. She seemed zipped into a towel, her wild hair terrible to behold, and sat upon the bed with the familiarity of one who has made it. Joseph followed each movement, transfixed. White hands darted out of her sleeve like laboratory mice and just as swiftly were withdrawn. After a moment during which Marjorie inspected him for flaws, she rose and moved in his direction. Joey put down his milk. Good boy, she said. You deserve a nice surprise. To Joey no surprise was nice. The Major bent over, her palms shot forth and closed upon his cheeks. The holes in the sleeves were great dark ovals now. Unhand me, Madame, you forget yourself, Joey said, frightened from the world into a novel; and Marjorie recoiled as though struck by the book from which he had unconsciously taken the phrase. Un hand me, she shouted. Un hand me, she repeated, with renewed emphasis. Next she screamed in his face at the point of his nose. As if blown by the noise, Joey backed his chair away, causing a plate of cookies to slide across the tiny table, overturning the glass of milk, and knocking a heavy history of music to the floor near which the equally startled stream of milk had commenced its spill. Her scream was as sharp and high as a child’s cry but lasted longer than the length of any blade and undulated as if made for a scary movie or the stage. Out of the room, whose door now stood open, Marjorie paused for breath before emitting a shriek that rivaled her first. Thoroughly frightened and utterly bewildered, Joey held one ear shut while trying to save his history. Finally he simply kicked the book to safety with a foot and released his ear, since the scream had wound down like the siren does for all clear. In the reverberating silence that followed, a few pellets of snow ticked the windows. He actually thought, Sleet; even: Oh dear. Finally Joey’s heart could be heard rising to the occasion.
After a pause to prepare his body for its next move, Joseph found a towel to mop up the milk, although one edge of the rag rug had done a good job. A door bang brought him to his row of windows. Marjorie, in her white scuffs and terry-cloth robe, was kneeling by the back bumper of the Bumbler. She removed the blocks from behind the wheels of his car, brushing the bricks away with a sweep of her hand. Then, after a pause and a faint squeak, the emergency brake failed, and the Bumbler accelerated awkwardly down the steep drive, careening over the curb and into the street, where it narrowly missed a parked car but struck a utility pole with such force the pole acquired a lean and the car a dent in its trunk that looked intended. Standing at her door now, Marjorie yelled, Good-bye, you ungrateful piece of waste, and disappeared into the house. The door shut with a slam that sung in his windows. At the foot of the drive, blocking half the street, the Bumbler sat in a pool of shade or a pool of grease; it was hard to tell because of the way the light had to fall now to reach the road.
Joey peered at his car in disbelief. That good-bye had been meant for him. What had he done, he wondered. Then — what had she? He could not immediately find any meaning in this attack on him or his vehicle, but he knew he would have to leave at once, pushed into the cold and continuing sleet, evicted like someone who hadn’t paid his rent. Ah, but perhaps his rent had come due just now. His mind refused to proceed in that direction. Somehow — the thought fell into his lap like a dislodged book — it was Debbie’s fault. Fortunately he had very few things that he needed to gather. There were the documents that Miss Moss had helped him compose (those that they had done together as a joke), a knot of socks, and — lucky break — Miriam had most of his laundry. He had to get himself and that car on the road. Or off the road. Joey’s eyes fled around his former room. His first fear was not that he would leave something behind but that he would meet her in the entry, ready to rescream and recurse and recriminate. Ah … the key. Should he leave the key. He fished it from a pocket and put it down by the turned-over glass. Then he snatched it back again. Suppose the car would not start. What could he do then? Where would he go? He had a library key, too. If he left the one he should leave the other. Or should he keep both and — Joey was surprised by his own train of thought, as if it had burst around a curve into its station — haunt the stacks, sneaking in to sleep like Portho might have, and in future years, in cahoots with Miss Moss, to spook the Major, visiting his thin presence upon a section labeled INJURED AND INNOCENT.
Joey decided to retain both and later mail them to Marjorie in a jar of silverfish. All of a sudden his head replayed her most recent scream. Unhand me, Madame, had he said? In a desperate hurry now, he packed his few things in a pair of pillowcases he pulled from those on his bed. These, too, he would send back to the library unexplained. After astonishment, shock, and shame came rage like a wind that’s had a run from upriver. So what if he met her in the entry? she who said she was his friend, with whom he had shared amusing observations, and whom she had called “good boy” more than a few times; yet who had attacked him with unsheathed claws, causing him to knock over the milk, which was only a little milk after all, good to soften a butter cookie, and did no damage, but spill as in the proverb, which implied that shrieking about a little thing like that was unmannerly and, what’s more, pointless and could have the most inconvenient and unfortunate consequences.
And calling his car a … a piece of waste wasn’t a bit nice either, even if it was a wreck, because after all it did its work and kept its promise to turn its wheels and keep to the road — he was through the entry, out the door — Close it closely, he advised himself, close it softly, no horrid slam such as he — the neighborhood — had already had to suffer, and he was oops … slipping a little on the curved and dipping sidewalk as he made his way down the rise, a sack on each shoulder — some Santa — why had it happened? but — another thought made its presence felt — sleet showered him like rice — if the car wouldn’t go for him now, it wouldn’t go for Miriam either, when she wanted to call upon the baby rising in Deborah’s belly and exchange recipes and give her daughter her gosh-darned advice. There is some sweetness in the sourest grapes.
He never locked his car, not the driver’s door or the trunk, and he was grateful for that neglect now. The trunk, though, wouldn’t open, deformed as it was, so he had to toss his pillowcases into the backseat. An onset of shivers overtook him. It was cold, the car was cold, the seat as cold as an enamel sink, his cheek bitten by particles of ice, and his ears were burning, maybe from her sounds, maybe from the wind. He felt keys heavy and cold in his pocket: house key, library key, car key, mom’s key … cold, and he was scarcely dressed. His hands hurt while on the wheel. Its cold cut through flesh and bones that were no longer fingers. There was a laugh in the sound of the starting car — Witch Hazel’s laugh — it coughed, she laughed, it ran, and he bungled the clutch into gear so the car lurched from its curbside onto the street and immediately began to wobble down the hill toward town.