There have been various rumblings and shiftings going on upstairs all evening. “What on earth are you doing up there?” Aggie asks when June finally appears, dusty and straggle-haired.
“Getting things down from the attic. I thought we might as well sort through them and clear them out a bit. Anything worth saving, maybe Frances would like to have. We can ask when she comes if there’s anything she’d like.”
“Why now?” As if she didn’t know.
“For one thing, one of these days I’m not going to be able to do it. I can’t believe all the junk we must have put up there.”
“So what are you going to do with it now?”
“Bring it on down. I’ve got it as far as the landing. Boxes and boxes of stuff. I can’t imagine what it all is, can you?”
No, not really. Things from away back, Aggie supposes. Even a few things she brought from her parents’ house, after they died and their pathetically few possessions were divided up. She remembers how small and insignificant those things seemed, with the people who had used them gone. A cushion, she remembers, with a Scottie dog embroidered on it.
“There’s a trunk up there that must be yours, too. I’m going to have trouble getting it down. I’m just taking a tea break. Do you want some?”
Hardly. Is this some none-too-subtle sabotage? Aggie has not forgotten, and has followed, George’s advice against having anything to drink after eight o’clock at night. Not that it has made a great deal of difference. Nor did his other advice. She has thought and thought, going off to sleep at night, concentrating on control, and has still wakened a number of times to find her body has once again betrayed her.
Oh God, what is Frances going to say? If she finds out.
Is there any hope she might not? At this point, if Aggie gets safely through the weekend, it’ll be as accidental as any accident.
Her dress is damp. That scares her for a moment, until she realizes it’s only perspiration, she hasn’t done anything so dreadful as wet herself sitting up awake.
Imagine being frightened of Frances. Or not of Frances, exactly, but of having Frances look at her, knowing she is seeing not her beloved, understanding, helpful, hopeful grandmother, but an appalling, fat old woman who has taken to wetting the bed.
She could, of course, be blunt about it: speak right up and say something, preferably make a joke of it, as best she can. “I’m on the skids,” she might say. “I’m going downhill. Your poor mother, she wants me to go to a nursing home, and of course I can sympathize with her, but I won’t do it, naturally.”
Just fine, as long as she doesn’t actually wet the bed. Even Frances might then fail to respond as Aggie could wish.
But what sort of face does Frances have? Not cruel, after all. Not one that would deliberately inflict pain.
She is fairly tall, taller than June anyway, and slender, although not thin, and the last time they saw her, a couple of months back, was wearing her dark hair cut short and tight around her face. The style made her eyes seem large, giving her a curious and vulnerable look, a bit startling, like a waif.
She is now of an age when bones are becoming important, the ridges around which her middle age will form. With good cheekbones and a strong jaw, she is unlikely to become one of those women whose faces, in late thirties and forties, disintegrate, losing character instead of gaining it. Aggie touches her own face, seeking the bones. Frances is how she might have looked if she hadn’t gone in for flesh. If she peeled herself down to the essentials, she might find a Frances.
Aggie was struck, the last time, by the webs of lines around Frances’s eyes when she arrived. She hadn’t recalled them being so pronounced before. But most of them vanished after a good night’s sleep. When Frances tilted her head, the light from the lamp behind her caught her hair, and picked up the little streaks and slivers of grey in it.
The pride with which Aggie regards her. The last time she was here, she stretched out on the sofa and said, “You know, Grandma, Mother keeps saying I get away with anything, as if that’s so awful. It’s true, I can pretty much. But it’s because I can get away from anything. The trick is, if something happens that really hurts, to be able to pick up and walk out and survive.”
Aggie thought right then that if Frances had done nothing else — had not learned, or gone to school, or made a career out of an inquiring mind — if she had not accomplished any of that, Aggie would still have been proud of her for understanding that most important piece of information.
Although she wonders now if such an intense interest in survival, like her own, will not leave Frances unprepared and bewildered at the end, when it is precisely survival that will be lost.
But how does a person let go and decide it’s been enough?
Aggie has let go so often: of her family on the farm, of the teacher and of June, of Frances and Barney and the bakery. But she has never let go of herself.
Wouldn’t it be simple? To put her head back and close her eyes, go limp and die? Can a person just die that way, willing the heart to stop beating and the lungs to stop pumping? The mind to stop thinking? Would she dare?
She puts her head back, closes her eyes, and tries to go limp, relaxing her body little by little, a limb at a time. The next trick is the heart. But it rears in terror and goes off racing and thumping, causing her eyes to flash open and her head to leap from the back of the chair in panic. Certainly not. What a stupid, not to say dangerous, experiment. Damned if she’s done.
It’s not so much pain. There may well be a certain amount of that, but she’s had pain before: she’s cut her hands with knives and burned her fingers and tripped on steps and gone flying. She’s been bruised and sliced and had teeth pulled, and some of it has been quick and some prolonged, but never has it been unbearable.
What a coward, though: telling June for years, and Frances too, “You must be responsible for yourself, and your own actions.” With varying results, between the two of them. And then even to think of dying, taking that huge dark step into space, simply to avoid the look on a young woman’s face when she sees that her grandmother has peed the bed.
Oh, really, love is one thing, but that would be ridiculous.
She won’t die for Frances, and this time she doesn’t intend to bake, either. Frances isn’t the eater she used to be. “I have to watch my weight,” she says, refusing desserts, and Aggie, even thinking how lovely she is, is still a little hurt. The food she plans and prepares for Frances’s visits is intended to speak love, and while she knows it isn’t true, and isn’t fair, it feels, when Frances turns it down, as if she has said, “I know, but there are more important things.”
It occurs to Aggie that June may not be the only one who makes untenable demands. That between the two of them, they push and pull in ways that may be hard for Frances to bear.
Only, food is what Aggie has done, and at some point it turned into a way of saying things. Well, though, maybe she can’t expect other people, even Frances, to see that.
Just the way they fail to see the art in ordinary things: in her cheese cakes and banana bread, bran muffins, white and dark bread, chocolate chip and oatmeal cookies, rhubarb and apple and cherry pies. What is it if not art, to take ingredients not necessarily useful or desirable on their own and combine them into works of a certain symmetry and grace and usefulness? And not only that: because while painters might look at their work, and sculptors touch theirs, she could do that and consume hers also, containing her own art.
The difference is that with luck, other sorts of artists might never have to quit, whereas she did, although she hung on grimly until five years ago. By then, new types of bakeries had come to town, chains of them like fast food outlets, churning out breads and muffins and tarts, and not bad, either. They were convenient, and people didn’t have to go out of their way, as they did to get to Aggie’s. Her own old customers, the ones she’d built up through familiarity and loyalty, died, or couldn’t get around much any more. So there was that.
But also it was too hard. Getting up in the mornings so early, all that kneading and stirring and bending and reaching took it out of her. The day June came home and found her sitting on the kitchen chair, leaning her head on the counter, grey in the face, all the pans and pie plates piled up still waiting to be washed, and the tins of flour and sugar and bran still out because she hadn’t seen how she could ever reach those shelves again to put them away, or how she could stand in the steam over the sink and do the washing up — that day June came home and looked at her and said, “Oh Mother, that’s it, you really have to close this up, you look absolutely dreadful,” that was when it ended.
June saw to putting the kitchen back the way it used to be. There are plants in the window now, and curtains on the back door, and a kitchen table. The sign disappeared from the front. What happened to the sign? Maybe they put it in the attic. Aggie hopes it didn’t go out in the trash.
How odd it was, to lie in bed in the morning (and finally to have to, waiting for June to come in and help), and having only her own baking to do, and being able to sit down for hours to read or look out the window or think, having nothing that she absolutely had to do. June fussed a bit. “I hope you’re not going to be too bored, Mother,” but in a way it was something of a relief.
How nice June was about it, how gentle. How kind June often is, really, in her way.
Sometimes, first thing in the morning, Aggie can still be startled to go into the kitchen and find it has a table and chairs and only one oven and no cash register; that it is missing counters and drawers where counters and drawers were for so many years. Sometimes, just for a moment, she disbelieves what she is seeing.
June has been staggering in and out of the front room, loaded with boxes, piling them up. “I had no idea we kept so much,” she says.
“I didn’t even know the attic was big enough.”
Now there’s a great thudding and scratching on the stairs, and a heavy dragging across the hall and into this room. June is perspiring. “Good God, June, what are you doing?”
“Your trunk,” she pants.
“For heaven’s sake, that’s far too big for you to manage alone. You might at least have waited for Frances to help you.”
“Well, it’s not too big or I couldn’t have done it.” Under the weariness there’s pride.
This blue hump-backed trunk, with its leather straps and handles and brass catches — Aggie remembers it being lifted into the back of the buggy as she and Neil left her home, and turning around in her seat waving over it. This trunk is what caused the scratches on the floor of the hallway inside the front door when he dragged it in. She doesn’t remember who could have put it in the attic, or when. And now here it is, making another appearance, looking a bit daunting and making more scratches on the floor.
“Oh my,” she says, “that really takes me back.”
“Mmhmm. I’m going to have a bath now, Mother, unless you want to go to bed first.”
For the moment, however, it might be unwise to move. She shakes her head. “No, you go ahead.”
All of this, all this past — it crowds a whole life, an entire eighty years, into this room, making it feel cramped, like her heart struggling to pound out a space for itself against the pressing flesh.
Funny, that old trunk sitting right beside the big colour television set, the one they bought when the bakery was shut down. She hopes she isn’t one of those old people who seize on things like that, to point out how much times have changed. But still, how times have changed, her times, between that trunk and that television.
“It’ll be nice for you during the day,” June said when they got the colour set, replacing the old black-and-white they’d bought when Frances was eight or nine because all her other friends’ homes had TV and if she didn’t have an ordinary family, she might at least have that. A retreat into television, at least in daylight, however, is Aggie’s idea of sin: uneventful, passive, dry, and passionless. Even in the evenings it’s not turned on very often. What she sees now, looking at the screen, is her own self looking back, a furry grey reflection.
Between the day the trunk and she arrived here and the day the television was delivered came the bookshelves. There are more, added over the years, than the teacher started with, and they’re loaded now with her own books. Aggie remembers thinking she’d maybe read some of her favorites again someday, perhaps when she was eighty. Now she wonders why she had ever thought she would manage that when there are still so many stories she hasn’t read, so many facts she doesn’t know. It makes her feel a little frantic.
Maybe when she’s ninety the time will come for rereading.
Ninety? What’s she thinking of? It’s a miracle this body has held up this long; she can hardly expect another decade out of it. If she were a car, she’d be a collector’s item, worth a fortune; although she would also have to be restored with some care, and probably with a fair number of spare parts. “I’m just going to drive her into the ground,” people say about their cars. Well, here she is, an old model driving herself into the ground.
Poor old lumbering, graceless, unwieldy, wrinkled, crumpled body, with its aches here and unexpected frailties there and the bits inside that are breaking down, and its terrible anchoring bulk. It’s one thing to cling on, trying to fend off death, but consider the alternative. Who would want to be Methuselah? Or how dreadful, to find out suddenly that she’s really only at, say, a halfway point. Imagine another eighty years. What on earth would she do with them?
At least death tightens up events, gives them the context of a cut-off point.
What a peculiar thought for someone terrified of putting her head back and letting go. What the hell does she want, anyway: life or death? What a choice. Another joke, she supposes, although at the moment she’s not inclined to laugh.
Oddly, considering that Frances lived here the least length of time, there are more signs of her in this room than of either Aggie or June. There’s the framed oil painting on the far wall over the sofa, done by Frances when she was about thirteen. June gave her a paint-by-number set for Christmas, and Frances painstakingly did this single landscape, with its little purple flowers blooming beside a stream, and big grey tree limbs hanging down. Aggie had it framed. Instead of doing any more paint-by-numbers, Frances used up the left-over oils by mixing the colors. Eventually they got over-mixed, so that what started out as brilliant slashes of colour on her little canvasses just turned muddy. Frances said, “I always go too far,” and threw them out.
On the same wall, over a bit, is a gallery of photographs of Frances. Well, not exactly a gallery: just three. Formal, so they have a posed, self-conscious look. Even the baby one, with Frances’s pudgy arms propped on a cushion, her hands cupping her chin, looks like someone masquerading as a baby. Then she’s graduating from public school, in a stiff pink dress that hints of breasts beginning. That was when she had her first nylon stockings, and her first shoes with modest heels. To the right of that one is her leaving university, in gown and cap, the latter perched precariously on sleek long, straight hair that was then in fashion. Under the gown, as Aggie recalls, was a skirt that was a daring five inches above the knee. June complained, but she hadn’t seen anything yet. A few months later, Frances’s skirts were so short she couldn’t bend over, and some of her outfits had matching panties, just in case.
Another, much younger Frances gave Aggie that little green ceramic deer on the windowsill. It’s actually a vase, although there aren’t any flowers in it. That deer’s been on that sill since Frances was nine. It has a long, arched neck and thin, frail-looking legs, but somehow they’ve managed not to break it in all these years. It came to Aggie for her birthday, filled with violets from the garden, picked by Frances. “Isn’t he beautiful, Grandma?” she’d asked.
What did a child’s eye see? Frances loved that green deer. “It’s for you, but do you think,” and she was hesitant, picking her words, “that I could have it? Someday?”
By “someday” Frances obviously meant when Aggie died. What a tactful little girl. “Of course you can, pudding. It’ll be all yours.”
She must remind Frances of that this weekend. Probably they’ll laugh. Frances’s tastes have changed, and the deer is a poor old thing.
Is there anything else Aggie promised her? What else is there, and in all these boxes, too? Which parts of her grandmother’s and her mother’s past might Frances care to take away with her?
Or, what parts might surprise her?
Aggie suspects, actually, that Frances dislikes any idea of things in this house that are unknown. Mysteries. She must have an image of them that she carries off with her and comes back to, but Aggie would bet it’s an image of them frozen. Like one of those old science-fiction movies, in which the inhabitants of a town are locked by evil-doers from space into a single moment, so that they’re caught licking an ice-cream cone that cannot melt, or raising a foot to kick a perpetually cowering dog, or holding someone in an embrace that can’t be felt, and there they are, ridiculous and helpless, while the invaders carry on their crimes. There is always a hero who retains the power of movement, sees the truth, and is out there fighting. That, Aggie supposes, would be Frances: the one allowed to move.
Well, maybe that’s not so untrue, or so unfair. Sometimes Aggie’s events seem, even to her, to have been terribly abstract. Given another eighty years, then, she might go out instead of in. She might pare down her body and take it in different directions. She might hunt around for pleasure and experience.
She does not have another eighty years. She has only a little time, and even less before Frances comes through the front door like the wind, pushing their silences back into corners, brightening rooms as if the light bulbs have been changed. The light she will bring this time now seems ominously surgical, however.
It is quite a new experience, to be afraid of Frances. And even more afraid of the ways she may betray herself.
What’s she doing, being afraid? Damned if she will be. Let them take their best shots. She’s stood up to worse than this in her time.
But that’s a lie. There’s nothing worse than this sort of creeping decay, leaving her so vulnerable inside this monument of flesh she’s built.
Nevertheless, she finds herself patting her belly, as if it’s an upset child she can still find ways to comfort.