South of Superior (4 page)

“What happened?”

“I stopped at Mabel's for coffee on my way home, and you would not believe what she told me, it's the last straw. The more I think about it, the more disgusted I get. They've done a nice job with that store, I can't say they haven't, but they've overstepped their bounds, now. Besides which, their prices are too high and half the things they have in there no one wants.
Pesto
and
hummus,”
Gladys sneered. “What for?”

“What happened?” Madeline asked again. It was clear she didn't think anything
could
have happened in the few blocks between 26 Bessel and the grocery store. Little did she know.

“They've cut people off their credit.”

“Ah.”

“They've cut off Emil Sainio, for one, and Randi Hopkins, and Mary Feather.”

“I'm sorry. Do they not have money to pay?”

“Money to pay!” That was hardly the point of anything. Did this girl know nothing? When had the last owners, Everett and Nancy, ever worried about money to pay? They'd run that store for thirty years without seeing fit to change the way things were done, and they'd survived, hadn't they? Just barely. But just barely was all you could expect in a place like this, or all you
should
expect. You couldn't get blood out of turnips. The Bensons might be just trying to make a living, but they wanted too much. They wanted it at the expense of the way things had always been done, and Gladys wasn't going to go along with that. She began shoving groceries back into sacks.

“What are you doing?”

“I'm returning these things.” Gladys felt deeply irked at Madeline's lack of ire and banged a can of tomato puree into a bag, then followed it with a tin of smoked oysters. That gave her a pang; she loved oysters. A box of noodles went in next, then a package of frozen peas. She hesitated at the baggie of the pricey cardamom seed she flavored her rolls and breads with—she was out and that was like being out of coffee, unthinkable—but then flung it in too.

“So who are these people, the ones they've cut off?” Madeline asked, taking things out of the bags and putting them back in more neatly. “Are they friends of yours?”

“They're just people. What are they supposed to do? Mary Feather's older than dirt and they just tell her, sorry, we can't help you any longer? It's not right.”

“Why'd they cut them off?”

Gladys didn't answer. Instead she opened every cupboard door and then the icebox, making sure she'd gotten everything.

“Did they just stop giving credit in general? I know some places have a policy—”

“No! No, it's not everybody, it's just a few.”

“So it's just some people, people they don't like.”

“It's nothing to do with liking.” Gladys clamped her lips shut.

“What is it, then?”

“Is that all you can think of, nitpicky questions?”

Madeline raised her eyebrows. “I only asked a simple question.”

Gladys slapped a bag of kidney beans onto the counter. Then she said, “It's people who haven't paid on time, if you must know. People who—tend not to.”

“Oh.”

“Yes.” Gladys's shoulders slumped and she sat in the closest chair and plucked Up the rooster pepper shaker. She frowned at it. “I got this from the grocery in 1953. Jack and Irene Whistle had the store then. They gave out Green Stamps, and you could get things with them. I got that set of nested mixing bowls in the cupboard too, the yellow Pyrex.”

“Those are nice.”

“One year when Frank was out of work, Jack and Irene didn't charge me a penny. Frank was my husband, he passed on in seventy-one, you know, his heart.” Madeline made a sympathetic face and Gladys sighed. “How time flies. I never got anything extra, just flour and sugar and coffee, a little meat and cheese. They let me pay it off when I could. Mary Feather brought Us fish all that summer.” She rubbed the rooster's painted red comb. It needed washing. “That was how things were always done, when I was a girl. Nobody had enough to make it through the winter. Everybody ran Up their bill. They had to. It's not so different now. Not for some people. Not for the
real
people.”

“Who are the real people?” Madeline asked quietly.

“I didn't come here with a retirement, you know,” Gladys said, feeling querulous even though there had been nothing but Understanding in Madeline's voice. “I've been here my whole life.”

“I know,” Madeline said.

Gladys frowned and ran her thumb over the rooster's comb again. It was hard to say who the “real” people were. She didn't have anything against most of the new people, not the retirees or the summer people or tourists or even the snowmobilers, not on a case-by-case basis, except that they tended to expect too much, to
assume
too much. But they paid their taxes and kept their lawns mowed and volunteered at the school and spent money in the local stores and had as much right to be here as Gladys did, she realized that. And McAllaster had always been a tourist town, a resort town; her own parents had made a living off that fact.

But things were changing fast, now. Too fast. Half a dozen new summer places got built on the beach every year, and no one was content with a regular house, everyone had to have a mansion. At this rate she wouldn't be able to afford the taxes on the house she'd lived in for more than fifty years, and any of the young kids who'd grown Up here and wanted to stay, forget it. There was almost nothing they could afford to rent, certainly nothing they could afford to buy. And worse than that was that
people
were changing, the rules of life were changing. Money to pay, indeed. Fury began to roil in her gut again.

“What are you going to do?” Madeline asked after a moment.

“Take these groceries back for starters. I mean to let them know how I feel.”

It only took a minute to load the things in her car. She climbed in the driver's seat and waited, but Madeline hesitated. “Coming?” Gladys asked, flicking the visor down.

“Arbutus will be awake soon.”

“She'd be with me in a heartbeat if she knew about this.”

“I don't really think—”

“Oh,
fizzle
.” Gladys clicked on the ignition and pulled off in a splash of gravel.

 

 

Madeline felt gutless
in the wake of her leaving. She checked on Arbutus (still sleeping), and set off for another walk, down Bessel Street in the opposite direction of Gladys. What did it matter if she hadn't taken a stand on this, she told herself, striding along the Uneven sidewalk. How false it would have been to seem decisive. She didn't know these people. Boy oh boy, did she not know these people. She'd been here two weeks, and every day she felt more like a square peg in a round hole. Probably this move had been a mistake. But she was here and Arbutus needed her, so here she would stay.

She marched past the rows of houses that had been put Up by the mill at the height of the lumber boom, according to Arbutus. She liked the way the small old houses, built all the same, had been weathered and Used into individuality. It said something about the triumph of the human spirit, only “triumph” was too grand a word for it—it was nothing sweeping or orchestral. The houses had been built poor and they were still poor, but each one had its own personality. Madeline respected that.

It was a chilly day, and sunny at last. As usual she was nearly the only one out walking. Sometimes she saw a tall woman with the beagle on a leash, an ancient-looking man with a cane and a sparkly grin, an old lady trundling slowly along with a walker. These people usually smiled at her, but no one ever said anything, and she didn't, either. She felt shy.

She always saw a car or two, or a few rumbling pickups, but there was never any actual
traffic
. There were always vehicles on the streets, people going in and out of the bank and the stores, but so few of them that it still disconcerted her, a little. If she'd stood in the middle of the street and screamed, there might only have been ten or twenty people available at any given time to come running.

She had never been anywhere so empty, or so silent. After that first exhausted night, the silence had actually kept her awake. It took awhile to figure out what made her feel so Uneasy, what was missing. It was the accustomed constant background sound of traffic, horns, sirens, voices drifting Up from the sidewalks at all hours of the day and night. Here there was just—nothing, pretty much. Wind. Waves. Gulls. If she stood outside at noon, she could hear the bells of two different churches tolling from opposite ends of the town. On pea-soup days, a foghorn blasted, mournful and patient. At nine every night an air siren blew, and she always saw children running for home just afterward. That was it.

The effect of the stillness was primeval, like the woods and swamps and the lake. She had fallen in love with the lake. The feeling it gave her—boundlessness. Hope, maybe. Awe. It was the best thing about McAllaster so far, aside from Arbutus. She wanted to paint it. She was actually trying to paint it, and it had been how many years since she'd allowed a thought like that in her head? But today even the lake couldn't distract her. Before long she turned right and then right again.

It was too late by the time she got to Benson's SuperValu, either to support Gladys in her cause or to slow her down. She pulled the double glass door open just as Gladys marched out. She swept along, giving Madeline a regal nod as she passed, and Madeline was left alone to face the woman at the register. A badge pinned to her shirt said “Terry Benson.”

Terry Benson had been popular in high school, Madeline thought. She had been popular and pretty and had worn her honey-colored hair feathered or curled or layered or waved, whatever the current style had been, and she had believed—still did believe—very much in her looks. She was still pretty, in a widened way, with a broad but shapely rear end and a prominent bosom. She stood with a hand on one hip and glared at the groceries Gladys had dumped on the conveyor belt. “You're the one staying with Mrs. Hansen, aren't you?” she asked when Madeline walked Up.

“That's right.”

“Do you plan on paying for this? Because we don't take returns. Not on food. What is she thinking?”

“Nothing's been opened,” Madeline pointed out, still not sure of her stand in this little war, but wanting to help Gladys if she could.

“She took it out of the store, I'm not putting it back on the shelves, what would my customers think?”

“Can't you just—”

“I won't take those groceries back. I can't! People can't get the idea they can take food home and then change their minds.”

From outside, the horn of Gladys's jaunty little red car beeped and Madeline glanced at her, sitting so erect behind the wheel. Proud, stubborn, cranky, and—fragile, somehow. Madeline took a breath. She reached for her wallet, thinking the total couldn't come to more than sixty dollars or so, she probably had that much. But before she could pull out any money Gladys tooted the horn again. Her expression was calm. Behind her, over the low rooftops of the stores across the street, Lake Superior crashed to shore in huge, white-capped waves. There was something magic in that endless turn of water, something oceanic and wild and old, something that would outlast the petty arguments of customers and cashiers. Out of nowhere a conviction rose in Madeline, inconvenient and romantic and maybe mistaken, but a conviction nonetheless.

She turned away from the window. What she saw: a fluorescentlit store bright with packaging, clean, neat, and somehow featureless. She saw a very conventional woman with an Understandable gripe that she nonetheless did not sympathize with. It was not so much that Terry Benson was wrong. It was just that these other things—Gladys's staunchness, the endless roll of the lake—felt so right, so rare, and so much more interesting.

“Well? Are you paying or not?”

“Not,” Madeline said, giving the woman a flicker of apologetic smile. She glanced at the man who'd come to stand next in line. Already she'd be getting a bad reputation in this tiny town. Arguing with the proprietor, refusing to pay a bill. But the man—about her age, dark-haired and brown-eyed with a little goatee—gave her a conspiratorial wink and Madeline felt herself smile in return.

“I'll be sending a bill,” Terry snapped.

Madeline nodded and went to get in the car with Gladys. Her heart was pounding and she put her hands—which had turned ice cold—up to her flushed cheeks to cool them. The man who'd winked at her came out of the store and Madeline watched him walk off down the street with a very slight limp.

Gladys was triumphant on the return trip to the house. “Pompous so-and-sos. Foolish little name tag, who does she think she's kidding, she's not in the city. Cutting off Mary Feather, I never heard the like. I hope you didn't give her an ounce of satisfaction.”

“No,” Madeline said.

“That woman had better cut back on the bread and cookies, she wants to keep what's left of her figure. Maybe she better start walking to work instead of driving, I never saw such people for driving. Four blocks from the store they live, and here they come by the house every morning in the car, and she comes back to run the kids to school every day to boot. It wouldn't hurt those kids to walk to school, we always did.” She flicked on her turn signal and made a right onto Bessel Street with no apparent sense of irony. Madeline cut a sideways glance at her.

Gladys gave a little shrug. “I had the groceries, that's my excuse.” She pulled in the drive at 26 Bessel, and then she shocked Madeline by patting her hand. “Sometimes you have to take a stand, that's all. Now. You go look in on Arbutus, I'm going down to the gas station for milk, we're out.”