Our bus skims along the back way leading into town. It is this route’s one bus, the day’s last run. We fly over the asphalt.
Our driver is new, young, a student from the university. Reckless boy. We are miles over the limit. But it is Tuesday, the day the sheriff leaves work early. Everyone in town knows this about the sheriff, it is the perfect time to speed.
The driver reads my thoughts, he accelerates. I can see his eyes in the rearview mirror, he is smiling, excited, thrilling to this little joyride into town.
He checks the mirror, catches me staring. “Too fast, ma’am?”
“No,” I tell him. And in a voice the others cannot hear, “Faster,” I say.
The driver drops his eyes from the mirror.
We are almost to town now, I see. We have reached the last of the farmland. I know these fields, the rolling hills beyond. They are at their best these last few weeks of spring. Narrow green rows of young beans, new corn, ripple over the black earth, wave after wave, relentless. Windbreaks of old oaks stand behind, fogged in the chartreuse of new buds, while along the field fences, wild roses leaf out, wild apples above them.
And oh, some days I do not think I can bear it. I cannot bear all the lushness, this dark fertile soil, hopeful spring. The dogged, futile reawakening. I cannot bear that I know it all so well, that it goes on and on as it does, when in fact nothing now is the same.
I rise. It occurs to me there’s a point to be made here. I have something to announce to this bus.
“Ma’am?” the driver says to the mirror. His eyes are stern. There are rules on this bus, we are to keep to our seats. He does not, he thinks, need to remind me.
I sit back down and return to the view. The light has turned soft, the horizon unusually far. I am reminded to give thanks for this window, this second-row-right window seat. I try to be patient and grateful.
Still, to be clear, there is something else now that is bothering me. Although I do not of course say it to the driver, this is not where I prefer to sit, it is not where I normally ride. Generally I sit fourth-row window-seat left. People on the bus understand this by now, they take their places elsewhere.
Except for the bread man, that is, a spindly fellow with a concave chest who carries his lunch in a bread bag. Lately he hurries on ahead of me if he can and eases himself into my exact same spot, four rows back, behind the driver. It is an unremarkable seat, it is not that the view is any better from that row. But it is where I like to ride, and if I do not line up for the bus early now the bread man beats me to my seat.
“What is wrong with that bread man?” I say to the mirror. The driver does not look up.
I slide down in my seat, feel the vinyl at my back, an uncomfortable fit.
So, it happened again this morning. First thing. Not the bread man, I do not mean the bread man edged me out on the ride into work. The bread man and I do not take the same bus in the mornings. What I mean is it happened this morning and when I awoke there it was, again just out of reach.
A great sneeze from the rear of the bus. I turn, take a quick, wary look back. We are all mindful this spring of the flu.
The others sit facing front and stare blankly. We do not know one another well here, we are not a friendly lot. But we have seen each other around. We all board at the sanatorium. If you ride this bus at all, you get on at the sanatorium. There is nowhere else the bus goes but from the sanatorium back into town.
We are not many today, Tuesdays are always light. Mostly we are just the regulars. The bread man of course. The woman in the blue coat. A nurse I am pretty sure, you can see the white stockings below her coat’s hem, although not a cheerful, willing sort of nurse. She spends the ride slumped and muttering. Across from her, the other, louder woman in the light green safari hat. We do not any of us know why she wears that hat on our bus. And at the back, the round and grinning Chinese man, the one extrovert among us. He looks up, spots me, gestures wildly.
I nod, turn back around. The driver twitches once in his seat.
A rise in the road and the bus flies up onto the old Center Street bridge. We are crossing the river that circles our town, that takes a curve not far from here and doubles back on the other side. It is a wide and slow-moving river, with banks always muddy where each spring it always floods. Indians once camped on these banks, canoed the waters, Sioux and Sauk, the Meskwaki after them, descendants of Black Hawk. They called the river the Drowsy, the Big Drowsy.
The bus rushes over the brown water below. Our driver does not slow down.
I look up at the mirror, meet his eyes there. He looks away, concentrates instead on the route. But I know he has been watching, stealing little glances as he drives.
I turn back to the window. We have made good time, we are at the town limits. Reiner’s slaughterhouse is nearby, and the municipal park. It is a strange place for a park, for the town’s municipal pool. In summers over the shouts of diving children, always there are the sounds from Reiner’s, the screams of young calves as bloodied, gloved workers slit open their velvet throats.
Through the closed window, something, a distant cry. I look at the mirror. “My god,” I say. “Can you hear them?”
The driver keeps his eyes on the road. His jaw is steel. He shakes his head and slows our speeding flight.
The bread man stands, trudges toward the front of the bus. He is headed for the bus door. The bread man gets off with the rest of us, there is only the one stop at town center, but he likes to stand near the door early so the driver will not forget him. The bread man’s face is skeletal, his eyes large and dark, also immensely sad. He carries his lunch in a bread bag tied to his belt. I do not think the driver will forget him.
I watch the bread man in the aisle to my left and pretend I do not. Mostly, although I try not to, I study his bag. The bread man must start out his days with it hopeful, the bag full with a good lunch, a large sandwich and some fresh fruit. But now in the afternoons what shows through the bag, what remains, is only a crust, a sliced pickle, maybe an orange peel. And I think how it is an odd thing all right, to carry one’s lunch tied to one’s belt. But how odder still to wear one’s leftovers home in the afternoon. It makes the bread man look in need of some help, and I should be ashamed, I think, that I fight him over a bus seat.
Our driver shoots him an angry look. The bread man is standing too close, it is annoying, hazardous, unnecessary. The driver has had enough of the bread man. He looks pointedly into the mirror, enough of all of us here. And I know then he will not last.
The fact is, we have a great deal of turnover in our drivers on this bus. They are almost always young, from the university, and I do not think they have their hearts in their work. At night, in the bars of this town, they tell themselves and each other that it is only what they are doing between things, this mindless driving in circles. It is only until they can graduate, they say, and start their lives in earnest.
Vigilance, I want to tell them. You, temporary bus drivers of this town. Youthful hopers and dreamers and soon to be college graduates, take heed.
This, or something close, I want to say to them. Impress on them, urgent and breathing hard. They do not know, they cannot. Still, slouched here low as I am in my second-row seat, I know the day will come when I will find myself standing, wild-eyed and shrieking at whichever of these young drivers it happens to be. Danger ahead! I will bellow. On guard. Beware.
I take a deep breath and hold it.
With more drama than necessary, the driver screeches our bus to a stop. Town center. We have arrived.
The bread man makes little shuffling sounds in the aisle, anxious to be off. I stand, and lowering one shoulder, push out for the door in front of him.
He pulls the bag from under the bed. He will not need to take much. A few shirts, his old khakis, socks.
Sabbatical, they’re calling it. The change of scenery will do him good.
A slow smile. Yes, it is good. It is good to be on his way.
He checks the bag. Socks. Right. He will need socks.
The bus driver offers a small obligatory sort of wave through the windshield. I wave in return and head north up the block.
So this is how it is. My name is Margaret Lydia Benning, and I am twenty-eight years old. I am also tall, single, and on the lanky side. I live in a Midwest university town, and thanks to a bequest of my great-aunt Inez, I own a small house here on Mott Street. Where I live by myself, I should add. As an only child, with parents both dead and now most recently Inez, I am accustomed to living alone.
Regardless, my days are full. Mondays through Fridays I work at the sanatorium outside of town. On weekends I stay home and plant things. And all this spring, in the time in between, I have been on general alert. Something is coming, something is up, closer and louder and higher. Some great locomotive of chance or design fast approaches, most days I am almost certain. And most days I know too that as the others all scatter, I’ll be the one still on the tracks. Try as I might to ignore the signs, they leave me not all myself.
The light at Summit turns red. A white van passes close in on my left and honks. I turn to look. No one I know. Always it is no one I know.
I tap my foot for the green.
Just now, I am on my way home. I am also just now in a hurry, as Mrs. Eberline most likely is waiting. Mrs. Eberline visits when she needs to find fault, and I’m pretty sure she’ll be at my front step again today.
Green light. I hurry across, continue on Church.
Mrs. Eberline lives next door to the east. Before I left for work this morning, she was already up hurling twigs from the silver maple at my house. It is a sign. Mrs. E has figured out Ben Adams is missing, and she will be wanting to have a talk when I get home.
A right here on Grant.
Ben Adams. Now there is a topic of discussion. He is a good man, Ben Adams, kind, wide-shouldered, wise. It is only for lack of a much better word that I refer to him as my boyfriend. My apparently now former boyfriend, vanished into this soft spring air.
Which can happen with boyfriends at times. Even when things between you are good, that is, they are going OK—well maybe not perfect, not every day, there are problems, you have to admit, but mostly you both are happy—it’s then that one day he just does not call. And then another day and another and still no call. So that after the following week or so you’ve pretty much got the picture. And by then of course so much time has gone by there’s no point in calling him yourself, asking, “Anything wrong?” when in fact you know it is over. Has been for a while. And you realize well all right, something has changed his mind about you. Or come to think of it you’re now of two minds about him. So you just let it slide, it is better than calling and embarrassing you both, saying anything official about endings.
Besides which, I do not think Ben wants to hear from me now. Not since our misunderstanding this winter. And oh how I wish we could change things. But it’s been over three months since I last saw Ben Adams, and I know time for a do-over is over. Still, if I could figure a way back to Ben just now, I would ask for a second chance.
I cross over Court Street, continue. And well here we are, the corner of Grant and Mott, less than a block to home. Enough for now of Ben Adams. First on to Mott Street and home.
I live on Mott in a lopsided limestone cottage, built one half century ago by Mr. Lazarus Mott, namesake and former hog farmer. We are an entire block here of little Mott houses, stone cottages all gone awry, no two in quite the same way. It gives us a certain renown, we are in fact on the National Register, out of flabbergast, we suspect, more than merit. Still, in some architectural circles we are noteworthy. We are the talk of the preservationists in town.
It is an odd street, all right, Mott. It does not in many ways belong here. We are a university town, our streets are mostly old and venerable, also leafy. Mott, however, while old and leafy, is not what could be called venerable. We are instead wide. The town’s cable car once ran down this street, we were at the time the end of the line, our width let the grip man stop, turn around. It lends us perspective, this backing up, backing off, this street and its generous expanse. We are of the live and let live, the laissez-faire school of neighborliness here.
Except that is for Mrs. Eberline. Mrs. E is a snoop and a meddler. She is also old, mad, and extraordinarily busy. Always Mrs. Eberline scurries, head down, always on task, on a mission. In winters, she indicts for snow left on walks, then shovels her entire front lawn. In summers she slips into random backyards stalking vermin with a pillowcase and broom. And then, late afternoons whatever the season, she stops by my house just for spite.
Or then again, it is possible there is more to her visits. Lately, I have noticed, something darker and more troubling has crossed Mrs. Eberline’s mind. I cannot say what for certain it is. But I am afraid now prophecies are involved.
That is to say, Mrs. Eberline fancies herself a seer, the latter-day sibyl of Mott Street. She has, people say, predicted all manner of disaster on our block, including her own death at the age of forty-two by an ill-fated encounter with a cleaver. But since Mrs. E is well into her sixties, and moreover, as mentioned, mad, we on Mott take her soothsaying lightly. We dismiss her forebodings in general.
Still, they can be distressing, these predictions of hers, when you find she has leveled them at you. She can tell you more than you want to know, more than simply the truth. So I worry about Mrs. E’s visit today. I worry what she might have to foresee.
The white van sidles up again and honks. I turn, it speeds on.
Frances at work says I should sell my house and move. Frances has two college degrees and once taught at the university. She is used to telling people what to do. There is no need to live next to a madwoman, she says. There is no need for sticks at your windows. “You have choices here, Margaret,” she says, sounding like the old lecturer she is. Other houses, other streets. Places that don’t harbor crones.
“Margaret,” she tells me, “take charge.”
Frances has a point. I could move, I could find another house, another block entirely to live. But I know I will not. The reason is simple, also iron-clad: This is the street where I belong. I know it in every homey fiber.
It is strange, however, about this street. Although I had been searching it for some time, I did not, when the realtor first drove me by, recognize that here it was. Nor did I at first take to the property for sale, my squat stone one-story-and-a-half. Still, the house sat up prettily on a little hill with a silver maple, big and graceful, in front. And when I saw then the other stone houses down the street, old pickups pulled into their driveways, the great tangle of tree limbs arched high overhead, very good, Mr. Abbott, I said. Now we are getting somewhere. And I asked him to drive around the block.
Because, as I explained on our third pass by, what really I’d been looking for all along was not so much house as street. Just one block, without all the rest of the town much attached. Certainly not the university. A block on its own, like some neighborhood geological outcropping, part and yet apart. Respite, refuge, asylum. Mott Street, I told him, was perfect.
It is a wonder of course I did not know about Mott before. I thought I knew this town well, I was what others would call used to it. A university town of desirous people. A town known for its ambition, its culture, its art. A Paris of the Prairie, some people said. And a town where I have just never fit.
But here on Mott, my guess was, things were different. People did not look so aspiring here, they seemed more a no-nonsense crowd. Neighbors who, on the assigned pickup day, rolled their own trash barrels out to the curb. Adults, probably good citizens. Ones at the university once too. Old students who found this town pleasant enough and stayed on as its carpenters and nurses and plumbers.
Yes, I thought, already convinced of the sale. We on Mott are the old students left over, a fact in which we take comfort. We are proud of our levelheaded normalcy here, despite our atypical houses. There’s not a romantic or despondent among us.
None of which I said to Mr. Abbott. Who was, our next pass, insisting we pull over and make a house tour. Although already I knew, I obliged Mr. Abbott, I took a quick look inside. It was luckily just right as well, all dark wood and low ceilings and sloping planked floors. And in the front room, a large fireplace of smooth river rock.
So five years ago now, I stood in the front room of the house, my new soon to be home, and I told Mr. Abbott, “Oh I have found it. This is the house, here is the street.” I left it at that.
Mr. Abbott just smiled and suggested a bid. And for his part did not bring up Mrs. Eberline.
Looking both ways—no sign of the van—I cross left onto Mott and check up ahead. Although I live more or less at the center of our block, my little hill makes my house easy to see. And as I suspected, Mrs. Eberline is there at my door. She stands now close up to it hunched inside her red parka, a coat she favors most seasons. She is a small woman, Mrs. Eberline, small and, as I’ve said, old. The parka is two sizes too large and with its hood pulled in tight engulfing her head, it only makes her look older and smaller. A little red crab of a woman.
I stop to see what Mrs. Eberline is up to. It is a belligerent, strange way she inclines toward my door, hands on both hips, nose pressed to the center wood panel. I wonder how long she has been standing like this, staring so intently at the grain.
Then as I watch, Mrs. Eberline takes a step back and begins pounding—pounding and pounding with both fists at my door. It’s impressive how far the sound carries. I must remind Mrs. E to please use the bell, she will upset the whole block with this pounding. But abruptly she stops. Stands still. Then reaching up to one side, she snatches two-handed into the air, turns, slams both palms to the door, and drags, fingers splayed, down the wood.
She is mad all right, Mrs. Eberline. Mad and I’m afraid growing madder. I take my time walking the last half block home.
He rises, walks to the drawer, looks inside. There, twenty pairs arranged roughly by color. Dark socks on the left, crews on the right, all neatly balled into pairs.
He surveys the drawer. Twenty pairs of socks and not one without holes.
No, not holes. Frays. Not one sock without frays. No new socks at the back to fill in, no Sunday socks saved for good. Now, all at once, all his socks have grown old.
He lifts the drawer from its runners and carries it into the bath. There, in late afternoon light from the window, he chooses the first ball and aims.
Mrs. Eberline stands facing my front door, her back to me. I pretend not to see her, I slip in by the side door and hope she has not seen me as well. Bending at the waist, I cross the kitchen low, stealthily, below window level. At the dining room, I begin to crawl. I am quiet, I am trying for the stairs. I want only to make it up to my bedroom, where I will shut and possibly lock the door.
But there she is now, knocking and calling out loudly, “Margaret, Margaret. I know you are home, Margaret. I see you in there. Open the door, Margaret.”
For all of Mott Street to hear.
Mrs. Eberline, as I have said, is in the habit of stopping by. I am nearly used to it by now, although I never know what to expect. Sometimes Mrs. E does not launch right away into vile accusation and rebuke. Sometimes, to throw me off, she comes by just to use my toilet.
The day I moved in, for instance. I opened the door and there below me she stood and “May I use your toilet?” she said, just like that. It was a strange request. Mrs. Eberline, I knew, lived right next door, she had a toilet, an entire bathroom of her own. Still, “May I use your toilet?” she asked, looking up at me and looking urgent.
Not wanting to appear unneighborly, I stood aside and gestured down the hall. Then keeping the door open, I stepped out to wait for her return, which, I soon realized, was taking longer than it should. And when I looked in to check on her, I found she had already shown herself back up the hall and was pacing off my front room.
“Mrs. Eberline?” I said, and hurried inside. “Mrs. Eberline?” I repeated, my voice rising, and felt then my first spasm of home ownership, the mother-bird rush to fly over and defend.
Mrs. Eberline turned, nodded once, and congratulated me on my new house. That is, she said “you folks’” house. “Nice big house you folks have here,” she said.
I smiled in return, still trying for goodwill. But then not wanting to misrepresent, I set Mrs. Eberline straight. I told her I was not folks, I lived here all on my own.
“No children?” she asked, her eyes growing narrow.
“No,” I told her. “No children. No family.” And then seeing no reason to stop there, “No husband either,” I added.
This gave Mrs. Eberline pause. She moved to the foyer, considering.
“Dogs? You got dogs?” She looked at me hard.
“No, no dogs,” I told her.
Mrs. Eberline kept her eye on me. She found this suspicious. “Well, it’s still a nice big house,” she said, as though I might disagree.
“A lot like my mother’s,” she added, before heading out the door.
I should explain that Mrs. Eberline lives with her mother, a very old woman I have never seen. But Mrs. Krantz across the street, who keeps track of such things, says oh yes, the mother has lived in that house sixty years. Although she too has not seen the old lady for some time, it is possible at some point she succumbed. Still, Mrs. Krantz says, for years now Mrs. Eberline has been the pair’s sole support. She cannot say she entirely sees how. “It can’t all be from those trash can liners.”
I nod. We on Mott all know about Mrs. E’s trash can liners, she takes them out with her early each day. They are large and black plastic and they make a lot of noise, as there is almost always something in them that clatters.
Which is to say, Mrs. E is a scavenger, it is loosely her line of work. She is a kind of landed bag lady. And while no one knows for sure all that she hauls in her bags, by the sound we assume it is cans, mostly empty bottles and cans, collected for their nickel deposits. It is a hard way to make a living, cans, and Mrs. Krantz does not think it possible, not even most days on two bags full. She believes it is welfare that supports Mrs. E, welfare and the senior citizen hot lunch that a van delivers each weekday for her mother.
I myself have a different suspicion. It’s stolen goods, I think, not hot lunches, that help Mrs. E make ends meet. Mrs. Krantz just refuses to see it.
That is, I have reason to believe Mrs. Eberline is a thief. Almost from the beginning there was evidence. The first summer I moved in, for instance, immediately she began crossing our property line, after which, I then noticed, I kept losing things—the grass clippers, new within the same month, that to this day I know I left in the lilies; a bag of bone meal where I was planting bulbs; a whole new large box of grass seed. Consequently I now garage my possessions, I do not leave them unattended in grass. I keep an eye out for Mrs. Eberline’s sticky, long reach.
All that may be, Mrs. Krantz allows. Mr. Krantz has seen her steal too. Still, she says, Mrs. Eberline deserves her due. She grew up on this block, there is that. She has history here, seniority. It naturally allows her rights.
Which apparently in your case, Margaret, she adds, are visiting and using the toilet.
I don’t know why Mrs. E prefers the facilities here. I’m not sure why she stops by so often. But over time I have learned to resign to these visits. They are never long and almost always strange, and despite their ominous bent of late, I’ve come to count on them in a twitchy sort of way. “Well come in, Mrs. E,” I say. And while she heads down my hall to the bathroom, I find I’m myself looking for cookies to offer. Then as Mrs. Eberline emerges and proceeds to my front room, I wait for the sport to begin.
At the sound of the toilet flushing, she calls. “Is that you?”
She listens, a second flush. “Are you all right?”
A third flush and she is on her feet.
“My god,” she says from the door and stares as he stands on the seat of their toilet, dropping what appear to be pairs of his socks between his legs and into the bowl.
“My good god,” she says again, but stops when she sees the water rising.
“Aren’t you well?” she asks, then quickly backs from the door as a small fountain of navy blue water rushes up over the rim of the toilet bowl and down onto the bathroom tiles.
So I open the door now to Mrs. Eberline’s pounding. I do in fact catch Mrs. E in the middle of her next attack. She stands below me one step, her fist raised midair for the door. The hood of her red parka is still up, it reaches just past my waistline.
“Well Mrs. Eberline,” I say, looking down at the top of her hood. I sound as though this is certainly a lucky surprise. “How nice to see you.”
I am always cordial to Mrs. Eberline. She does not buy this of course, she knows well enough that we are not friends. Still, there is no advantage with Mrs. E, I have learned, to incivility. We are stuck with each other, she and I, next door as we perpetually are. There is no need to make things any harder.
Mrs. Eberline steps up into my house and storms past me for the front room. Today it is apparently not my bathroom she is after. I close the door and “Have a seat, Mrs. Eberline,” I am going to say. Though when I turn, I see she has already found her place on my couch. Hunched small and withered on the far end cushion, the hood of her parka pulled in tight, she looks up at me. Then glaring, she works her lips back and forth.
“Is something wrong, Mrs. Eberline?” I ask. What little color she has has escaped her face. She does not look the least bit well. “Would you like a glass of water?”
“That Ben feller,” Mrs. Eberline says, and looks at me. “Ain’t seen him ’round.”
Ain’t seen him ’round. I consider the diction. And so today, it seems, Mrs. Eberline has gone Appalachian. She is her old hardscrabble self, just one of her many leading roles. They are part of her madness, these shifting personae, we on this block all expect it. I myself brace for the show.
That is to say, Mrs. Eberline is an actress, or was, of some local renown. She once studied at a famous drama school. She was a starlet in Hollywood in the thirties, it was rumored she was groomed to play Scarlett. But when a dark horse Brit was cast instead, she left film and turned to theater. She played off-Broadway, she played summer stock. She turned to the regional stage. And eventually, though no one in town agrees why, she ended up here with her mother.
Where still there was drama to pursue. For years Mrs. E played character roles in our local community theater or sometimes in university shows. If not great, she was a good actor, reviews said. Certainly she emoted well. Certainly she took theater seriously. Until at some point no longer clear, she took it entirely to heart. So that now, with the madness fully descended, always Mrs. E is in character. Always she is trying out for new parts.
Which means that rarely can we here on Mott in a day predict just who Mrs. E will be. Although sometimes we can guess by wardrobe, by what shows under the ubiquitous red coat. Two personae in particular she favors, and we know both their costumes well. Some days, for example, she dons a silky blue caftan. A sign Mrs. Eberline is having a Belva White day, a role she embraced long ago, a kind of diva à la Vivian Pickles. On Belva White days, Mrs. E throws her arms open wide and lavishes others with Darlings, and But dearest, you-simply-cannot-imagines.
Other days, rolled-up men’s trousers appear under Mrs. E’s coat and her accent takes a dramatic turn south. She removes her false teeth, drops the endings from words, and believes herself back on Tobacco Road. I check and indeed Mrs. Eberline is in trousers today. I am right. Today Mrs. E is in sharecropper mode.
I take a seat on the other end of the couch. “Ben Adams?” I say to Mrs. E. I smile, I am pleasant. I sound as though I am just making clear which Ben feller she might have in mind.
Mrs. Eberline scowls. “Don’t be gittin’ smart with me, missy,” she says. She sits back in the couch, crosses her arms, holds her line. “I seen him take off. And I ain’t seen no truck out here since.”
She tucks in her chin, lets out a loud sigh. Mrs. E is disgusted or possibly just pining for Ben. With that parka hood up and hiding her head, it is difficult telling which.
Ben Adams was a favorite of Mrs. Eberline. Ben Adams is good-looking, I should mention, tall with lovely deep-sea green eyes, and whenever he was around, Mrs. E arranged always to be too, out in her yard, available. Ben favored Mrs. Eberline as well. And sometimes when I would call him to the window to watch, to see what now Mrs. E was up to, what new scavenged thing she had dragged onto her lawn, the latest pedestal sink she had managed to upend at her door, he would just smile and look knowing. “She means no harm, Margaret,” he would say. “You should not be so hard on the woman.”
Mrs. Eberline shifts impatiently on my couch, and I decide to come clean. “You have me there, Mrs. Eberline,” I say. “Ben Adams is gone.”
Mrs. E looks up. “Gone?”
“Right,” I say.
She cocks her little head inside its red hood.
“Well, that is, missing,” I say. “Ben Adams has gone missing. Disappeared.” And lifting both shoulders, I shrug. For her sake I try to make light of it.
Mrs. Eberline only stares.
I think how to be more clear. “Ben Adams has left, Mrs. Eberline,” I say, “and I do not know if he is coming back.”
This last part startles me a little. And before I can think what else I can say, a funny thing starts to happen. I feel something inside me beginning to rise just as I do lately when waking. This time it feels like a sob.
I look off, clear my throat, go no further.
Mrs. Eberline still stares, considering. Then suddenly turning piercing, not to mention loud, “I knowed it!” she shouts. “Ben gone, and you’s why.”
She scowls once more. Then dropping her head and shoulders, she withdraws again inside the red hood. She sits looking down, very still, and does not offer anything more.
I see Mrs. Eberline is onto me. She has been keeping an eye on my house. She knows I’m the reason Ben left. But I have watched Mrs. Eberline with Ben Adams as well. There are things she could answer for too.
Always, as in the rest of her life, Mrs. E overdid it with Ben. When she saw he was here, for instance, if she spotted him lying out back in the grass napping or tossing a baseball over his chest, she would race out of her house and straight back to her garden, from where she would beckon flagrantly to him. Almost always she would be in the slinky silk caftan, it would swish seductively below her red coat. Mrs. Eberline normally wears trousers to garden. It’s a wonder she found time to change.
Ben would tell me about Mrs. Eberline’s chats, I would not have to watch them to know. When he’d come in at last, generally he’d be quiet and thinking them through.
“Psst,” Ben told me. He would just be lying there resting and from out of nowhere he’d hear this loud psst. Psst. Psst. And if he did not sit up right away, give Mrs. Eberline a wave, he knew that when he opened his eyes, there she would be right overhead, throwing her shadow all over him, and peering down into his face.
So always, he said, when he heard that psst he would get up and walk to Mrs. Eberline’s side. “Well hello again, Mrs. E,” he would say. “Those are some fine-looking asters you have there.”
Ben did not know why, but generally Mrs. E would take off then straight into some long-festering grievance. Mostly related to me. “Please darling,” she would tell him, and point to my maple, “when you see that young woman next-door, please tell her she really must move her tree. It simply ruins the view and shades my tomatoes and come August I shan’t have a single Big Boy.”
Mrs. Eberline was not telling Ben the truth here. The reason my tree is shading her garden is that she has planted a good half of it in my grass. Mrs. E is not one for details, not one to worry over property lines. I must remind Ben of this one day.
But that was not the part that concerned Ben. It was what would come next, when Mrs. E would drop back her red hood, shake out her hair, and look again up at him. “I’m an actress you know, dearest,” she would say. A sly smile. “They say I’m a star.”
Always Ben would tell her he knew. “Yes,” he’d say. “They have told me.”
And always then Mrs. E would look away. Stare, turn dreamy, look back.
“They say I am beautiful. They say men fall at my feet.” She would lift her chin, meet his eyes. Again her sly smile. “They say I’m myself fond of men.”
Ben said he would never be sure how to reply. Yes? Yes, they have told me that too.
Ben worried about Mrs. Eberline. She has no one, he would say. There is no one she can tell her stories to. He thought maybe she needed our help.
Help, Ben? I’d say. Ben has not lived next door to Mrs. E as I have, he could not possibly know. But when I said no then, I did not think Mrs. E needed any more help, she was pretty good at helping herself, Ben just gave me a slow, sad smile. “It’s a hard thing, Margaret,” he said, “to find you’ve been left all alone.”
And now Ben himself is no longer around.
Mrs. Eberline sits in my front room, head down. For a very long time she just sits. And I start to prepare myself then. While I cannot see what it is she is thinking, I can feel in her stillness something brewing.
Early the day of his flight, he cannot sleep. He rises quietly, slips on a jacket, steps outside. The sun is not up, thick fog has rolled in. He heads east. And at the third block, near a yard he cannot see, he hears a man calling for his dog. The voice sounds distant, it hangs midair.
It is the fog, he thinks. How strange it is walking in fog. You do not hear birdcall or traffic or the sound of your own shoes on pavement. Which is why the man’s voice just now is surprising, attached as it is to nothing. “Brownie. Brownie.”
It is only the fog. Only a man out calling for his dog. But he thinks he will tell her, he will say how it was, this one voice before dawn. It is how it is with him now, he will say.
There are still things in a day he thinks he will tell her. From habit, from the way it was before. How the peonies in the side yard have all come up, the shoots like chicken feet clawing out of the ground. A funny way to come up, feet first. Or how the wisteria in the cottonwood has buds on it now. The vine thick as a python, has she noticed? It has climbed the cottonwood three stories high. And the buds, he will say, you cannot imagine. Giant grape clusters of new buds, he will say.
Although in the end he does not. He no longer has stories to tell her. They neither of them have the heart for it.
Still Mrs. Eberline sits on my couch, and still she does not move. She is beginning to worry me and for the second time today I ask if she would like a glass of water.
It is all I can think to come up with. It is what people generally offer when they don’t know what else to do with an unwelcome guest in their house, with someone, say, dormant and downcast hunched in the corner of their couch. Or possibly just silent and seething. Would you like a glass of water, may I get you some water? It’s an excuse to head for the kitchen, to spend time there letting the tap run cold. And sometimes it works. When you return with the glass, it is possible your strange guest will be gone.
I do not wait for Mrs. Eberline to reply. I go for the water and when I come back I realize it was a mistake. Mrs. Eberline revived while I was away and she has brought out her tin of cigarillos. Mrs. Eberline is a smoker, lifelong. Her mother will not let her light up at home, so she smokes wherever she can, or even where she cannot, most specifically here on her visits. It is something we have discussed at length. No smoking allowed in my house. It is one of my few hard lines.
But before I can say, “Mrs. Eberline, what is that?” and point dramatically at the open tin, again at the unlit cigarillo now dangling from her fingers, she lifts her head and pulls me urgently back onto the couch. Her eyes narrow, a brow lifts. She takes a long breath, leans in.
“Missy,” she says up close to my face, wagging her Swisher Sweet at me. “Missy, we got to go git Ben.”
She takes me by surprise. I expected a fight on the no-smoking front. I expected more accusations about Ben. But git him? Has Mrs. E not been listening here? When I say Ben Adams has left, Mrs. E, what I mean is that he has left me. I’ve been dumped, Mrs. E. Do you not understand? We cannot just go off now and git him.
But Mrs. Eberline sees it differently. Or rather, she seems not to see it at all. Or hear anything, for that matter, I’ve just said. Something has shifted, distracting Mrs. E. She seems now no longer much even in the room. She sits very still, back straight. Her gaze grows distant, her eyes turn to dark flat disks. And I know then it is her sibyl stare, her look when she’s feeling prophetic, when she feels a divination coming on.
She turns toward the window, toward the garage beyond. For a moment she only just stares. Then “Ben?” she says slowly, as though trying to make him out in dim light. “Ben,” she says again, now watching. She holds her breath, still watching. Then “Ben!” she cries. “Ben!” And eyes opening wide, she howls, “No!”
Flinching, she withdraws back into her hood. And rocking a little, holding herself, “Oh Ben,” she says, her voice a deep, frightening whisper, “oh Ben, you in terrible trouble.”
For a moment she goes on rocking. But then abruptly she stops, listens, watches. And turning her head to one side, as though tracking now something new, “Or headin’ for trouble,” she says, and stares trancelike a moment more.
Then shaking herself once, she faces me, eyes clear again and burning, “Missy,” she says, “Ben ain’t got much time.” She takes a quick, anxious breath. “Somethin’s ’bout to happen to that man, I seen it. More terrible than I can say.”
And in case then I somehow have missed her point, she raises her voice, moves in closer. “I’m sayin’, missy, you got to go git Ben. Bring him back. Keep him here where we kin watch him.”
I look at Mrs. Eberline. Ben is in trouble? She seen it? And despite her pleas, despite my better self, I cannot help thinking not so fast here.
That is, there are things that need sorting out in all this, in this latest of Mrs. E’s visions. And I try to work each one through. First, Mrs. Eberline, prophet though she believes herself to be, in fact is not often on target. That is to say almost never. It is not likely Ben actually is in trouble. Second, her exhortation just now to go save Ben clearly has her own interests at its heart. Third, and this is the deal breaker, I’m not sure I’m the one who should be saving Ben, assuming he actually needs saving, since it is not at all clear he would want me to.
So I tell Mrs. E I am not so sure about Ben. I say I think he is probably doing just fine. And, I add, to tell the truth I don’t know it would work, having him back in my house again. I do not go into detail.
Mrs. Eberline looks out again at the garage. “It ain’t got to be your house, missy,” she says. “You got choices.” She nods toward the window. “Ben Adams can stay in that there garage. You ain’t even got to know the man’s here.”
She turns to me, now vehement. “Ben is in danger, I’m tellin’ you.”
I look back at Mrs. E as though considering. About the endangered Ben Adams.
Mrs. Eberline eyes me sternly, waggles again the Swisher Sweet. “You got a whole garage empty there, missy,” she says, and then starts rummaging in her pocket for a match.
I watch Mrs. Eberline, I should stop her. But now I’m thinking about what she’s just said, so for her sake, I look out at my empty garage. And on track again now, I have to admit Mrs. Eberline has a point.
Which, to be fair, I am going to acknowledge to her. But I turn and find Mrs. E has gone back into her trance. She stares out the window where just now she’s seen Ben. And “No, wait. missy,” she says, her eyes dark again, “now I’m seein’ you.” She stares. “I mean to say I’m seein’ Ben, and you is right there too.” Then shaking her head, “Looks like the both of you is in trouble.”
Pressing and pleading again, she moves closer, Ben Adams still her main concern. “Missy, you gotta save Ben. Bring him back where he be safe.”
I think about this. It is generous of Mrs. E to be seeing after Ben, except now I’m as well in the picture. “But Mrs. Eberline,” I say, “if I save Ben, who is going to save me?”
Mrs. E stares blankly. She shrugs. “Well I just reckon that’s up to you.”
Then sitting forward, her voice rising, as though I still have not got the picture, “Missy,” she tells me, “you got to go git Ben. Ain’t nobody else a’gonna.”
Having said her piece, Mrs. Eberline plumps herself back on my couch. And watching me for my reply, she strikes her match and lifts it blazing, threatening to light up should I delay.
I try to think fast, I try to be fair. I could go find Ben, keep him safe here with me. His demands would be small, there is room, it’s all true.
Mrs. Eberline holds the match aloft.
I study her face. The flame reflects in her crazed little eyes, and I know then it’s an awful idea.
So “No,” I tell Mrs. Eberline. I am sorry, but no. “No, no. Ben will not be moving into my garage.”
Mrs. Eberline gives me a long, hostile look. She holds it a beat or two. And then aware of it or not, eyes steady still on me, she loosens her thumb and forefinger, letting the lighted match drop.
We both watch it fall in slow motion, bounce once on my couch, then roll onto the center cushion. And oddly, at first I am calm. The match lies sideways near the cushion’s edge and looks like it is going out. Its light goes dim, shrinks in. No need to overreact here, I think. Or give Mrs. E that satisfaction.
But just then I see the match head starts again to grow bright, and beneath where it landed what looks like a large black ink stain spreads out in a menacing halo. The stain grows rapidly larger, the center dissolves to a glowing red rim. And as I watch, now pretty much spellbound, the perimeter suddenly cracks and erupts into a shocking orange flame.
Everything then happens fast. Before Mrs. E or I can move or try to put anything out, the cushion starts sending up thick dark smoke. Great licks of fire leap high.
“Mrs. Eberline!” I cry. “Now look what you’ve done!” And reaching for her glass of water, I hurl it into the flames.
The water splashes sideways toward Mrs. E. She jerks back out of the way. Then furious and snorting, she jolts to her feet and stomps brusquely off for the front door.
I myself run for more water. But on my return I see Mrs. E has stopped just outside and is glaring back from the top step. Still thinking of Ben, I suppose, not to mention herself, she points a bony finger in my direction. “It just mean of you, missy,” she cries. “You just a tall, mean old thing.”
Then, with my couch still burning and sending up smoke, she tells me what she always tells me, that I am going to die hard and lonesome.