Hilda and Pearl (2 page)

Mike had a regular job but he had wanted to be a musician. He had played saxophone in a jazz band during the Depression, when he was a young fellow, but he couldn't make money at it. He still played with some friends, not often, or he practiced at home. But his hands often played an instrument that wasn't there.

Frances started to walk, and the sneakers bumped her chest and back rhythmically as she climbed the short rise away from the beach. In a book about old times, a girl might walk barefoot on a dirt road with her shoes bumping her chest and back. The towel could be a shawl. The road was hot and stony. Frances had to place her feet gingerly when she took a step, and that seemed wrong for what she was imagining, for the girl walking barefoot.

Frances moved to the edge of the road, where the lawn started, because it would be cooler and more comfortable, but it was the dirt and stones that had made her feel like an old-fashioned girl. Her suit was still wet and the middle of her body was cool, but her arms and legs felt hot now. She came to a shaded place and she stepped off the lawn even though the stones would hurt her feet. She almost wanted the stones to hurt her. In front of her, a little to the side, a brown striated stone stuck out of the ground and came to a point. Frances deliberately ran her foot over that stone, and put her weight down so the point pressed into her arch. It hurt. If the stone cut her, she could get blood poisoning and even die.

It was dishonest to imagine dying—though it was interesting. One day, when Frances was on her way to Macy's with her mother to buy a coat, she had heard a woman crossing a street in New York say, “Nobody believes he's going to die.” When Frances looked into her mind, she discovered it was true of her: although she knew everyone died, she didn't believe
she
would die. She didn't know it in the obvious, ordinary way she knew that she lived on the third floor of an apartment house, the way she knew that if she rang the doorbell, her mother, Hilda Levenson, would open the door.

It seemed wrong not to believe in something true. Whenever she thought of dying after that, she made sure to tell herself over and over that someday she was going to die. Once, she had felt herself just about to believe it, and to her surprise had pulled her mind away quickly the way she might pull her foot from a stone.

She was almost at the cottage. She came to a place where the road was soft sand and easy to walk on. “I'm going to die,” she said out loud in a low voice, and with some excitement she heard herself differently, as if another ear had opened in her body. The words went straight in and she knew they were true. She looked at the trees and the gray cottages, and still knew she was going to die, and didn't have to keep telling herself. She had thought that if she ever believed it, it would be for only an instant, and if she wanted to believe it again, she'd have to work just as hard.

She crossed the short lawn in front of their cottage. Her mother's brown slippers, which she wore to the beach, were drying on the step. Frances climbed the wooden steps and caught the screen door just before it banged.

The cottage was dim and quiet. Simon was not lying on the cot where he was sleeping this week, on the screened porch. In the living room, the daybed where his parents slept was closed, and nobody was there. Frances dropped her sneakers in the living room and went to the doorway of her bedroom, but as she stepped inside she saw Simon stretched out on her bed, apparently reading, looking as if he'd been there for a long time, propped on one elbow with his back to her. He didn't turn around. “I'm going to die,” she said in a low voice, but his back, in a white shirt, seemed to be telling her in a quiet but clipped voice to go away. His legs were bent at the knees, and behind him on the bed were her clothes, her shorts and halter and her underpants on top. Maybe they were where she had left them, and maybe he had pulled the pile of clothes closer to the end of the bed so he'd have room to lie down. Frances stepped forward, just to take the pile of clothes. She would go into her parents' bedroom, which was on the other side of the living room, the side that got the sun in the afternoon. Frances opened the door without knocking, then remembered her mother and Aunt Pearl.

The yellow cotton curtain had been pulled across the screen, and the room was dim and still. Heat struck Frances's face as she stepped in, as if someone had reached out a flat palm. There was the sweet smell of talcum powder, and a cloud of it in the air. Frances's mother was facing away from the door, naked, her fingers curved and close together. She was going to apply powder to Aunt Pearl's back. Aunt Pearl, also naked, had her back to Hilda. Her skin was red on either side of the white lines of her bathing suit straps, and in between the lines. Now they both turned slowly and some of the powder in Hilda's hand drifted to the floor. She leveled her hand to save it and applied it to her own body, lifting her breast and stroking her chest underneath it. “What is it, baby?” she said.

“I need to change out of my bathing suit,” said Frances. “Simon's in my room.” Her mother's breasts were larger than Aunt Pearl's, and hung down, so there were those little rooms under them, secret places. Her mother's belly was round and full of folds, and her belly button, in the middle of it, seemed mournful.

“Come on in,” said her mother. “We were just taking a little nap.” The air was rich with sleep. It seemed to Frances that it would be easy and delightful to lie down on the rumpled, bare sheet—the blankets had been pushed to the floor—and fall into her mother's nap, Aunt Pearl's nap. The sun was coming through the curtain and the air was yellow, and it did seem as if yellow was the color of naps, and if she just pulled off her wet suit and lay down, she could enter the nap where Hilda and Pearl had left it.

But she felt small and naked, even though she was wearing her bathing suit and Hilda and Pearl were not wearing anything. They were wearing their flesh. Aunt Pearl was tall, with short blond hair. Her breasts were smaller than Hilda's and her belly was not so large, but her rear end was large. Her body swelled below her waist, and her buttocks were like a chair, firm and broad, yet with that line down the middle that looked childlike to Frances.

She hesitated. If she left, there would be nowhere to change but the bathroom, and there the floor would be wet, and she would see a spider while she was undressed and have to put her clothes on before she could run away.

“Are you sunburned?” said Aunt Pearl. “You look as if you're peeling a little.” And she stepped forward and turned Frances around to examine her back and shoulders.

“Do you want some powder, honey?” said her mother, and now it was as if Frances had been standing on a step or a little stool, just above the room, and she deliberately stepped off it into something fragrant and soft. “My stomach hurts,” she said, making her voice sound as if she were younger than she was.

“Are you constipated?” said her mother. “Did you go to the bathroom today?”

“It's not that,” said Frances. “It's like something rubbed on my stomach and made the outside hurt.” Her bathing suit had cotton ties that went into loops and made a bow behind her, and she reached back and undid the bow, and then worked the suit down her body.

“Is it a mosquito bite?” said her mother.

“I don't know.” There was a bite on her stomach, and her mother squatted in the dimness to look at it and said that was it. Frances wanted to lie down on the bed but she didn't. She sat on the bed and Aunt Pearl sat down next to her. She was still behaving as if she were younger than she was, younger than eleven. “Mommy's fat,” she said.

“No, she's not,” Aunt Pearl said. “I'm fat. I have a fat tush.”

“Mommy has a fat stomach.”

“I think it looks nice,” said Aunt Pearl. The truth was that Frances thought it looked nice, too.

Frances's mother stood in front of the mirror and looked at herself, but the mirror was too small, it showed only her head. She picked up her hair. “I used to be thin,” she said. “When I was in high school, I had to have an extra hole made in my belt.”

“Well, I never had to do that,” said Aunt Pearl.

“You're
still
thin,” said Hilda.

“Except for the backside,” Pearl said. “That was pretty small, too, until I had a baby.”

Frances tried to imagine Aunt Pearl pregnant. She had been pregnant with Simon. Her belly would swoop out in front, but Frances didn't see why her backside would get bigger. There was a towel lying on the bed and Frances dried her stomach and what she could reach of her back. She was only a little damp. Aunt Pearl took the towel, though, and dried the part of her back Frances couldn't reach. Then she rubbed powder on Frances's back. Her hand felt large.

“It's not so big,” said Hilda.

“Yes, it is,” said Pearl. “If I had another baby, I'd have a behind like an elephant.”

Frances began to get dressed. “I don't think so,” said Hilda vaguely, as if she was thinking about something and had lost track of the conversation.

Then Hilda said, “I gained most of the weight the first time,” which didn't make sense, because Frances was an only child.

“You were pregnant only once,” she said in her regular voice, no longer pretending she was a little girl.

Her mother turned toward the chair where she had left her clothes. She glanced at Frances but didn't answer for a moment. “I said I got big when I was pregnant,” she said.

“No, you didn't,” Frances said. “You said you got big the first time.”

“It's the same thing.”

Frances was annoyed. “That doesn't make sense. Why would you say it was the first time if there was only one time?”

“Well, that was the way I said it,” Hilda said, with a laugh, as if she often said silly things.

Frances knew the answer. Her mother had had a miscarriage. Simon had said once that her mother had had a miscarriage, one of the rare times they talked at any length. Frances had asked her mother what a miscarriage was, and her mother had said it was when a baby died before it was born. Frances didn't feel she could ask whether that had happened to Hilda. Now she knew it had. She thought it must have been before she was born. She'd remember if her mother had had a dead baby when she was around.

Her mother put on her underpants and fastened her brassiere, reaching behind her back and leaning over. Frances quickly finished putting on her clothes. Aunt Pearl was wearing her bathrobe. She said she had changed her mind and was going to take a shower, even though she'd already used all that powder. There was a snap and a thud from outside, and Aunt Pearl shook her head. “My hunter is home from the hill,” she said. Now Frances remembered that she had heard the screen door, and a voice, her father's voice. She couldn't remember what he had said to Uncle Mike. “Juice,” that was it. While Aunt Pearl was putting powder on her. He had offered Uncle Mike some juice.

The snap was Uncle Mike's slingshot, which he'd made the night before. There were insects in the cabin, big shadowy long-legged drifting insects that Hilda said were baby wasps. Her father swatted them with a newspaper, but they always seemed to float away before the folded paper hit the wall. When Aunt Pearl and Uncle Mike had arrived, Uncle Mike said he knew how to get rid of the baby wasps. He walked up and down outside the cabin until he found a forked stick. He broke off the prongs so it was the right size, and peeled off the bark. Hilda bought blueberries in boxes that came with rubber bands on top, and Mike cut a rubber band and fastened it to the forked stick, making a slingshot. He was still experimenting with ammunition. So far he was tearing up newspaper and making wads. He'd killed two baby wasps but said he could do better if he could make the slingshot work just right.

When Frances came out of the bedroom in her shorts and halter, Uncle Mike had made half a dozen wads of newspaper and he was shooting them at the corner near the ceiling, one after another. He stared upward and flopped his hair off his forehead by tossing his head back. He looked flushed. Frances didn't see a baby wasp. The wads of newspaper were falling onto the floor in the middle of the room. Simon was standing behind his father in the doorway.

“Pick those up, will you?” Mike called, gesturing with his head, then looking over his shoulder for a second so Simon would know he meant him. Simon knelt on one knee and swept the wads of paper into his hand. He dropped them onto the daybed where his father was sitting. Then he sat down, at a little distance from Mike. Frances's father was coming in from the kitchen. He was drinking a glass of orange juice.

“Simon,” he said, “can I offer you some juice?”

“No, thanks.”

“Frances is the lady of the house. She can pour juice for herself,” he went on. “One of the ladies of the house. But if she likes, I will pour her some anyway.”

He stopped and looked at her inquiringly and Frances shook her head. Then she changed her mind and went to get herself some juice. The sun had dried her so thoroughly she needed something wet. She stood in the doorway and watched Uncle Mike shoot wads of newspaper at the ceiling. She could hear the sound of the shower. Her mother, dressed, came out of the bedroom. “We'll eat soon, Nathan,” she said. “Those people are coming in for dessert.” She had invited two other couples. Frances thought they would probably bring a guitar or a banjo and sing.