42
Psssst! from overhead
The next morning I lay in bed an extra few minutes casting my mind back to Brokedown House, to Maud and the Sheriff and me in that fusty old bedroom, and something I was trying to remember. I saw the room, Maud, the Sheriff reading, the ring he’d held out. My mind’s eye roved that room, but I couldn’t discover what I needed to remember.
I got out of bed and padded down the hall to the bathroom. The stairs to the fourth floor are near the bathroom and I could hear Aurora banging around up there and talking to herself. I sat down on the toilet with my head in my hands, still seeing us in Brokedown House. I tossed cold water on my face and swiped my toothbrush across my teeth a few times. I studied my face in the mirror for signs of dis ... another “dis” word, dis, dis, dissipation! I left the bathroom.
“Pssst! Psssst!”
I looked up. Aurora was hanging over the fourth-floor bannister. I honestly couldn’t remember ever seeing her out of her chair before.
“Pssssst!”
“Why are you going ‘pssssst’? There’s no one else around.”
“Don’t you get fresh with me, Miss! I want an Appledew.”
“But it’s hardly more than seven A.M.!”
She responded to that by saying—fluting, more—“I have something you’d like to see.”
I hadn’t noticed she was holding a book, or journal, until she patted it and looked really smug.
I’d been standing at the bottom of this last flight of stairs up, and as I started up them, she yanked the book back. “Oh, no you don’t! You don’t get to see it till I get my Appledew!”
Stopping on the third step, I said, “What is it? You can at least tell me that.” More than likely, what she had was of no interest to me. But then I thought, no, if she tried tricking me with it, then I’d never know whether to believe her; I’d always think she was tricking me and wouldn’t fall for it.
“It’s a picture album.” She patted it again.
Now, photographs have a lot of promise in them as far as information goes. I said, “I’ve got to serve Miss Bertha and Mrs. Fulbright their breakfast before I can make any drinks.”
“You mean that Bertha is still coming here? Crazy as a bed-bug, that old lady. Okay, then bring it after, but don’t make me wait too long. These pictures might just waltz away if you don’t come back soon.”
And here, Aurora began to waltz around, reminding me of the dance last night. Maybe I should have invited her.
Miss Bertha wanted pecan waffles with orange syrup and I said I was sorry (which I was, but not for her sake), we didn’t have any, that we did have grits and hot biscuits (one of Mrs. Fulbright’s favorites), and eggs, of course. “Any way you want them,” I generously added, knowing how she’d get them.
After much grumbling and tomfoolery and moving things around on the table—her silver, the water pitcher, the vase of wildflowers—and stabbing her butter patty with her butter knife, she said, “I’ll have eggs over easy, since you can’t boil an egg. Mind you get the grease off.”
I put my pencil behind my ear and minded I wouldn’t and returned to the kitchen.
Walter was standing at the stove stirring the grits in the top of a double boiler. That’s what my mother always used to keep things hot. The biscuits were in the oven heating up. He was wearing one of my mother’s aprons. He turned to me and said, “What’s the old fool want?”
I laughed because he sounded just like my mother and almost looked like her too, as he stood with arms splayed and hands resting on the long counter.
“Eggs over easy, no grits. Can you do it without breaking the yokes?”
“Sure can, I watched Miss Jen do it.”
“Well, don’t. At least break one.”
“Got it,” he said, just as my mother would have.
“I’ve got to make Aurora Paradise an Appledew.”
“Ain’t no more apple juice, but there’s pineapple. You could make a pineapple dew.” Walter broke two eggs into a small bowl. They both ran. Calmly, he picked up another egg and broke that and the yoke stayed whole. He heated up the frying pan.
I considered a Pineappledew, leaning on the counter as Walter had done and as my mother did. It was her thinking position. Vera would march in and rattle off four totally different orders and my mother would stand arms akimbo, her head bowed a little, eyes shut, nodding. When Vera was finally done, she’d say, “Got it.”
A feeling wrenched me, almost as if someone had literally grabbed me around my waist. It was a terrible feeling, no doubt caused by her absence, that there would come a time when my mother would not stand so, arms splayed and eyes tight shut. Vera would come no more to bark out her food orders nor would Mrs. Davidow come to sit on the center table, to smoke a cigarette and gossip. It was the same feeling that had washed over me in the upstairs storeroom where cobwebs floated in the thin light that slanted through the grimy windows, the same feeling as I had got when I remembered the Waitresses. In this lingering absence, it was as if something knocked loose within me to roll across a green baize table, like the one in the poolroom next to the Conservative offices —to roll away and out of control. I could not find words for it, or maybe I did not want to find words for it, for they might give it a shape (as William Faulkner says) and I did not want to see the shape. Then I wondered if not wanting to see it was just my cowardly way. I hung my head and wondered if anything could set all of this to rights.
“Is this broke enough?”
Walter’s voice snatched me back from this hard place and I’d half forgotten what we were doing. I looked at Miss Bertha’s fried eggs. “Yes.” One yolk had spread flat and hard and the white was tough and stringy. Just the egg my mother would never have allowed into the dining room, not if they tortured her for a spy.
“Sorry,” I said to Miss Bertha, when I’d set the breakfasts before them. “We used the last egg on that.” But somehow I didn’t feel as gleeful as I usually did nor think the joke as jokey.