The Sisters Montclair (2 page)

It seemed they were as desperate to have her, as she was to have the job.

The house was deceptively large inside. The ceilings were nine feet tall and the rooms along the back, the living room, dining room, and sunroom, all had French doors leading to a wide verandah overlooking the valley. The view was spectacular, the valley bathed in sunlight, the Tennessee River meandering like a snake, and the distant mountains of the Cumberland Plateau rising into a violet sky. Despite its view, the house had a fusty, over-heated smell. Stella stood in the wide foyer staring at an oil portrait that hung on the wall of a somber dark-haired young woman. In the library to her right she could hear the sound of two female voices, one low and well-modulated with the aristocratic accent her mother had always dismissively called “Plantation South,” and the other higher-pitched, too loud, twittering.

“Miss Alice, the new girl is here and I want you to be nice to her,” Janice said.

“New girl? What new girl?”

“The one who’s taking Martha’s place.”

“I don’t like Martha.”

“I know. That’s why she’s not coming back. Now you sit here and write your letters and I’ll show the new girl around and then bring her in and introduce you.”

“Oh, all right then.”

Janice came hurrying out of the library, a small nervous-looking woman, smiling brightly. “Follow me. I’ll show you the kitchen.” Her eyes swept Stella, came to rest, pointedly, on her lip ring and her hair, dyed an unnatural shade of black, and then skittered away.

Stella followed her down a long narrow hallway through a butler’s pantry to the kitchen. Janice was talking the whole time.
Miss Alice likes this, Miss Alice doesn’t like that.
“You’re not to eat her food. Bring your own lunch and dinner from home. She’ll tell you what she wants to eat. Here’s her routine,” Janice said, opening a three-ring binder that contained accounts of all the minutiae of Miss Alice’s daily life, down to the time and quantity of her bowel movements. “She exercises twice a day, morning and afternoons, five complete laps of the ground floor.” Janice took a glass down from the cupboard. “These glasses are for Miss Alice only. You can use the ones on the bottom shelf. You have to walk behind her as she walks to make sure she doesn’t fall. Before you begin, fill one of these glasses with ice up to here, just here, do you see where I’m pointing? The rest with water. Put the glass on the table and cover it with a napkin. That way, when Miss Alice needs to hydrate as she’s making her laps, she can just pick it up off the table. The rest of the time, she has a little bell and she’ll ring it if she needs you.”

Stella thought,
I’ll call Charlotte tonight and tell her I can’t take the job.

“Are there any questions?” Janice said brightly.

“No. I don’t think so.”

“Don’t worry,” Janice said, laughing. “You’ll do fine.”

Her financial aid hadn’t come through, not in the amount her counselor had told her anyway, and now she was short on tuition for the spring semester. Short on tuition and short on money for books, food, and housing, too. It was the way her chaotic life always went. If things could go wrong, they would. She should have been used to poverty by now, she’d been on her own since she was sixteen, she should have developed thick skin, calluses, a devil-may-care attitude. But she wasn’t like that. Poverty wasn’t like that. It wore you down, permeated your clothes, your skin, like a fine powder. After awhile you gave it off like a stench.

Just once, Stella wanted life to be easy.

She deserved it, damn it. If anyone deserved an easy life, it was her.

Alice Montclair Whittington was nothing like she had expected. She had expected Joan Crawford in a padded-shoulder suit, but Alice was thin, of medium height, with a cloud of white hair. She wore a green knit dress and a pink sweater, and a pair of tennis shoes with pink socks. Her eyes were a faded blue but Stella saw something move in their depths, something sharp and fierce. Those pale eyes fixed on Stella’s face while Janice twittered on, speaking in an overly-loud and jovial voice, as if she was talking to an unruly child.

When Janice had finished, Alice looked at Stella and said, “I hear you’re from Alabama.”

“That’s right.”

“Well, I’m sorry for you.”

Stella stared at her a beat. “It could be worse,” she said.

“I don’t see how.”

Alice was sitting in a wingback chair next to a wall of bookcases. Janice stood behind her.

“Now, Miss Alice,” she said nervously.

Alice ignored Janice and continued her perusal of Stella. “What’s that mark on your arm?”

“This?” Stella hesitated, and then pushed up her sleeve so the old woman could see. “It’s a tattoo. It’s the Sanskrit symbol for peace.”

“You young ones are always marking up your skin. Do you know what that will look like when you get to be my age?”

Stella pulled her sleeve down. “I try not to think about it.”

Behind the chair, Janice frowned, giving her head a warning shake.

Alice brightened, slanting her eyes up at Stella. “Ever do this kind of work before?”

“Nope.”

“But you think you can handle it?”

“It’s not brain surgery. I can handle it.”

“They say I’m difficult.”

“I’m used to difficult people.”

“I’m not difficult. I just like things done a certain way.”

“I understand.”

Alice folded her hands in her lap. She gave Stella a sly look. “You’d be a pretty girl if you’d do something with your hair.”

“And you’d be a nice old lady if you’d stop saying things you shouldn’t.”

Behind Alice’s shoulder, Janice’s mouth fell open in shock. The clock on the mantle ticked steadily. Stella thought,
I never even had a chance to ask what the hourly rate was.

Without warning, Alice Montclair Whittington put her head back, and laughed.

The girl reminded her of someone. She had suffered; you could see it in her eyes, in the fierce, wary expression on her face. The girl’s face was heart-shaped; a sign of beauty in Alice’s generation but less so now, with their celebration of thin, blade-faced women with over-full lips. The girl reminded Alice of someone but she couldn’t remember who.

Memory was like that. It shuffled in and out of her consciousness like an old servant. One moment she might be looking at the angelic expression of a blonde child in a sepia-tinted photograph, and the next moment she remembered, with all the fresh anguish of grief, that the child was her own son, long grown now and dead.

Alice watched the girl’s face as Janice explained the dreary routines of this dreary house. The girl listened attentively, eyes hooded, chin dropped slightly, and Alice was reminded again of someone she’d known long ago. Memory stirred, began its lumbering progress along the dusty corridors of her mind toward the shuttered room where something unpleasant waited.

No.

Alice closed her eyes and let it go, sinking once more into blessed oblivion.

Stella and Janice were standing in the library when Alice’s sister, Adeline, drove up. Stella watched her through the window, listening half-heartedly to Janice describe the routines of the house, still in shock that, despite her inappropriate comment to Alice, she’d been offered the job. Adeline came in carrying a bag of chili-cheese Coneys that she’d picked up at the Sonic Drive-In. She was well-dressed and looked every bit the aristocrat, handing the greasy bag to Janice and saying, “There are three in the bag. Make sure they
all
go in the refrigerator.”

Janice took the bag gratefully, without so much as a grimace, but Stella blushed.

“I’m Alice’s sister,” Adeline said, her eyes sweeping Stella. “Who are you?” The disapproval in her face was obvious. She didn’t even try to hide it.

“I’m Stella.”

Alice said, “She’s my new caregiver. She’s taking the place of that other one. The one I didn’t like.”

They looked as different from each other as sisters could look, although Janice had warned Stella that Adeline visited often, and that she and Miss Alice quarreled like children.

“Done this kind of work before have you?” Adeline asked Stella.

Stella frowned slightly. “No.”

“I didn’t think so.”

“Stop interrogating her, Adeline. I don’t come to your house and interrogate the help.”

The help.
Stella blushed again and followed Janice into the kitchen. The whole time she stood listening to Janice give instructions on how to make meals, Stella was thinking, I won’t be back.

But later, as she was leaving, walking past the library door, Alice called to her, “Are you coming back tomorrow?”

Something hopeful and hesitant in her voice made Stella stop. She raised her chin and stared boldly at Adeline, and then at Alice, giving her a tight little smile.

“Of course I’ll be back,” she said, lifting one hand carelessly, and turning, she walked out.

They watched her through the library windows climb into her small rusty car and drive away. The January sky was darkening, pressing down on the roofs of the houses across the street.

Adeline said, “She has a tattoo.”

“It’s the Sanskrit symbol for peace.”

“The what?”

“The tattoo. It’s Sanskrit.”

“She has a ring through her lip.”

“They all do these days.”

“Only the bad ones. Did you hide the silver?”

“I like her,” Alice said. “I think I’ll keep her.”

All the way back to Josh’s apartment Stella rehearsed in her head what she would say to Charlotte. She would tell her another job had come up. She would tell her her school schedule had changed. But then, in the middle of imagining what excuses she would use to not take the job, Stella remembered her promise to Alice. She remembered Adeline’s expression of open dislike and she felt a tremor of resentment. All her life, people had been looking at her the way Adeline had looked at her.

As if being poor was a crime.

It was one of the reasons why, despite the odds, she’d gotten her GED. It was one of the reasons she’d enrolled in college. To make something of herself, to rise above poverty and hardship through her own merits, without any help from anyone. To use education to get what so many people around her seemed to take for granted; a good job, a roof over her head, food on the table.

A life of her own.

Josh was sitting on the sofa playing Halo when she got home. The apartment was a townhouse, with a living room and dining room in front and a kitchen in back, and two bedrooms and a bath upstairs. The downstairs was crowded with several sofas and easy chairs that Josh had picked up from neighbors who were moving out. He was a packrat, but he paid the rent on time and kept food on the table, which was more than her previous boyfriends had been able to do. The sex wasn’t great, but it was good enough.

“Did you get the job?” he said, without looking up.

“Have you ever seen that movie,
Driving Miss Daisy
?”

“Yeah.” He frowned. “I mean, I think so.”

“Okay. Well, I’d be the Morgan Freeman character.”

He chuckled but she could see that he had no idea what she was talking about. He kept his attention fixed on the screen.

“Why aren’t you at work?”

He glanced at her and then back at the TV. “I stayed out late last night and didn’t feel like going in. I called in sick.”

“Nice.”

“You can do that when you’ve been gainfully employed for awhile.”

She refused to let him rattle her. She said benignly, “One of the perks of full-time employment, I guess.”

“Yeah,” he said. “You should try it.”

She went into the kitchen and opened the refrigerator, pulling out a beer. She stood for a moment at the kitchen window, staring out at the hard-packed dirt yard and the roofs of dilapidated houses and the distant ridge tops, dark against the winter sky. This part of Chattanooga was hilly and well-settled, with small shotgun-style cottages perched on the sides of steep ravines, and here and there, a rambling old Victorian cut up into small apartments. After a few minutes she went back into the front room and slumped down in one of the overstuffed chairs facing the TV.

“Did you pick up some more beer?” he said, without looking up from his game.

“No, I forgot.”

“You can run out later.”

She hadn’t forgotten. She didn’t have the money for beer. She didn’t have the money for anything. She owed him two months’ rent, which of course, was what he was pissed about.

“So when do you start?”

“If I took the job, I’d start tomorrow.”

He glanced at her and then back at the TV. “What do you mean,
if
you took it? You have any other job offers recently?”

Asshole
. He knew she’d been looking, had been trying since Christmas to find a part-time job to supplement her meager work study earnings. Still, it couldn’t be easy for him either, having to support her. He worked as a computer tech for a local insurance company and although the money was good, it wasn’t good enough to support two.

She felt a mind-numbing weariness come over her. She stared moodily at the screen, remembering Alice’s statement to her sister.
I don’t come over to your house and interrogate the help.
The help. That’s what she would be; a servant at the beck and call of a rich old lady with a little silver bell. How humiliating would that be? Still, compared to everything else she’d faced, was facing now, what difference did it make?

“I’ll probably take the job until I can find something else,” she said.

“Good girl,” he said. “What’s it pay?”

She told him. He shrugged, not looking at her. “Not too bad. That should buy a few groceries.” He seemed in a better mood now that he knew she’d have some money coming in.

She put her head back and closed her eyes. In the apartment next door, a child began to wail.

“Speaking of groceries,” he said. “What’s for supper?”

I don’t know, fucker, what’s for supper?

That’s what she wanted to say. She spent a lot of time fantasizing about saying things like that to him. But reality kept her mute. She was tired of sleeping on the flea-infested sofas of people she barely knew.