He turned over on his side and snuggled up to Mary’s back. His hand felt the smooth swell of her baby. Yes. He smiled to himself. This baby girl and two more.
BEAUTY IS . . .
CHAPTER 1
Martha Mannes was forty-seven years old when her parents died. Her father died first, and she watched as her mother called Mr. Simmons who drove out from town and took her father away. So when her mother died, Martha left her in the bedroom and called Mr. Simmons. He held Martha’s hand for a moment, looked at her carefully, and kissed her on her forehead; then he left with her mother in the back of his long black car.
Martha was alone.
It was hard to remember just what her parents looked like. There was an old picture on her father’s desk, of a man, a woman, and a little girl. They looked vaguely familiar, so this was the woman she thought of when she thought of her mother.
After her mother had gone, Martha continued to do all the things she’d always done. She baked bread, she went to town for groceries, she fed the chickens and gathered the eggs. She set three places at the table, and cleared away two unused.
Sometimes she missed them, but most of the time she just missed all the things they used to do.
Father used to yell a lot. “Tell your retard to chop some wood and start stacking it,” he’d say to her mother. Martha would see the stricken look on her mother’s face and get up to chop wood. She didn’t know why mother looked that way. Mother called her Martha; Father called her Retard.
As the years went by, she noticed that no one yelled at her anymore, so she stopped chopping wood, mowing the lawn, and canning peaches. She hated canning the peaches. But she made bread. It was good, squishing the dough, and the white all over her hands and wrists and the counter and the floor. She made bread until the refrigerator was full, and she piled it up on the counter until it turned black and musty. Then she fed it to the chickens. “Chickens gotta eat,” she’d coo as she sprinkled the bread crumbs in front of their house.
She was never allowed in the barn, so when the terrible awful smell came from there, some people came and brought her things to eat while they burned the barn so she didn’t have to think about it anymore.
Since Martha wasn’t chopping so much wood and canning peaches and mowing the lawn, she had a lot of time to herself. She did a lot of wondering. She would stand in the wooden doorway to her little home and look out and wonder how the weeds got so high, and would they get as high as the roof. She never found out, though, because now and then a nice boy from town would bring his big machine and mow them down. She sat at the scrubbed table and fingered the wide glossy pink-white scars that ran all around her nose and wondered where they came from. She wondered where the sofa came from, and how come there were always baby chickens and what made the stove hot. And then she’d get dressed up and go to town and buy more yeast and flour and sometimes Mr. McRae, the shopkeeper, would give her a cookie or some other little treat.
When Martha was fifty-four, she put on one of her mother’s dresses because hers didn’t fit her anymore. She looked in the mirror and thought she looked very familiar, just like her mother, so she sat down and put on powder from the little round flat thing with the cracked mirror, then tried lipstick. Her lips didn’t match so good when she tried to rub them together like her mother used to do, and the lipstick smeared on one side. She took a tissue and started to rub it, and suddenly a little face looked back at her from the mirror. A younger face, with darker curls, a girl with a lump of a nose that hooked to the side, surrounded by fat red scars. The girl had traced the scars in lipstick and mother was removing it with a tissue and a scolding. Mother was crying, and Martha didn’t understand. Then the vision was gone, and Martha went to town.
She went to the bank first, where they all knew her. She asked for twenty dollars and they gave it to her. The pretty girl in the window told her she looked nice, and Martha repeated it to her. “You look nice today,” she said. She took her crisp bill and went over to the general store and bought what she always bought. Milk, yeast, flour, sugar, and root beer. The 4-H kept up a garden at her house which provided all the vegetables she wanted. Especially carrots. She loved to pull up the carrots, all warm from the sun, wipe the dirt off on her dress, and eat them.
Mr. McRae, pleasantly scrubbed and mostly bald in his white apron, was always smiling. “Good morning, Martha. How are you today?”
“Look nice,” Martha said.
“Yes, you look very nice today. Do you want the usual?”
“Flour . . .” Martha said, ticking off finger number one.
“Yes. Wait just a minute and I’ll get it all for you.”
Martha waited, looking at all the shiny jars with the colorful striped sticks inside. Mr. McRae returned with a sack full of groceries and set them on the counter.
“What do you do with all this flour, Martha?”
Her face screwed up in listening intensity. “Bake bread.”
“Freshly baked bread, eh? Do you eat it all?” He glanced at her bulk.
“Chickens gotta eat.”
“You feed the bread to the chickens?”
She looked at him blankly. “Chickens gotta eat.”
He leaned over the counter closer to her. “I’ll tell you what, Martha. I’ll give you some real good food for the chickens, and you bring me the bread you bake, okay? And some fresh eggs?”
“You want bread?”
“Yes,” he nodded. “I’ll buy it from you.”
“You want eggs?”
He nodded again.
She laughed, a rasp, horrible in its lack of practice, her poorly sewn-on nose crinkling redly. “I get bread. I get eggs.”
“Good. Here.” He put a small solid sack of chicken feed in with her groceries. “Feed this to your chickens, and bring me bread and eggs, okay?”
She picked up the sack and left without acknowledgment. Mr. McRae shook his head as she waddled out of the store.
Martha headed for home. A block away from the store, she had to go to the bathroom. She paused for a moment and thought about it, then turned and walked through the next door she came to.
Her eyes opened in amazement. She’d never seen a place like this before. There was a long bench, only it was too tall to be a bench; stools were in front of it. There were little square tables and red booths. Three men sat in one booth, cigarette smoke curling to the ceiling. Sparkling glasses and bottles covered the wall behind the man who stood on the other side of the bench. He smiled at her.
She hefted her sack and set it on the corner of the bar and said to him, “Bathroom.”
“Follow me, Martha.” The smiling man with the white apron like Mr. McRae took her to the back of the room and pointed at a door.
When she came out, the three men were sitting on the tall stools. They watched her approach with greedy enthusiasm. One of them stopped her with a big rough hand. “Can I buy you a drink, Martha?”
“Drink?” She looked up into the cold blue eyes. Each tooth of his fierce smile was rimmed in gold, and a toothpick protruded from the corner of his mouth.
“Yeah. You thirsty?” He turned and winked at his friends. The three of them looked at her, smiling expectantly.
She smiled her crooked smile, trying to understand. “Thirsty. Okay.”
“Draw her a brew, Mike.”
“Come on, guys, leave the lady alone.”
The smile faded, the toothpick trembled. “She said she’s thirsty, Mike. I’m buying.”
The bartender leaned over the counter at Martha. He looked menacing, coming at her like that. “Wouldn’t you rather have a soda, Martha?”
She cowered behind the one who cared about her thirst. “No,” she said.
Mike set the tall mug of beer on the bar, while the one helped her up to a stool. She sipped the beer and made a face.