“Where do you want to start?” June asks, right after an early supper. They have, she estimates, just over three hours before Frances arrives.
“Wherever. It doesn’t matter.” Aggie still sounds listless, but on the other hand she did bake today. The mixture of inertia and energy is puzzling to June; attracts pity, an emotion which for different reasons neither of them would welcome. She hauls over the first of the boxes.
Aggie leans a little forward in her chair. Oh yes, those old school readers of Neil’s, which she put away to make more room for her own books on the shelves. June holds up one of the shabby, battered, faded little volumes. The Third Golden Rule Book. Inside the front cover are the spidery lines of his signature, so finely drawn with a nibbed pen. Aggie remembers the scratching of those nibs and the pauses while he dipped them into the black bottled ink. “Let me see, June.”
The pages are yellowed and feel fragile. Aggie tries to recall the days when she was so painstakingly teaching herself the rudimentary lessons here. Imagine, just learning to read! “Oh, listen to this,” she says, struck by a once-familiar verse.
“I am glad a task to me is given,
To labor at day by day;
For it brings me health and strength and hope
And I cheerfully learn to say:
‘Head, you may think; Heart, you may feel;
But hand, you shall work alway.’”
“Good grief, that’s a grim thing to teach kids, isn’t it?”
“What’s grim about teaching children to work hard? You always have, and I have. It’s something people ought to learn, that that’s what they have to do.”
“Well, yes, to a point, but a little more might have been nice, don’t you think? More than just working? To have time to travel, maybe, see different things? The whole world there, and all we’ve ever seen of it is pictures and words.” Aggie has continued to flip through the book. “Listen to this one: ‘Attempt the end and never stand in doubt; nothing’s so hard but search will find it out.’ Imagine never standing in doubt.”
“I don’t know, I think it sounds nice. That if you try hard enough, you can have anything.” This sounds so unlike June that they are both startled.
“So what should we do with all these? Throw them out, or are they worth something, do you think?”
June has reached for the book, is stroking its cover, turning it over, leafing to the page inside where her father’s name is written. The signature is faded now, and faint. Almost half a century ago. He would have been nearly ninety now, if he’d lived.
What an odd thought: imagining him still alive. What would he be like now? Stern is the word that leaps to mind. Aged and frail, perhaps, but stern. June has a vision of a shrunken, angry old man; strange, surely, when her recollections are of tenderness? “No, I don’t want to throw them out or sell them. There aren’t so many of his things left.”
Almost, Aggie thinks, as if June is intent on turning these old books of his into his body, here in the front room. How morbid.
“Not a very effective beginning, then, is it?” she suggests. “By way of getting things cleared out?”
June doesn’t answer; she has repacked the box, pushed it to one side, and hauled over another. “Oh, look, old pictures.” She unfolds the grey and brown paper frame of the top one. “It’s Father, when he was little. With his mother.”
Aggie leans over to see. “You know, I could never connect him with those pictures of him as a little boy. Like he’d borrowed some other family’s photographs to bring with him.”
“He looked happy, didn’t he?”
“Yes, he did. I used to wonder about his mother, what she was like. She seemed to be the only woman he ever admired.”
Maybe it’s just June’s hearing, but she detects sadness, rather than bitterness, in Aggie’s tone. “I used to wonder about her, too. I used to imagine I knew her. Sometimes that I lived with her.” Now, why did she reveal that? She looks at Aggie anxiously, flinching from the anticipated crack.
“You did?” No crack at all; just surprise.
“In a way. When I was little, if I was unhappy.”
“Were you so unhappy then?” Aggie remembers saying almost the same words, in another conversation, that one with Frances.
June shrugs. “Sometimes.” She folds up that photograph and takes out another. “This one’s your family,” handing it over.
The family portrait. There she is at eighteen, all their lives ago. The stern, mysterious faces of her childhood, and her own the most mysterious to her now. She would reach back and warn that hopeful young woman. The way she feels sometimes watching a suspense movie on television, where the dangers are clear to any fool except the hero, so that she wants to call out, “You idiot, don’t go up those stairs, can’t you tell there’s danger up there?” And to the small brown young woman in this picture she might say, “Stop and think. Be careful what you decide to want. Listen to your first impressions.”
Although maybe not. Here she is, sixty-odd years later, her body crammed with food of her own making, her mind crammed with stories and with information that sometimes comes in handy, and she’s in her own living room with her daughter and a pile of boxes from the past, and her granddaughter will be here soon and she sometimes has accidents in her bed. Some things she might change, but maybe not so many, on the whole.
There are only a few photographs in this box of Frances, and none at all of June’s childhood. Nor are there any of Herb. They seem to have left large parts of their lives unrecorded.
The next box is quite large but not very heavy. “The old pots and pans from the bakery, remember, June? You took what we didn’t need day-to-day and put them away.”
Here is a stack of bread pans tucked into each other; and pie plates and cake tins, with the levers on the bottom that swivelled around, neatly freeing the finished product. And pots for boiling fruit, and mixing bowls and measuring spoons and cups and flour sifters — all the equipment with which Aggie supplied herself as a recent widow for quite a different life. “Well, these can certainly go. Why on earth didn’t we throw them out at the time, June? Or maybe the Salvation Army would be interested. They’re a bit battered, but they’re still usable. Unless Frances might want them.”
“I doubt it, she says she doesn’t bake and there’d be far too much here for one person anyway. But we can put them aside for the Salvation Army, that’s a good idea.”
Another box contains piles of large black notebooks. These are the ledgers from the bakery, going right back to the beginning when she didn’t quite know how to keep accounts. Looking at them, Aggie can see the clumsiness and uncertainty in the early figures. Like learning to read, that was, a different language, arithmetic, adding up sales in one set of columns, costs in another, the numbers getting regularly larger until the business was a going concern.
Here and in those pots and pans are more than forty years of batters being mixed as the sun rose, her hair slipping loose as she bent over the hot oven; hundreds and thousands of hours of stories, women coming and going with their tales of life being lived out there beyond her door. All her beautiful sweet food. And Barney, her friend. She feels tears stinging.
Gradually things are being separated: what will be kept (the pictures and books), what will be given away (the pans and bowls and pots) and what will go to the garbage (all those ledgers). Aggie supposes it’s a good thing to have order emerging; and, really, it would be foolishly sentimental, and she loathes foolish sentiment, to hang on to any of this.
They haven’t yet found anything Frances might want, but now they encounter several boxes of clothes: old dresses and sweaters, with rips in the armpits and unravelled elbows, a shabby black cloth coat so ancient the teacher was alive when Aggie bought it. She can’t imagine why she would have stored all this away so carefully. Really worn-out clothes she tore up to use as dustcloths. These things are merely damaged, but repairable.
June is holding up a dress, a calf-length print with a ruffled throat and long sleeves flaring out from elastic at the wrists. “Good grief, Mother, was this yours?”
Aggie remembers wearing it to go shopping, in the early days of being married. Its hem is coming down, but aside from that it seems in good enough shape. Why did she keep it, though? With the thought that at some point she would reach some peak of bulk and then begin to go backward until she could fit into such a dress again, once she fixed the hem? As if she had another body entirely, tucked away, waiting for her to come back to it?
It’s something, finally, that Frances might like. This sort of thing is back in style.
Aggie isn’t sure, however, that she wants to give it to her. Because, she thinks, Frances might treat it lightly, as a costume; whereas for her it had been a kind of uniform.
June, feeling the shiny, thin material, is shocked. She has a memory of this dress, but the mother who wore it was young, and slim. All the times and ways she has remembered the Aggie of her childhood, she has forgotten to remember her slim; the way she must have looked when June was very small. She has been putting the wrong figure to some of her recollections, then; a disturbing discovery.
“Do you think we should set the clothes aside for Frances?” she asks. “There’s still a lot of use left in most of them.”
“I don’t think so. She has plenty of clothes. Let’s give them away, too.” Aggie thinks she would be much less unhappy to see these things worn by a stranger on the street than by Frances.
Lying in the bottom of this box, for no apparent reason, is a small, thick white leather-covered volume. “What’s that?” Aggie asks.
“Well, for heaven’s sake,” June breathes, reaching in, “I’d forgotten that. It was mine, when I was little. Daddy gave it to me.”
Daddy? Aggie looks at her fifty-nine-year-old daughter with distaste. “A Bible, is it?”
“He gave it to me for some reason. A reward for something. Learning verses in Sunday school? I can’t remember.” She stares at the inscription inside the little volume: “To my daughter June, with great expectations”.
Not even “To my beloved daughter June,” which she might have assumed. And what were those expectations of his that were so great? What did he want from her?
So even he had had grand visions, large demands. She feels suddenly hemmed in and surrounded. Also judged.
What is Aggie smiling about?
“Oh, I was just thinking about you, remembering you going off with your father on Sunday mornings, holding his hand and carrying that Bible in the other. It was sweet, in a way.”
Now Aggie laughs. “I remember you coming home one Sunday and telling me you wanted music lessons. Do you remember that?”
“No.” June is puzzled. What’s Aggie getting at? Something, likely, with a twist.
“Well, I thought you meant singing, because your father always said you liked the hymns.” (So they must have talked? They must have had ordinary conversations about their child? This comes as a surprise. She ought, perhaps, to consider this later: what other words she may have forgotten.) “Anyway, I was busy getting lunch and I just said, ‘Yes, that’s nice, if you like singing so much perhaps you should have lessons, we’ll talk to your father.’
“But you said quite firmly, ‘Oh no, I want to learn to play the harp,’ and I thought for God’s sake what next, there can’t be a harp teacher within two hundred miles, who teaches harp? But I wanted to take you seriously, that you were interested in music, anyway, so I suggested the piano, because of course every little town is hip-deep in piano teachers. But you said a piano wouldn’t do either. You don’t remember any of this?”
June shakes her head.
“Well, of course I asked why it had to be the harp, and you know what you said? You said, ‘So when I get to heaven, I’ll already know how to play, so I can be a better angel right away. They don’t play pianos in heaven, you know, Mother,’ as if I were stupid not to know that.”
June also smiles now. “But I didn’t get the lessons.”
“No, so I’m afraid you’re stuck being just a beginner angel.” But this is said lightly, kindly.
How very odd, what’s been put aside, and not merely in the attic. And the atmosphere is interesting too: like a Christmas truce in wartime.
June hauls the trunk closer. “This looks like the last of it.”
“You know,” Aggie says, “whatever’s in there will go away back. Things I brought from home. It’s queer, all these years piled up like this together in a heap.”
“You feel queer?” June looks up, alert.
“No, not that, really. It’s just strange, everything.”
June struggles with the stiff old trunk straps, pushes the lid open and back.
The trunk is divided with trays, lined with a faded flowered cotton that has disintegrated in places. Here are things Aggie has not seen for years, had forgotten all about. Like the white hat on the top tray, with the veil that went over the eyes and the jaunty little feather that stuck up in the air — her first grown-up woman’s hat that she wore to her engagement showers. Of course it’s crumpled now, and certainly not as white.
June is lifting out more delicate items: scarves and undies. “What’s all this? These don’t look as if they were ever used.”
“Ah, that’s part of my trousseau; hope chest,” but Aggie immediately regrets the irony, damaging the atmosphere.
Here is also the vanity set her brothers gave her as their wedding gift: bone-colored comb and brush and hand mirror, a shoe horn and manicure set, all in a case. Pooling their small resources to buy something nice for their big sister who was getting married. Once again her eyes fill — how teary she is tonight. She hardly knew those boys, who were little, and then big, red, rough-handed men, and out of touch. She’s the only one left, and she barely knew them at all.
A tiny box also in the top tray contains the heart-shaped locket Edith gave her: not real silver, but silver-looking. Aggie wore it at her wedding, pleasing Edith.
She tells this, in an absent sort of way, to June, who asks, “What did your parents give you?”
Aggie has to think for a minute to remember, visualizes the buggy being loaded up as she and the teacher got ready to leave. “Oh yes, that table over there.”
This is a piece of furniture against the far wall that has been there for years, pretty much unnoticed except for having to be dusted. Short-legged and oval, it has no obvious purpose. Mainly they’re in the habit of laying things on it temporarily, like unfinished books or mending. “My father made it,” Aggie says, and suddenly sees the curves of the legs, and how it is put together without nails. All the shaping and carving and sanding he must have done, out in the barn, to please his daughter. A gift of his own efforts, a speech he couldn’t make. And at the time she hadn’t heard.
“Oh,” she says, dismayed, weighed down, “there is a lot of past here.”
“Do you want to stop?”
“No, never mind. Let’s keep going.”
June lifts out the top tray. On the one below rest all the supplies for a marriage. “Heavens,” says June, shaking out a pillowcase, “look at the embroidery on this, look at the work!”
Pink and yellow flowers are twined on green stems, at the edges of what at the time was white cotton, now yellowed. Hundreds and hundreds of tiny stitches. Likewise, hundreds of hours sitting around the kitchen table with embroidery hoops and coils of thread, needles and concentration and talk.
“Even the towels are decorated,” June exclaims, removing other items, “and washcloths, sheets, everything. Didn’t you ever use any of this?”
“Doesn’t look as if I even unpacked it.”
“But why?”
Why indeed. “I must have thought they were too nice to use, I guess.” Or more precisely that the hope and care that went into them would be unsuitable in that marriage of discord and dislike. June may know that without being told.
June is struck by yet another picture of her mother, this one just a girl, stitching away at all this.
“We liked pretty things, you know,” Aggie explains. “People can buy patterned sheets now, but we had to make our own.” It’s not exactly that these things are frivolous, but they do remind Aggie that not everything back then was grim and geared only to survival. “It was a custom, too, something women did together.”
June is now lifting out a quilt, unfolding it, holding it up. “Did you do this, too?”
“No, I believe that was done by the church women. They had quilting bees, and made one for each bride as the weddings came along. The designs were supposed to mean certain things, but I don’t remember if I ever did know what this one’s about.”
It is mainly yellow and blue, in different materials, with different patterns, flowered and plain and striped. It’s the intricacy and the care that astonish.
“Frances would like it, I expect,” Aggie says finally. “Unless,” she remembers too late, “you would.”
June might have, if her mother’s first thought had been for her and not for Frances. “No, she can have it. She’d probably like the rest of this as well,” indicating the towels and pillowcases and sheets. “Not to use them, but to have.”
“She might. I can’t see giving them away, at any rate.” When it comes down to it, Aggie can’t feel any real attachment to the things themselves. They’re only recollections and reminders, and beyond that only towels and sheets and a quilt, taking up room.
June carefully folds each item and sets it all back in the tray. “There’s one more layer, I guess,” peering into the trunk. “What’s all this, wrapped up in tissue paper?”
At a glance, Aggie remembers. She remembers them stitching it, with more intricacy and care than any pillowcase, and she remembers wearing it. She sees the teacher’s pale, strained face waiting at the end of the aisle, as she approached on her father’s arm.
“My wedding dress,” she says shortly. This is more than a small sting of impending tears. She feels that if she allowed it, she might break right down and bawl her heart out.
The dress looks like a museum piece, as if it could be worn by a mannequin, with a label beneath it bearing a date. The collar is higher than Aggie would have remembered, the shoulders are puffed, and the sleeves are straight and narrow to the wrists. There are tiny fake pearls sewn into the embroidery around the throat and sleeves and waist.
Her mother would have done this, Aggie thinks: taking the dress from her and folding and wrapping it so carefully that after sixty years it has merely yellowed, but not crumpled.
Clear as a bell, June can see Aggie in this dress. Getting married to him, her father, the teacher. Why, she thinks, they must have had hopes. They must have had all kinds of private moments. Maybe even love.
So this is what Aggie has been saying all this time: that June’s memories of them are only childish ones. The woman, after all, who put all this into a dress, all those tiny pearls and stitches, evidently had higher hopes than June ever would have dreamed.
All this time, perhaps, Aggie’s been saying, in her way, “Look at me, it wasn’t only him, I was disappointed too.” And maybe hurt. Also, of course, all those times she has said angrily, “But I cared about you too, it wasn’t only him,” and all June heard was the past tense.
She looks at her mother’s great sagging body, the face with its expressions camouflaged by flesh, and sees it young and slender, buttoned into this dress, leaping happily into a new and different life, getting away, eager. Aggie flings herself into things; she must have been flinging herself into this, too.
“I’ll put it away again, shall I?” she asks, preparing to refold and rewrap it with preserving care.
Aggie, however, reaches out to touch it, drawing it away from June. She regards it for a moment with an expression June can’t interpret. Then she begins folding it again, but roughly, without care.
“Here, Mother, let me do it, it’ll get all wrinkled that way.” June pulls at it, and the seam of a sleeve, weakened by time, tears. They stare at hanging threads.
“That figures,” Aggie says finally. “Just throw the damn thing away, for God’s sake.” These sudden sinkings of her spirit, these abrupt sadnesses, make her angry.
June doesn’t argue, but has no intention of throwing out the dress. She doesn’t quite know what to do with it; thinks maybe if she hung it in her room and stared at it for a time, it might reveal something to her she has never understood. The thing to do at the moment is fold it again, ignoring the rip for the time being, and remove it from Aggie’s view, since it seems to have upset her.
They are surrounded now by a litter of boxes, things to be saved and things to be thrown out. It looks, Aggie thinks, as if they’ve been packing up to move.
Well, though, maybe they have.
Oh, but she’s tired, so tired. She would like to sleep now for a while; maybe until the weekend’s over, whatever is going to happen. “I get frightened, you know,” she hears herself saying. Did she actually say that? Must have, June’s looking at her so surprised.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean you to be afraid.” This is not quite true, but truth is not necessarily the best thing at the moment. “I don’t know. I really don’t,” June adds, sounding neither angry nor despairing; just speaking a flat fact.
Aggie thinks, “She’s tired too.” Well, June has every reason to be tired. “We’ll think of something, June. I know we’ll have to do something.”
June stands. “I’ll make tea, shall I, while we wait for Frances?”
In the kitchen, putting on water to boil and warming the teapot, setting up the tray with milk and sugar and little spoons to take into the front room, June wonders what came over Aggie, admitting fear, so unlike her. Although she is no longer so sure of precisely what is like Aggie, and what is unlike.
There are all those faces, without much resemblance to one another: the girl sitting in a farmhouse kitchen, stitching pillowcases; the young woman in that family photograph, who made that dress; the mother who apparently danced and sang with her child, although the child cannot remember; the widow who sat staring out of windows after her husband died; the woman who punched holes in walls, and rose before dawn, and sat with her feet up on the kitchen counter in the mornings, laughing with the dairy man; the one kneading dough and hitting cash register keys; the one with her nose buried in a book; the one sipping her first drink, laughing about how it tickled; the one who stitched a nightgown for her daughter, and took that daughter back, along with a grandchild, even though she didn’t want to; the one whose eyes were rimmed with redness on a few occasions, although she would not weep in front of June: when her granddaughter finally left home, when her friend finally moved away; the one defying June and God with irritating, blasphemous questions.
The one who sometimes in the mornings looks up despairing from wet sheets. And also the dead one with the secret, from the dream last night.