I SAW THE END OF ME AND JAMES COMING AT ME ALL ALONG, just coming right down the road like truth in a truck, rattling closer and closer until it stopped at my feet, and then everything under those cold blue skies got real quiet up there. Even though the early birds of spring were whooping it up in the tops of pine trees and waking me at four in the morning, it always seemed quiet. There must be a certain quiet that comes into a person’s world right before someone they love is about to say good-bye.
I knew days before James said anything that our love was over, because I could feel how he wasn’t really in his hands anymore when he touched me. It was like he somehow found a way to keep himself out of his hands, so that they were like the reluctant hands of a stranger, and yet even as I knew that, they were also the same hands I loved, with their hard, lined knuckles, their short, clean nails, their thick-skinned palms. I liked being touched anyway, even if his spirit was elsewhere, so even though I knew it was over, I couldn’t bring myself to say a word. When he kissed me one cold night in his flannel-lined coat down by the lake I thought, This is the last kiss, drink it in, and every time he touched me that week, whether it was accidental in the kitchen when his arm brushed mine to reach for butter, or on purpose in the bedroom when he ran his hand through my hair I’d think, This is the last touch. I’d try to memorize the way it all felt, because I was afraid he’d be the final lover in my life, maybe because I wanted him to be.
Then he went and got all involved with a pregnant Canada goose that was out there on the roof at Muriel’s. It came to me one day that I couldn’t compete with that goose, and if a woman can’t compete with a goose, well, I’d call that a problem too big to fix.
It was a sad ride back home, sad, dark, and quiet, and when he dropped me off I asked him not to come in, and he agreed to see Gladys some other time and I was grateful because it would’ve been more than a little awkward with me, James, and Gladys sitting in that kitchen. When I got out of his car I took my shoes off and stood on the grass and felt the cool earth on my bare toes while he backed away. I’d been wanting to take my shoes off the whole time I was in that car, but somehow it seemed like a personal thing to do, another thing I wouldn’t do anymore with James, so I kept them on. My feet felt good that night in the cold dark grass, and since they were the only part of me that felt good, I tried my best to concentrate on them while he left.
When he beeped a small good-bye it was like the sound of the horn was a hot coal in my throat, but I looked up at the moon and said to myself, “You will be fine.” And I walked across the cool grass and smelled the spring and then out of nowhere, I found myself whistling the song “That’s the Night That the Lights Went Out in Georgia,” a song I hadn’t even thought of in over five years, and when I raked my mind I couldn’t come up with one reason why such a tune came to me in that moment, but I kept on whistling. I didn’t want to face Gladys, because I felt like a failure and I knew I was right where she’d expected me to land. Another part of me wanted to face her and get everything out in the open.
I walked into the house, feeling the oddness of being there but still whistling and the kitchen was empty and orderly, with the clock ticking and the old foreign dolls that Louis had sent me lined up on the shelf. I went and picked each of the dolls up, one at a time, then put them back. “Hello, Gladys?” I said to the empty living room. I flicked on the light. The couch and chairs were exactly where they always had been, but for a second they looked littler to me, and the one blue chair that I always thought of as Gladys’s chair looked worn out and faded like a five-dollar item in a garage sale, and I wondered why I never noticed before. Beside the chair was a biography of Harry Truman and on top of that book a white rock. The rest of the room looked pretty much as usual only on the table near the window was this little statue of a boy with a bluebird on his shoulder, something I knew had to be a gift because Gladys weren’t a knick-knacker and never would be. I’m by nature a knickknacker, but Gladys never did permit me displaying my items. Years back we went through a time where I’d try every so often to set out some cute little china statues of dogs I collected, and she’d try to live with them for a few days, then she’d end up saying, “Ivy, about those dogs?” and that was my signal, I knew they were driving her crazy, so I’d box them up and try again a few months later, but she never changed.
I went and picked up the statue of the bluebird boy and looked out the window, like maybe Gladys would be marching toward the house out there in the dark, but all I saw was the moonlit air, and the black trees in the distance on the far hill, and then my heart started pounding because I hadn’t checked the bedroom yet and somehow I started thinking Gladys might be sick. I hadn’t even talked to her for months. I actually even thought she might be dead to tell you the truth, and I can’t explain why I got that feeling, but it made my hands and face go cold and my heart pound and as I walked to the bedroom door I didn’t breathe. First I knocked. Then I opened the door and the first thing I see in that dark was the wind puffing out the white curtains, new white curtains I noticed, I could tell they were whiter and nicer than the old ones even in the dark. The rest of the room was completely the same as far as I could tell, and when I flicked on the light and saw how much things hadn’t changed I felt both relieved and disappointed. And I looked at my old twin bed and something twisted in my heart. Because I’d be going back to being a person in a twin bed, after so many nights in a double. And then I looked at Gladys’s bed and imagined her sleeping here all these nights alone, and I wondered about what state she’d be in.
I put some things in the closet, undressed, showered, and got into bed. It was the loneliest, strangest sort of feeling, to be in a single bed again, just myself, waiting for my sister and not knowing what she would say when she saw me. I waited and thought of Gladys but also my mind was still on James. James was in my mind, stuck there no matter how many other things I thought.
I laid under the sheets with my eyes closed and soon enough my head started to feel like it was stretching out behind me like a road, and James was driving and driving and driving, and my head was getting longer and longer and longer, and I felt there was no end to what shape your head could take when a man was driving in it. I tried to imagine him stopping the car so the road could end and I could drift to sleep, but it didn’t work, he just kept on going with the windows down and the spring night blowing in his hair. So I sat up in bed and looked through the curtains into the starry sky and shook my head until I finally got that road out of my mind, and laid back down with a normal-shaped head. Still I could smell his body, and see his hands on the wheel, but gradually it all faded and for a minute or so all I saw was the room I was in, the curtains, the moonlight, the night-stand between the two beds, the sheets, and the mirror on the back of the bathroom door like silver.
Then I had about an hour of just lying there in that bed, with my thoughts drifting way back into my childhood, way back to my mother, who would walk down the hall and come into our first-floor room at night when she thought we were asleep. I remembered how she’d stand and just watch us for a few minutes, her two little girls sleeping, and I’d be awake and wondering what she was thinking as she watched her sleepers, and I always had the feeling she was praying for us, just praying that we’d be happy in our lives, happier than her, that we’d find love and happiness as we grew and turned into women. And when I was about eight she’d still do this and I’d feel her own unhappiness, or sadness, but I never really thought about it much, never really asked myself why she seemed sad. It was just the way she was, a sweet but sad type of woman, with big dark eyes, married to a man who hardly ever spoke a word to her, and now here I was, a grown-up woman nearing fifty all the sudden missing her more than I ever had since she died years ago. Because I thought if she was alive I would call her on the phone and tell her I was heartbroken and she wouldn’t say, “Serves ya right for runnin’ around with your sister’s man.” She would say, “Oh, Ivy.”
She would listen, and she would say, “I’m sorry.” And she wouldn’t know what else to say, and she was always a woman who just said nothing unless she knew exactly what to say, and she hardly ever did. So I’d just fill in the silence on that telephone and tell her not to worry, I’d be all right, and then we’d hang up. But since she was dead of course I couldn’t make that call, so I just lay with my eyes closed and started feeling like she was in the room, like I was a child again pretending to be asleep and she was in the room watching me and thinking, Let her be happy. Let her turn out a happy woman. Let her have a good life, Lord.
I had the oddest sense that my whole life was stretched out in front of me for me to live.
That was when I heard the kitchen door squeak open, slam shut, and the old, familiar, solid footsteps of Gladys head toward the bedroom, while my heart pounded in my ears.
“Gladys?” I called out, to warn her.
I heard her footsteps stop.
“It’s Ivy.” I sat up in my bed.
She wasn’t moving, and she didn’t say hello. Not for a minute or so. I didn’t say anything either. We just felt each other in the house, and I tried to slow down my pounding heart. She seemed to be rifling through some papers or a book out there, and I heard her clear her throat.
Finally she came back to the bedroom and stood in the doorway and looked at me.
“So. When did you get here?”
“Just a while ago.”
“Where’s James?”
“He dropped me off.”
“He dropped you off?”
“Yes.”
She went and sat on her bed, took off her Cuban-heeled black shoes. She wore a blue dress with three-quarter-length sleeves that I’d never seen before. It weren’t her style, it was one of those baggy dresses with a real low waist and some kind of black embroidery around the hem which I can’t say was fancy or pretty. It actually scared me for a second because I thought it meant she lost all her good taste, and if she lost her good taste, what else did she lose?
“This old girl had a blind date tonight,” Gladys said. “With a man who installed us a new industrial dishwasher.”
“Was it a nice time?” My heart was still pounding. Her voice sounded flattened out to me.
“I don’t know. Is listening to someone talk about industrial dishwashers for three hours a nice time?”
“I’d guess not.”
“The fella took me to his apartment,” Gladys said. “Showed me his collection of empty cough syrup bottles.”
“Empty cough syrup bottles?”
“He’s got over eight hundred.”
“Does he fill them up with colored water?”
“No.”
“Little stones?”
“No.”
“Does he decorate the outsides or something like that?”
“No, Ivy. Stop hoping it’s normal. It’s not normal to have over eight hundred empty cough syrup bottles. Why the hell would you think that was normal for one second?”
“Sorry.”
Of course I didn’t think it was normal, I was just trying to fill up the air in that room with something other than the strangeness I was feeling.
“So did you have a good time in Canada?” she said, but I could hear something in her voice that made me feel cold. “Did you have a real good time?”
“I’m sorry” just spilled right out of my mouth.
“Are you? What are you sorry for?”
“I’m sorry if I hurt you.”
She shook her head, then gave me a kind of laugh, or chuckle, one of those unreadable chuckles she gave me all her life, then said she was tired and went into the bathroom. When she came out she was in a nightgown and her hair was brushed and she didn’t say a word. She got into bed and turned away from me.
“Gladys?”
“Ivy, I’m tired.”
“I was going to say I’m real glad to see you.”
“Okay.”
I lay awake half that night, and wished I could whisper over to Gladys, I was thinkin’ of Mama, and how she’d come in and watch us sleep, and it made me miss her. But soon even when I tried to think of my mother, I couldn’t. I couldn’t see anything but a pair of her old blue sneakers she would set by the door in the kitchen. And remembering my actions with James seemed to pin me down on the bed so I couldn’t really move at all.
I lay there trying to figure out why I’d been with James when deep inside me the whole time I knew that Gladys loved him and always would. Or did I know that? Maybe it only seems that way now, looking back. Maybe at the time I didn’t know if Gladys really cared all that much. The problem is, I don’t really know. So I couldn’t sleep.
* * *
The next morning Gladys had these sad-looking red sneakers on her feet, the kind you buy from those big bins at the supermarket and then never wear, hopefully. She wore a pair of white shorts and a shirt with a flower print. She had dyed her hair darker and her face was made up like I’d never seen it before, with mascara and smoky eye shadow and dark pink lips, and she had her old cat-eyed glasses on that I hadn’t seen in years. She looked all right, she had nice legs and everything, but actually she also looked a few bricks short. I don’t know why she was in those 1950s glasses, and I don’t know why her hair was so dark, but she thought she looked good.
“The worse you feel, the better you need to look,” she said when she caught me staring at the breakfast table. Then she winked and laughed.
“So you better go talk to Brent Quinn, Ivy. You might not have a job anymore. You were gone longer than Brent thought you’d be. Hell, you better go talk to him now.”
I didn’t know why she said that, because we both knew Brent was absolutely not the firing sort, not just because he was nice and liked the two of us, not even because he had one of these big hearts that just forgives every human foible, but because he was lazy and wouldn’t want to go through the trouble of firing someone, he’d just rather shuffle us around, put me back in the garden or something.
I went to see Brent that night. His cabin was filled with the purplish light of a spring evening, and jars of wildflowers all over the place. He was in his pajamas as he often was, only he had work boots on instead of bare feet or slippers. He said, “Hello there, mystery woman.” He poured me beer in a big mug that was all frosted up from being in his freezer. We sat at his table and he didn’t turn any lights on because his whole house ran on solar energy and golf cart batteries. So his white hair looked like it glowed in the dark.
As it turned out, he wanted me back in the kitchen with Gladys and Nadine because he said there would be more campers this year, but I got the feeling Brent really just wanted me back in the kitchen so Gladys and I would work side by side because he liked the idea of that, he told me a long time ago that he had a brother he hardly ever spoke to because they’d had a terrible falling out years ago, and every time he saw me and Gladys together he envied us and admired us. Well, I felt like saying to him that night in his cabin, “Brent, you can stop your admiring now.” Because I could feel how things with me and Gladys weren’t the same, and maybe never could be.
So there I was, back in the kitchen with the new dishwasher that didn’t make much noise like the old one, and Nadine the bird woman who started wearing all kinds of gypsy jewelry and smiled too wide whenever I looked at her, and Gladys in her cat-eyed glasses, who bit down on her lower lip and hardly said a word. We weren’t exactly three happy clams on the half shell. But we were busy, it was orientation week for the new summer counselors, and we were supposed to cook our best meals for these kids so they’d look forward to coming back up for three and a half months. Things like blueberry pancakes with whip cream, pizza on prebaked shells, melted cheese on their baked potatoes at night. I’d cook and whistle and try not to think, but I could feel something, even with the oven blasting out its heat, something I didn’t have words for, and maybe all it was was Gladys. I could feel Gladys. And she didn’t much feel like the old Gladys to me.
“You should come with Gladys and me bird-watchin’ sometime,” Nadine said.
“Gladys and you go bird-watchin’?” I said. I looked at Gladys, trying to picture her with binoculars and rolled-up pants.
“What the hell is so surprising about that?” Gladys snapped out at me all the sudden. It was the strangest thing, and I just stared at her for a few seconds.
“Nothing,” I said. “I just . . . ”
“You think I wouldn’t be the sort to like birds.”
“No, I don’t think that.”
Gladys looked at me and I couldn’t read her expression.
“Ivy,” Nadine said, “why don’t you come with us this evening? We’ll be looking for the red-winged blackbirds this evening. They’re just stunning, aren’t they Gladys?”
“Stunning little buggers,” Gladys said, nodding.
So that evening I walked through the woods with Gladys over to see Nadine, and I was feeling happier because Gladys was acting more normal, more like herself, and telling me a story about Nadine’s crazy sister.
“Her name’s Carmella but they just call her Mel. Isn’t that cute? So Carmella’s got these damn twins. She hauls them up from Camden, New Jersey, to see Nadine for Easter time. Well, here’s what happened. Mel is just driving along. Driving along in her banged-up Futura. One of the twins looks up ahead and sees a little rabbit. A little brown rabbit by the side of the road. This little twin is named Leanne, by the way. Leanne and Stan are the twins’ names. ‘Look at the cute rabbit,’ Leanne says. So her mother says, ‘Honey, I think that’s the Easter bunny!’ She drives another few seconds. ‘Why, it is the Easter bunny!’ So the twins get excited and start bouncing up and down. ‘The Easter bunny! Mommy can we stop! Can we stop and see the Easter bunny?’ Well, the rabbit darts right out into the road. Poor Mel just slams on those brakes. But it was too late. She kills the damn thing. So now she’s got little Leanne and Stan crying with red faces and tears. They’re saying, ‘Mommy killed the Easter bunny, Mommy killed the Easter bunny.’ They cried and chanted for miles. Mel said they must’ve said it two hundred times. She said she was ready to stop the car and kill them too.”
I laughed at that story, laughed until my eyes teared, mostly because I was grateful for my sister’s company as we walked through the woods, grateful to hear the tone of her old voice, and grateful to hear her laugh.
“Carmella tried to tell me the story like she thought it was a sad story,” Gladys said. “Like her kids would be scarred. But I started laughing. So she started laughing too. She said I had what she’d call a sick sense of humor.”
“I don’t think so.”
“I don’t either. You could just tell it was the kind of thing that always happened to Carmella. You could tell by looking at her. She might as well have been voted ‘most likely to kill the Easter bunny in front of her children’ back in high school.”
I laughed, and then I smiled over at Gladys. I thought maybe it would be a nice moment and she’d smile back, but she just got an odd look on her face and the green in her eyes got darker. They got about as dark as the pine trees in Canada, I thought to myself.
Nadine and Gladys and I took turns with binoculars down by the river, spotting red-winged blackbirds. I had a nice enough time, but every time my sister spoke she looked at Nadine, and not at me, so I began to feel terrible. We all walked back up to the old blue house about eight at night. Nadine wanted us all to sit on her back porch and listen to the wind in the chimes and drink some beer, but I just thanked her for the bird-watching and said I’d go on home, and I did, I went on home.
Between breakfast and lunch the next day after Nadine went home I followed Gladys out of the kitchen, all the way back to our house. About ten feet from the door leading into the kitchen I finally said, “Gladys? Did you know I was following you?”
“Yes,” she said, and walked inside. And I followed her into the kitchen. It was half in shadow, half lit up by the morning sun. I said, “Gladys, I’m worried about you. I’m just nervous you’re not doing so well. I can’t tell where you are, how you’re doing.”
“Fine. I’m fine.”
“What I mean is, I can’t tell if you hate me or if you’re just sad.”
“Well, I can’t tell either,” she said, running the water at the sink.
“Don’t hate me, Gladys,” I said. “James doesn’t even love me. We’re over.” I waited, holding my breath after I said this, and she waited before she said anything. She kept her back to me, kept on running the water over her hands.
“I don’t hate you, Ivy. I’m too tired to hate people.”
“What is it, Gladys?”
“Ivy, you wouldn’t understand. You’re a different person.”
“How do you know I wouldn’t understand?”
“Ivy, I don’t have the words. All you need to do is let me be.”
“No, I can’t. I can’t because I feel guilty as Adam’s house cat. I think I did a wrong thing, Gladys, and I don’t know why but I need to make it up to you.”
“This isn’t about you, Ivy. I can tell you that.”
“Well, Gladys, why don’t you do yourself a favor and talk to me!” I was getting upset, my voice was rising, and tears were in my eyes now. “Just talk to me instead of keeping me shut out of your whole life! You don’t even turn around to look at me.”
I have to say a part of me was in a state of shock that all this was coming out of my mouth.
Gladys sat down at the table.
“I feel confused,” she said. And the second after she said that she said, “And now I feel angry as hell because I said ‘I feel confused.’ That sounds like the biggest goddamned understatement I ever came out with, goddamnit.”
She got up from the table.
“You gotta start somewhere,” I said to her, and winced because I was figuring she’d turn around and scream at me, but she didn’t.
She walked away from me, through the living room and into the bedroom. She closed her bedroom door. Any other time I would’ve just walked out of that house and let my sister alone, but something just pushed me toward the bedroom door and had me knocking before I knew it, and had me opening the door and saying, “What’s wrong? If you want James back don’t worry because he’s going to visit you. He told me. He wants to see you. He’ll be back, Gladys. I bet he still loves you.”
It didn’t feel too good saying that. It felt terrible, and I felt a burst of warmth come into my face, and I figured it was the truth I’d blurted out.
She was sitting on her bed with her back to me, looking out the window and taking a deep breath while I said what I said.
“I’m not a little girl on a television soap opera, Ivy. Don’t talk to me if all you know how to come out with is horseshit.”
“I’m not saying horseshit, I’m just trying to find out what your problem is. You just waste your life like this! You just waste your whole precious life!”
Then, real quiet, Gladys says, “Bingo.”
I don’t say anything. So she says, “I wasted my life. That might be what’s ailing me.” She turned around to me, and for a second her face looked like someone else’s face, some stranger’s face you see in the street and think, What happened to that poor soul?
“Maybe you wasted your life too,” she said to me, and then she smiled.
And in my head a voice was saying, “Certainly did. We all do. You could look at it that way, couldn’t you.”
But to Gladys I said, “I didn’t waste my life. And neither did you.”
“You wasted your life pretending you were happy,” she said.
“I am happy.”
“Horseshit, Ivy.”
“I am happy!”
“Ivy, what in the goddamn world do you got to be happy about?”
And a voice in my head was saying, Not much, not much. But another voice was saying No. Don’t be like her. Be yourself! Be Ivy. You are Ivy.
“I got a lot to be happy about! I got people I love, I got a good job, I got a good home, and I got my health. I got a nice son who visits a few times a year. I’m not starving out in Africa and I’m not dying of leukemia. I count my blessings, Gladys! All you do is look at the bad side of things!”
“So when’s your nice son coming to visit?” she said. She stared at me like she was putting holes in my head.
“I don’t know, sometime in July he usually comes.”
“You don’t know what the hell it is to lose a nice son, do you, Ivy?”
“No, I don’t.”
“Do you know what the hell it is to feel your life go down the drain when you lose a nice daughter, Ivy?”
“No, I don’t. But if I did lose one, if I did lose one, I wouldn’t waste the rest of my life over it licking my wound.”
My face turned bright red. I could feel it. I was saying something without thinking about it, but as I said it, I realized I’d thought it all along, and I was glad I finally said it.
“Get out.”
“I can’t.”
“I said get the hell out of this room.”
“I can’t. I can’t move.” It was true, I couldn’t. I felt like my sneakers were glued to the floor.
A long silence fell. I just stared at her back and tried to pick one of my feet up off the floor, but I couldn’t. Something shifted in the room when Gladys sighed.
I said, “You can’t just go on and on and never get over it.”
“I can’t?”
“Well, maybe you can. Maybe you can. If that’s your choice.”
Then I left the room.
Next thing I knew things got worse. Gladys with her face dark red and her green eyes on fire came out of her room yelling at me, “Just because you ran off and had a love affair with my husband doesn’t mean you got the goddamn answers to my life!”
“He’s your ex-husband!”
“What the hell difference does that make? You think you got all the answers now. You think you can march back in here and tell me I wasted my life! Maybe I got reasons for how I live. Maybe I think about that. Maybe I’d rather live by my losses, Ivy. You want me to whistle through this goddamn shithouse of a life? Would that suit you?”
“He was your ex-husband and he came here for you and you weren’t even here! You left me first! You got on that bus with an oddball little girl and went way the hell across the country and couldn’t have cared less that you left me behind. You didn’t even miss me and didn’t care if I missed you, and when I told you James was here you didn’t even say you’d like to talk to him! You acted like you didn’t give a damn about the man, and I did. I do. I care about him! I got ways of showing I care! And I loved Wendell and Ann too! Maybe not like you did, but I loved them both!”
Gladys just kept looking out the window.
I didn’t say anything, I just stood there, feeling how everything between us was different now. A terrible feeling came into my stomach, and I missed us, I missed the old Gladys and Ivy, where Gladys was strong and somehow kept to herself and Ivy tried to cheer her up and never crossed the line. I wanted to take back everything I said to her and just start acting like the old Ivy, but I really wasn’t the old Ivy anymore. I was shaking.
“Ivy, can you stand here and tell me you really thought I didn’t care about James anymore?”
I couldn’t.
“I want you to know something, Ivy. This is not about James. We’re talking like it’s all about James. What it’s really about is something bigger. It’s about my life, Ivy. My whole life. And yours. And as far as I’m concerned, you went off with James because it was your chance to get back at me for being our father’s favorite.”
“What?”
First thing I’m thinking is, Gladys, you finally lost your last marbles. Then I’m thinking, Does she have a little point?
“You felt left out your whole life because he loved me. And didn’t give a cow’s last shit about you.”
“Don’t tell me that. I didn’t feel left out.”
“Oh yes you did. That’s why you had to turn on the cheer. A welcome wagon lady. You had to whistle and smile so you wouldn’t know how left out you felt. I know how you felt. Like you’re not worth a cow’s last shit.”
“Maybe that’s how you felt,” I said, talking real quiet now, because it was like she punched me hard with something and I didn’t yet know how I felt. “Maybe you felt like that because he made you into his little wife. That’s not exactly the right thing to do, Gladys. If you had a nine-year-old girl would you buy her fifteen aprons and make her cook you dinner every night?”
She didn’t say anything for a long time, and I knew why. I knew she was sitting there thinking, If I had a nine-year-old girl, if I had a nine-year-old girl. But I didn’t respect that feeling of hers just then. I didn’t feel like just saying nothing anymore and I didn’t feel like walking away, and I didn’t feel like going way back into the past where our father made some oddball decisions, because that time was over and I don’t care if I was loved or unloved in that time, it was gone, and it always would be gone, and I said as much to Gladys. And then I said she ought to try to see things different, she ought to try to appreciate what she does have instead of mourning her whole life away. I even told her in the old days people lost dozens of children and they just picked their feet up and went on, including our great-grandmother, whose picture used to hang in our bedroom in a big frame and scare us at night until Gladys begged our father to put her in the basement.
“All those people might have lost their children, Ivy, but they didn’t kill their children. They didn’t turn their backs and let their children drown.”
“You made a mistake!” I said, and all the sudden I started crying when I said that. “Can’t you understand you made a human mistake?”
Gladys looked down at her hands in her lap and wouldn’t look at me, and I kept crying and wishing she would cry too, wishing she would come over to my arms, but she didn’t move.
She said, “If someone else let her drown, I’d never forgive them. Why should I forgive myself?”
I sat there for a while. I looked at her. She had her head bent down and her eyes closed. I said, “Because that’s all you got, Gladys.”
And then she didn’t say a word, and we had to gather ourselves together to go back to work. It was a relief to be in the kitchen with a big supper to prepare, to go through the motions of shelling beans and stirring sauces and mashing potatoes and chopping carrots and onions. After that, we got out the rolling pins for pies. “You two sure are quiet today,” Nadine said. And we were quiet like that for days before the ice broke.
The children from the winter school were going home now, and the summer campers and counselors would arrive soon. The last night the winter school kids ate in the dining room their teachers told them to sing “For they are jolly good ladies” to the familiar tune of “For he’s a jolly good fella.” We were in the kitchen still refilling the bowls of food, and we didn’t even think much about the kids’ singing. They sang a lot of songs. But then we started hearing our names, “For Gladys’s a jolly good lady! Which nobody can deny!” “For Ivy’s a jolly good lady! Which nobody can deny!” “For Nadine’s a jolly good lady! Which nobody can deny!”
Well, we felt like we should open the wooden shutter that closed our view to the dining room so we could thank the children for their song, so we did, we rolled up the shutter.
One of the teachers started them off clapping, and we stood there looking at them. They looked like nice little kids, and a few even put their heart into the song, and two little girls were waving at Gladys. Then Gladys took a bow. So I took a bow and Nadine took one too. Then Gladys took about ten more little tiny bows, and I watched her and started laughing, and she started laughing too, and the kids kept clapping and then they sang another round of their song, and Gladys spread her arms out wide and took a more dramatic bow and said “thank you thank you thank you” the way Ed Sullivan used to, and Nadine and I just bowed right along with her.
Afterward we pulled the shutter back down and Gladys shook her head and said, “It’s hard being a star, ain’t it girls? Now let’s be jolly good ladies and clean these damn pots so we can go the hell home.”
We stepped out the back door of the kitchen into the evening of bright stars and moon in a dusky pink sky, and I thought we’d just walk down the hill and up the hill back to our house as usual, but Gladys was real quiet with a small smile on her lips and then right out of the clear blue she started singing. She started off in a real quiet voice. “For I’m a jolly good lady, for I’m a jolly good lady, for I’m a jolly good lady! Which nobody can deny!” She started singing it louder, then real loud, and she swung her arms, and I thought she was either going crazy or getting better, it was hard to tell. She just sang and sang and marched with her swinging arms and from the distance we heard Brent Quinn yell “Encore!” when she stopped. So she sang another round, and then one of the teachers yelled from her shack in the woods, “Again!” and she sang it again, and then decided she would march all over the flat field behind the dining hall, so I kept walking with her, sort’ve running almost because she was going fast, and when I said, “Where are we going?” for an answer she just sang louder, “Which nobody can deny!” Soon a bunch of kids were racing toward us and following us like Gladys was the pied piper, and they were laughing at her or with her, I wasn’t sure, but they kept following and she kept marching and singing, and walking down the path through the dusky woods. A little girl with a wayward eye walked right beside her, looking up at her the whole time like Gladys was her hero. In the woods the kids started singing along with her. “For she’s a jolly good lady,” some of them sang, while others sang, “For I’m a jolly good girl,” and some boys sang, “For I’m a jolly good fella,” and some wiseacre kid named Tony Ramoni sang, “For I’m a jolly good asshole!” which inspired a few cronies to join in, and all the different voices and words were bumping around in the dark and sounding so good I wanted it to keep going and never stop even though a part of me was afraid Gladys was about to walk off the deep end.
But she didn’t, she just walked around that way for a while, back out of the woods and into the flat field and down the hill, then suddenly stopped so all the kids slammed on their brakes behind her and she turned around and started walking, this time real quiet, so we could hear the kids’ teachers ringing bells and blowing whistles. I just followed Gladys, and so did the kids, and they were whispering, “What’s she doin’? Where we goin’? How come she’s so quiet?” But they kept on her trail up the hill, and followed her right to our house, just ignoring the bells and whistles, and for a second I thought Gladys would invite them all in for a party, but she just stood on the stoop like the queen of England and looked out at her followers and said, “Good night, children.” And then she went inside.
They ran off laughing and singing and I went inside and found Gladys in the living room in her blue chair opening her Harry Truman book like nothing had happened.
“Well,” I said, standing near the couch. “That was something else!”
“Oh yes,” she said, not looking up from her book. “It sure was.”
“That was what I call a lot of fun.”
She still didn’t look up from her book.
“Those kids, they loved it.”
She just kept on reading, and I said good night, and she said good night, and I went into my room and laid on the bed and smiled.
* * *
She was pretty much back to normal the next day and didn’t want to talk about her pied piper night, so I dropped the subject. Some kids hung out of bus windows yelling to her as we walked to the dining room, and she gave a brief wave and kept walking and I understood she was embarrassed about it all. She was glad those kids were going home and a new batch was coming, and glad to be in the kitchen with Nadine, working.
One night she was up at Brent Quinn’s drinking some beer with him, which weren’t usual, and I was alone in the living room trying to get interested in the Harry Truman book when I heard a car pull up. I was still in the stage where every time I heard a phone ring or a car pull up I thought James? and so I went to the screen door and stood looking out into the darkness, and I could sense it was him even before my eyes adjusted to the night. He walked his long-legged easy walk toward the door and I stepped back and let him in and he said, “Ivy, hello,” and bent down and kissed my cheek. He was clean shaven, in jeans and a blue work shirt, and his eyes looked bluer and he seemed taller and I wanted to stop looking at him so I opened the refrigerator and said, “Are you hungry?” He said, “I just ate a while ago.” I said, “Well, how’ve you been these weeks?” He said, “I picked up some work a few town’s over. They’re putting up a new motel.”
I told him to have a seat at the table, and I sat down across from him and was disappointed to feel myself heartbroken again, and I had an urge to stoop to a very low level, I had an urge to go over to him and pull on his sleeve and say, James, just come back to me for one night, just tonight let’s go off somewhere, and that’s all I’ll ever ask you in this world. Instead I kept my bearings and talked to him about his construction work on a new motel, and when he said, “My body’s getting too old for this kind of work,” I felt a twinge of pleasure or relief at that, but it didn’t last long.
“I thought I should wait a while before coming around, Ivy,” he said. The clock ticked. That kitchen could be so quiet. I wanted Gladys to come home and I wanted her never to come home.
“Well, I appreciate that,” I said, real quiet. “Gladys will be glad to see you.”
“Well, I came to talk to her but I also came to talk to you.”
I raised my eyes to his face and waited for what he’d say.
“I know you said not to thank you. I understand why you said it too. But you helped me a lot, Ivy. You helped me more than you’ll ever know.”
“Why? Why did I help you? How?” I noticed my tone was harder than I wanted it to be.
“That’s hard to put into words. But when I was with you, I had room to think. I had room to figure things out. You gave me a kind of shelter. Nobody else gave me what you gave me, Ivy, and I wanted to tell you that. I wanted to tell you I’d always remember it.”
“Is that right?” I said. “Well, so will I.”
Again my tone wasn’t what I wanted it to be. I just sat and looked at him, and he looked away.
“Ivy, I know I used you.”
“Used me? Is that what it’s called?”
“I’m sorry. I wanted to say I’m sorry. I wanted you to see that I never meant to hurt you. I’m just sorry.”
I could see he was feeling bad, and my heart softened up a bit. I said, “Thanks, James, for saying that.”
And then between us a little bit of ease set in, and I started telling him about working with Gladys and Nadine, and how Gladys liked birds now. He told me about a man he worked with who used to be a millionaire and lost all his money in the stock market. I got him a glass of water and put out a bowl of chips on the table. I told him Gladys was up at Brent’s cabin and might not be home for a while, and if he wanted I’d go on up there and bring her back to the house. He said, “Why don’t we both go on up?” Maybe he was curious to see who Brent was, maybe he was thinking Brent was Gladys’s lover. I just let him go on thinking whatever he was thinking, and we took ourselves a walk in the dark and I didn’t much care for that walk, that space between our bodies that felt like it was marked by a fence that would shock me if I tried to touch it.
At Brent’s we stood and looked through the window and saw they were having a little party that consisted of Brent, Gladys, an old man I didn’t know who was probably a townie, a pretty young woman named Sylvia Micheski who taught pottery in the summer, and a real old black woman named Minna Kates, who’d been hired as a storyteller for years, and who was sound asleep now sitting up straight in one of Brent’s old armchairs with a smile on her lips.
“Well, let’s go knock on the door around the side,” I said, and James said, “Why don’t you, and I’ll stand back here.”
So I guess James stood at the window and watched me step into the party and watched everyone say, “Ivy!” “Hey Ivy!” and watched Gladys say, “Little lambsy Ivy!” She was drunk, I could see, but looked nice in a simple green dress and bare feet because she’d taken off her sneakers, and she was wearing her wire frames instead of the old glasses. I sat next to her on the couch and said, “Gladys, James is here. He’s outside right now.”
And she said, “What?” And I said it again. She stood up and excused herself, said she’d be right back.
About five minutes later she pops back in and thanks Brent for a nice evening, and then she’s gone. And I’m there at the party. And I started to drink. I drank and drank and drank that night. I drank like I never drank before. And in the morning, when I woke up in Brent Quinn’s bed, I didn’t know what had happened.
Brent wasn’t beside me. Maybe he’d just given me his bed. It was a pretty room, so pretty I had to take a moment just to look around. He had paintings hanging, including a pretty one of a woman in a bathtub with a dog on a mat beside her, and another one of a laughing old man in a café, and another one of the ocean, and all of them were in old frames, and the shutters were half open so the light streamed in, and on his bed was a handmade quilt of every color, and on the sills were jars of flowers and little statues, and I’m just looking around thinking, This is certainly one way to live, when Brent appears in the doorway holding a tall glass of fresh squeezed orange juice.
“I bet you feel about as good as I do,” he said, smiling. Now, I didn’t know how to take that remark, as you can imagine, so I just sat up and said, “I bet.” And I couldn’t look him in the eye, but I took the juice and told him he had a real pretty bedroom. He said Sylvia Micheski was making pancakes out in the kitchen, why didn’t I come on out and join everyone. I made myself look at him, and he looked back at me, the sunlight in his eyes making them hard to read. What happened last night? I wanted to say, but couldn’t, so I smiled, and I said, “Well, it sure is nice to wake up here,” and next thing I knew I was at his long oak table in the kitchen feeling a little sick and watching pretty Sylvia flip jacks, rocking back and forth on her small, sandaled feet. Old Minna Kates and William, the man from town who seemed to be her good friend, were over on the couch, talking quietly with mugs of coffee. When Brent came back into the kitchen, he stood beside me with his hand on my back, while he and Sylvia talked about blueberries.
I walked back home to get ready for work. It was Sunday. I’d be making stew. Gladys had off. Gladys and James weren’t in the house and I didn’t have the energy to wonder about where they might’ve got to. I got dressed and walked down to the kitchen with my head splitting open from one of the worst hangovers I ever had, and Nadine was there waiting for me, cutting up the vegetables. We stood side by side and cut vegetables for almost two hours. I told her I just wanted to be quiet.
After work I was still hungover. After all I wasn’t a spring chick, and somehow that was a sweet feeling, that feeling of knowing all I could do was sit in a tub, soak my bones, get into a nightgown, and slide my body in between the sheets, which I’d just recently changed, so they were crisp and cool and I cried from the happiness of how they felt, and the happiness of having no other choice but to sleep, and then I slept.