When Alice Lay Down With Peter (25 page)

Beside the wood stove at the Andersons’, she made herself a couch of pillows covered with some discarded drapes, plush velvet, royal purple. She curled up, chewed a strand of her hair and read the biography of Mrs. Vanderbilt. I worked and tried
to ignore her. I have felt like a servant only in my daughter’s presence. If I hummed, she sniffed at me. If I murmured to myself, she would stop and look. I had neither solitude nor company. I had an adolescent daughter. A daughter more beautiful and more dangerous than Circe, more captivating than Calypso. The kitchen became a prison.

She began to make her demands.

She wore a garland in her hair, coneflowers, of all things, wild sunflower, small sprays of aster. It was September and Indian summer. The flowers were bearing fruit; their florets drew away from their receptacles, revealed stamen, pistil. Yellow with dark brown discs, set in her coiled braids. Still very young, she had the potency of an older girl, as if Richard’s presence had created a hothouse.

She appeared at the swinging door with flushed cheeks, looking like a girl who has recently been kissed. In her distraction, she held the door open, her gaze unfocused, and I saw Richard in the dining room behind her, his small hands in his pockets, his look of excited satisfaction. The air was full of broken constraints. Through the open door, I caught Richard’s eye. His slight smile, his pride. He then dismissed us both and disappeared.

“Come in or go home,” I told her. Our eyes met for one horrible, naked moment. We began to bustle. She dropped her shawl, rolled up her sleeves, and for once actually proved useful at the sink.

“Good drying weather,” said she.

“Yep,” said I, “sun and wind, wind and sun, that’s what it takes.”

“How are the turnips coming?” she asked.

I stopped and turned to her. “Who wants to know?”

She blushed. “Just trying to be nice. Why bother?”

Acrid silence.

Never give up on your kids. I tried again. “Peter’s happy with the rye this year.”

No response. A coal mine caved in. Tap, tap. Tap, tap. Signs of life.

Vipers hatch and breed in the silence of an adolescent, quickening in our children’s righteousness. The kitchen filled with them, asps and snakes. Helen’s set jaw. A lovely frown, crisp habit with the vegetables, scrubbing with a brown bristle brush, suddenly tall. “Are you taller than I am?” I feigned surprise. Helen, given the chance to top me, stopped and stood and let me stand proximate while we measured shoulders. Hers an inch below. “Not just yet.” The scraping of vegetable skin resumed. “But soon,” I said, yearning to give her something, a pint of blood, both aortas. “Give you another winter, and you’ll outgrow your mum. You’re becoming a woman, Helen.”

“Then let me be.”

“Don’t I? I think I do. You do as you need.”

“Not what I really need.”

“And what is that?”

“Travel,” said she.

“Certainly, my darling. I’ll sell some gold and you shall travel.”

“What if you didn’t need to?” Then, “What gold?”

“I was joking, dear. Mother was being funny, ha, ha.”

She speared me with a look. “You’d say no.”

“Don’t be so sure. Don’t be so hard on me, please, Helen. I’m not your enemy.”

“You just want to make me work in the kitchen. You want to keep me home so I can be just like you, a bitter old lady with dried-up skin. Your hands are wrinkled. Your face is wrinkled. I’m never going to be like you.”

“No, that’s true. You’ll be rich and beautiful and feel no pain and do no work and have many children who never cry, and you will never grow old because you’ll live in a glass casket and God help you.”

“Bitch,” said Helen clear as ice.

I swung round and slapped her before the word had quite left her lips.

“Well,” said Helen, “that’s that.”

“Get your things. I’m taking you home to your father.”

“Go to hell.” Then she fled, of course, and I thought, Jeezus, children are vaudevillian.

“Helen!” I shouted. My shout was a formal resignation from the employ of the house of John Anderson. “You will come here at once! You will do as I say!” Of course she didn’t, and wouldn’t, and Edith Anderson was in the bath and didn’t hear a thing, and Richard was playing pool on the third floor and stopped, just as he’d aligned his final shot and lifted his head, the light falling on his golden curls, and he looked up through the lead-paned window and smiled and aimed down the length of the cue and banked the eight ball into the corner pocket, winning yet again against himself.

But John Anderson heard my cry, and he stepped across the carpet and pushed through the swinging door, knocking gently on the kitchen wall. “Hello?” he said. “I thought I heard you sneeze.” He smiled.

“I was just about to murder my child.”

“Ahhhh. But she murdered you first.”

“She is evil.” I untied my apron. “John Anderson, KC, it’s been very nice knowing you. But I am finished here, and will forthwith take my deceitful bitch-goddess back to her father.”

“She could come with us, Blondie.”

I stopped.

He said, “Richard has asked me about it. They’re very young but—”

“She’s a little girl!”

He shrugged. “The world is changing.”

“Don’t give me that ‘world is changing’ crap!” I was going to touch him, let him feel the cattle prod of my electric touch. “You disappoint me, John Anderson. You disappoint me more than I can say. You turn out to be the same as all your fat pals.
Fin de siècle
, my eyeball! The world’s been faint and sick for eons, and you’re just as decadent as the rest of your butt-lazy cronies.”

“Yes, but it really is.” That ineffable generosity. What an ass of a class specimen; what a class act as a simple human being.

I couldn’t tell him I distrusted his son. He saw me hesitate and pressed his advantage, running off to get the illustrations, the map of the
Titanic
. We stood at the pastry table, and he showed me the four smokestacks, told me the proportion and weight of the hull. He had the drawings from the shipwright. Typical of the man. Biting his pipe with excitement, pointing with its stem at the six air compartments that made the
Titanic
unsinkable.

Richard walked in, leaned back and watched me as I squirmed.

“Think about it,” said John. “What an education! She’ll see London. We’ll go to Paris, and I promise to stay away from Belgium. She’ll be in no danger.”

“She’s too young.”

“We’ll look after her. Won’t we, Richard.”

Richard’s slight smile.

“What will she go as?” I asked.

John didn’t understand me. “As? Well… As?”

“What will she go as?” I couldn’t find other words for it.

“As… as Helen. She’ll go as Helen.”

John Anderson was innocent. He clapped his hands. “There! It’s done!” He softly punched Richard’s shoulder. John Anderson’s innocence always won him vast returns.

E
LI BECAME A BIG RODEO STAR
, making saddlebags of money. Not only bronc riding, but playing his guitar and singing those homeless cowboy songs in front of hundreds of fans, dressed with a black string tie and a silver knot at his throat, a silver buckle at his waist, long and lean, for he’d got taller in his black cowboy boots, and his black ten-gallon hat with the silver hatband set with turquoise added another six inches. Broncobusting kept him mellow, his voice burrowed into his leathery soul and his whole body said, I’m lonesome and I want it that way, ain’t no home for a cowboy. Helen and I were two gold pieces he kept in his chest pocket, right next to his homesick heart. I enjoyed the moonglow of Eli’s reflected fame, being the good woman in all those aching songs—my gal, rose of my heart.

The money that came to Eli from the rodeo seemed like the kind of money to throw at a new wardrobe for Helen: easy money, glamour cash. She had to have travel clothes, walking shoes, a good wool coat with a cape because the ship would pass close to Newfoundland on its way to New York. She needed evening dresses with matching bags and stockings and dancing shoes. They were travelling first class. Two other families from town were going too, but they were only going second class. Hats and kid gloves, a shawl, and of course, the pearls. Seeing his
money spent this way, Eli grew ever more reckless in the rodeos, which served only to make him richer.

Richard watched us attire his prize. He brought her more gifts. Fastening drops of amber to her ears, he touched her face as if his fingers would leave an imprint on the soft surface. She blushed, modestly raised her eyes and kissed his cheek.

My distaste for the young man grew more acute. He bought her a short lamb coat, breathtaking with her hair, her ivory complexion. We were pinning a dress when he carried it in. Surprised, I too exclaimed over it, “How lovely!” She danced about the room, smiling at us both and said, “Oh, thank you!” He looked at her with neither fondness nor friendship, but a custodial regard. His voice was smooth, having changed without becoming raspy, a manly tenor. He wore a coal grey wool jacket with a white collar.

They were stylish. Their style was an end in itself, an activity, like racing.

Eli took a gulp of cold coffee and put his mug on the porch step. He’d just come off the fall circuit, and he was stiff and sore all over. “Walk with me, Blondie,” he said and took my hand, and we went walking through the golden woods. It was a warm fall day. The leaves smelled of apples. We walked down to the riverside, the water brown and still. Dad had fixed up the dock last spring. Eli began by loosening his string tie and unbuttoning his pearl buttons. He wrenched off his boots and pulled off his pants, and wearing only his hat, he unbuttoned my dress and stripped me down. We held hands and jumped into the river. The freezing water ripped the air right out of our lungs.

A
LICE EYED HER GRANDDAUGHTER’S COSTUME. “YOU
look like a girl,” she said sadly. “I never thought I’d see the day when a McCormack woman would go off wearing women’s clothing.” Young girls mimic women even better than women mimic women. The white kid gloves, the rouleau, tendrils on her throat. She’d brushed her eyebrows and fainted them with brown shadow.

The moment of their departure. Raining. Grandmother Alice refused to come with us to the train station. Grandfather Peter had a bad back. He walked out painfully and stood beside the carriage that would take his granddaughter into the arms of the enemies of the revolution. He stared straight ahead. Helen’s desire to be off too urgent, she patted her grandfather’s crustaceous white hand. Dad nodded and hobbled back to the house, tears running down either side of his long nose.

With my heart in my father’s shirt pocket, my conscience up my mother’s sleeve and my first loyalty wrapped around my daughter’s little finger, I climbed up beside my husband and we rode off, a rodeo champion, beautiful Helen and me.

John Anderson greeted us at the station, to the merriment of loose pocket change, and took Eli’s hand in both of his. John Anderson found friends where Eli heard coyotes. Eli shook John’s hand. I’m not sure whether, in his innocence, John understood Eli’s subtle generosity. Then our strange Aphrodite sweeping past.

There were twenty minutes before the train’s departure. Helen, hearing this, panicked, not at leaving her mother and
father, but at the delay, for she did not want to be our child a minute longer. Eli and I gazed at her, ashamed for her, in love with her. Took pity on her and said we had errands to run, we must go. Everyone but John Anderson felt relieved. He had tears in his eyes and said he’d take care of her for us, that was a promise.

We went back to the house. I stood in Helen’s room, looking. A messy child. I let things stay where they’d fallen. If tomorrow came, it would not come to her empty little room.

“Does she know we are abandoned?” I asked Eli.

He considered, then pretended he hadn’t heard me. Marie’s dirge, the clock, the rain.

I
MISSED HELEN
while she was on her travels, but I didn’t envy her. I like it here. Inland, where the river flows up the middle of the continent. The sun will skin you alive. And in winter, we are so thoroughly bereft of heat and light, we can know cold for what it is: the end of ourselves. A message from dead stars: There’s nothing out here, lucky for you, so cheer yourselves with one another. The days are as broad and free as the wings on the heron swinging over the slough. And come winter, the days will be as crisp and short and dark as an eighth note.