Vinegar Hill

I
n the gray light of the kitchen, Ellen sets the table for supper, keeping the chipped plate back for herself before lowering the rest in turn. The plates are pink with yellow flowers twisting around the edges, and they glow between the pale frosted glasses, the stainless steel knives and forks, the plastic pitcher of milk. In the center of the table, the roast platter steams between the bowl of wrinkled peas, the loaf of sliced bread. Ellen wipes a water stain from the cupped palm of a spoon. Soon all the bright plates and glasses and flatware will be soiled, and she finds herself imagining how it must be to wait for that first hot splash of meat, the cold dribble of milk.

“Time to eat,” she calls down the narrow hallway to the living room, where the children and her husband and his parents are all watching TV. She gets the cloth napkins from the drawer and folds them into tall, peaked hats, something her mother always did when she wanted the table to look nice. The napkins are also pink, and they match the plates and the tablecloth, and come very close to matching the curtains, which are drawn tightly closed. The yard beyond stretches plain and white into the next yard and the next,
the single scrawny pine along the lot line stiff with ice. When Ellen walks home from work late in the afternoon, that tree reminds her of an animal, the way it stands without the slightest movement, corralled by the neat rows of houses lining the block.

The children straggle in and sit twisting in their chairs, raising the cloth napkin hats to their heads, giggling at their game. James and his parents shake out the hats, and James smooths his across his lap, his shoulders firm against the back of his chair. Ellen sets a saucer of margarine beside him, and abruptly the color seems too bright, like cheddar cheese or sweet acorn squash. She fights a vague queasy feeling; when James's father begins Grace, she closes her eyes, speaking each word clearly in her mind, trying to concentrate. It's one of the first prayers she ever learned, chanting along with her mother and sisters in the cozy heat of their farmhouse kitchen, the family cats brushing their ankles like silk. She remembers the rich odors of
mustripen
and sausage and thick bread pudding, the eager edge of hunger a deepening crease that ran from her chest to her stomach.

Bless us O Lord. These thy gifts
.

By the time she has finished praying, the serving bowls have already begun their slow start and stop around the table. The children look at her curiously; she quickly takes a piece of bread. James ladles peas onto his plate with a clatter that lets her know she has embarrassed him in front of his parents, in his parents' home. They eat without speaking, and it's hard to swallow without the gravy of conversation, the children's playful bickering, James's questions about her day, her own questions and his responses, the hollow overlappings of their words.

She watches his jaw as he chews his roast, the roast she has prepared for him, dry, the way he likes it. The motion of his jaw is steady and unconcerned; his lips are pinched tight over his teeth.
She thinks,
I have kissed those lips, I have pushed my tongue against those teeth
, and this thought fascinates and repels her. Amy asks for milk and Ellen fills her glass. Herbert's napkin slides to the floor and she tells him to pick it up. But her eyes are fixed to James's jaw, and she thinks about how strange it is that one small thing like a jaw or a look or a brush of a hand can become so much larger than it actually is, so large that it closes itself around you and squeezes until it is hard to find air.

It is November, and she can hear the wind moving over the walls of the house, stroking the windows, trying to coax its way past the curtains to blow the flowers from the napkins and plates, to muss the perfect leaves of the plastic plants that hang side by side above the sink. The house is filled with knickknacks—china angels, statues of saints, small glass animals with beady eyes—and each of them has to be dusted and the surface beneath polished with lemon oil, and then each has to be set back down precisely as it was before, the beady eyes staring in the same direction, the dust settling about it in the same design. The copper duck and goose Jell-O molds have hung for so long above the stove that the paint behind them has kept its color, and when Ellen takes them down for polishing, a perfect bright shape of a duck or goose remains.
A place for everything; everything in its place
. The house is as rigid, as precise as a church, and there was nothing to disturb its ways until three months ago, when Ellen and James and the children moved in because they had no place and nowhere else to go.

James had been laid off just as the lilacs in the yard of their rented house bloomed, open-eyed and fragrant, trusting the Illinois winter had passed. The next day, an ice storm trapped the world in crystal. The school where Ellen taught closed for the day, and she spent the morning playing cards with Amy and Herbert—their school had closed as well—and mourning the lilacs, and the
budding trees, and most of all the colorful heads of the tulips, which were frozen to the ground. James watched TV on the couch, bundled in a quilt, his body tucked close against itself as if he wanted to disappear.
Talk to me
, Ellen said, but he listened to her the way you'd listen to a faucet drip, not assigning any particular meaning to the sound.

He refused to look for work. He read the paper in the morning and napped in the afternoon. She came home with the children one evening to find him pawing through a shoe box of old photographs. Most were of his older brother, Mitch, who had died in 1957, fifteen years before.

“If we lived closer to home,” James said, “I could tend to Mitchie's grave. Pa doesn't care about things like that, and Mother isn't able to do it anymore.”

Ellen could see Amy and Herbert tasting the word
grave
with their tongues. She tried not to notice that James was still in his bathrobe. Bits of egg were caught on one sleeve; dandruff lightened his eyebrows. “
This
is our home,” she began, but James shook his head as if he were clearing away a brief spell of dizziness, shaking free of an unpleasant thought. Yet he had been the one to choose the house, just before Amy was born: a bungalow with two bedrooms, a porch, and a sunny, modern kitchen. The first night after they'd moved in, a thunderstorm startled them out of their sleep and it was James who raced through the rooms closing windows, already protective of the woodwork, the carpet, the neatly painted walls that cradled the beginning of their lives together. Since then, they had brought two children into this house, penciling lines on the kitchen wall to mark each year of their growth. James had repapered the bathroom; Ellen had sewn curtains for the living room windows. The furniture was arranged to cover the marks on the carpet from the time Amy broke open a pen. The ivy
hanging in the kitchen window had woven itself into the blinds. The house had become a diary of their lives, and Ellen could not imagine leaving it.

But they couldn't live on her salary alone, and when the bulk of their savings was gone it was the excuse that James was looking for. They would live with his parents, he said, to save money. They would get back on their feet. After all, where else could they go? And as each day passed and he did not look for work and the money dwindled and disappeared, Ellen could feel his excitement building until, at the end of the summer, they left Illinois, the rented house, the stunted lilacs. They moved back to Holly's Field, Wisconsin, the town where they had both grown up and their parents had grown up too.

James's parents are not old—Fritz is just sixty, Mary-Margaret is sixty-four—but the house is thick with the smell of old age, of pale gray skin and Ben-Gay and many dry roasts and silent suppers.
My whole life I worked hard
, Fritz likes to say,
now all I want is some peace
. Ellen watches him take yet another slice of bread; he sweeps it across his plate, and the bread picks up the juices and the colors and the shattered bits of food until he raises it, dripping, to his mouth. He chews ferociously, but without pleasure. Meals, like everything else in life, are just another task to complete. Everyone must wait quietly until his food is eaten and his plate wiped clean with bread.
Children should be seen and not heard
, he says, when Amy and Herbert complain. Then he leads after-dinner Grace, even the children staring briefly at their hands, even James's restlessness steadied by the drone of his father's voice.

“Salt,” Mary-Margaret says, peering around the table. Ellen finds it behind the milk jug and passes it down, but Mary-Margaret doesn't want it for herself; she sets it in front of James and smiles, proud to have anticipated his needs. James is his mother's boy
again; under her care, he sleeps less, he has even managed to put on weight. In Illinois, he'd sit down to dinner, apologize, push his plate aside. Now his throat bulges as he swallows another chunk of meat, jaws grinding steadily.

The first time Ellen sat at this table she was twenty years old, bright-cheeked after a spring afternoon spent walking along the lakefront with James, planning their upcoming wedding. It was 1959, and she was eager to make a good impression. She didn't know then that Mary-Margaret disliked her, that she was considered
Jimmy's mistake
. They had dinner: dry pot roast, canned peas, and, for dessert, blue-frosted angel food cake, which Mary-Margaret pinched into cubes and ate with her fingers like bread. Mary-Margaret asked James,
How long does she intend to go to school? Ain't high school good enough?
and Ellen said,
I'm going to be a primary school teacher, and for that I need a college degree
. Mary-Margaret asked James,
Do her parents speak High or Low German?
and Ellen said,
My mother speaks Luxembourg and German. Low German
, Mary-Margaret said,
and her father, too. He's dead but I remember him coming into the church in a stocking cap!
Then she and Fritz spoke in German about Ellen's father while Ellen chewed on a mouthful of that dry roast, trying to swallow it down. Thirteen years later the roast has not changed, but now Mary-Margaret won't tolerate guests, family or otherwise. Even Ellen's mother and sisters may not visit because of Mary-Margaret's poor nerves.

And now Mary-Margaret dresses only in pink. Pink stretch pants and pink polyester blouses, pink hose, pink shoes. She puts on her long pink rayon nighties and pink chenille robes by four in the afternoon, because she has to be careful of her heart. Then she goes into the living room and plays the piano until supper. The big color television is in the living room also; Fritz turns the TV volume
louder and she strikes the piano keys harder, pounding out hymns and singing along in a cracked, dry voice until Fritz says,
What's that? Did somebody bring in a cat?
Then he shakes with the sort of laughter that is angry, bitter, taunting, not amused.
A cat would've made me a better wife
. Their arguments fill the house like an odor, clinging to the sofa and seeping between the bedsheets, lingering in Ellen's hair.

Each night, before she goes to bed, Mary-Margaret calls Ellen into the bathroom to rub Ben-Gay on her shoulders and to watch her take her pills so she won't forget and take the same ones twice. Biting her cheek, Ellen obeys; to refuse means James's cold back stretched like a wall down the middle of the bed.
She's old, she's unwell. You couldn't do her that one favor?
The bathroom is also pink; the shelves are lined with powders, oils, creams, perfumes. Some of the bottles are so old Ellen wonders if they are valuable. Certainly they are beautiful. Many are in the shape of the Virgin, but there are also birds and buildings and flowers, and high up on the top shelf is an empty bottle shaped like a ballerina, dressed in a full-skirted pink gauze dress. Beside it stands a tiny upright piano, still filled with perfume, which Amy particularly loves. Would you ask her if I could hold it? she asked Ellen once. You have to ask her that yourself, Ellen told her, although they both knew what the answer would be. Mary-Margaret doesn't care for little girls; it is boys who mean the future, the family blood, the family name. Ellen rubs Mary-Margaret's pale gray shoulders and her fingers sink into the softness past skin, past thin span of muscle, until they jar against bone. Taped to the mirror is a prayer card, a picture of Christ on the cross. His eyes are closed, His lips half-parted. The caption reads,
Lord, Help Me to Accept What I Cannot Change
, and Ellen finds herself reading these words, without meaning to, over and over.

Nights, she goes in to James smelling like his mother, like the house, like the dry pot roast from the kitchen. She strips down to her panties which are not pink but white; cotton panties, practical panties, with blood stains at the crotch, perhaps, or the elastic sagging at the waist. James wears boxer shorts with flies that are stained the pale yellow of daisies, and he watches the portable black-and-white television on the low table at the foot of the bed. Television, like prayer, is soothing to James, and he watches until he falls asleep. It is Ellen who jolts awake later on and gets up to turn it off, filled with a loneliness as dense as clay inside her. Some nights she doesn't wake up until after the programming has ended. The shrill held note of the dead airtime is twisted through her dreams, which are of police sirens and fire alarms and running and climbing and seeking escape.

James finishes his roast, and Mary-Margaret is quick to pass the serving dish. “You should have more,” she says to him, pleased as if she has cooked it. But Ellen cooks the meals and cleans the house, as part of their payment for shelter, for warmth, for dry pot roast and peas. Mary-Margaret makes out the shopping list; on weekends Ellen shops and on weeknights after work she cooks the meals the way Mary-Margaret tells her to. And now Mary-Margaret offers to James what Ellen has made, the roast that she has prepared.