A PERSON MIGHT WONDER HOW I ENDED UP WALKING OUT of my kitchen job and into my garden job and that’s the easy part to explain so I’ll start there. I just had to get away from the townie fellow who temporarily replaced the man who replaced Gladys after she’d left on a bus with Raelene. I had to get away from the second replacement not because he looked like a young Merv Griffin, which he did to the point where I had to ask him if Merv was his long-lost brother, but because he was boring me to tears with talk of gubernatorial races in a nasal voice and at the time I couldn’t see any good qualities in him. I’m a person who can usually see a good quality or two in most anyone without even trying, but somehow Gladys leaving for so long made me less of a friendly soul. I was lonely without her and angry that her travels were lasting so long and surprised that she could get on so well without me. Standing on my feet for a total of seven to nine hours each day in a kitchen so hot I ate salt tablets like candy began to hurt in a different way without Gladys there to share the burden. And Merv Griffin had the habit of leaving sharp knives in sinks filled with soapy water, which anyone who ever worked a minute in a kitchen knows is the most inconsiderate mistake you could make. I almost cut my finger off one day. Life didn’t feel quite normal.
Not that I wasn’t still counting my blessings. My son, Louis, visited and brought me sixteen dolls from Thailand, for one thing. “Dang, you look great!” he said when he saw me. “Like a twenty-five-year-old! What’s your secret?” You’d think it was flattery, but he weren’t that type, he actually thought I looked great and it is true a little extra weight on a woman my age can smooth out the face and make her young looking, plus I had Shine for Life on my hair. I lined the dolls from Thailand on the kitchen shelf and they looked real pretty until he left and they started seeming too alive, like they were watching me, and the quiet in that house started sounding like a loud noise in my head.
So I abandoned poor Merv (I privately called him this in my mind) in the kitchen one morning and walked all the way up the mountain to the cabin where Brent Quinn lives; Brent’s the boss of the whole camp—fact, his father was “old money” and he owned it way back when, and started up the winter school, too, where Brent used to teach. And now Brent’s sixty-some years old, and calls himself “your basic old lefty escaping the madness,” and he liked me enough not to ask too many questions about why I had to quit the kitchen work. He gave me a cup of coffee and I sat and talked to him in his old striped pajamas and he told me I belonged in the garden and feeding the animals. “I can see you in the garden,” Brent Quinn said. “Fresh air, the company of children, shorter hours, it’ll do you good. You can be there until the fall really hits us. And by the way, stop by and visit me if you want sometime. Must be lonely without Gladys.”
“I will.” I liked him, and once a few times a year I’d drop by to drink some beer with him, and I never minded when he went on his art history tangents, fact I liked it, he was educational.
So I started that garden job the first week of July, which meant I had to wake up at five in the morning and walk down to the dewy garden in the dark and wait for the children to poke their sleepy faces out of tents like little hatchlings. They were nice enough children, most of them eight or nine or ten, and I felt for them, since they’d been shipped out by parents for a whole summer. The parents wanted to travel in foreign lands without any nuisances. About 5 percent of the kids were scholarship campers from the inner cities, mainly black kids, and they didn’t generally mix in too well with the others. In the old days I’d sneak the city kids donuts. Then I got yelled at, certain counselors saying donuts are bad for their teeth and doing them special favors would make them feel more like outcasts, so that was it for my donut sneaking days.
As we all picked the peas, the green beans, the first peppers, and the last of the strawberries, I can’t say I felt too good about the new job initially. It hurt my back to bend so much and my hands ached too. I was using different muscles than my cooking muscles. It wasn’t so hot as the kitchen was, though. And each day it got better and finally I came to stop dwelling on Gladys and when she might return. I had my own life and my health and this garden job, which was more than a lot of people had. I never was one who felt too smart complaining.
We would work until nine in the morning, then go down and feed the chickens, goats, and baby calves, who most of the girls were mad for with their spindly legs and big sad eyes. “Aw! Look! Aw, isn’t he cute!” They were getting early practice for the sad-eyed spindly legged boys they’d learn to love in a few years.
Then the day was mine, all mine, and what was I to do with myself? All my life I’d mainly worked hard, come home, relaxed, and slept. Any worrying I did was wrapped around Gladys. Now there was this space. This whole person named Ivy who was there now in a strange way I don’t have words for.
I became a walker, walking each day into town dressed in a shift and sneakers and a nice hat and sunglasses, and I’d just happen to swing by Edgel Greely’s garage, where he’d be working in his big blue shirts under cars or talking to his partner. Once or twice I brought Edgel Greely some iced tea and once or twice I convinced my heart it was falling in love but it weren’t and I knew it. “Call me Edge,” he told me, but I couldn’t. I did like Edgel but not like I liked him when he was in the far-off distance. He was like a house you pass on the road and think its pretty for years, then it goes on sale and you walk inside and think, This isn’t the house I imagined, it doesn’t have enough light and the ceiling’s too low. Turned out Edgel was the sort who laughs too hard and too long at his own jokes, so you end up feeling all that laughter is privately tied up with things you’ll never know about because he barely does himself. So there I’d be on one of them vinyl genuine barbershop chairs that Edgel Greely had two of in the corner of his garage, and I’d be feeling kind’ve sad for Edgel that he had to laugh like that because I don’t imagine it won him many friends.
I gave up on dropping by the garage, which didn’t feel real good because I’d been counting on Edgel as a kind of new interest for months and now there was nobody. This didn’t stop me from being a walker. As I walked I felt light as a girl.
I lost some weight, enough so a few workers at camp called out, “Lookin’ good, Ivy.”
One particular day as I was headed into town just breathing in all that blue air and watching the very beginning of August’s red and yellow leaves in the sun, I heard a car slowing down behind me. It didn’t scare me because I was in a fine mood and figured it was someone I knew stopping to ask if I needed a ride, or maybe some parent trying to find the camp, because the kids were going home now. The winter school kids would stay, and some new ones would come up. I was all set to decline the ride or give directions. I weren’t at all set for the man who turned out to be at the wheel.
He slid his car up beside me. His window was rolled down and he was framed there in that rolled-down window and I just stared at him with the cat on my tongue.
“Touch the car and make sure I’m not a vision,” he said.
“Jimmy? James?”
He smiled at me and reached out the window to grasp my hand. His was clammy, not the strong dry hand I remembered. His dark blue eyes were heavier or maybe older looking, and his face more weathered and streaks of silver filled his hair. But he was still James, a man too tall for his own car.
“James G. Pittman. I’m not dreaming, am I?”
“Can I give you a lift?” he said.
“A lift?” I said. “A lift?”
“Into town.”
I got into James Gehrig Pittman’s old Valiant, the same car he’d had when he left, with the same faint gasoline and old leather smell basically, and the same mixture of chaos and cleanliness.
“James, why the corduroy coat? It’s summertime,” I said. I don’t know why, but I wasn’t calling him Jimmy like the old days.
“It was cold early this morning. I’m not used to the north anymore,” he said.
I had the oddest feeling in that car, like the tires underneath us were enormous, like we were up high in the air because the tires were so big. I don’t know what that was all about.
James talked in the same old way with his jaw tucked down near his neck, head bent and blue eyes straight ahead. Every five seconds he’d glance over at me, half-smiling as we rode into town like two people in a stranger’s dream on those big fat tires.
We were quiet for a while and then James tells me that two nights before he’d been visiting some friends in Clairton, Pennsylvania, and they watched a nice documentary about people and their pets. And he goes on to tell me all about this nice documentary of pets and the folks who loved them like they were children, just like he’d seen me the day before. I was glad this was how James was.
“So it was mostly dogs and cats these people were grieving?” I said.
“That’s right. And there’s animal graveyards all over this country. People go visit the graves and leave things like Milk-Bones and toys that squeak. Or sometimes painted portraits of themselves and the pet. Or one fella left a violin.”
“Is that right?” I said.
“These people were noble,” he said.
“Noble.”
“They were noble because of how much they loved. All that love was simple and ennobling.”
“Well I’ll have to watch it sometime myself.”
“You should. The line I liked was Animals are put on this earth to love and be loved. I like the simplicity of that. I keep running it around in my head.”
So there we were after eight years of not seeing each other just riding along talking about this pet-lovers’ documentary in his old Valiant filled with faded maps and hardback books he must’ve forgot to take back to the library. Or maybe he bought them at used stores, I don’t know.
We headed past the big lake and James looked out across it, then back at the road. “Nice to see this land again. Nice to see mountains,” he said. “So how’s Gladys?” he added, and I felt him tense up as he waited for an answer.
“She’s still traveling,” I said. “She left with Raelene, this girl she knows. Did I mention her on the phone? The girl—well, it’s a long story.”
“I’d like to have a drink somewhere,” James said. “Is the Little Moon still open?”
“Sure is,” I said. “Haven’t been there since I last saw you. But I know it’s still open.”
The Little Moon was your basic bar in the woods with a little door so you had to duck to get through if you were over five feet. Once you got inside you were fine. The two of us were struck by how much the same it was, with Seany, the old bartender, still doing crossword puzzles, and Mrs. “Sloe Gin” Kingston, a white-haired six-footer in her thick glasses, still writing letters at the center table to a man named Professor Danicki, who most people thought was dead. And on the old Wurlitzer were the songs we used to play. When James and I walked over to the booth under the high window with the dark red curtains I think we both felt the ghosts of him and Gladys. We just sat right down on the laps of those ghosts and had some draft beers.
James wasn’t looking up much, and when he did he wasn’t smiling exactly, and his eyes were friendly and worried.
“I have some things to tell you,” James said. “But you know me, it’ll take a while. I’m adjusting to this now.”
“This?” I said.
“Everything,” James said.
“Where were you before you came here? Maybe you can start at the end of your tale and go backward. If you feel like talking, that is.”
“Louisiana,” James said. “It’s a long story.”
“I got time.” I smiled at him. It was so good to see him.
“But I’ll give you the short version. The long story is something I couldn’t tell you. I can’t even tell it to myself.”
“Long or short, it’s up to you.”
He took a deep breath and looked sideways.
“A child grew close to me. Her name was Cecile, but they called her Pie Pie. I was with her mother for three years.”
James spoke in his quiet voice without much expression. You had to listen hard to him to figure out what his words meant, which ones were the most important. This wasn’t how he used to talk, and I got the feeling he’d rehearsed this speech in his car as he drove.
“Pie Pie’s mother,” I said. “What was her name?”
“Nicoletta Graves.”
“Nicoletta Graves,” I said. “With a girl named Pie Pie. Pie Pie Graves.” I was smiling.
James didn’t smile.
“She grew real close to me, Ivy. Too close. She didn’t look a thing like Ann, but all the sudden all I’m thinking of is Ann. It snuck up on me. Because Pie Pie was three years old going on four.”
Ann.
We never said “Ann.” Gladys never said it, so I never said it. I took a deep breath. All the sudden I wanted to say “Ann.”
“Three going on four,” I said. “Like Little Ann was.”
James looked down, wouldn’t meet my eye.
“Like Ann,” I said again. I wanted to say it a hundred times.
“Pie would sit out on the dirt under the laundry line with her metal cars. She had three metal cars, and one metal ambulance, and one dune buggy, and one Barbie doll. That was her whole toy collection. She’d make that doll walk and leave footprints in the dirt. She’d sit out there by herself for hours in the evening and play in the dirt.”
“And you’d play with her, right?”
“No, no. I’d sometimes sit on the front stoop and watch her. And sometimes she’d tell me things.”
“So you left the little girl, James. Is she heartbroken?”
“She’s got a father. I’ll never be her father. Her father came over once a week and took her out on the town. He was a comedian. I mean he made his money that way, locally. Pie Pie loved him. He told her he was going to take her around the world when she was ten. She’ll miss me a few weeks, but then she’ll forget me. I’m no father to her.”
“I don’t think you’re real forgettable, James,” I said. “I don’t think Gladys forgot you for a second.”
“I don’t know why I even want to see her,” he said. “I might just want to say hello and good-bye. But I have to see her to know.”
“That’s understandable.”
“Anything really new with her? Anything I should know? She ever go to night school like she always said?”
“Night school?”
“She always said she would.”
“Oh, that’s right. No, no night school that I know of.”
“Would you say she was happy?” he wanted to know.
“No, James. I would never say that.”
“She talk about Ann?”
“Oh no. Never.”
“She talk about Wendell?”
“Maybe once or twice.”
Before we left the bar James played “Ring of Fire” on the jukebox, a song we all loved in the old days. Him, me, Gladys, maybe a man I was seeing, we’d all sit in that same booth singing.
We left that day before the song was even halfway through. James said he wanted some fresh air, and I knew that whatever he thought the song would do for him, it did something like the opposite of that.
He drove us down into the valley, asking me questions about my own life now. Was I happy? “Sure,” I told him. “Happy enough.”
“What’s that mean?” he said.
“Can’t complain,” I said.
“Go ahead and complain. You could do it if you tried.”
So I complained that maybe I was a little lonely now that Gladys was gone. A little out of sorts.
“I venture that’s an understatement,” James said.
Maybe that was the sort of conversation that made me like James so much. You don’t often find men who ask you to complain.
Men who know you well and know when you’re making an understatement. Men who know you well enough to say, “So, Ivy, can I stay with you a while?”
“Sure you can.”
“Won’t put you out?”
“Hell no, James.”
We were in the kitchen and James was looking taller than usual because of the low ceiling, and I was suddenly remembering him as a young man with bare arms and Wendell sleeping on his shoulder at Rehoboth Beach on a lazy gray day. We all left the beach that day just as it started to rain. Most of the other people ran off the beach headed for shelter, but we all walked slow as usual, and for a second I saw James had his face lifted to the rain and his mouth open. And Wendell opened his sleepy eyes, then went right back to sleep with his head on James’s rainy shoulder, and a smile came to James’s lips for just a moment, then was gone.
For a second I could see James the fifty-two-year-old and James the twenty-four-year-old at the same time, like both men were in my kitchen. The older man might have looked over at the younger man like he was a complete stranger, but I could see that James was still James and his best quality was still a kind of gentleness.
I fixed him some supper and gave him three glasses of ice water, and he ate and drank in silence while I sat and looked out the window, over at him, out the window, over at him.
He stood up after he was through and thanked me in a formal way and asked if he could go to sleep on the couch, so I went and got some clean sheets and a pillow and made it comfortable, and he took off his boots and lay down and fell asleep in about two minutes with his legs bent because he was too tall, and for a while I just stood in the doorway looking at him because I never saw a grown man sleeping in the dusk light, only children.
That whole first week James stayed was nice because he inspired me to fix the faucets and helped me repair the roof, which I’d been putting off for years. And one morning he even came down to the garden with me, not to work but to see what we were growing, which weren’t much because the fall was coming, and the children all looked up at James and studied him. He smiled at them and said hello. “You people good gardeners?” he asked them.
“Yes,” they all said.
“Not afraid to get your hands dirty?”
“No,” they all said.
“I admire that,” James said. “From the looks of this patch of ground you all do a fine job.”
The little anorexic girl, Cassie Dean, stayed by James’s side the whole morning, the two of them weeding partners, James just praising her ability and telling her about what a lousy weeder he was when he was her age, how he always ended up leaving in some roots. She finally took off her red plastic sunglasses, which I’d never seen her without. Her eyes were small blue jewels. She had a smile on her face and that was for James.
I like to remember James walking beside me toward the garden before the sun even came up, everything cool and dark and dewy, James in a T-shirt and jeans and his boots, stopping once in a while to pick up a stone and turn it around in his hand.
During this time Gladys called, and I told her James was here. I expected a big reaction and I thought she might start coming home. But she said otherwise, and I never mentioned it to James. I guess I didn’t want to talk about her with him for a while.
In the evenings we’d go for drives together in the valley, which James loved and said he missed. I can’t explain it, but the tires underneath us felt bigger than ever. We were way up high, almost floating down the road.
At the end of that week on one of our valley drives with the windows half open and the smell of red leaves in the car, James reached over toward my hand, and I wasn’t too sure what he was doing so I didn’t give my hand over to him. I just looked at his hand and did nothing so he took his hand back and put it on the wheel.
But after that my heart started pounding and it just got louder when I told myself to calm down, because there was a new feeling in the car and it dawned on me that James wanted to hold my hand so I reached out and touched his hand on the wheel and my throat swelled up. Without looking at me his hand slid off the wheel down to the seat between us and our fingers just linked up like they were old friends having a reunion.
I mean to say holding the hand of James didn’t feel new, it felt old, like I’d held it a million times. I don’t have an explanation.
So I’m riding along trying to breathe in the piney mountain air and trying to say to myself, this don’t mean much, Ivy, you’re just holdin’ hands and bein’ friends, honey, so why the racing heart, why’s your throat swelled up, old girl, and why so warm? Warm in the face and the body?
That’s all understatement, the truth is that just holding his hand that day in the car felt better than most anything I could remember. A pleasure in my body like a steady flame that got stronger when James took his finger and traced little patterns on my palm.
Maybe when he was tracing those patterns on my palm is when I said to myself, Ivy, this is more than friends.
Back at the house he helped me make the supper, which was fried chicken and a lot of nice vegetables. James cut all the vegetables up and sat at the table in his new-looking white T-shirt with a glass of beer beside him. I was at the stove and kept looking over at him, thinking he might look up and smile, but he didn’t. And if he had, I would’ve looked away, since the air was thick and still with all our feelings.
I was frying that chicken saying to myself, Ivy, this is not your man. This is your sister’s old husband. This is not your man. This is not your man. This is not your . . .
And another voice would come into my head that was more like the sound of the wind in the leaves, or someone saying, Shhhh.
And pretty soon I listened to that voice and got quieter than I’d ever been in all my life. The whole kitchen filled up with quiet that was coming from me and from James, so now you could hear every sound from the pots and pans like it was coming through a megaphone.
So we ate the meal together and still we didn’t say a word, and now it was like we both understood that we shouldn’t talk and break the spell.
After that meal we go out for a ride and end up in the valley and we walk way down to the very bottom of it. The sky was all thick with clouds like a hard rain was coming. Some of the mountains are hiding behind the clouds, some aren’t. And James is talking more about pets now, about a man he knew with a dog who learned to steer the wheel of the man’s Chevy. The dog would sit between the man’s legs with its paws on the wheel and the man would tell the dog “left,” “right,” and the dog, who wore a Yankees cap, would steer just fine.
“The man never got into a single car accident,” James said as we went deeper into that valley. “I’ve been in three, myself. You think I should get a dog to do my steering, Ivy?”
“Maybe that would be just the thing,” I said.
And then we were down on the grassy ground in the darkness, no blanket under us, no stars over us, no hesitation left inside us.
We were good together, that’s an understatement. James was a man who could make you forget yourself when he kissed you. He was a man whose weight felt good on you, like his weight was made up of things you wouldn’t mind knowing. Some men, their weight feels all wrong, and even as they’re making you feel good, if someone said, “Would you like to see everything inside his heart?” you know you’d answer, “No I wouldn’t, thank you.”
With James I wanted to see everything.
The problem was the ghost of Gladys hovering over us or stretched out beside us so that any time I remembered myself I felt a burning in my heart and a need to sit up and say “Stop, I’m not Gladys.” But see, I never did sit up and say this, in fact I never sat up at all unless he pulled me that way. Ivy the rag doll.
So what happened, or what seemed to happen, was that the spirit of Gladys somehow slipped into my body. Now don’t think I don’t know that sounds mystic of me, me who thought I didn’t have a single mystic bone in my body.
All I know is that while James was making love to me my own face felt like my sister’s face. And when I cried out it sounded like her voice.
And after that first time James said, “I feel a bit worse off now than I did before. I’m not sure this is the right thing to be doing. Considering everything.”
I didn’t know what to say to that because I didn’t want to think. I just looked up at the dark sky above and tried to feel exactly like myself but I believe I wasn’t sure what that was anymore. Though I did feel a bit like a patch of dry earth with a brand new stream running down through the middle.
* * *
One night in the middle of our love affair I made up some spaghetti sauce. All we were doing with our time was making love, and we weren’t hungry at all, but we needed to eat to keep going. I stood at the stove on a warm fall afternoon making that sauce and feeling furious at James all the sudden.
Because he had this power over me no man ever had before. I had a hunger for him I never had for anything or anyone before. All I had to do was look at him and my whole body hurt from desire. He came into the kitchen and said, “Ivy, are you okay?” because he could feel my anger. Hell, Brent Quinn could probably feel it all the way up on his mountain. I kept stirring the sauce and said, “Fine,” but I snapped it out. So he leaves the kitchen. And I start pouring hot pepper into the sauce. I pour about three or four times the usual amount. Then I taste it. Then I add a little more hot pepper.
I served him his spaghetti and served myself some too and we sat at the table together. “Wow,” James said after his first taste. “Hot! Are you trying to kill me?”
“Maybe.”
I sat there and ate and felt angrier and angrier because all he’d have to do was reach out for my hand and I’d be leaving the table and following him to the bed. He knew this was the case too.
“What did you do, pour a whole jar of peppers into this sauce?”
I shrugged my shoulders. He smiled at me. I think he understood.
“So when do you think she might be coming back?”
“Oh, I don’t know. If she knew you were here I imagine she’d come back if she had to walk across America on bare feet.”
“I don’t know about that.”
“Maybe not,” I agreed.
Because who knew anything about all of this? Who knew what time had done to the heart of Gladys?
You might think I started feeling overwhelmed with guilt like any woman would have after sleeping with the long-lost husband of her own sister, but it didn’t happen like that. The guilt was there, but it was like a little bad music in the background or an itch or sometimes at moments a knot in the chest, but it was not the main feeling at all. The main feeling was lovesickness as bad as a girl’s, but not as innocent, and not with the same kind of promises for future lifelong happiness. In fact I felt the promise of doom. But it was love all the same. And there was this rudeness, this rude part of me that thought only of myself, and hurt. I never felt so bad or so good in my whole life. After we made love each night I’d lie there and talk to James and he’d listen for a while and then fall asleep and I’d lie there and look at his sleeping face for a while, then lie there some more staring up at the ceiling, then maybe walk outside, look at the sky, then come back in and toss and turn and finally sleep.
One day James slept most of the morning, and when he woke up he wouldn’t look at me. He sat and ate breakfast at the table and neither of us said much, until he finally said, “I’m in bad shape.”
“You’ve been through a lot,” I said, real quickly like I could feel what was coming.
“I’m in worse shape than I can say,” he said. “Shouldn’t keep coming into your room.”
“I don’t mind.”
“You should mind.”
“Why’s that?”
He didn’t say anything.
“Why’s that?”
He looked me in the face then and said, “I came to see Gladys. I’m not sure this is the right thing to be doing. I came to see Gladys.”
“And Gladys is gone,” I said.
“I was just lonely, Ivy. And now I’m even lonelier,” James said.
“That’s something,” I said. “That’s something. Because I’m not lonely, and I can see now I been lonely all my life and never even knew it.”
James just looked at me while I cast my eyes down and thought about my words and wondered if what I said was true or false.
When Gladys called again I told her he was still visiting, but nothing else because it didn’t seem like something I could say over the telephone. I asked her if she was coming home and she said “Not sure,” and I was glad of that. Because by the time she called, I knew I was in love with James.
Maybe he was lonelier after each time we were together but maybe that was his goal, to get lonelier and lonelier, all the way to the very last edge of lonely, so he could see his whole life clearly. Or why would he have kept coming back to my room, and why would we have taken those walks in the valley at sunset with neither of us speaking and sometimes holding hands and sometimes just lying right down on the dark green earth?
And I wasn’t eating anything because love like that takes all your appetites away, it’s like your appetites for sleep and food and other people just get sucked up into your appetite for your lover, and suddenly you’re fifteen or twenty pounds lighter and you have these dark circles under your eyes but you still look good because your cheeks are pink and your body is filled with a secret hunger and a kind of sorrow that feels like happiness.
Meanwhile I was still working the garden with the little winter-school children. Pretty soon it would be too cold for gardening, but it was perfect in late September, with a sharpness in the air you could take inside you. And hundreds and hundreds of ripe tomatoes we’d can. I learned something about children out there. They’re a lot more interested in you if they can feel you’re carrying around a secret world, a world you consider more important than the world of children. The campers always liked me well enough, but out there in the garden they liked me even more and asked me questions no child had ever asked me, not even my son. “Ivy, when you were small, did they have televisions? Did you have a nice mother? Did you hate school? Did you hate boys? Where did you live when you were eight?”
I’d answer all the questions and they’d ask others and the gardening went quickly like a smooth dance and afterward I’d always walk down the dirt road alone, carrying my shoes and feeling like some kind of queen because the children would sing, “Bye, Ivy! See ya tomorrow!”
And a fine-mannered Indian boy named Apoorva made me a nice lanyard. That was a first.
Sometimes at night after a warm fall day we’d take a sheet down into the valley, a white sheet that we’d spread out on the black grass. James would get undressed and I would kneel beside him and massage his back and his legs. I was good at this, and sometimes James returned the favor, and he was good too.
One night as he was returning the favor I kept having a vision of my father standing on the hill just looking down into the valley at me and James. It was a childish wish of mine and I understood it was childish right away. What I wanted was for that man, my father, to see me with James and see that James loved me, even though I knew deep inside me that James really didn’t love me, but it looked like love and felt like love to me if I didn’t think too hard, and I wanted my father to come back from the dead to see me as a woman who James was loving. The man who loved Gladys was now loving me.
This surprised me because I hadn’t given much recent thought to the man. My father, I mean.
“Guess who I’m thinking of?” I said to James. He was sitting beside me, one hand on my spine.
“Who?”
“My father. I keep picturing him in his black hat standing over there on that hill.”
“He had the heart of a bull, your father.”
“What?”
“Your father was a bull.”
I thought about that for a second, and started laughing, and laughed harder the more I tried to figure out what it meant, and I kept seeing a real bull, a live bull, walking around in my childhood house, snarling, and the bull had my father’s face, and I couldn’t stop laughing at the thought. But I laughed myself sick and started crying.
Basically I see now I was a whole different person by this point, crying like that.
James looked over at me and was quiet for a second.
“He showed favoritism, no denying that,” James said. “He favored your sister. I always wondered how that felt for you.”
He had started to refer to Gladys as “your sister” and never said her name during this time.
“Why do you think he favored her? Why was he so hell-bent on pretending I didn’t exist?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “A mystery.”
“Come on, James.”
“Maybe he knew your sister would be harder to tame. Maybe he liked the challenge. He was a certain kind of man.”
“Maybe,” I said.
I was unsettled. It was all happening too quickly. I had always thought of myself as happy, my life as easy, but something about this love affair was cracking me open like a safe where I’d locked away pain. Because really, Gladys had it harder with my father. It was easier to be ignored and dismissed and every so often teased. Not always easy, but easier. Because I did love him. You don’t come into the world as a child with a choice about who you’ll love, you just love whoever’s there. And it’s deep inside you the rest of your life no matter how much you know your love’s unreturned. But still, it was easier to be all that than to be beaten. Not only beaten, but made into a little wife in an apron. Made into a prize possession.
Gladys was beaten with a belt at least five times that I remember and I wasn’t even once struck with his hand as far as I know. I put almost all of my energy into giving him no reason to hit me, I think. I remember the first time Gladys was beaten hard enough so that she had red welts on her legs she was only eleven or twelve years old. In those days the boys from school had the habit of visiting girls in their class in the evenings. They wouldn’t knock on the door, they’d just roll around on the front yard like gymnasts. They’d be dressed in white T-shirts and dark gray baseball pants. They’d do head-stands and backward somersaults and things like that while the girl would stand in her bedroom window or maybe on the front porch dressed nicely because she’d have been expecting them. Gladys was out there on the porch one autumn evening in a dress and her white patent leather shoes that she wore all year-round when everyone else only wore them in summer because she was an individual. She watched the boy gymnasts performing under red trees with a small smile on her lips, not giving them too much appreciation, but just enough. My father wasn’t home when this was going on, just my mother, and she thought it was sweet. She’d stand behind a curtain and watch the boys herself.
That night Gladys whispered out to the boys, “Come around back in about five minutes.” Which they did, and Gladys let them in the basement door and gave them each a shot of whiskey. My father kept all the spirits down there in the basement. So after they had their shot they all went running off except for Digger Kovaleski, who Gladys had a case on. Digger and Gladys stayed down in the basement kissing too long, because the next thing they knew my father was there beside them pulling their hair to separate them, throwing Digger Kovaleski out onto the ground, and ordering Gladys up to her room. The other boys were waiting for Digger, hiding on the side of the house. I looked out the window at them from the dining room. Next thing I know Gladys is being beaten with my father’s belt up in our bedroom. All the windows were open up there. I could hear the belt get louder on her skin, and a few times she cried out but mostly she stayed quiet. And the boys on the side of the house could hear this beating, could hear the sound of that belt against Gladys and could hear her cries. They just stared at each other wide-eyed, some of them smiling, and all of them listening until it was over, and then they ran off.
Gladys had welts on her legs and her back and they lasted a long time. My father told her he wouldn’t beat her so hard if she’d behave, and it hurt him more than it hurt her. My mother didn’t know much better, since she’d been beaten too (maybe most people had, spare the rod spoil the child and all that), so she didn’t say a whole lot. She had a heartbroken look and tried to be extra nice to Gladys, but that just infuriated Gladys.
I told James this story and afterward nothing was quite the same between us. I could feel I’d changed everything, but I kept on talking. James had a Quaker mother who raised him without any violence, so for him the story had more impact than it would a more regular person, I guess.
I told him a story from when I was a girl, a story that I never told anyone, and the problem was even as I was telling it I could hear how it couldn’t mean much now, not to James and not to me. Still, I talked on. I told him how when I was just a little girl back in southern Delaware, twelve years old, I thought I loved a man named Willy who worked behind the counter in the local drugstore. I considered him to be the most romantic man in the world because his fiancée had run off on him. The fiancée was a pretty girl who wore a Stetson hat with a dress, and everyone thought it looked good because she gave you the impression she was a queen, even when she was slouching at the counter waiting for Willy to take a break and smoke a Lucky Strike with her out front.
Willy had thin black hair, too long for those days, so it made him stand out as a bit unusual, and he wore old shirts with his father’s name stitched onto the pocket, Warren, and I could smell his body when he set my Coke down on the counter, and I’d want to touch his arms with their muscles, and whenever people came into the little creaky floored drugstore and Willy gave them a slow, sad dip of his head, I’d have to bite the edge of my fist I liked it so much.
I kept telling this story to James, maybe trying to erase the story of the child Gladys, and the more I told it the more I felt like the child Ivy was a figment of my imagination and only the child Gladys was real. I was telling the story fighting for the child Ivy to be real as I talked. I just laid on my back and looked up at the sky and kept going.
I told James how I wrote little love letters to Willy sometimes right there at the counter, all hunched over so he wouldn’t see the words but wanting him to be curious, and then one day he was. It was four in the afternoon and I was at the counter on the red vinyl stool that twirled up and down, though I weren’t much of a twirler considering my size, and that little store was half lit with orange afternoon light and half in the shade, and Willy was by the window biting his nails, which on most men wouldn’t look good but on him it did. He was looking out at the street when suddenly he turned from the window and called down, “Hope you’re not writin’ some boy love letters down there.”
James was trying to perk up a little, trying to forget my sister and remember me, and his hands were pulling up the grass and he said, “So did you give Prince Charming of the drugstore your little letters?” and I could see on his face he was working hard to be interested, and maybe he was a little bit, so I told him how my face got red and my heart pounded and I yelled back to Willy, “No, I’m just doodling.”
And Willy said, “Don’t be duped.”
“I won’t be duped,” I told him.
“Because you only got one heart, partner. One heart.”
“I know.”
Then he turned right back to the window.
Even then I sensed that Willy was planning to waste his life biting his nails behind the counter and warning others to protect their hearts, but at that age it seemed romantic to me. Then one evening I went to Willy’s house and spied through his window while he ate his dinner from two cans, can of beans, can of corn, and he used his bed (unmade) for a chair and his dresser for a table and he wolfed down the dinner like a starving man, looking at his own reflection in the dresser mirror the whole time.
I just stopped going to Willy’s after that I felt so bad to have seen all that, and I never could get it out of my mind, fact it’ll just come to me about once a year when I least expect it, clear as a bell, like I’m seeing it all over again.
James pulled me to him all the sudden. It surprised me.
Something reached his heart in the memory I told him, or maybe he just felt it was pitiful how hard I was trying.
We both stayed quiet for a minute.
“Don’t understand why she never mentioned something like that,” James said. “She told me most things.”
“Who knows,” I said, and turned away my face because my eyes were stung by confusing tears.
We kept on with our love affair, and we kept on talking.
It just wasn’t quite the same.
My son, Louis, called in mid-October to wish me a happy birthday. He said he’d be coming home to visit for Christmas. He asked me if anything was new and I stood by the kitchen window and said, “No. Not a thing.” I saw right then I had turned into a woman with too many secrets.
Then, a week or so later, when James and I were about to take a drive into the valley, me in a new sweater and lipstick, both of us almost at the point of thinking she might be gone for good, Gladys was at the door, battered brown suitcase in hand, the evening sun behind her. She wore a white cotton blouse and a blue skirt, or rather a blue sarong. On her feet were black Cuban heels.
“Hi,” she said, smiling.
I must’ve looked at her funny, and mumbled hello. Then I reached out to her, and gave her a hug, but it was stiff.
“What’s wrong? Something wrong? Am I a stranger?”
She had made her way into the house. I followed her. Then the toilet flushed.
“James is here,” I explained.
“He came back for another visit?”
“He stayed.”
James walked out of the bathroom and saw Gladys standing there still holding her suitcase.
Those two looked at each other for a long moment, and I’m feeling a sort of crumbling take place inside me.
“Hi, James,” Gladys said. It looked to me like she suddenly had tears in her eyes.
“Hi,” he said. Then he looked over at me for a split second.
“It’s all right,” I said. I was talking to myself but James thought I was talking to him and he looked over at me like he was thanking me for saying it was all right.
A small part of me was glad to see Gladys. Most of me just kept on crumbling.
Gladys started walking back toward the bedroom with her suitcase and I stepped in front of her and said, “Let me take that for you, here, sit down on the couch, James get her some cranberry juice, she still loves it, I’m sure. . . ”
Gladys let me steer her toward the couch. She was tired. She had been on a Trailways bus for three days.
I let James wait on her while I took the suitcase back in the bedroom, closed the door behind me, and hurried around that room to gather James’s shoes and his books and his pants and shirts on the hook by the window. I stood there with all of it in my arms and thought I’d throw it all out the window then go out and deal with it later.
But I remembered I was not a child and not a fool or a liar. I wasn’t sure what I was but I knew what I wasn’t. And the smell and feel of James’s belongings began to pierce my heart just as if he were wrapped around me saying, Good-bye, Ivy, it’s all over now.
I finally set it all down on the bed. I could hear Gladys’s voice out there in the living room and I heard what I thought was James’s laugh once. I figured Gladys was thinking I was back in the bedroom to give them a little privacy.
So all his belongings were on the bed and I began to fold his shirts and pants neatly. The maroon flannel, the two worn plaids, the gold T-shirt, the two white T-shirts, a robe I bought him, his jeans, his underwear. I put his shoes on the floor.
Then I walked back into the living room and for a second saw it like I’d never seen it before, saw that oil painting of the ship on the rough sea at night, saw the way the couch sagged underneath it, saw the little statue of the girl in the yellow dress like it was brand-new.
I didn’t really see Gladys and James now. They were blurs, and I took my seat on the couch next to Gladys and across from James and for a few seconds it was silent.
“I think we oughta tell Gladys something,” I said to James.
And the odd thing was I wasn’t a bit nervous about it, mainly because I knew I’d lost everything that really mattered to me then, meaning James’s love and companionship, and whenever a person loses like that a kind of bravery sets in, maybe a hopeless bravery but it’s better than being afraid.
James looked at the floor and said, “Well, I guess so. Seems an odd way to say hello to her after so long, but I guess you’re right, Ivy.”
So I looked at Gladys and said, “James has been mine for a while.”
“James has been yours for a while,” she said. “Now what’s that supposed to mean?” She was smiling. She knew what it meant.
“James and I are lovers,” I said.
“Whoah!” she said. “Whoah Nilly!” She was still smiling.
“I’m sorry, Gladys, it just happened,” I told her. I felt no emotion at this point other than a bit confused about that smile on her face.
Then she starts laughing. She throws her head back and laughs and says, “Ivy! Ivy and James!” And she keeps on laughing.
* * *
I went for a walk alone when that laughter died. Gladys wouldn’t look at me. I wasn’t sure what to make of it all, but I knew that I was the third wheel in that room, that James and Gladys had a long life together that maybe happened long ago, but it was there in the room just the same, and I felt like a girl again, a girl excluded, alone on a porch swing in the dark.
But I couldn’t stay on that swing in that dark because I was a whole different person now, and my heart was in great pain, and all I wanted was to turn around and head back to that house and say to James, “James, tell Gladys you love me. I know you love me. I know you do, James.”
But of course I kept walking into that autumn night because I knew James didn’t love me.
When I was twenty-two a man named Stewart Rivers dated me half a year. Stewart was a nice man in most ways, and a handsome man too, often in a tie because he was an architecture student. My mother told me he was the best I’d ever get. He might have been, but I didn’t love him, so I had to break his heart. Stewart didn’t take that heartbreak well, in fact he called me on the phone crying, he showed up at my house with roses once a week for three months straight, and he wrote me about sixty letters signing them “Love, Stew” when all I’d ever called him was Stewart.
I walked that night straight out of the camp and down the dark road that led to town, and the whole time I thought of how Stewart Rivers became smaller and smaller and less like someone I could love the more he persisted that way.
I would not be Stewart Rivers with James. I’d be the opposite.
I’d go on with my life, and whatever he wanted to do, well that was plainly his business.
There was no moon that night, only stars. I couldn’t see where I was going, but I didn’t much care.
Next thing a car is shining headlights on my backside and Gladys is hanging out the window saying, “Ivy, get in!” And I turn around and walk back toward James’s car and get into the backseat. Gladys is at the wheel, James is in the passenger seat, and a football game is on the radio for a second until Gladys changes the station and now we’ve got the singer Al Green.
Sha-la-la-la-la-la oh baby
Sha-la-la-la-la-la
I’ll never forget it.
Gladys drove straight and James turned sideways in the passenger seat, reached back and squeezed my hand, and all the sudden I’m filled with the most painful hope I ever had. I squeezed his hand back.
“We going to the Little Moon?” I said.
“We just came out to rescue you, sister,” Gladys said.
“So where are we going?”
“Back home,” James said. “Gladys and me need some time to talk.”
“So why can’t I walk if you two need to talk?” I was angry all the sudden. Terribly angry.
“It’s too dangerous out here, Ivy. You could get hit by a car.”
He squeezed my hand again.
Al Green kept on singing.
I let them take me home.