Too Much Happiness (17 page)

“Don’t start kidding with me.”

He gathered the knives and put them back in the drawer, and sat.

“You think I’m dumb? You think I’m nervous?”

She took a big chance. She said, “I just think you haven’t ever done anything like this before.”

“Course I haven’t. You think I’m a murderer? Yeah, I killed them but I’m not a murderer.”

“There’s a difference,” she said.

“You bet.”

“I know what it’s like. I know what it’s like to get rid of somebody who has injured you.”

“Yeah?”

“I have done the same thing you did.”

“You never.” He pushed back his chair but did not stand.

“Don’t believe me if you don’t want to,” she said. “But I did it.”

“Hell you did. How’d you do it then?”

“Poison.”

“What are you talkin about? You make them drink some of this fuckin tea or what?”

“It wasn’t a them, it was a her. There’s nothing wrong with the tea. It’s supposed to prolong your life.”

“Don’t want my life prolonged if it means drinkin junk like that. They can find out poison in a body when it’s dead anyway.”

“I’m not sure that’s true of vegetable poisons. Anyway nobody would think to look. She was one of those girls who had rheumatic fever as a child and coasted along on it, can’t play sports or do anything much, always having to sit down and have a rest. Her dying would not be any big surprise.”

“What she ever done to you?”

“She was the girl my husband was in love with. He was going to leave me and marry her. He had told me. I had done everything for him. He and I were working on this house together, he was everything I had. We had not had any children because he didn’t want them. I learned carpentry and I was frightened to get up on ladders but I did it. He was my whole
life. Then he was going to kick me out for this useless whiner who worked in the registrar’s office. The whole life we’d worked for was to go to her. Was that fair?”

“How would a person get poison?”

“I didn’t have to get it. It was right in the back garden. Here. There was a rhubarb patch from years back. There’s a perfectly adequate poison in the veins of rhubarb leaves. Not the stalks. The stalks are what we eat. They’re fine. But the thin little red veins in the big rhubarb leaves, they’re poisonous. I knew about this, but I have to confess I didn’t know exactly what it would take to be effective so what I did was more in the nature of an experiment. Various things were lucky for me. First, my husband was away at a symposium in Minneapolis. He might have taken her along, of course, but it was summer holidays and she was the junior who had to keep the office going. Another thing, though, she might not have been absolutely on her own, there might have been another person around. And moreover, she might have been suspicious of me. I had to assume that she did not know I knew, and would still think of me as a friend. She had been entertained at my house, we were friendly. I had to count on my husband’s being the kind of person who delays everything and who would tell me to see how I took it but not yet tell her he had done so. So then you say, Why get rid of her? He might still have been thinking both ways?

“No. He would have kept her on somehow. And even if he didn’t our life was poisoned by her. She poisoned my life so I had to poison hers.

“I baked two tarts. One had the poison veins in it and one didn’t. Of course I marked the one that didn’t. I drove down to the university and got two cups of coffee and went to her office. Nobody there but her. I told her I’d had to come into town and as I was passing the university grounds I saw this nice little bakery my husband was always praising for their coffee and their baked goods, so I dropped in and bought a couple of tarts and
two cups of coffee. Thinking of her all alone when the rest of them got to go on their holidays and me all alone with my husband gone to Minneapolis. She was sweet and grateful. She said it was very boring for her there and the cafeteria was closed so you had to go over to the science building for coffee and they put hydrochloric acid in it. Ha-ha. So we had our little party.”

“I hate rhubarb,” he said. “It wouldn’t of worked with me.”

“It did with her. I had to take a chance that it would work fast, before she realized what was wrong and had her stomach pumped. But not so fast she would associate it with me. I had to be out of the way and so I was. The building was deserted and so far as I know to this day nobody saw me arrive or leave. Of course I knew some back ways.”

“You think you’re smart. You got away scot-free.”

“But so have you.”

“What I done wasn’t so underhanded as what you done.”

“It was necessary to you.”

“You bet it was.”

“Mine was necessary to me. I kept my marriage. He came to see that she wouldn’t have been any good anyway. She’d have got sick on him, almost certainly. She was just the type. She’d have been nothing but a burden to him. He saw that.”

“You better not of put nothing in them eggs,” he said. “You did you’ll be sorry.”

“Of course I didn’t. I wouldn’t want to. It’s not something you’d go around doing regularly. I don’t actually know anything about poison, it was just by chance I had that one little piece of information.”

He stood up so suddenly that he knocked over the chair he’d been sitting on. She noticed there was not much wine left in the bottle.

“I need the keys to the car.”

She couldn’t think for a moment.

“Keys to the car. Where’d you put them?”

It could happen. As soon as she gave him the keys it could happen. Would it help her to tell him she was dying of cancer? How stupid. It wouldn’t help at all. Cancer death in the future would not keep her from talking today.

“Nobody knows what I’ve told you,” she said. “You are the only person I’ve told.”

A fat lot of good all that might do. The whole advantage she had presented to him had probably gone right over his head.

“Nobody knows yet,” he said, and she thought, Thank God. He’s on the right track. He does realize. Does he realize?

Thank God maybe.

“The keys are in the blue teapot.”

“Where? What the fuck blue teapot?”

“At the end of the counter—the lid got broken, so we used it to just throw things in—”

“Shut up. Shut up or I’ll shut you up for good.” He tried to stick his fist in the blue teapot but it would not go in. “Fuck, fuck, fuck,” he cried, and he turned the teapot over, and banged it on the counter so that not only the car keys and house keys and various coins and a wad of old Canadian Tire money fell out on the floor, but pieces of blue pottery hit the boards.

“With the red string on them,” she said faintly.

He kicked things about for a moment before he picked the proper keys up.

“So what are you going to say about the car?” he said. “You sold it to a stranger. Right?”

The import of this did not come to her for a moment. When it did, the room quivered. “Thank you,” she said, but her mouth was so dry she was not sure any sound came out. It must have, though, for he said, “Don’t thank me yet.

“I got a good memory,” he said. “Good long memory. You make that stranger look nothin like me. You don’t want them goin into graveyards diggin up dead bodies. You just remember, a word outta you and there’ll be a word outta me.”

She kept looking down. Not stirring or speaking, just looking at the mess on the floor.

Gone. The door closed. Still she didn’t move. She wanted to lock the door but she couldn’t move. She heard the engine starting, then die. What now? He was so jumpy, he’d do everything wrong. Then again, starting, starting, turning over. The tires on the gravel. She walked trembling to the phone and found that he had told the truth; it was dead.

Beside the phone was one of their many bookcases. This one held mostly old books, books that had not been opened for years. There was
The Proud Tower
. Albert Speer. Rich’s books.

A Celebration of Familiar Fruits and Vegetables: Hearty and Elegant Dishes and Fresh Surprises
, assembled, tested, and created by Bett Underhill.

Once they had got the kitchen finished Nita had made the mistake for a while of trying to cook like Bett. For a rather short while, because it turned out that Rich did not want to be reminded of all that fuss, and she herself had not enough patience for so much chopping and simmering. But she had learned a few things that surprised her. Such as the poisonous aspects of certain familiar and generally benign plants.

She should write to Bett.

Dear Bett, Rich is dead and I have saved my life by becoming you.

What does Bett care that her life was saved? There’s only one person really worth telling.

Rich. Rich. Now she knows what it is to really miss him. Like the air sucked out of the sky.

She should walk down to the village. There was a police office in the back of the Township Hall.

She should get a cell phone.

She was so shaken, so deeply tired, she could hardly stir a foot. She had first of all to rest.

·  ·  ·

She was wakened by a knocking on her still unlocked door. It was a policeman, not the one from the village but one of the provincial traffic police. He asked if she knew where her car was.

She looked at the patch of gravel where it had been parked.

“It’s gone,” she said. “That’s where it was.”

“You didn’t know it was stolen? When did you last look out and see it?”

“It must have been last night.”

“The keys were left in it?”

“I suppose they must have been.”

“I have to tell you it’s been in a bad accident. A one-car accident just this side of Wallenstein. The driver rolled it down into the culvert and totalled it. And that’s not all. He’s wanted for a triple murder. That’s the latest we heard, anyway. Murder in Mitchellston. You were lucky you didn’t run into him.”

“Was he hurt?”

“Killed. Instantly. Serves him right.”

There followed a kindly stern lecture. Leaving keys in the car. Woman living alone. These days you never know.

Never know.

Face

I am convinced that my father looked at me, stared at me, saw me, only once. After that, he could take for granted what was there.

In those days they didn’t let fathers into the glare of the theater where babies were born, or into the room where the women about to give birth were stifling their cries or suffering aloud. Fathers laid eyes on the mothers only after they were cleaned up and conscious and tucked up under pastel blankets in the ward, or in the semi-private or private rooms. My mother had a private room, as became her status in the town, and just as well, actually, seeing the way things turned out.

I don’t know whether it was before or after his first look at my mother that my father stood outside the window of the nursery for his first glimpse of me. I rather think it was after, and that when she heard his steps outside her door and crossing her room, she heard the anger in them but did not know yet what had caused it. After all, she had borne him a son, which was presumably what all men wanted.

I know what he said. Or what she told me he said.

“What a chunk of chopped liver.”

Then, “You don’t need to think you’re going to bring that into the house.”

One side of my face was—is—normal. And my entire body was normal from toes to shoulders. Twenty-one inches was my length, eight pounds five ounces my weight. A strapping male infant, fair skinned though probably still red from my unremarkable recent journey.

My birthmark not red, but purple. Dark in my infancy and early childhood, fading somewhat as I got older, but never fading to a state of inconsequence, never ceasing to be the first thing you notice about me, head-on, or are shocked to see if you have come at me from the left, or clean, side. It looks as if someone has dumped grape juice or paint on me, a big serious splash that does not turn to driblets till it reaches my neck. Though it does skirt my nose pretty well, after dousing one eyelid.

“It makes the white of that eye look so lovely and clear” was one of the idiotic though pardonable things my mother would say, in the hope of making me admire myself. And an odd thing happened. Sheltered as I was, I almost believed her.

Of course my father could not do anything to prevent my coming home. And of course my presence, my existence, made a monstrous rift between my father and mother. Though it is hard for me to believe there had not always been some rift, some incomprehension at least, or chilly disappointment.

My father was the son of an uneducated man who owned a tannery and then a glove factory. Prosperity was ebbing as the twentieth century progressed, but the big house was still there, the cook and the gardener. My father went to college, joined a fraternity, had what was referred to as a high old time, entered the insurance business when the glove factory went under. He was as popular around our town as he had been at college. A good golfer, an excellent sailor. (I have not mentioned that we lived on the cliffs above Lake Huron, in the Victorian house my grandfather had built facing the sunset.)

At home my father’s most vivid quality was a capacity for hating and despising. In fact those two verbs often went together. He hated and despised certain foods, makes of automobile, music, manners of speech and modes of dress, radio comedians and later on television personalities, as well as the usual assortment of races and classes it was customary to hate and despise (though perhaps not so thoroughly as he did) in his day. In fact most of his opinions would have found no argument outside our house, in our town, with his sailing companions, or his old fraternity brothers. It was his vehemence, I think, that brought out an uneasiness that could also amount to admiration.

Calls a spade a spade. That was what was said of him.

Of course a production like myself was an insult he had to face every time he opened his own door. He took breakfast alone and did not come home for lunch. My mother ate those meals with me and part of her dinner also, the rest of dinner with him. Then I think there was some sort of row about this, and she sat through my meal with me but ate with him.