They wait together at the front room window, Aggie watching from her sunken chair, June standing, leaning forward, hands propped on the windowsill, looking out into the darkness. They are watching for the sweep of headlights around the corner down the block, a car with a lighted sign on the top that will say “Bert’s Taxi”.
Aggie is alert, sharp-eyed, uneasy. June, glancing down at her, thinks, “Look at her, so excited, waiting for that wretched girl.” Except of course it’s a particular sort of excitement this time: not the pure pleased expectation of an ordinary visit, but tinged with tension, and apparently fear.
June herself feels a little of that, too, and it makes her cross and snappish. “Wretched girl,” she thinks again.
Aggie thinks how stupid she was to have a cup of that tea June made; what a fool, to drink it down without thinking, until she tipped it up to drain the last of it and realized too late what she’d done. In just a few minutes’ heedlessness, she has vastly increased the odds against herself, in the circumstances that may arise tomorrow morning.
The other question is whether June did it on purpose.
But she has never known June to be downright vicious.
Aggie also wishes she’d thought to suggest a bath after the sorting was finished. It would have been better to present Frances, surely, with skin smelling of soap; let her first impression be of cleanness and freshness. She wonders if she may not smell a little musty, like a closed-up room. “I should have had a bath,” she says.
“You can have one tomorrow.”
Unspoken is, “You may need one tomorrow.” Or maybe she reads too much into words. June may not be thinking any such thing. What makes her think she has any idea what goes on in June’s head, now pressed against the window, looking out? She sighs.
June, thinking the sigh is impatience or concern, says, “The train may have been a bit late. It often is.”
Aggie nods, although June is turned away from her. How thin June is, especially from the back. It’s almost possible to make out her shoulder blades and the stepping stones of her spine, not to mention her ribs, beneath her dress. She even seems shorter than she used to be. Aggie is startled once more to realize that June is also getting old. “She’s shrivelling,” she thinks. “Poor child.” It does not seem inconsistent, from Aggie’s point of view, to see June as both an aging woman and a child.
Why not reach out for once then and place a hand on her daughter’s narrow back and say something tender? Except, what? Anyway, they obviously don’t use words well between them. Original meanings tend to disintegrate into awful misunderstandings. So then why not reach out and place a hand on her daughter and not say anything at all? Just that it’s such a straight back, formidable and uninviting.
One way and another, bodies block people’s views. Aggie has difficulty seeing past her own flesh to the slender hopeful young girl who didn’t know words, much less stories, and married a teacher in ignorance. At some point she must have decided to choose between appearances and cravings, and come down on the side of banana cake and bread.
Just that now, things are collapsing in there. She pictures organs like balloons, losing their air, deflating with slow leaks.
Columbus had such trouble with his sailors because they thought the earth was flat, and were sure they would fall over the edge if he insisted they keep going. People laugh at that now, but it seems a perfectly reasonable fear for the time. Aggie is in a similar position now: sailing to the edge and slipping over into nothing. Maybe later, knowing better, she will laugh; that would be a good joke on her.
June can see her mother’s reflection in the glass, a pale circle like the moon, featureless and indistinct. She has a sudden painful vision of Aggie in that nursing home, nightgown rucked up around the waist, a stranger’s busy hands. Being diapered at nightfall. Diapered! That’s what they do, isn’t it, with the incontinent? The vision stabs her with pity, a wound in that region she thought had been anaesthetized long ago, below the breasts.
If she were dreaming this up, she would have conjured a sense of triumph: victory over oppression. She leans her forehead once more against the cool glass, so that she can see the darkness outside, and not her mother’s moon-face.
Aggie has made a promise of sorts, but only a vague one: that something must be done. The words might have been only an effort to buy time, bribe June beyond this weekend. At the moment June doesn’t have the energy to unravel such complexities as her mother’s intentions. Things will fall into place. She still has no clear idea how, but it will be soon. This weekend. She feels a clutching in her stomach, and thinks of making more tea, to soothe. It occurs to her to wonder what possessed Aggie to have that cup of tea. June made it and as always offered it, but certainly did not expect Aggie to accept. Self-sabotage is not something her mother has ever gone in for. Self-preservation, always. She closes her eyes but sees again those remote adept hands, busy with pins — do they use pins? — and cloth, dealing briskly with Aggie’s warm, soft body.
Aggie has made a promise of sorts and now wonders what on earth she meant by it. Well, then, she thinks, shape up or ship out. Could she shape up, and how could it be done? For one thing, obviously, by remembering not to drink tea so late at night. But maybe also to let June be, test her, if she must be tested, a bit more kindly? What harm does it do if June wants a small, safe existence? Who is Aggie to insist on something else? Well, she is a mother; but then, if she demands that June stop looking at her with a child’s-eye view, she must surely stop, herself, looking at June with a mother’s eye. Which, it appears, has been after all an insistent, punishing one.
All very well, except it seems to be the habit of a lifetime, just taking occasional new twists, as in recent weeks.
So, then, she could ship out. But there’s only one way of doing that, and she’s not about to take it, voluntarily.
If they had more time. If Frances weren’t coming so soon.
If they had more time what? She might say to June, “Sit down, let’s talk this over without our grudges.” By “this” she would not mean only the future.
June thinks, “I’m not ready,” and wishes for more time. She feels unprepared for Frances. Inaction, after all, has a comforting sort of rhythm. It’s the process of indecision that has kept her going these past few weeks, or maybe even a good deal longer. It might be another case of hopes and expectations failing to live up to reality.
How far might she go to maintain hopes and expectations?
“I think she’s here,” Aggie says, and June’s eyes flare open. She has missed the headlights rounding the corner, but here indeed is the car with the yellow roof light, slowing and stopping.
“Help me up,” Aggie requests, reaching out. Ordinarily, she can get out of a chair, at least, on her own. June feels the trembling in the grip, but can’t tell which of them is causing it.
A rear door opens in the taxi, the interior light flashes on, and they can make out a woman’s figure turning and lifting and stepping out.
Aggie, her arm still linked with June’s, begins, “You know ...” but then can’t think what. An appeal of some sort? Maybe just that: You know.
“What?”
“Never mind.”
The figure on the sidewalk leans to the window of the taxi and hands the driver money. She picks up her suitcase and briefcase from the sidewalk, turns toward the house, and pauses — looking at what? She straightens her shoulders, tightening her grip on her cases, and strides briskly up the walk, toward the porch and the front door.
Aggie and June move toward the hall to meet her. As Aggie lets go of June’s arm so that she can walk ahead, June drops back a step. They do this automatically, so that if Aggie wavers or trips, June will be right there behind her, ready to steady her, or catch her.