The Excellent Lombards (17 page)

Suddenly the pique I’d felt about my lack of playmates, the dreary vacation, William spending far too much time at Bert Plumly’s, even Philip’s visit to us, all that misery faded in my fright and exhilaration, tiptoeing up the stairs to the gate. The long hall was dark, my heart at the back of my throat as I began to open doors looking for signs of a college boy. Every room I put my head in was like a jumbled attic, a confusion of artifacts and what looked like trash. The fourth door was the winner, the room by the kitchen, a room that must have belonged to one of Sherwood’s many sisters long ago. There was a vanity table with a mirror, the clue. It wasn’t much of a guest room but one of the twin beds at least had been cleared of boxes and clothing and books and records, all the stuff that Louise or Margaret or Emma Lombard had once cherished but not enough to haul up to Alaska and the other places they lived. Philip’s backpack was on the floor, his notebooks and paperbacks on the desk, underwear, socks, and shirts folded neatly on top of a cardboard box, a little island of Philip things. The notebook: a black-and-white-speckled composition book with unlined pages. I opened it. Lists, he was a list maker. Lists of books to read, items to pack, people to write, music to listen to, recipes to cook, and there were drawings, as well, of mushrooms and flowers, a new lamb, and the bridge-graft he’d done with my father down in the west orchard. No master plan for his life, no mention of love or money or William and me or even May Hill. Only the lists, the drawings, and also he had written out poems, poetry by John Keats and William Shakespeare. I turned every page until there was no more writing. It was the most disappointing document I could have imagined, but maybe he used invisible ink for his true feelings? I spit on a page to see if water brought up a message. No. Nothing. On the desk there was a tube of lipstick in a clutter of markers and pencils, erasers and paper clips, the relics from the time of Louise Lombard. I took the cap off, the dull red tongue of it brand new even though it was something like fifty years old. Without thinking I carelessly applied it to my mouth and then I planted a kiss on that fresh page. “The end,” I said. “Ha, ha.”

Where, I wondered, did May Hill sleep? I was no longer quite so frightened or alert, an easy thing, really, to steal through someone else’s house, especially when they were out chopping down the forest. I went along the hall again and stopping midway, with exquisitely tuned radar, I opened a door. Although at first I thought it was only another junk room, I saw instead that I had chosen correctly. It was clearly May Hill’s room because on the bed there was a pair of neatly folded sweatpants and a big top, May Hill’s pajamas no doubt, and by the pillow a book of some kind, her nighttime reading. You had to be attentive to the clues, however, to understand it was a bedroom because the place was filled, from floor to ceiling, with boxes, a narrow aisle to the adjoining bathroom and a corridor also to the window. I carefully made my way along the towers in order to look out to the orchard. Down below I could see my father hauling brush and all the way across the road there was our house, May Hill able to keep track of everyone if she took the time to squeeze along through her maze. I would leave in just a minute, I thought. Wouldn’t William be surprised by my expedition!

Since the interview I had sometimes imagined that May Hill might be one of those people who made whole miniature towns out of bottle caps, or she’d have fabricated a family of paper dolls that were intricately cut with tiny little scissors, the kind of thing lonesome people do to keep themselves occupied. But there in her room were no astonishing worlds, her boxes stuffed with what looked like newspaper clippings and some of them had labels such as
CHECK
STUBS
,
1978–80
, and
TAX
BILLS
, and
BANK
STATEMENTS
. There were several towers of ancestral letters, documents I guess she needed to sleep with. A few items seemed nice, an enormous jar of buttons on a shelf, for one, and a crock of marbles for another, and a blue padded book of the sort my father had, filled with coins of silver. I opened it up to see the half-dollars. So there were those pretty things to look at, and to be glad about, too, glad that May Hill had a great many unusual and ornate buttons, and maybe the agates and the coins were worth hundreds of dollars, which probably made her happy.

Had I been looking at those precious things for a long time? It didn’t seem like it, but when the footsteps sounded on the back stairs I snapped to attention. Where was I? May Hill’s bedroom, that’s where. I instantly curled up by the radiator, very tightly, behind a box column, listening to the flat quick footfall coming closer, closer. It could be none other than May Hill herself. The person, she, stopped. The door had been left open, how stupid could I have been! She must have been thinking about that unusual fact before she took the simple action of closing it. There, it was shut. She then went farther down the hall to the living room. She was possibly looking for something and maybe she found it or maybe she didn’t. I thought I might throw up. After a while she went down the front stairs and from what I could hear she was out the door to her work again.

My inner ears seemed to have taken up my entire head—that’s how hard I’d been listening. Time to reverse my steps and get out of the manor house, steam away home. I went to the door. I turned the knob this way and I turned it that way. It didn’t, it wouldn’t open. I rattled it, I looked through the keyhole, and I pulled at it with all my strength.
No
, I kept telling myself.
I’m not locked in.
I hurried back to the window to see if my father was still driving the tractor along the rows. He was gone, no hope of holding up a flag, or making a sign that said
SAVE
ME
.

Amanda had finished her horn practicing; all was quiet downstairs. I went into May Hill’s private bathroom, the sink with a crusted rust stain from faucet to drain, and the small tub also rusty, where she had to fold up her tall thick self to get clean although a person didn’t imagine her removing her clothes. I was trapped in that bathroom and in the bedroom, too, the boxes closing in, the bed probably booby-trapped in some way. The water from the faucet poisoned. I knew I mustn’t cry and I mustn’t be sick. May Hill had smiled at the story of Elizabeth Morrow Lombard and the scalping of the Indian because she, herself, was a scalper—I had to buckle over.
No, but think, think!
If I could jump up and down to rouse Amanda and Adam below. If the storm windows weren’t sealing in the regular windows I could thrust them open and climb out on the roof or at least call and call. Or I could leap to the ground, risking life and limb.

In the end all I could do was stick my fingers under the doorjamb, like a cat when he’s playing, his paws blindly fishing for whatever he thinks is on the other side. Then I did start to cry, wishing so hard that Mrs. Kraselnik would come and get me, and being furious all over again that William was spending so much of his vacation with Bert Plumly. My predicament was his fault. It soon would grow dark and May Hill would enter and get into bed. That thought alone was passing strange. Or else she knew I was in the room and she would leave me to my punishment, she’d lock me up, day after day, choosing another chamber for herself, plenty of other beds for rest.

I curled up by the radiator again and I couldn’t help it, I whimpered. I lay there drawing circles in the dust. And some squares. Maybe after a long time for just a minute despite my fear I fell asleep because when I woke up my worry had come true and it was getting dark. Down the hall I heard the clatter of dishes. My head hurt. I was stiff and sore and maybe bruised. Someone was preparing supper. I was coming to understand that probably, and finally, there was nothing to do but give myself up. Even if I didn’t want to, even if facing that prospect scared me half to death. And so, in order to do that, I went to the door and I began to knock, softly at first but steadily. May Hill was moving pots around and probably chopping vegetables, or sharpening her knife—sharpening her knife. And yet I must knock. I knocked harder. I knocked for what felt like an hour, changing knuckles every so often.

When she opened up I was still knocking, knocking at the air without the door. I stopped the little song I was bravely singing. It’s probably a fact that she was stunned by the appearance of Mary Frances Lombard in her bedroom, that she’d been expecting a bat to be flying around or a rodent on the prowl. That’s probably why she didn’t say anything. She’d been cooking dinner for Philip, a boy about to come in after a long day’s work for his good supper. From the heap of ages she’d dug up an apron with rickrack, which under different circumstances would have been humorous on her manly frame. She looked at me. I looked at her and then I ducked. I ran past her down the hall, yanked open the gate, practically tumbled down the back stairs into Dolly’s kitchen, and another tumble down the basement stairs, bumping into Philip at the bottom—“Whoa, girl,” he said, as if I were a horse. He held me, thinking he was doing yet another rescue.

I slapped at him, slap, slap and ran away out the door, and I didn’t stop until I was inside our door in Velta, in our kitchen.

“Where were you?” William said.

My mother was at the sink washing lettuce that she herself had grown in a cold frame, her pride. My father was sitting on a bench taking off his work boots. William had Butterhead, the cat who loved him best, in his arms. I was home. Somehow I had gone far away and somehow I’d returned.

“Marlene,” my father said.

“Did you have a nice time?” my mother wondered.

William narrowed his eyes in that expert way of his. “Are you wearing lipstick?”

I slapped at my mouth.

“Marlene?” my father asked. “Are you all right?”

“What happened to you?” my mother said, coming from the sink.

“Nothing,” I said. “I wasn’t anywhere.”

14.

Blossom Day

P
hilip was at long last gone and the vacation over, our school lives resuming. Somehow, though, I did not feel the same after being May Hill’s prisoner. That’s how it seemed to me, that she had captured me, that she’d put me in her own bedroom, that she meant to fatten me up or starve me. The story could go either way when it came to how much food, but the outcome for the girl, whether fat or thin, would be the same. Ultimately nothing left of Mary Frances but bones. I would have liked to tell William about the capture but for a reason I didn’t understand—even though I lived in my own self, and should understand my own reasons—I didn’t want to tell him.

Mrs. Kraselnik could see there was something wrong with me, because every now and then when I was staring out the window, in my mind chained to May Hill’s radiator, she would say in her stern low voice, “Mary Frances, are you there? Where have you gone?” I’d have to shake myself back to the four–five split, wishing I could explain how close I’d been to never returning.

If I loved my teacher it’s probably fair to say that William was intrigued by Brianna Kraselnik, who was sixteen in her first spring with us. Her brother, David, had been sent to a military academy after he’d been in rehab, Brianna theoretically the good child. The single community activity that she took part in was the Library Cart Drill Team, her parents no doubt forcing her to do volunteer work for college admission. We were still for the most part full of appreciation for our mother’s kitschy enterprise, it never occurring to us that the project might have been an indictment of her character, or at least proof of her Alcoholism.

The art of Cart Drill at the basic level is to push the shelving carts to musical accompaniment. Sometimes you kick a leg out, or do a hip swivel, and as a team you make patterns as a marching band does, or you get a running start and glide with your feet hooked around the base, although that’s advanced work. Across the nation at that time there were eighty-four teams and counting, Cart Drill not something my mother herself invented. She was hoping we would one day enter the American Library Association Annual Cart Drill Competition in Chicago, and it was perhaps in order to achieve this goal that she invited Brianna Kraselnik, who was on the high school pom-pom squad, to choreograph a routine for us.

We began to rehearse in mid-April for the Memorial Day parade, our single performance of the year. All of our efforts riding on that forty-five-minute spectacle. We were an unusual team because we were not middle-aged librarians in seasonal appliquéd sweaters and gay men employees but a cross section of the community, which highlighted us, the bibliomaniac children. It’s customary for marchers in a parade to throw treats at the spectators but when we performed the crowds rained candy upon us. That’s how much our townspeople loved the team. We always kept our focus, every member serious and in sync, ignoring the great reward, the crowd laughing and whooping, Dubble Bubble and Tootsie Rolls filling the top shelves of our carts.

At our first rehearsal in the back room of the library Brianna made her entrance carrying her own enormous boom box, a canvas bag of CDs, and a clipboard. She set her load on the banquet table. Behold: Brianna Kraselnik in an aqua leotard with gathers between her breasts, those cupcakes sharply delineated. On the bottom half she wore gray sweatpants that were cut off at the knees and dingy pink leg warmers dribbling down around her ankles, around her soft leather shoes. We’d never seen any dancer’s outfit that was so ragged but also obviously professional. She was nothing like the aristocratic Mrs. Kraselnik, Brianna a girl with bovine eyes, the long lashes bristly with mascara, and she had a luscious red mouth, the puff of her lips something you wanted to try to pop, the way we did to Bubble Wrap, and there was the glossy hair all the way to her rump. When she appeared I was already practicing along the wall: forward, back, run, glide, an accomplished pro myself, a team member who was not showing off but rather refining her technique. William, sitting on the floor with a book in his lap was squinting at me and his eyebrows were raised, too, and his forehead furrowed, all of that musculature at work at once. As if to say,
Really, Frankie?