THE COILED TRAIL OF the car lighter in the dark reminded me of Mother when Uncle Billy was smoking and supervising Arthur as he carried to the backdoor and into the kitchen roped boxes from Mother’s house. Suitcases, clocks, chiming clocks, more boxes. Uncle Billy held out the fur hat to me. “Where she is now,” he said, “your mother won’t need it.” The hat in my hand came alive; I felt it warm and breathing and felt the weak heat hushing from the baseboards against my ankles, my feet.
Arthur was driving again. He was driving past shapes crouched in sleeping fields, past unplowed snows and smokeless chimneys. Grimaced light and hard snow, loose doors, abandonment. “Is it time to go to Uncle Billy’s?” I asked. “Are we here already?” Here at Arlette’s, at Nonna’s, at Uncle Billy’s, at Nonna’s, no logic to the rotation, no meaning I could figure except to know the first house and the last at different ends of the lake. Uncle Billy’s house was first—brick walk, cold wind, water, water roughing against the shore. I saw the water’s darkness in the distance when so much else was under snow. But the ledges from the rock gardens jutted out like tongues; and the trees, standing before the moon, were reprimanded. The moon was a scold.
“Outside after dark is for animals,” Aunt Frances said. “Come inside where it is warm.”
Hardly warm! The old sashes rattled in the windows—hundreds, all sides—so that a cold air rimmed the rooms and rooms and rooms of Uncle Billy’s house. “There!” someone pointed: Great-Granddaddy in an accomplished pose, painted a year shy of his dying. I looked at his eyes, and it seemed to me he did not want to live and that Mother was right: Great-Granddaddy had rushed into his dying.
Uncle Billy said to Aunt Frances, “That sounds like something my sister would say,” and Aunt Frances said to me, “I don’t know what your mother allowed, but here we talk only of living,” and she took away my picture books of pyramids of rings and shoes. “Depressing photographs,” she said, and she gave me books on animals instead. I liked these, too, and I liked the new haircut; it was better than what Mother usually did. Mother who would never fix me. “I can’t do French braids,” Mother had once confessed. “Look at me! Wear a hat!”
Aunt Frances, holding up clothes from my suitcase—socks, shirt, the same hat—said, “Why aren’t these name tagged?” And she gave my clothes to Arlette. Dragged hems, belts broken, Arlette could fix almost anything provided I helped.
“Hold still!” Arlette said, or “we’ll go to Miss Pearl. Hold still!” Little wiggler, little bungler, always dirtying herself! “I remember,” Arlette said, and then she told such stories I had just as soon forget.
On any day in the week, I wanted to be away from Uncle Billy’s and in the car with Arthur driving past where I once lived. Down Lawn and across School was how I had walked for all of my life; I had walked to where a far-below, mean-looking river dropped at my feet: Main Street, the original. Walked north, away from water and local business, Main Street was houses: Sloane’s and Doctor Humber’s and Miss Pearl’s—old, old Miss Pearl’s, with her pointy tongue for sewing, who crawled below my skirts and never pricked me. Her porch windows snapped in the cold; I heard them despite passing fast, and I ducked, not wanting to be seen in Uncle Billy’s gem-like car. I did not want my old block to see me. I was avoiding the scalded daughter with the patched-over face. Friends once, and friendless, we had walked far apart through the fields behind our houses on the small side streets.
“My street!” I called after, going Arthur’s way to school, airport, Arlette’s—wherever it was he was taking me.
“Pull over there,” I sometimes said rudely. “Park there and wait, Arthur. No one will see me. I just want to look.”
My old house, the original.
The window I looked through showed open doors and light from windows unseen, and I wondered what the rooms were like upstairs. Had the upstairs been emptied, too, and would I never again see our house?