Postcards (19 page)

Mernelle and Ray MacWay sat in the backseat like pillars, each conscious of the heat of the other’s body and hearing, not Mrs. Greenslit’s waves of talk, but the sound of breathing. Over the mildewed upholstery Mernelle could smell soap, shampoo, pinewood, warm skin, Dentyne chewing gum. Her stomach growled and she hated it, willed it to shrivel.

In the kitchen a bumblebee that had mistaken the gap between the screen door and its casing for nirvana flew at the windows, seeking to enter again the familiar world, visible and near, but walled off by a malignant force.

Mernelle was back again in a week, banging the screen door against the house as she backed into the kitchen. She carried a cardboard circle with a store cake covered with coconut as thick as fur. The rumble of the exhaust in the dooryard stopped, car doors slammed.

‘Happy Mother’s Day, Ma. It’s me and Ray. Mrs. Greenslit’s here too.’ She hugged Jewell around the waist.

‘Well, fill me in on the news,’ said Jewell, startled at the way Mernelle had changed, guilty at how little she had worried about her. Mernelle wore a long-skirted blue suit and a pink rayon blouse. She had on high heels and her face was made up. Her black hair cut and crimped in a permanent wave like a helmet of sheep’s wool. She looked taller, even more gawky, but there was a sureness in her that estranged her from the old child’s life.

‘Tell you quick before Ray and Mrs. Greenslit comes in, Mr. Trueblood wouldn’t marry us.’ Murmuring, half-whispering. ‘He said it was a publicity stunt and he wouldn’t marry us until we’d known each other for a year. He said “quick courtship, quick divorce.” Ray gave him a swat and he called the sheriff. So we all had to go down to the sheriffs office in Billytown, and Mrs. Greenslit busy writing it all up. Well, another story come out in the
Trumpet
and we got all these letters from other ministers who will marry us, including one up at Rouses Point that done the funeral service for Mrs. Greenslit’s father when he died. So I guess we will go up there. Ray wants to see her father’s tombstone anyway. So we’re going up there today and want you to come. Mrs. Greenslit will bring you back. Ray and me is going on a honeymoon to Montreal. The
Trumpet
is paying for some of it. Ray don’t like them to pay for it all. He’s got some money saved up.’

Jewell put on the kettle for coffee. The commotion in the kitchen seemed immense. Mrs. Greenslit, arranging paper plates, putting out plastic forks and knives. ‘Hello, hello, hello! Here we are,’ she cried. Mernelle shuffled through the chipped dishes, picking out the four nicest. ‘There’s ice cream, too. Strawberry. Butter pecan. That’s the new flavor. You’ll love it.’

Ray came in carrying a waxed tissue twist and held it out to Jewell. ‘The
Trumpet
didn’t buy them,’ he said, and smiled. His stiff face broke
in half, showed bad teeth. There were a dozen tea roses the color of boiled shrimp. She unwrapped the paper, as green as new popple leaves, filled a cream jug with water. ‘Been a good many years since anybody gave me flowers. Flowers from the florist, that is,’ remembering Mernelle’s hot bunches of daisies and vetch, violets with half-inch stems, wilting lilacs.

‘I’m happy I can do it,’ said Ray and sat down beside Mernelle. Mernelle handed Jewell a package in flowered paper. She made a fuss over the prettiness of the paper, smoothing and setting it aside. There were two pairs of nylons, 60 gauge, 15 denier, ‘Piquant Beige’ on the label. Eating the cake Jewell looked at Ray from under her eyelids, looked at his forgettable face, his thin arms, his hungry eyes. She thought with melancholy of roguish Dub, of handsome Loyal, lost or stunted in their lives while this one got ahead. Ray cut more cake, Mernelle doting on the sawing motion of his hand. The frosting hung off their forks. Mrs. Greenslit jabbered. Jewell felt how fierce she had grown in her solitude. But she smiled and said, in her kindest voice, the cake was a treat, said she would ride with them up to Rouses Point for the wedding. And went to the attic with Mernelle to find a certain silk handkerchief edged in handmade lace.

‘It was your father’s mother’s when she was married, and she had it down from someone else. I believe it came from Ireland. It’s very old.’ They sat in the dusty attic chairs in front of the trunk with its freight of old schoolbooks, awkward clothing, a ruined buffalo robe, family papers and photographs, a parasol in tatters.

‘I don’t suppose there’s anything I can tell you that you don’t already know,’ she said. ‘There’s things you’ll learn that nobody can tell you.’

‘Well,’ said Mernelle. ‘It’s not that I know so much but that I trust Ray. I know he’ll never hurt me. I’ve never seen
him
loose his temper.’ Her voice vibrated. It was pitched lower as if she had been singing for hours every day. ‘So, I mean, I guess I didn’t grow up on a farm for nothing. But there’s something I wanted to know for a long time.’ Her voice wheedled. ‘About Mrs. Nipple. What it was about Mrs. Nipple and Toot you never would tell me?’

‘My Lord, that’s not anything to talk about now. Supposed to be a happy occasion and that morbid story’s enough to depress an angel.
It would spoil your day and poor Mrs. Nipple would roll over in her grave. Spoil my day, too, digging that up. Let’s go on down and have a happy time of it.’

‘It must be something pretty awful,’ said Mernelle, half sulky. She’d been up to plenty, thought Jewell.

‘You know, I’d say it was. Now I’m going to go put on my new nylons and see if I can’t show up the bride. And there’s something else I want to give you. The money from the farm that was left after the bank and all was paid out, I divided it up equal so’s me, you and Dub and Loyal all get a share. It’s not much, comes to two hundred each, but it’s something. If I was you, I’d just put it aside in the bank or something, don’t say nothing to Ray, not that he’s not a nice fellow, just put it aside for your own little nest egg. You can’t tell, you might want it someday.’

‘Ma, that money’s to keep you. Ray and me’ll make out o.k.’

‘Don’t worry about me. I may have grey hair, but there’s life in the old girl yet. Ronnie been teaching me to drive so I can get a job. You ought to know how to drive soon’s you can, Mernelle. It’ll make an awful difference in your life.’

‘Ma, we don’t even have a car. We been going around with that reporter woman, Mrs. Greenslit, and if we ever get rid of her I’ll be so thankful I won’t mind crawling on my hands and knees. But Ray’s saving up. I got to get a job too. What are you going to try for?’

‘In fact, I already got two jobs. It’s funny. Ronnie’s been taking me over and picking me up as part of the driving lessons. If you’d come yesterday you wouldn’t of found me here. I was working down to the cannery. It’s just cutting up vegetables that come in on the trucks, carrots all week. They say they get everything, broccoli, celery, beans. In the evening I been knitting stockings for the Ski Shop or whatever they call it, Downhill Shop. Long stockings with a fancy design knit in the leg and contrast color cuffs. I made a pair with red valentine hearts all over like that hat I made you when you were in the eighth grade, and they went crazy over them. The two women that run the place, Jo-Jo, the young one, says she is taking the valentine stockings down to New York. Thinks they’ll be good sellers. It seems funny to be knitting wool stockings in summer, but that’s how you
get the stock built up, they said. Anyway, it’s enough for me to make out on pretty good. Where are you going to live?’

‘We found an apartment. Can’t afford our own house for a long time. Big old place down by the lake, this old house that’s divided up into eight apartments. There’s real big windows. It’ll take just yards and yards to make curtains, but I don’t want to leave them bare.’

‘Just dye some sheets the color you want and hem them up. Cover the biggest windows in the state. Listen, Mernelle, you keep this money to yourself. In case you ever have an emergency. Or it can be a start toward education money. For your kids.’

But Mernelle told Ray MacWay on the way up to Rouses Point, whispering in his ear, while up front Mrs. Greenslit talked about her father’s tombstone and the armless trucker. Jewell saw the woman was a miserable driver, treading on the brake for every curve, forgetting to shift down on hills until the car bucked.

21
The Drive

ONCE RONNIE GOT her through the tricks of the clutch and gear shifting, it seemed she’d been driving for years. She had a feel for it, and by August her license was in her new brown purse and she ventured onto roads she’d never traveled. Her fear was that the car would stall on a hill in traffic and she’d hold up the parade while she tried to start it again, would flood the engine, forget the brake and roll down backwards into an ambulance.

At first she stayed on valley highways, but after a few weeks began to pick mountain roads where she could lean into the corners or nurse the old heap up the slope to a pull-off at the top and take in the panorama through her new eyeglasses. Continuity broke: when she
drove, her stifled youth unfurled like ribbon pulled from a spool.

There was the idea of what outsiders saw in ‘views’ – when you went somewhere you wanted to see something, when you’d been driving with your eyes on the road for hours, you wanted to let them stretch out to the boundaries of the earth, the farther the better. All her life she had taken the tufted line of the hills against the sky as fixed, but saw now that the landscape changed, rolled out as far as the roads went, never repeating itself in its arrangement of cliffs and water and trees. View was something more than the bulk of hills and opening valleys, more than sheets of riffled light.

When she turned the ignition key and steered the car out of the drive, the gravel crunching deliciously under the tires, she went dizzy with power for the first time in her adult life. The radio played ‘Cherry Pink and Apple Blossom White,’ and she was glad. She felt she was young and in a movie when she drove. She had never guessed at the pleasure of choosing which turns and roads to take, where to stop. Nor the rushing air buffeting her face and whipping her iron hair as though it were child’s hair. As though they had given her the whole country for her own. Did men, she wondered, have this feeling of lightness, of wiping out all troubles when they got into their cars or trucks? Their faces did not show any special pleasure when they drove. Men understood nothing of the profound sameness, week after week, after month of the same narrow rooms, treading the same worn footpaths to the clothesline, the garden. You soon knew it all by heart. Your mind closed in to the problems of cracked glass, feeling for pennies in linty coat pockets, sour milk. You couldn’t get away from troubles. They came dragging into the mirror with you, fanning over the snow, filled the dirty sink. Men couldn’t imagine women’s lives, they seemed to believe, as in a religion, that women were numbed by an instinctive craving to fill the wet mouths of babies, predestined to choose always the petty points of life on which to hang their attention until at last all ended and began with the orifices of the body. She had believed this herself. And wondered in the blue nights if what she truly felt now was not the pleasure of driving but being cast free of Mink’s furious anger. He had crushed her into a corner of life.

Coming back from her journeys, from seeing houses set in a hundred
positions, some beside the road, some back in a knot of trees like a brooch on a hill’s breast, her own house showed up as a slatternly lean of paintless clapboards, the porch slipping away like melting butterscotch.

She saw the landscape changing. Ronnie was right. Everything was changing. Brush growing up. She was critical when the road crews cut overhanging limbs from the maples. Tears streamed when they cut the trees themselves to widen the highway, hardtop now all the way to the Post Road. The village grew unaccountably, men sawed down the yellowing elms, tore up stumps with great corkscrew machines. The street spread like unpenned water to the edges of the buildings. Metal roofs glittered. At the dump, heaps of broken slates invited potshots from rat shooters, then sent the bullets ricocheting back. The town sold off the timber in the watershed above the valley and for two years endured the nasal moaning of chain saws. The clear-cut left the hills as bare as the side of a scraped hog. The old common became a park with walks and concrete benches already crumbling in their second spring. A War monument, an awkward artillery gun plugged with more concrete, pointed at the Methodist Church. It peeled to rusted metal in a year. She hated the way boys spun their bikes on a bare dirt patch where the old bandstand had teetered, its fretwork a tease to look at.

New people. New people owned the general store, started new stores, turned barns into inns and woodwork shops. They moved into farmhouses hoping to fit their lives into the rooms, to fit their shoes to the stair treads. She thought they were like insects casting off tight husks, vulnerable for a little while until the new chitin hardened.

The local people who used to be good at something worked out now. Robby Gordy, who made a maple chair of simple but satisfying shape, strong as iron, worked in the new tennis ball factory. Yet this young fellow, Hubbardkindle, moved up from Rhode Island and began sawing out clumpy pine chairs. Charged an arm and a leg for them and got it. He had a clever sign in the shape of a chair that hung out front, put ads in the paper. You had to know Robby Gordy to know he made anything at all.