19

… put an extra condiment into your dish,
and it will poison you.

Walden, “Higher Laws”

It had been a month since the death of Alice Snow. Honey Mooney was up early to get ready for church. First she washed out the casserole in which she had cooked the pasta for last night’s party. She didn’t really need to scrub it so hard. It wasn’t her pasta that would be to blame, if anybody bothered to investigate. It was Mavis Buonfesto’s pecan pie, and Honey had tucked the stuff neatly into only one serving, the piece that went to Shirley Mills.

Then she looked in her closet for something suitable to wear to church, although she doubted she would actually get to church this morning. Where was her knit blouse? Oh, of course, she had left it in the dryer in the laundry shack.

Charlotte Harris too had a basket of dirty clothes to take care of. Carrying it to the laundry shack, she tried to smooth the sadness from her face. For weeks she had been struggling with depression. Normally she threw it off by getting mad and doing something about it, but this time there was nothing to do, since the only person to be mad at was herself. Charlotte was still aching with embarrassment about her letter to Julian Snow.

For the entire month she had scrupulously avoided Julian. She hadn’t even allowed herself to walk to the other end of the park. But at the same time it was unendurable to be incarcerated week in and week out with her husband.

This morning even Pete noticed something different. “What’s the matter, baby doll?” he said, getting up from the table and putting on his cook’s white coat, ready for the Sunday morning shift at the hospital.

Baby doll. If anybody in the world was not a baby doll, it was Charlotte Harris. Charlotte was a tall, angular woman with big hands and feet. There was nothing fluffy about her at all. She wanted to strangle him for calling her that. “Oh, I guess I’m just kind of down this morning.”

Pete wasn’t listening. He gulped down the last of his coffee and tramped out of the kitchen, ready to dismember chickens all day long. Opening the door, he glanced back. Charlotte tensed and closed her eyes. “Don’t take any wooden nickels,” said Pete. The door banged.

For a moment Charlotte sat very still with her eyes closed, asking herself why she had married him. Well, that was a stupid question. She had been young, that was why. She had been a fool. Pete had been just as dumb, to have picked her from all the rest.

The real question was why she stayed married, why she didn’t just walk out. Charlotte knew the answer to that question, too. She was afraid. If she left Pete, she would get sick, or else Pete would get sick. It was what happened to people who abandoned their mates or were abandoned by them. They got sick and died. It had happened to Charlotte’s father, who had walked out on her mother and promptly developed prostate cancer. It had happened to Charlotte’s older sister, who had left her husband, only to die of liver disease. It had happened to the wife of her cousin George when he went off with a younger woman. Poor Loretta had suffered a fatal stroke.

So Charlotte hung on, timid, superstitious. At least she was able to get away from Pete every day at her job as bookkeeper in the hardware store. She liked the proprietor, she liked his new young clerk, the boy from India. Once in a while she set young Ananda straight about the merchandise. “The customer wants a box of washers,” she would say, drawing him aside. “Look, they’re in this drawer, in different sizes. They fit between things, like this, you see?”

But at home things were going from bad to worse. It was strange the way Pete never seemed to notice her weary hostility. Well, he wasn’t exactly deprived. Pete took what he wanted when he wanted it. The more Charlotte despised him, the more she felt it her duty to go along.

The laundry shack was not her favorite place. The machines were in a basement seven steps below ground level. Opening the door, she inhaled the dank underground smell and heard the buzzing hum of the washing machines and the tumbling noise of the clothes in the dryers.

Julian Snow was there ahead of her, raising the lid of an empty washing machine. It was the only one that was not shaking and sloshing. “Oh, sorry,” he said, backing away. “After you.”

“No, no, you were here first.”

But he insisted. “Go ahead. I’ll be back later on. You just go right ahead.” And he went away.

When Honey Mooney came in a moment later, she found Charlotte with tears running down her cheeks. “Charlotte, dear, can I do anything? Tell Honey what’s the matter.”

You’re not my honey, Charlotte wanted to say. She rammed a quarter into the machine and turned to look straight at Honey. “Where does it come from, your name?”

Honey giggled. “It was a pet name of my husband’s. And my mother used to call me that.”

“Because you’re so sweet, is that it?” Charlotte said it with ironic intent, but she knew Honey would take it as a compliment.

“Let me know, dear, if I can help in any way,” said Honey, smiling, pulling her clothes out of one of the dryers.

Walking back across the driveway, Charlotte couldn’t help thinking that there was too much unnecessary love in the world. Of course it was important to have love between the sexes at a certain stage, so that people would have children and reproduce the race. But why should there be all this extra amount left over? Here she was, a woman past the reproductive age, yet she was still mooning over a person of the opposite sex. It was part of the overabundance and extravagance of nature. There were too many mosquitoes in the midsummer air, too many spiders building webs under the propane tanks of the mobile homes, too many tadpoles in the shallows of Goose Pond, too many stars in the sky—and now somebody had found a whole lot more galaxies in the infinite depths of space.

Charlotte looked back at the woods beyond Julian’s house, where too many trees were vying with each other and too many leaves were thick on the too many branches. She opened the door of her own house and went inside. Her own excess of love was part of it. In a tidier universe a woman would die at the end of her hormonal usefulness. She would simply vanish from the earth.

Honey Mooney, Mavis Buonfesto, and Shirley Mills were the only regular churchgoers at Pond View. On Sunday mornings they met at Honey’s at nine-thirty and drove in her car to St. Bernard’s for ten o’clock mass. They always sat in a pew halfway to the altar beside one of the stations of the cross, Christ falling for the third time. And afterward they went for coffee and sweet rolls at Brigham’s on Main Street, and then they liked to wander along the sidewalk and see what all the cute shops were selling—cunning teddies and fancy gift items and funny Garfield greeting cards. And then Mavis would buy a new lipstick at the drugstore and Shirley would pick up a dispenser of hand cream, and Honey would choose a new decorating magazine, because she loved to see all the new ideas for fixing up your home.

This morning Shirley was late. Mavis kept looking out Honey’s window, expecting to see Shirley hurry along the driveway in her navy sport jacket and ruffled blouse, but she didn’t come, and she didn’t come, and finally they went to fetch her.

Her door was locked. They knocked, but there was no answer.

Mavis was tall. Standing on tiptoe, she could see into Shirley’s bedroom window. “Oh, for God’s sake,” said Mavis, “she’s still in bed.”

Mavis rapped sharply on the window, but Shirley didn’t stir. “Shirley,” called Mavis, “get up, it’s time for church.”

Shirley still didn’t budge.

“Oh, dear God,” said Mavis, turning to Honey with wide eyes. “She looks really strange.”

They hurried down the road to the park manager’s house, because he had duplicate keys to all the mobile homes. The manager came back with them, and soon they were all standing over Shirley’s bed, looking down at her. Honey shook her and called her name.

Shirley didn’t respond. She was curled up tight, her eyes squeezed shut, her features pinched together in a grimace.

They looked at each other in horrified surmise. “I think she’s dead,” said the park manager.

“Oh, no,” sobbed Mavis. “She was just fine yesterday.”

“She was only fifty-two,” wept Honey. “I know, because she was exactly five years older than me, to the very day.”

They called Dr. Stefano, the physician who took care of all the people at Pond View. He called them his private zoo.

“But I don’t think I ever examined Shirley Mills,” he said, looking down at her sadly. “I just saw her once, when she had the flu.”

“She had a heart condition,” explained Honey. “Didn’t she tell you?”

“You know,” said Dr. Stefano, looking at Honey severely, “you people shouldn’t be living alone. If somebody had called me, I might have been able to save her life. It’s dangerous for all of you to be by yourselves. Why don’t you women double up and live together?”

“I’m a married woman myself,” said Mavis proudly.

“We all keep an eye on each other,” said Honey.

“Think about it,” said Dr. Stefano, packing up his black bag.

Roger Bland made a habit of reading the obituary page of the Concord Journal, and he noted with satisfaction the passing of one more resident of Pond View. “Look,” he said, showing the paper to his wife, “another one of them is gone.”

Marjorie Bland’s face took on its automatic expression of sorrow before the transitory nature of life on earth. “Oh, too bad,” she said, sipping her sherry. Then her attention was caught by the birds fluttering around the feeder just outside the living room window. “Oh, Roger, look at the darling chickadees.”

“That’s thirteen now,” said her husband, hardly glancing at the chickadees.

“Oh, no, not as many as that. One, two, three. No, four. Five! Oh, Roger, look!”

Thirteen, thought Roger, smiling to himself. Only thirteen more to go.