Honeydew: Stories Page 5

  Ingrid’s living there—it had happened in an accidental way. She had been visiting last June—she came every season for exactly four days. Chris was then completing the arrangements to enlarge his carpentry and woodworking business to include the manufacture of wood pellets. He was converting a small plant a few miles away from the shop. The lining up of suppliers and distributors and the hiring of staff—that work would soon take almost all his time. He needed someone to keep the business itself running. Ingrid and his uncle had run a small leather-brokerage company. And so, seemingly out of the blue, he invited her to be the temporary manager; to join his staff and his household as well. “For about three months, I’d say.”

  “Me? Why on earth me?”

  “You are…wise.”

  She shook her head so violently that her glasses flew off—very smart narrow ones, she hoped they hadn’t broken—and her hair shook too, hair that had once been the color of an autumn maple leaf but had now faded to wood shavings. Here and there her expert hairdresser had striped it with the old maple color. “Wise,” Chris repeated, with one of his rare smiles. “Worldly.”

  Did he mean old? She sucked in her stomach, and her bosom swelled slightly. She was wearing a V-necked jersey blouse. It had captivated a number of elderly suitors, but paired with these jeans she’d bought yesterday, it probably looked ridiculous. When Chris had first seen the blouse, he turned his face briefly away…Did he think she was too noticeably available? She was still interested in men at seventy-two; perhaps that offended him.

  “And warm,” he finished, pulled by alliteration. “Can I have you?”

  “Oh, good Lord.” And she produced an exaggerated and somewhat tactless groan. “I don’t think so.”

  He picked up the fallen glasses and folded the earpieces inward without touching the lenses. Holding the bridge between thumb and third finger, like a ring, he handed them to her. Almost handed them to her, that is—she’d been told that her eyes without glasses gleamed like warning lights. And so, warned, he paused, and pressed his well-defined lips together into a grimace of disappointment—no, it wasn’t a grimace, he was preventing himself from saying please. Then he gave her the spectacles. “Maybe?” he said.

  Of course not, she thought. And then: Why not? A stone house instead of a stone city. An underfunded public library instead of that pretentious den. Rabbits on the lawn instead of monkeys at the zoo…

  “Maybe?” he repeated.

  “Maybe,” she echoed. But it turned out she meant yes.

  To slip away from her New York life…it was as easy as stepping on an escalator. Board members would hardly notice her absence; real decisions were made by three or four people who met in a broom closet. She leased her apartment immediately—one of her friends had a cousin from New Jersey eager to spend a season in the city. She gave herself a farewell party on Labor Day.

  The following morning, she visited Allegra. Allegra was not bedridden yet, but soon.

  “Don’t look mournful, Ingrid. You’ve seen me through a long illness. There are plenty left to help me die.”

  “I…should be one of them.”

  “Perhaps I’ll hold on.” They wetly embraced.

  And just like that, Ingrid returned offhandedly to her relatives, as if the visit would be the usual strict four days, not a lax three months. She took a plane from New York to a southern hub with a moving walkway that kept falsely warning her it was about to stop, a mini-plane to an airport thirty-five miles from the town, a bus. At the depot, the driver pulled her single large scuffed suitcase from the bus’s belly. “What an item!” Allegra had once said.

  “Fido? My second-best friend.”

  Lynne had wanted to give Ingrid the guest room she occupied during her quarterly visits, one of the three charmed rooms under the slanted roof—she’d been able to hear Chloe cry when the child was an infant, she could hear Chloe’s parents’ soft lovemaking now. The room would have been perfect for a second child, but Lynne’s hysterectomy precluded another child. Ingrid didn’t want that room. “I am no longer a guest,” she said. “I am an employee.” And indeed she was; Chris was paying her a salary; she was quietly depositing it in the trusts she’d set up for her daughter and for Chloe. “An employee of the woodworks, with household and child-care duties at home. I will sleep in Useless. Let’s find a bed, a bookcase, a dresser. Secondhand, please.” The four of them went right out and bought those items. What more did she need? Well, a mirror would be nice. Chris supplied one he had made himself, probably intended to sell, could sell, after she left. It was oval, framed in cherry.

  The woodworking shop was two miles away along a two-lane road. She could have hitched a ride with Chris in his pickup, but at six a.m.! Anyway she liked to walk through the woods. It took more time. She’d discovered she was interested not in saving time but in spending it. She chose a longer route along a path of old-growth trees and new saplings and spiders’ webs and busy wasps. Brushwood guarded her way.

  Then she turned off again, along a second path that led to a narrow river with a gentle decline. The water splashed swiftly through groups of pearly rocks, then leveled. She called this little plaything of nature the Falls. Alders by the side of the brook were dropping leaves thin as tin. Cylinders hung in tiny clusters from their branches, protecting the pollen of the spring to come. On the other side of the river the ground was green with tiny, ivy-leaved veronica boldly rising. They would straggle through the winter and in April greet the sun. And greet Ingrid too—she often visited in April, when the opera season was over. Nearby, unseen, caterpillars were spinning their cocoons.

  She noticed one day that a black stone was awaiting her on the path. She picked it up. Partially smoothed and also jagged, veined with green, it seemed to throb on her palm. She slipped it into her back pocket.

  From these private Falls, she returned to the main path and went on to the woodworking shop. There, as Chris had predicted, she deftly handled the business of the business. Her office was a little doorless room off the large shop floor. During her few idle minutes, she watched the men at work. She saw chests and dining tables and moldings in the making, and sometimes an artistic element—an elaborate architrave which would surround a simple window. She thought briefly of her own slatted Manhattan blinds. She admired the tools: drills and chisels and gouges and what seemed like hundreds of kinds of saws. She loved the planes that lifted a thin epidermis from a plank. There wasn’t much conversation on the floor, although one man, Danny, older than the others, sometimes took his break at her desk and talked about his beekeeping. He lived alone in a cottage and grew vegetables. He told her that the black and green stone now resting on her desk was chromite. The rough part could be smoothed. “I know a silversmith who could set it, and you could wear it dangling from your neck.”

  My long, long neck… But she didn’t say that. “I don’t want to tamper with it” was what she did say.

  At the end of the day she tramped back through the woods. At the familiar black stove she prepared dinner with Lynne and Chloe. Then came the eating of dinner, and the washing up, and then Sorry! or television or reading. They had no stereo. She wanted to give them a piano but they wouldn’t accept it. She could will her own Steinway to them and then fling herself onto the Falls, but she’d just smash her kneecaps on the rocks.

  Sometimes, in the late afternoon, if Chris had loaned his pickup to someone, that someone drove him from the pellet plant to the shop. From there, Chris offered to walk her home, grave as a suitor. He pointed out things that she was not yet clever enough to notice: the hunting spider, which does not build webs but instead spies her prey and chases it and pounces. He showed her a toad crawling to his death while nearby a generation of tadpoles, some of them his progeny, sped through the water. His fingers lifted a low branch and there bloomed a miniature plant with a tiny dark flower: a plant that lives its whole life under a leaf, hostage to its own nature, visible to no one except some expert winged pollinators. Its story would make a
good opera, Ingrid thought; no, not an opera, a ballet, a ballet meant for children. She imagined lines of well-dressed kids and their grannies lining up to see The Lonely Flower. If she were in New York she’d be obliged to take Allegra’s grandchildren…She was still squatting to peer at the flower. Getting up wasn’t as easy as it had once been. Chris held out his hand.

  In the evening Danny sometimes dropped in. His bees were swarming, he told her. The queen mates with a few lucky drones—they are her sons, if you want to be accurate, sometimes her grandsons. Nature is no respecter of seemliness.

  Happiness lengthens time. Every day seemed as long as a novel. Every night a double feature. Every week a lifetime, a muted lifetime, a lifetime in which sadness, always wedged under her breast like a doorstop, lost some of its bite. When she went back to New York she would feel that a different person had occupied her body for a while, and a different wardrobe had taken over her closet—now she wore only tees and jeans. The stone had found a proper home in her back pocket. The V-necked blouse had been shoved into Fido. Her hair was of course longer, its seemingly random stripes of chestnut—how clever her hairdresser was, how natural they’d looked—now surrendering to honest blond-gray. Brown, pale yellow, gray—she was coiffured in wood bark, wood pulp, and dust. Her glasses were permanently bent because Danny had sat on them. She could probably be mistaken for a displaced bag lady. Or a beaver, who lived among trees and water and other beavers, and feasted on cellulose.

  In November she went back to New York for a few days. Allegra had died.

  “I’m sorry for your loss,” said the well-brought-up Chloe. “Come back right away,” she then commanded. “It’s more fun when you’re home.”

  “Keep the chromite for me,” said Ingrid. “Rub it once in a while.”

  In her ragged state, Ingrid attended the funeral and then went to Allegra’s apartment. Everybody recognized her except for one woman she had never liked, who glared as if she were a hillbilly freeloader. But other friends asked eagerly when she would return to New York. “I’ll be back soon,” she promised. She visited a gallery she admired, and also the optician.

  And again the big plane, and the talkative moving walkway, and the small plane, and the bus. She stepped down off the bus into tiny Chloe’s arms; into Lynne’s arms, not much bigger; into Chris’s gentle, huge embrace. From the backseat of the car she saw the house over Lynne’s shoulder. In the late afternoon of the late fall day, the stones looked mauve, a color borrowed from Odilon Redon. Should she mention that? She should not. A rabbit from the woods was chewing on a carrot that Danny must have dropped.

  Sometimes the college hosted a quartet or a singer for an afternoon concert. One principal violinist rose up and down on his toes. A poorly modulated soprano projected into the next county. But there was a good second-rate pianist, and Chloe and Lynne listened attentively, and Ingrid, leaning forward, listened hungrily until the last almost-good arpeggio. She felt Chris’s eyes on her. Afterward they went to their favorite restaurant. The waitresses were in their fifties and wore aqua dresses under white aprons. The lamps in the booths were pleated. There was always meat loaf on the menu, and crab, and a vegetarian special. The corn bread was the best she’d ever tasted. They ate from one another’s plates like any family—two big people and two little ones.

  When they ate at home, Chris served from the head of the table, handing Ingrid the first plate, his thumb flipping a stray string bean back among the others. After dinner, when Ingrid read to Chloe, she read fairy tales—they both had a taste for make-believe, especially if royalty was involved.

  “You’re our queen,” Chloe said one night.

  “Queen Giraffe?”

  “Yes! Daddy is the Lion King and Mommy’s one of those little princesses that gets stolen or put to sleep for a while.”

  Lynne was doing laundry and missed the exchange. “And what are you?” Ingrid asked.

  “The nightingale the king can’t live without.”

  Stones figured in many tales, inert minerals transformed into active participants. They induced love, they captured memories, they murdered ogres, they arranged themselves on the path so that Hansel could find his way home.

  Some evenings, when Chris put his feet up on a particularly ugly brocaded ottoman and closed his eyes, Ingrid and Chloe and Lynne busied themselves in the kitchen making a pot of soup that would last a week. Lynne’s garden supplied herbs. Chloe threw in the chromite. Ingrid muttered some syllables. “That’s an incantation,” she invented.

  “Are you a witch?” Chloe giggled.

  “No, just a crone.”

  “A glamour crone,” said Lynne. “Always New York beautiful.”

  “Oh…it’s the eyeglasses,” said Ingrid hurriedly. “Here’s a Chinese proverb that will make the soup even better. Cutting stalks at noontime, perspiration drips to the earth. Know you that your bowl of rice, each grain from hardship comes? I learned that from a healer on Mott Street.” It was only a slight exaggeration. She had found the proverb in a fortune cookie; in Chinatown what she’d learned was that there were elderly men whose impassivity seemed like friendship. In narrow store after narrow store, she’d heard Allegra recite her symptoms. The men pulled out little drawers and scooped up powders and leaves and poured the stuff into sacks and handed the sacks to her friend. Allegra boiled them into a tea.

  “How does it taste?” Ingrid asked.

  “Rank. Nauseating, like the chemo.”

  Tonight’s soup, unadulterated except for the stone, was perfect. Ingrid put the stone on the windowsill, ready for the next meal.

  When Lynne came home exhausted from teaching fourth-graders, Ingrid ordered her into the guest-room daybed and tucked the quilt around her. Mostly, though, it was Chloe who needed time off, time off from being an only child, time off from the helpless scrutiny of her parents. Then Ingrid spirited her away into the woods.

  They walked along various paths. Just yesterday they had followed a trail to a little pond. Ingrid pointed to the knobs on the willows. Each was a tightly curled leaf, saving itself for next spring. “What goes round comes round,” Ingrid heard herself saying. “Death is the gate of life.”

  “Don’t you ever die, Queen Giraffe,” ordered Chloe.

  “I’ll die in my time, darling. Like everyone else.”

  The child shook her head. “You belong to us,” she said, as if that conferred immortality.

  And then in January the pellet plant was built and running, and Chris was free to return to the little office off the shop, and Ingrid was free to go back to her real life.

  On one of their walks home together, they stopped to rest beside the Falls. “You’ll be glad to return to New York—theater, friends, fabrics, museums.”

  “Fabrics?”

  “I meant clothing. The walks in the neighborhoods, I know you love to do that, you’ve told me. Parties…”

  She listened to him telling her what she was presumably feeling.

  He said: “I spent a year in New York once, studying wood sculpture…”

  “I remember. Your uncle was still alive.”

  He nodded. “I liked the fresh mornings, the sound of the garbage trucks. But there is so much more that you like. Maybe we’ve kept you here too long.”

  “Not at all,” she said politely, telling the truth and not seeming to. Let him think she wanted to leave. Let him never know what she really wanted.

  Let him never know that she—with the wisdom of crones, of Mott Street medicine men, of memory-laden stones—knew what he wanted. He did not look at her breasts, her abundant hair, her eyes kept safe these days behind newly broken glasses. They had been born thirty years apart, he was thinking, she was thinking; and they had known each other all his life. They stared at a tree which would outlive them both. He wanted to bury his nose in the cleavage she had learned to hide. He wanted to say sweet words.

  Instead he pressed his lips together to let no words escape. Stay with us was all he would have said. Stay in m
y sight. To keep wanting, and not getting—it was a satisfaction of its own. She was another house he would never build.

  I cannot stay, she might have said. Oh, Chris. Oh, Lynne, oh, my Chloe, how sweet it sounds, how tender it might be. The four of us living a life, running two businesses, not getting in one another’s way. Danny visiting. Bees swarming.

  But I see farther than you. I see myself weakening, getting querulous, not useless but not useful either. I see Chloe outgrowing Queen Giraffe. I see Lynne trying to conceal her boredom. I see you mourning the loss of your longing…And beyond that bearable future, there are less pleasant predictions; dirty pictures, you might call them. There’s a stroke, and you attach yourselves to the nursing home—not giving money, for I can pay; giving attention you dare not withhold. You cannot leave me day after day, strapped to a chair, calling for my dead child. Or perhaps, mobile, I’ll become a demented comic, wandering from floor to floor and stealing my neighbors’ false teeth. The home will call you like an annoyed principal. And there are worse scenarios—the illness of organs, who cares which organ or what illness so long as it doesn’t kill me as it should but instead keeps me in my room here, visited regularly by strong-armed nurses, the walls shaking with my strenuous attempt not to cry. I’ll scream—too late—for the bedpan. I’ll throw my stone at the laggard aide. Our dusty street will be invaded by the occasional ambulance. My body still alive but decaying visibly and audibly and odorously next to the kitchen will remind us to regret your invitation, my acceptance. The house will call us fools.