Objects in Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear (12 page)

Harriet saw the old lady only once, when she had looked up at the window that was the mirror of her own and had seen through the perfectly familiar mullioned panes of glass a ghostly face and a waving, clawlike hand. Harriet didn’t wave back because she was scared of that eager, smiling face, those deformed fingers, and she felt somehow guilty about being caught looking.

For days after, Harriet avoided playing anywhere in sight of Mrs. Marshall’s windows. And it was only a few weeks later, right after Harriet had begun kindergarten, that she came home for lunch one day to the shocking sight of an ambulance and a police car sprawled in the street in front of Mrs. Marshall’s house. The poor old thing had “give up the ghost,” Carrie, the Roses’ housekeeper, explained gently as she poured
Harriet’s milk. Harriet pictured one of the claws grasping the edge of a ghost’s trailing hem and letting go, like someone releasing a curtain that fluttered free in a breeze.

The house was put on the market by Mrs. Marshall’s daughter, who lived in Connecticut and had rarely come to see her mother, a fact pointed out by Mrs. Marshall’s housekeeper, one Lavinia Patterson, a middle-aged alcoholic (according to Harriet’s mother, Ruth Rose, who sometimes called her Tabitha Twitchit and sometimes called her Mrs. Danvers) who had stuck around for years because Mrs. Marshall had always promised “to take care of her.” It had been she who had done the taking care, for twenty-eight years, and now she was left with two weeks’ severance pay and nothing else to show for it.

Harriet didn’t like the sound of Mrs. Patterson’s voice, and the way she began her sentences with expressions like “to tell you the God’s own honest truth” and “believe you me.” Mrs. Patterson, engaged by the estate to clean up the house and pack for the Goodwill people everything the daughter didn’t want, kept coming by for coffee, and Carrie didn’t know how to turn her away.

For several weeks, every day when Harriet came home from kindergarten, hungry for lunch and bursting with observations of her morning that she knew would intrigue or amuse Carrie, there would be Mrs. Patterson, drinking coffee and laying her hand across her heart for emphasis as she proclaimed the truth and injustice of it all.

When she denounced the indifferent daughter in Connecticut yet again, her voice would grow louder and higher, until Harriet, sitting at the table eating her lunch, would begin to count the number of words in each sentence she spoke. Sometimes Harriet counted other things, too, such as the number of times Mrs. Patterson used the word
I.

Harriet’s mother was not in the habit of joining her children or housekeeper for lunch. She preferred to have something
on a tray in the bedroom where she spent most of the day reading. Sometimes it seemed to Harriet that her mother was afraid of doing something wrong around Adam. Maybe she was afraid that she could make him worse. Harriet had come to feel that even when her mother had just entered a room, she was always leaving. Carrie usually carried the tray up the stairs to her, and Harriet would listen for the familiar, worrisome sound of Carrie’s bad knee cracking with each step.

Adam usually ate a sandwich on the floor in the living room in front of the television. He wasn’t in school right now because the Roses were waiting until January when a space would open in a special school, and meanwhile the regular public school a few blocks away that Harriet attended didn’t want him to come back. So instead of starting third grade like any other eight-year-old boy, Adam was at home every day that autumn.

Harriet loved her lunchtime conversations with Carrie, missed them, and was terribly relieved the day Mrs. Patterson announced that she was finished with her work next door and wouldn’t be back.

“That poor lost soul,” Carrie said to Harriet after Mrs. Patterson had bid her farewells and stalked off into the October afternoon for her last walk to the subway station, loaded down with four shopping bags filled with the last haul of “things Miss High and Mighty would never miss anyway.”

“Why do you say lost?” Harriet wondered.

“She doesn’t know what to do without Mrs. Marshall,” Carrie explained. “She loved that old woman like they were family to each other, like Mrs. Marshall was her own little child, and now she’s all alone. Those bits and pieces won’t hardly comfort her. But it wasn’t right, what they did, leaving her out that way. It wasn’t right. You won’t leave me out, will you, Rabbit?”

Harriet wasn’t sure what Carrie meant, but she agreed. Would she someday be very old and wave a clawed hand to a
little girl under her window while an ancient Carrie prepared soup down below? She couldn’t imagine leaving Carrie out of anything.

Mrs. Marshall’s house wasn’t on the market for long. Ruth Rose heard from the mailman that a family had bought it and would move in right before Christmas. Soon after that, workmen began to appear regularly, as the house next door was readied with new bathrooms, a new kitchen, long, rolled carpets. When the only van left belonged to the painters, an odd-looking truck arrived one afternoon. Enormous sheets of smoky mirrored glass were mounted on both sides of the truck, and Harriet watched from her lawn in fascination as two men first undid straps and then slowly hoisted the first mirror high and turned to carry it up the front walk, each man supporting his end by a strap below and a grip that looked like a giant suction cup above.

Harriet looked into this momentary window and could see her house, and the winter lawn, patchy with snow that looked gray and swirled in the reflection. In the middle of the lawn she glimpsed herself, a little girl in a red plaid jacket. As the mirror moved by, with only the legs of the men showing underneath, it looked like an enormous snapshot. Then the mirror was tilted as they prepared to clear the steps, and it changed to a silvery sheet that dazzled her eyes for an instant.

Then the work was done and the house was ready for the new family. When Harriet came home from school now, trudging the shoveled sidewalks in the cold, her bare legs chapped because she couldn’t, wouldn’t wear tights, but didn’t want to appear tomboyish in overalls either, she would automatically check the windows of the house next door for some sign of change.

Finally, she was rewarded one afternoon by the sight of Mr. Antler, and a moving van so high it had broken a big branch off the maple tree that arched across the entrance to Rutland
Close. Mr. Antler spent most of the afternoon standing on the front lawn with a clipboard, which he consulted frequently while instructing the movers on destinations for boxes and items of Antler furnishings.

The movers were slowed by drifted snow on the front walk and brick stoop, which, unshoveled, had been worn to slush in a narrow path by their traffic. Emptying the truck took a long time.

The first time Mr. Antler spoke to Harriet, when he spotted her playing that afternoon behind a yew bush that grew beside the Roses’ house, he doffed his old-fashioned black homburg and greeted her very formally, calling her Young Lady. He was enormously tall, and Harriet thought he was handsome, like the jack of diamonds.

Harriet’s parents made no effort to meet him, although they were, she could tell, exceedingly curious. Moments after the moving van had pulled up in front of the house next door that morning, Simon Rose had decided that he didn’t need to go to the office until the afternoon. When Harriet came in from school—Carrie was away that week and the next, visiting her sister down South for Christmas—her father and mother sat down together to have lunch with her, which was an extraordinary circumstance in itself.

While Ruth was pouring milk for Harriet and coffee for her husband and herself, Simon turned to Harriet as if she were an adult he was having lunch with in a restaurant and asked her how her morning had been. She said it was okay and stared into her soup, at a loss for what else to say. He said that he wasn’t sure there was enough work on his desk to make it worth his while to go in to the office at all that day, seeing as how he was still home and here it was almost one o’clock. Harriet looked up at the teapot-shaped clock over the refrigerator to see what one o’clock looked like. It didn’t look very different from noon.

Harriet had heard him complain about the Christmas rush only the previous night. Grown-ups were such liars sometimes, but the difference between grown-up lies and kid lies was that when the jig was up, kids would admit it. But you couldn’t say, “Liar, liar, pants on fire,” to a grown-up, or you could, but then you would be in trouble.

All during lunch, Simon and Ruth kept getting up from the table to peep out the kitchen window. Harriet slurped the tomato soup as loud as she dared, louder and louder, but no reprimand was forthcoming; the usually squeamish Simon was that distracted. He and Ruth kept up a running commentary on the Antlers’ worldly goods as various pieces were removed from the van and carted into the house: “Matching highboy and lowboy. Reproductions.” “Piano.” “New bedroom set.”

Later that afternoon, after the moving van had gone, Mr. Antler introduced himself. He rang their doorbell (“Like a salesman,” according to Simon) and stood smiling on their front steps with his hat in his hands. Simon and Ruth went to the front door together, something Harriet had never seen them do before. (Simon often said, “Bells are for servants,” and rarely responded personally to a doorbell or ringing telephone unless no one else was at home.)

“Hello, neighbors! Albert Antler!”

Mr. Antler offered his hand to Harriet’s father, who slowly extended his own and introduced himself in a wincing way, saying, “Simon Rose. I believe you have already made acquaintance with half of my offspring.”

This was not entirely correct, as Mr. Antler did not yet know Harriet’s name, and she squirmed as Mr. Antler peered into the dark hallway behind her parents and spotted her where she stood on one foot, twiddling the coat-closet doorknob.

“Yes, indeed!” he boomed, too loud, as though he sensed that something was wrong with the entire Rose family that
could be remedied by a jolly tone. “And who is this young fellow?”

Adam had been drawn to the sound of voices in the front hall from his nest of pillows on the living room floor in front of the television where he spent his days. He had dribbled tomato soup down his chin, and it was all over his pale blue shirt. Carrie knew better than to serve him soup by himself, Harriet thought.

All week, Ruth had left the crusts on Harriet’s sandwiches, and she hadn’t known that Harriet liked a drop of vanilla extract stirred into her milk. She hadn’t even known there was vanilla extract in the house, and Harriet had climbed up onto the kitchen counter, stood, and opened the high cupboard where it was kept to prove that there was. Now she had given Adam soup.

Adam spoke, surprisingly, given the presence of a stranger. He had speaking days and nonspeaking days, but could rarely be persuaded to talk in front of someone he didn’t know.

“I am Adam Jacob Rose. Although I am only eight, if you want me to, I can name every movie Jerry Lewis has made.” He enunciated clearly, as if he were speaking into a microphone, which Harriet guessed he was, from his point of view. He often communicated with his family through a series of public announcements.

“Well, an expert,” said Mr. Antler with a confused laugh, straightening up from his talking-to-a-child crouch and addressing Harriet’s mother now, with whom he was face to face. She smiled tentatively at him and said, “Hi.” There was a pause. As the silence lengthened and she said nothing more, Harriet’s father footnoted, “Ruth Rose, mother of the expert.”

Feeling left out of this introduction, Harriet wondered if Mr. Antler wasn’t quite sure about who her own mother might be, then decided that if he thought she was adopted, that would be okay, too.

They all stood there that way for another moment, Mr. Antler on the front steps and the entire Rose family gathered at the open doorway as if grouped for a family photograph. Harriet wondered what someone passing by just then would make of her family. It was hard to believe that anyone would think they were a regular family, but you never know. Most people don’t notice what they’re looking at.

Mr. Antler, deducing that no invitation to enter the Rose household would be forthcoming at this time, put on his hat and then tipped it toward Harriet’s mother.

“My family arrives from Philadelphia tomorrow, and I am sure my wife will be pleased to meet our new neighbors. I myself am blessed with two fair maidens for daughters, and we are expecting another wee one, perhaps an heir to my own modest little kingdom, in early spring.” Mr. Antler sounded to Harriet like someone reciting lines from a school play. Or was he quoting something that grown-ups would recognize?

“He takes himself awfully seriously,” her mother murmured after Mr. Antler had been “gotten rid of.” They all stood at the door, still united by their common curiosity, and watched Mr. Antler as he inexpertly maneuvered his car away from the curved curb of Rutland Close. He signaled for a right turn at the corner, although there was nobody behind him, nobody to see his turn but the Roses.

Harriet’s father had explained to her that it wasn’t necessary to signal when leaving Rutland Close because there were never any cars behind you, and it was more like turning from a private driveway. Harriet’s mother, on the other hand, always signaled, “just in case.” (In the same discussion, she had also cautioned Harriet about the danger of turning off one’s turn signal manually. It strained the signal stem, she said.)

Now that Mr. Antler was gone, the Roses were all selfconscious, standing there together. Harriet’s father began sudden preparations to leave for his office after all, murmuring
something about work piling up in this frantic season. “A pleasant stuffed shirt,” he pronounced as he carefully wound a muffler around his neck and buttoned himself up for his walk to the subway station. Harriet’s mother asked him if he would be home for dinner. He didn’t answer, and she didn’t ask again.

Harriet gathered up the Roses’ old orange cat, Tobermorey, who lay sleeping in a patch of sunlight on the windowsill in the dining room. Clutching him like a bundle, she went upstairs to her room. She shut the door and dropped him onto the bed, where he obligingly stayed, a creaky rumble of a purr beginning to form somewhere deep inside him. As she lay down next to the cat, carefully curling herself to fit his contours, the purr surfaced and she began to stroke him in rhythm with it.