The Cape Ann (22 page)

When I found Earl Samson, I would tell him that his love had moved to Chicago and was on the radio there. It shouldn’t be too difficult for him to find her. Everyone in Chicago must listen to her program.

A dim light shone from the kitchen door, beyond the little dining room: Mama had left the bathroom light burning so I could find my way. I needed to go, but I lay there for a long time, putting it off, not wanting to cross the dark living room and dining room. When I could hold it no longer, and knowing Mama would spank me if I wet Aunt Betty’s couch, I threw off the cover and scurried as fast as I could, looking neither left nor right, but heading straight for the light.

In the bathroom, I hooked the door and clambered up onto the toilet. Cold against my thighs, the seat momentarily froze the contents of my bladder. After a minute, it thawed, and I relieved myself and sprinted back to the couch, noting from the corner of my eye that the door to the tiny bedroom off the kitchen was closed. No light shone beneath it. Mama was asleep on the cot. It must be very late.

Back on the prickly couch, under the crazy quilt, I hugged myself and studied the night sky outside. If Papa was still awake, he could see the same stars I saw. Wasn’t that unbelievable after a hundred-mile trip? But it was true.

I’m looking real hard at the big star just above the chimney of the German Woman’s house. Are you looking at that same star, Papa?

Then I noticed that lights were glowing behind the drawn shades in a back room in the German Woman’s house. She must be reading, or maybe she was braiding rugs. Her windows were open. The nearest lighted one was maybe thirty-five feet from where I lay. The night was utterly silent. I heard the German Woman cough behind her shade. I fell asleep.

When I woke at dawn, her shades were already up. She was a go-getter like Mama. In the kitchen and back hall, I heard Mama’s feet on the linoleum: tap, tap, tap to the kitchen sink to run water into kettles, which pinged as they struck the lip of the sink; tap, tap, tap to the stove to set the kettles to heating; tap, tap to the back
hall, where she was scrubbing and rinsing laundry in a pair of galvanized tubs.

At home we had no place to do wash, so Mr. Borman came once a week and picked it up and brought it back later, except for items like my dresses, which Mama didn’t trust to Mrs. Borman. Those Mama did by hand in a basin. “I can’t wait till we have a place of our own, with a basement where I can do my own laundry. Think of it, Lark. We’ll have a Maytag like Grandma Browning’s, and lots of lines so we can hang the laundry in the basement in bad weather.”

Because she was always putting up indigent cousins from Sioux City or Fargo or Helena, and sometimes taking paid boarders as well, Grandma Browning had insisted on a Maytag. She spoke of it as her one extravagance. In addition to the Maytag, she had
two
rinse tubs, the first filled with hot water, the second with cold.

Aunt Betty didn’t have a Maytag. She had two galvanized tubs on a base that rolled around so she could bring the whole business into the kitchen in the winter. One tub was the washtub, and in this was standing a rippling washboard, on which Mama was scrubbing sheets. The other tub was the rinse tub, which must continually be emptied and refilled as the water grew soapy.

A hand-cranked wringer was attached first to the washtub, so most of the soapy water might be wrung from the laundry before it went into the rinse, and then to the rinse rub, so the clothes weren’t dripping wet when they dropped into the laundry basket.

Wrapping myself in the crazy quilt like an Indian chief, I hobbled in short steps to the kitchen, arranging myself on a chair at the table by the window. I saw Mama in the backyard, wiping the wire clotheslines with a rag dipped in gasoline, removing any grime or rust that might have collected on them. When she had cleaned them all, she tossed the rag in the old oil-drum incinerator out by the alley.

Garbed in one of her fancier housedresses, a red one with white marguerite daisies sprinkled on it, Mama began hanging sheets on the line. A bag of clothespins swung ahead of her as she worked. She filled her pocket with pins, and when she’d used them all, she refilled it from the bag. In the heavily dewed grass, her high-heeled pumps were getting wet. Smoothing the last sheet, pulling wrinkles from it, she returned to the house, tap-tap-tapping across the back hall.

“You look pretty, Mama. How come you’re wearing high heels to do the wash?”

“I want the neighbors to understand that the Browning sisters are not Okies or down-and-outers. We’re from good family.” She flounced across the kitchen, removed a kettle from the stove, carried it to the back hall, and dumped its contents into the washtub. Pausing in the doorway, she asked, “Did you know, Lark, that my great-great-grandmother—your great-great-great-grandmother—was a lady-in-waiting in the English Court?”

“What’s a lady-in-waiting?”

“I’m not sure, but it’s important.”

“What’s an English Court?”

“It’s where the king and queen live.”

“How do you know she was?”

“My grandmother told me. Granny was very fine herself, although they’d lost their money. You never knew her. She died before you were born. She had beautiful manners.”

What had brought all this on? I wondered. Aunt Betty and Uncle Stan must be in very dire straits, indeed. Setting the empty kettle down beside the sink, Mama began preparing a big, gray enamel coffee pot for the stove. Soon it was percolating, filling the little house with its perfume. Sunlight streamed across the faded linoleum, and Mama made me hot milk toast with a dash of cinnamon and sugar on top.

Waiting for lines full of wash to dry, Mama dusted, swept, and ran the carpet sweeper. Then, as the laundry reached damp-dry, she hauled it in by the basketload and set up the old, wooden ironing board in the kitchen by the stove. Now the house smelled of clean laundry and ironing.

When I wasn’t carrying trays to Aunt Betty or straightening up the kitchen drawers, Mama had me drawing water from the cistern beside the house and watering the scraggly, dry plantings around the front porch.

“And when you’ve given them all a good watering, you can pull out those weeds around the flowers.”

As I worked, I kept an eye on the German Woman’s house, hoping she wouldn’t appear. I wasn’t eager to cross paths with her. About one-thirty she emerged from the inner door, looked to see what I was at, said nothing, and settled herself in her rocker on the screened porch. Knitting needles commenced to click, but I could
feel her eyes on me. I worked hard, afraid she might criticize if I left a crabgrass root in the ground.

Before Mama came to fetch me for my nap, the German Woman called to me, “Ven you haf finished der, you can come ofer here unt do mine.”

I didn’t know what to say, so I said nothing. Did she mean what she said? Did she want me to come over and work in her yard? I didn’t want to find myself on the other side of the raspberry bushes encircling her backyard. Not ever. I pretended I hadn’t heard.

On my previous visits to Aunt Betty’s, there’d been no German Woman next door. A very old, bent-over woman with an ear trumpet had lived there. What had become of her? I wondered. She had skated around on ancient leather carpet slippers, but she hadn’t been rude or scary. She didn’t remind me of the witch in “Hansel and Gretel.”

After my nap, I was dispatched, protesting, to the German Woman’s, my arms loaded with meticulously ironed bed linens and, on top of these, wrapped neatly in waxed paper, a large slice of Mama’s famous spice cake with penuche frosting, which she had baked while I weeded.

“Tell her thank you very much,” Mama instructed me tersely.

I would rather have weeded for three days than return the sheets and pillow slips to the German Woman. But Mama was convinced that these compulsory social experiences were building my character and breaking down my shyness.

Now, here I was, smelling of Swan soap, dressed in my favorite sunsuit—a green-and-white-striped seersucker—and wearing fresh white anklets and my shoes that Sheila Grubb’s dog had gotten his sharp little teeth into, trudging down the street to the house next door. I would never have dreamed of walking on the German Woman’s grass, and there was no sidewalk running between the two houses.

There was a sidewalk leading from Aunt Betty’s porch to the street and another from the street to the German Woman’s door, where I found myself all too quickly. She was not seated in her rocker as earlier. I couldn’t let go of the linens to knock, so I called, putting my face to the screen, “Hello. I’ve brought your sheets. Hello. Are you home?”

The house was so still, I could hear a clock ticking in the living
room or what was presumably the living room. Again I called, “I’ve brought your sheets,” adding, “and a piece of spice cake.” My anxious heart and the ticking clock were all I could hear.

Then suddenly, soundlessly, she loomed in the inner doorway, tall and displeased, and if she were a child, I would have said, sly. What was there about me to which she had taken such an instant dislike? Why did she not want me at her door? I’d think she’d be happy to have her linens quickly returned and smelling so fine.

Unhooking the screen, she relieved me of my burden, informing me, “Dey are folted wrong. I vill haff to folt dem again.” She pressed her lips tightly together, rehooked the screen, and turned immediately away.

“Thank you very much,” I called after her. No response but the ticking clock. I stood rooted to the step. Finally I fled, dashing headlong. In the dusty street, I stopped and swung around, panting and staring at the small house, sheathed in shining white clapboard but looking dark and full of warning.

WEDNESDAY MORNING, EARLY, AUNT
Betty was very sick. I woke to see Mama hurrying to her room with a wet towel and a clean bowl.

“Stay in bed,” she told me.

I sat up, pulling the quilt around me. The sun was over the horizon, and the German Woman was out, moving slowly around her yard, plucking a dead blossom, straightening a stake, rooting up a dandelion, and, perhaps I imagined it, listening. Her tightly coined head seemed to incline slightly in our direction.

“I’m going to call the doctor,” Mama told her older sister.

“No,” Aunt Betty cried, beyond the green drape. “No. I won’t have him.”

“Because of the cost? Don’t be a fool.”

“I won’t see him,” my aunt screamed.

“What if this is uremic poisoning? You could die,” Mama warned her.

“I won’t see the doctor! I don’t have uremic poisoning. You get those ideas from Mama. A woman gets the least sick, Mama cries, ‘uremic poisoning.’ I’ll be fine. This happens all the time, and I’m not dead yet.”

“I’ll pay for the doctor.”

“No, no, no, no,” Aunt Betty screamed hysterically, and threw something which hit the wall, causing me to jump. Then she began to retch again, but there was nothing left to come up, and she simply made painful choking sounds. “If you call the doctor,” she sobbed, “you’ll never be my sister again.”

What
was
the matter with Aunt Betty? I wondered. She’d gotten very fat, it was true, but that didn’t make people sick, did it? When the stork brought the baby, how would she be able to take care of it if she didn’t get well? Mama had said the stork would be bringing the baby any day. How did Mama know that? Who had told her?

If Uncle Stan wasn’t making any money and they were practically starving, would they let Mama and me take the baby home and keep it until times got better? What was to become of them? Would they go to live on the poor farm? Surely they wouldn’t take the baby there.

Throwing off the quilt, I dressed myself in my sunsuit and pulled on my shoes and socks. The house still smelled of clean laundry, much of which sat in ironed, folded piles on the dining room table. In the kitchen, I buttered a slice of bread and carried it out to the back step. The step was wet with dew, but I sat down anyway.

If the stork came from the southeast, as he had in my dream, this would be a good place to watch for him. I watched the sky until my neck ached and the sun lay on top of the garage roof. Then I examined my hands, discovering with a pleasant shock that this was the third day in which I had not bitten my nails.

“Mama,” I called, racing through the house and into Aunt Betty’s bedroom, “Mama, my nails are growing.”

“Lark, get out of here,” Mama said, wringing out a washcloth. Aunt Betty had removed her nightie, and Mama was helping her wash herself. I stood staring at my aunt, who sat with her legs hanging over the edge of the bed.

There certainly was something wrong with her. Her stomach looked as if she’d swallowed a canning kettle. I’d never seen
anything so grotesque. The belly button was ready to pop right off and fall on the floor. What if Aunt Betty exploded? I agreed with Mama, we ought to call the doctor right away and find out what could be done. Maybe Aunt Betty needed to pass wind, as Grandma Browning would say. It was hardly any wonder she felt sick to her stomach all the time.

I backed out of the room and dropped onto the sofa, pulling the quilt over me. I could hear them in there.

“Have you told the folks that you don’t have any money?”

“No. And don’t you dare tell them.”

“Do you know how mad Mama would be if she found out how you’re living?”

“My loyalty’s to my husband,” Aunt Betty replied stiffly.

“What kind of husband expects his pregnant wife to starve rather than ask her family for help?”

“Stan never told me I couldn’t ask. But it would kill him. You don’t understand. Wait’ll you see him, Arlene. He’s not the man he was when he was working for salary.”

Uncle Stan used to be a bookkeeper over in Mankato, at a big implement dealer there. He drove back and forth to work from Morgan Lake because it was cheaper living in the smaller town. But that dealer couldn’t afford to keep him on salary, so now he was on the road.

A sweet-natured man, Uncle Stan had a smiling, childlike way about him that made you want to protect him. I understood Aunt Betty’s silence.

But Mama sounded disgusted. “You’ve got a loyalty to this baby now, and don’t you forget it.”