June could simply kick herself. She’s done it again. Or is still doing it. Or, precisely, has not been doing anything at all. Now Frances is coming, and what can she tell her? What arrangements have been made? The biggest actions she’s taken since all this started have been buying a plastic sheet and putting Aggie’s name on a waiting list. Nor has she pressed George for help, or a decision, or more tests, or just a nudge in the right direction. For all she knows, Aggie’s name may still be at the bottom of the waiting list. Or it may be near the top, with a call to come any time, who knows? What happened to that urgent sense of future?
What a coward she must be.
And now Frances is coming. This must surely be a sort of deadline for finishing something that can’t go on. So what is she going to say? It’s not the sort of thing that drops easily into a conversation. When Frances asks, “So what’s new with you guys?” she can’t just blurt, “Your grandmother’s having accidents and I think she’ll have to go to a nursing home.”
Or Frances might find out for herself, wandering into Aggie’s room on Saturday morning. June imagines Frances coming to her in the kitchen and saying, “Oh, Mother, why didn’t you tell me? You can’t go on like this, it isn’t fair to you, we’ll have to do something.”
How unnerving Frances is, the difference she makes, the decisiveness she imposes, just by coming.
Aggie sees that, too, June knows from the apprehension that leaps to her face when June tells her. That’s never happened before. Usually Aggie is overjoyed by word of Frances, and immediately sits down with her cookbooks and starts planning treats, like a child getting ready for Christmas. “Shall I get out your recipes?” June asks, setting breakfast on the table.
“No, don’t bother.”
“Aren’t you going to bake for Frances?”
“Not this time, I think. She’s usually watching her weight. Probably if you get in lots of lettuce it’ll be enough.” How dry her tone is — or is it defeated?
June ought surely to have a sense of victory, then. If one loses, the other wins, isn’t that simply logical, clear-cut? It is necessary only to make a move. Do something, she scolds. Just, what?
For one thing, aim for Frances’s support, her sympathy. Not easy. If she does it wrong, Frances will look at her with horror and say, “Oh no, you couldn’t, it’d kill her, she’d hate it.”
Really, this time she must make an extra effort to get along. Every time Frances comes to visit, June makes promises. This time, she regularly pledges, there’ll be no nagging, no old and new resentments bubbling up. This time she won’t tell Frances to sit up straight and cross her legs properly; she won’t ask if any of the men Frances knows is serious; she won’t say, “Surely you have time to come to church with me, you never do, and people would like to see you.” She’ll also try not to sit in church wondering what Frances and Aggie may be talking about while she’s out: what secrets may be spilling, or what judgments being made.
Every time she makes these promises, and every time they break down. Friday night is usually all right: Frances comes in on a roll of city energy; enthusiasm gets them through. Saturday morning when they get up, things are a little saggy. Frances is usually grumpy, withdrawn, just wanting her coffee and a cigarette. By afternoon she is really getting on June’s nerves, because, after all, how hard can it be for her to make the effort to sit straight and cross her legs at the ankles, even at the knees if she must, but not fling them around, sticking them up on tables or over the arms of chairs or tucking them underneath herself. How hard could it be to get through a weekend without swearing or smoking or taking a drink?
June always winds up aggrieved, Frances impatient and sometimes angry. “For God’s sake, Mother,” she cries, “can’t you let me alone for just one weekend? Do you know how old I am? Can’t you let me be?”
Sometimes when she leaves she looks sullen, sometimes only tired. Any animation will have come from the tales she tells of her life away. Whatever possessed her to take up such an occupation, going out of her way to find out things it’s better not to know? Just knowing certain information must be corrupting, June thinks.
And it didn’t have to be that way; might not have been, if Aggie hadn’t stuck her oar in on June’s and Frances’s argument over university or teachers’ college. Still, she must admit it might not have been comfortable, having Frances teaching here. June would have felt responsible, and even back then Frances had a way of going off on tangents. First thing June knew, Frances would probably have been out organizing demonstrations — against war, for women, all this and that she’s been involved in. What a mystery it is: a daughter so righteous about her causes, and so unrighteous in her lack of faith.
She supposes it’s not entirely Aggie’s fault. She must herself have lacked her father’s story-telling gifts, so that she never could grip Frances with his stories or his lessons. She never was able to impress on Frances the importance of sacrifice or duty.
“Your grandfather, my father, was a lovely man,” she tried to tell her. “It’s a shame you couldn’t have known him.”
“What did he look like?”
“Like me, I guess. Or I look like him. He was gentle and quiet. He used to tell me about growing up in England and how his parents saved up and did without so he could have an education. He was so brave, coming here all on his own.”
“I don’t think he was very nice to Grandma,” Frances ventured.
Nice to Grandma! “Let me tell you, young lady, Grandma wasn’t exactly nice to him.”
“How come?”
“Well, she had no education. She had no idea what it meant, being a teacher’s wife. And then she always thought she knew better. She brought him down in the world.”
“You guys,” Frances said, “you guys,” shaking her head, “sure tell things differently.”
June knows that Frances has, in fact, finished any number of projects: university, stories, buying a house and decorating it. But nevertheless she has a picture in her mind of a Frances who gets tired of things, disinterested in the middle of them, putting them down uncompleted and going on to the next.
This is not someone to depend on.
Even Aggie now apparently realizes that.
But how would June feel if she were the one having accidents in her bed, and Frances was coming to find out? She would rather die.
Settling Aggie in the front-room chair for the day before she leaves for school, June glances at her with startled pity. This will be the worst thing Frances could find out about her grandmother.
What would be the worst thing she could find out about June?
Oh, how could she have been so stupid? Startled, she almost trips on an uneven piece of sidewalk. What if she died? What if Frances came home and, as she would have to in those circumstances, began sorting through June’s possessions? All those things collected over the years, all of them inoffensive and innocent, except for one.
That brown envelope, with the letters and documents from Herb’s lawyer. And the final divorce decree — where on earth did she put it? Surely she didn’t stick it in the attic, did she, with all the other accumulated this and that she and Aggie have tucked away over the years? Whatever they didn’t want to throw out, but had no particular use for any more?
She imagines Frances coming across that envelope, and idly opening it, without any particular interest, and finding out. “Oh God,” she prays, “don’t let anything happen to me until I can find that and get rid of it. Let me get through this day and I’ll take care of it tonight.” She must destroy it, because it’s impossible now to tell Aggie and Frances about it. “Why on earth didn’t you say?” they’d ask.
Well, why didn’t she? It ought to have been reasonably simple, the day the first warning of Herb’s intentions came in the mail, oh, years ago, to mention it over supper: to say, “Guess what I got today? Herb’s getting a divorce. Apparently there’s nothing I can do about it.” Something like that, dealt with briskly, as if it didn’t matter.
But it did matter. She wouldn’t have guessed how those papers would bring it back: the terrible failure of purpose, those desires she neither understood nor felt; and there was Herb out there making appointments with a lawyer, still drawing up her life on paper, no doubt still indulging his desires.
And there was the law, on his side: like some heathen Moslem man, able merely to say “I divorce thee” three times and it was so.
She didn’t get a lawyer. There was, she understood, no way to oppose him, now that it was merely a matter of not being together for a certain period of time. He was neither offering money nor asking for anything to do with Frances, who in any case was almost grown up then, getting ready to leave. If he’d been interested in his daughter, he’d have shown it long before.
At least June was the one who picked up the mail, so no one else had an inkling.
When the final divorce decree came, she sat in her room reading it. Chilly words, legal talk and Latin — how to connect them with endurance and distance? How did they contain bearing a husband’s body or a child? What did they have to do with hopes, or even walking down the street with an arm around the shoulder? Or planning a wedding, and a mother who sat up embroidering a secret nightgown? These stiff and foreign words had nothing to do with lying awake listening to silence or a husband snoring, or with washing floors and dishes and making meals, or being tapped on the bottom and told to make more sandwiches. They failed to mention liquor on the breath or hair cream on a pillow case or a steamed-up bathroom heavy with the humid scent of aftershave. Certainly they did not refer to the dizzy pain of ending, or the humiliation of starting again. If she’d said to Aggie or Frances then, “Herb’s gotten a divorce,” she would have been afraid of not stopping there, of all these words and secrets bubbling out. So she said nothing and then, of course, it became impossible, since they would have said, “Oh? When did he do that?” and “Why didn’t you say so at the time?”
None of this will matter in the long view: in heaven, where earthly remembrances will be cast aside (although surely there will be a recognition and reunion with her father: maybe only briefly, in some hazy period between world and heaven, when the boundaries are unclear). She recalls Aggie joking once about heaven, when they all would come together. “Even Herb eventually, and you and your father and I, and Frances and whoever she may take up with — can you imagine how awkward it’s going to be? All the introductions?” Adding, however, “But perhaps you don’t think we’ll all get to heaven. It’ll just be you good folk up there.”
All the good folk, June thinks, who, like her, have had to trail around behind events, cleaning up the messes.
There are still a few messes waiting to be cleaned up.
The first thing is to find that envelope, which will require going through those things in the attic. This could have, she realizes, a secondary effect: a sorting out, clearing away, a step toward shifting Aggie as well. She will go home tonight and say, “I’m going to get down all that stuff in the attic so we can go through it and get rid of a lot of it. Who knows what’s up there, and most of it must be useless.” Starting small, with things, she will work up to something large, to Aggie. Who will see immediately what’s going on, in case she’s been under the impression June’s forgotten her intentions.
The decisiveness of this cheers her and restores the briskness of her walk.
“We can keep out whatever Frances may want, and she can check it when she gets here,” June will say. “Then she can take anything she wants with her when she goes.”
June doubts that will include Aggie. Even on her visits, Frances just kisses them good night and skips off to her own bed. No help from her, getting Aggie’s clothes off and her nightgown on. She said once, “I know Grandma needs help, but it feels wrong.” Does she think it feels right to June? If something has to be done, does it matter how it feels? These refinements, these little niceties, are all very well, but when things need doing, you put them aside.
Aggie praises Frances’s independence, which is all very well, except that it has another side to it: that she turns her back too readily.
So what has she done to earn devotion?
It’s not Frances, after all, who knows every ripple and curve and roll and hair and mole and freckle on Aggie’s body. It’s not Frances who knows all the places where it folds, or the way the nipples droop to touch those folds, or how the hair below has gotten grey and sparse. It’s June who knows the flatness of Aggie’s feet, from standing so many years in the bakery, and how the flesh of her arms and legs dimples like hammered silver. It’s June who feels the warmth and surprising softness of Aggie’s skin. It’s June’s shoulder on which she leans when she’s stepping into her panties, and it’s June who slips her dresses over her head. There are freckles on Aggie’s thighs, and a mole above her right elbow. Frances has probably never even noticed.
June also knows the routes of the big purple, dangerous-looking veins in Aggie’s legs, could trace them from memory, from thigh to calf. She knows that when Aggie is going upstairs, she has to rest on every second step to catch her breath; and that when she stands, the skin on her knees doubles over just like her stomach.
It’s June who’s seen the bleak terror on Aggie’s face when she’s had an accident. No one else, not a soul anywhere, knows so much. Certainly not Frances.
Also, no one knows as much about June as Aggie does. Without Aggie, who would know her at all?
Oh, but that’s silly, like one of those questions Aggie used to ask about something she’d been reading: what exists if no one sees the existence?
What would June be, if someone weren’t there to watch?
But God sees, how stupid to forget. God is always watching. That’s a comfort, of course, but also sometimes a little irritating. She might wish occasionally that God would go and watch somebody else for just a little while. It might make all this easier.
Anyway, she never wanted to know all the things she knows about her mother. She never asked to see Aggie naked in the bath. She didn’t force her to lust after food so much that she finally can’t manage her own body. The perfect mate for Aggie, food: something she could roll around and stir and beat and cook and then consume.
It’s Aggie’s own fault, what she’s become. If she prattles about people being responsible for themselves, well then, let her take the consequences.
Keep going, that minister said years ago when June was still a child: one step and then the next. Well, she’s done that. The difficulty has been with the rest of it: doing it with joy and courage. The shininess gets blurred, with all the wearing details of getting through the day. Maintaining joy appears to require some kind of nourishment not provided by teaching small, scary children and raising a wilful daughter and living with a woman whose ideas of nourishment are contrary.
Sometimes, though, she has the feeling that her memories are incomplete, or may have gotten twisted somehow; that words have been spoken and events have occurred that have been turned around in her head, or tucked away. Like putting things for which there’s no immediate use away in the attic.
She is irritated by confusion. A few weeks ago she wasn’t especially confused. She knew her duty and was doing it. And not only that: there was considerable comfort in having days the same.
It was Aggie’s accident that stirred things up. Once, as June struggled to cut a turnip, the knife slipped and caused quite a bad gash in her hand. She wrapped it in a tea towel and called a taxi and took herself to the hospital, where they gave her a shot and bandaged her up and said it wasn’t serious. But she couldn’t use the hand properly for some time. It was surprising how much she needed it. Until it healed, she was almost constantly aware of what it couldn’t do, and she had thought what a poor cripple she would be, how badly she reacted to a minor deprivation.
Now this other sort of accident has happened, and although it isn’t even hers — how much worse is it for Aggie? — everything has been disrupted. She has had those wild moments of hope, imagining a different future, the luxury of coming home to an empty house; of being free. To what? It came as too much of a surprise. She still hasn’t prepared herself for freedom. She can only think so far ahead.
At the moment, her job is to enter the schoolyard, filled with racing, shrieking, tumbling children who are nevertheless careful not to accidentally bounce into her, and get to her classroom, and, when they file in, to subdue and teach them. Her job is to take one brave step at a time, until it all comes out somewhere.
She watches out the window at recess. The children play tag, throw balls, skip rope. From where she is on the second floor, she can discern the patterns and alliances, the friendships and small rages, all the energy, altering and shifting. She thinks this must be something like what God sees, looking down. Even, perhaps, thinking benevolently that they will pretty much turn out all right, once they settle down.