Mulch (9 page)

“Oh, hi,” she said, recognizing the calm face beneath the hood. It was Nora, mysterious Nora, with whom she had not spoken since the cocktail party at Eric and Jan’s when they first moved in. Louise felt unaccountably nervous. The smoky woman. The woman that men liked so well.

“Louise.” Voice warm and lilting. Gray eyes irritatingly beautiful and unlined, although she appeared to be in her early forties like Louise. “I’m so glad I found you. When I rang your bell no one answered.” She tilted her head back and looked at the sky. Her hood fell off her dark, straight hair.
Then she moved close to Louise. “Rain’s stopped. D’you want to try sitting on a log out in your backyard?” She pointed to Louise’s supersaturated woods.

“Wouldn’t you rather go inside?” asked Louise. “It’s so … chilly out here.”

The big eyes studied Louise seriously. “Not really. I would always rather be outside, with the squirrels and birds.”

“I’m dressed for it, I guess,” conceded Louise, leading the way, clumping down the slight decline to a large log. The termites that had once feasted on it had contributed to making it a good seat. Nora would have a good view of squirrels here: They were working furiously, cleaning and burying oak nuts for winter.

“How about this?” asked Louise, and plopped down.

“Perfect,” said Nora, smiling. “We’re right in the spirit of Robert Frost.” She settled her body down gracefully, then drew cigarettes and matches from a pocket and languidly lit up. Louise noticed she didn’t inhale much; could she be smoking just for the effect? And how could she smoke if she were such a nature lover?

For a moment Nora said nothing. Then she turned her gray eyes on Louise and said, “I see you’ve had a contractor doing things to the house.”

“Yes, a very
slow
contractor. He finally finished renovating the guest bathroom before Bill and I died of old age.”

Nora chuckled. “We could tell from the things you put out to the curb.”

“I’ll show it to you if you like.” Her voice was not enthusiastic. At the moment, nothing interested Louise less than her hard-won remodeling job.

“And you’ve populated your woods with the most wonder-fill-looking plants.”

Louise took a side wise glance at Nora’s serene countenance. How unruffled the woman appeared, in contrast to Louise’s churning inner discontent. “I didn’t know if you’d noticed all the activity. I’ve just been trying to achieve—oh, that Japanese thing with near distance.” She opened her hands on her lap. “I think, however, I’ve done enough this fall.” That was surely an understatement.

Nora’s cigarette was now at rest in her graceful hand, like a small, magic wand. Her bearing, as she sat on the termite-ravaged log, was as royal as a queen’s. She turned her serene gaze again toward Louise. “I know you’ve been terribly busy, Louise, and done wonderful things. But are you happy here?”

Louise, who thought she had composed herself against domestic disorder, erratic contractors, closet putrefaction, the onset of empty-nest syndrome, and the psychic anguish of moving, looked for a moment at the poet sitting beside her on the log.

Then she burst into tears.

J
ANIE SNEAKED QUIETLY OUT THE REC ROOM
door, closing it soundlessly behind her. Leaning against the house near the door was her bamboo walking stick, one her father had found for her and neatened up by cutting off its small branches with pruning scissors. She grasped it firmly and took off, loping through the woods that were her yard and down the street toward the nearest park. She left behind parents talking money. Specifically, Martha’s college costs. By the time Janie
went to school, think how much time they’d have to spend “talking finances,” as they called it. By then, Martha would be a senior and the family probably would be penniless. They wouldn’t sit there and tell comfortable little jokes to each other while they did their figuring. They would probably look grim and resentful, the way poor people always looked when they discussed their problems on TV shows. Janie was afraid of being poor. Maybe she had better get an after-school job; her mom didn’t seem in a hurry to go to work. Having peeked at Martha’s quarterly tuition bill, Janie didn’t want to be the one to bring the family down.

She entered the park, walking quickly, enjoying the smell of rotting leaves and the gathering damp of night. She kept her stick at the ready. Then a tree root tripped her and she had to grasp a nearby scrub tree to keep from falling. “Clumsy,” she condemned herself, and slowed down. She was walking in what she liked to call her “canyon.” It was a narrow valley with a little creek running through. Next to the stream was a well-worn trail that had felt the tread of the feet of schoolchildren bound for Sylvan Valley Elementary. On either side of the park were lines of houses built on top of ridges.

Janie loved to walk here. She couldn’t believe people lived in glass houses and didn’t even pull the curtains at night. Well, some people did, but a lot didn’t. She didn’t know everyone yet; sometimes she and Melanie walked around on weekends or after school, and Melanie of course knew everything about everyone. But when Janie walked at night like this by herself, she often crept up through backyards and peeked in windows. Once when she did this, she met a chained dog in the backyard, a big dog who magically remained silent. A large, silent,
golden dog. Rebuking her with its silence. Saying (silently), “Don’t you know Sylvan Valley people do not reveal their normal curiosity about their neighbors? So what are
you
doing here, you misfit?”

She must not appear to be a threat to anyone, not even a dog. At this thought, she brandished her stick like a sword and leaped forward at an invisible foe and warned: “En garde!” Then, dropping her pose, she sauntered on. Maybe she would fill out like her sister, Martha, and then people would notice her more. Dogs might even bark at her.

Janie noticed that some houses had little additions, some had great big additions, while others had separate buildings similar to the one at her house. Her mother was now using this addition as her writing studio, which meant Janie rarely could entertain friends there any more. Instead she had to bring them into her bedroom, which wasn’t nearly as cool. This had all happened after her mom talked with Nora, Melanie’s mother. Although Janie liked Nora (“Call me Nora, Jane, and I’ll call you Jane,” she had said in that low voice of hers) she noticed that Nora was another housewife who didn’t go to work. She wrote poetry, and Melanie said her mother got paid for it, too, but not even minimum wage if one counted up all the time it took. And now Nora had influenced her mother not to work but write instead, which was a little embarrassing, because Janie worried that her mother would never get published. So that left two of the women in the cul-de-sac as housewives who wrote, which was kind of funky. Secretly, it’s what Janie could see herself doing when she was married. Secretly, she would like to be a Shakespeare or at least an Elizabeth Barrett Browning.

But the rest of the mothers had jobs with real salaries, like Mrs. Mougey, who was becoming a kind of friend of Janie’s. She raised money to help needy children in the world, and probably earned lots of money, which always meant the family could more easily pay for things like college. She thought that type of job would make you feel good about yourself, although it was giving
Mrs. Mougey
more gray hair. She worked so hard, coming home late almost every night, leaving her husband alone all the time in the evening. Janie had a perfect view of their house out of her bedroom window.

She was torn. If only she didn’t have to worry about money. Then she felt guilty: She was well aware of the homeless when the family drove through Washington. They made her ashamed to drive by, a passenger in a big, new car, wearing clean, new clothes. She knew her family would never suffer like that, and wondered how God figured out what was fair for people.

She saw the outlines of a big tree ahead. This was where the trail curved sharply up. Here she had a good view of one of those outbuildings, with a man working inside. A saw whined faintly. Janie scrambled up the small incline for a closer look, the leaves crunching like cornflakes. She crossed the yard. The man, who seemed very large, slowly moved his body with the saw, with an occasional forward thrust as if he had hit an easier spot in the wood. The saw’s whine rose to a higher pitch when he hit those easier spots. Her father always talked longingly of having a saw so he could make his own furniture, but she knew somehow that this was just talk. Her dad was more of a reader than a carpenter. She came a few steps closer, then realized the saw had been turned off. Had he heard her? She froze. He
was right there on the other side of the glass, blond, with thick glasses, wearing jeans and a big plaid lumberjack shirt like one her dad wore. In his hand was some kind of a planing tool, which he grasped like a weapon. He slowly turned around and stared at her, his eyes blue and dangerous.

She was visible! He could see her blond hair, her blue eyes, her skinniness, her jeans jacket, her tan Levi’s, her dirty tennis shoes … he could see it all, she was sure. If only she had been a brunette, he wouldn’t have been able to see her! Dropping her stick in terror, she turned and stumbled out of the yard, tripped and sprawled down the shallow incline, and landed in the path.

She pulled herself up to a sitting position. “Oooh,” she groaned, and gently touched her face. Then a light shone on her. She looked up and there he was, standing motionless on the edge of the yard. She put a hand up to shield her eyes from the glare.

His voice was low and threatening. “My, what a pretty girl you are. But this is the last time I want to see you hanging around my house. You understand?”

Janie mumbled, “I … I understand. I’m really sorry. I won’t ever do it again.”

“And take your stick with you. Here it comes. Heads up.” He threw it down at her and she brought a hand up to catch it but missed, and it caromed against her body, then flipped out into the darkness.

The man and the light had disappeared. Limbs trembling, she heaved herself up and ran back on the trail the way she had come, out of the park and down the street to home, leaving her stick behind.

She stood in her own backyard, panting for breath, her mouth and throat dry, her body cold but wet with perspiration. She slipped up the timbered steps leading to the patio and watched through the expanse of glass windows her parents sitting at the dining room table. Her father’s arm was around her mother, and she knew this meant that later they would probably make love. If he had been sitting without touching, it would have meant one or the other had given some signal that they weren’t going to make love that night. She had figured this out recently. And the rest of the world could figure it out too, because it was all right there for them to see. Her family was just like the others—no curtains drawn—families all over this neighborhood were living in fishbowls! No wonder kids were window peepers.

She retreated to the other side of the house, coming in through the rec room door, then quickly retired to the bathroom and locked the door. She looked at her face. The scratches were on one side only; she pulled her long, curly blond hair over the area. She was pleased to see that not only did it hide the scratches but it made her look very pretty, actually very grown-up, like that blonde in an ancient movie with hair over one eye and a lisp. Her eyes, for another thing, were still wild with excitement. The eyelashes were like little curtains sweeping the edges of her cheeks. Very becoming, she decided. Then she shuddered, remembering the man. Hoping she would never meet him again.

“Darling, are you taking a bath?” Her mother was at the door of the bathroom. “I thought you were still doing your homework.”

“All finished, Ma,” Janie said in a breezy voice. She
thought guiltily of the array of open books in her room. Yet any proper investigating mother would know that a person as neat as Janie would never leave them like that if she truly had finished her homework.

She turned on the water to almost the hottest range. She took off her torn and dirty clothes and sneakers and carefully bundled them to wash later. Her mother would ask too many questions if she found them, so they would go temporarily into Janie’s superhiding place.

The bath was now quite full of steaming water. Into it went Janie’s thin body. She lay back and put her blond head on the back of the tub.

“Gosh, this is living,” she said to herself, and closed her eyes.