I turned right around and went back into the kitchen. Nellie had told me I should eat something. I sat at my place, in front of a bowl of Grape-Nuts, small pieces of gravel that would aid my digestion. Nellie had somehow turned the clock back one hundred years; she was the farmwife, the unsung heroine, up at the first glimmer, making a cake for noon dinner. She lived by the creed that there was no wound or woe an angel-food cake couldn’t heal or conquer. The twenty-five-pound sack of flour was bursting from the cupboard, and all the new, clean, glinting Jell-O molds were stacked against each other on the drain board with the symmetry of a chorus line. There was a leg of lamb thawing on the counter, and the green onions, miraculously salvaged from the dead garden, drying
on a napkin. There was food everywhere I looked. There seemed to be enough time to pickle and preserve and nourish. I was dimly aware of Nellie, luring the girls to literature in the living room. Their voices were far off, as if they were ghosts of little farm girls from long ago.
The day before, I had lain in the thicket for quite a while, until I realized that the light was fading, that once it was dark I might not be able to find my way out. I was walking along the road, halfway home, when Howard drove by. I hadn’t realized at first that he had passed me. He slowed down and pulled over to the shoulder. He sat looking at the dashboard while I crossed in front of him, shuffled around to the passenger side, and opened the door. I felt as if I’d been called to the principal. My heart was throbbing in my throat and I wanted to bury my face in my hands, to tell him, through my fingers and my sobs, that I hadn’t meant to, that it was a mistake. He waited for the click of my seat belt before he signaled. He drove leaning forward, his nose nearly against the windshield, as if he was worried he might run over an ant. I scratched and scratched at my ear, although it didn’t itch.
He parked next to Nellie’s Oldsmobile Achieva in the driveway. He took the key from the ignition and remained seated, staring at our beautiful white barn with the gleaming blue silo nestled into its side. “There were four grown men carrying Lizzy’s casket down the aisle,” he murmured, “when one would have done. When my father died it was sad, but nothing like this naked grief—”
I had blocked my ears, said I didn’t want to hear another word.
“That’s fine, Alice,” he said, turning to me, “but if you’re going to be dramatic you’re going to have to pay the—”
“Don’t you think I know what that old bitch, Mrs. Glevitch, is talking about right this minute?” I had shouted. “She’s telling everyone, ‘Alice Goodwin, the girl who—who drowned the baby—stepped on my brogans as she ran from the funeral. Alice Goodwin didn’t have the moral fiber to pay her final respects.’ Don’t you think I know?” I had screamed. I didn’t ordinarily raise my voice, but there was a thrill to the misery when it came at such a pitch.
“Okay, Alice,” Howard had said. “Calm down. Forget it now. Let’s go get into bed and forget it.”
I had looked at him, at his eyes that were too close together, as if they were snaps to hold his nose to his face. “Right,” I had said. “Forget it. Is that what I’m supposed to do, Howard?”
He had been ducking his head to get out of the car and hadn’t heard me. “What are brogans anyway? Alice, why do you let total strangers drive you batty? They don’t know you.”
But I knew better. What Mrs. Glevitch thought she knew was as potent as truth, and pretty soon would become truth. Word was out about me, and she would take the bits of information and dress them up with her distinctive brand of poetry. I was quite sure that Mrs. Glevitch would wave her wand, and behold, Alice Goodwin, rising out of Lizzy’s ashes, refashioned to fit the crime.
After we got home from the funeral I had run upstairs, to get away before Nellie appeared from around the corner. I waited in the hall as the guest-room door opened and her capable stride sounded through the living room into the kitchen.
“How was it?” Nellie had asked, after she fussed over the suit, praising its splendor: the colors, the textures, the weight, the classic cut, the fact that it could be worn in every season. Such a suit would never go out of style.
“The service, it was”—I could hear Howard letting his shoe drop from his hands to the kitchen floor—“a nightmare.”
“Oh, my land.”
There was a muffled silence. Howard was probably telling Nellie about my sudden departure from the receiving line.
“At the beginning,” I heard him say then, “the pianist played ‘The Requiem for a Dead Princess’. That did everybody in. Reverend Nabor stood at the pulpit trying to compose himself. Finally he said something like, ‘These are the times that try our faith.’ He said that he usually could find a few positive things to say in a funeral oration, but on this occasion it had been difficult to find the thread of goodness.”
“Dear God.”
“He spent the next twenty minutes trying to prove himself wrong. The glories of heaven, the mysterious ways of the Lord, the lessons Elizabeth was sent to teach. In the end he said he hoped God had spent some time with a two-year-old before. The congregation tried to laugh.”
There was a pause before Nellie said, “Gracious. I think that church needs a new minister. Where’s Alice? Is she all right?”
I had closed my eyes and leaned against the dresser. Howard’s other shoe dropped to the floor. I kept hearing the thunk, reverberating, growing louder and louder, until I had to clap my hands over my ears.
I stood at the kitchen window, watching Nellie coax the children into the yard with marshmallows. They weren’t going to give up the television without exacting a price, pound for pound. Nellie was having to increase the bribe. I went upstairs and lay on the bed. It was eight o’clock in the morning and the sun was shining right on my face and it hurt again, to breathe. It hurt to stand and it hurt to lie down, and it hurt to open my eyes to the light and it hurt to shut them and see. There was nothing to do but lie absolutely still and remember music, remember the steps. Howard banged the door and came in the kitchen to find, not the good wife sitting eating a bowl of cereal to insure regularity, but Nellie cooking eggs and another round of grocery-store bacon from pigs that had been fed antibiotics and stressed in cramped quarters.
“That smells good, Mom,” I heard him say. “Where’s Alice?”
Nellie was trying to be unobtrusive, trying so hard to be no more noticeable than the sensitive waiter who whisks away the plates and brings on the next course while the young people conduct their romance. There were indications of her presence everywhere. She had dug out shirts that had been stained for years and they were all soaking in mysterious solutions in the bathtub. She was making Howard’s favorite foods to fatten him up, including the fabulous Jell-O recipes which brought together the exotic and the ordinary. She had never thought to teach him to cook and without a mother or wife he would have been in danger of starvation. Nellie meant only to sustain, to clean, to help in my absence, but through the ceiling I could see her look, her shrug, eyes rolled heavenward in answer to the question, “Where’s Alice?” I heard Howard start up the stairs and then Nellie say, “Let her alone for a little while, Howie.” Howie. He was thirty-six years old. “Give her some time.”
Bless her heart, I thought, working up the energy to roll over and stretch my arms across the entire width of the bed. She hadn’t liked me at
the start, and I hadn’t grown on her at all over the years. “Bless your heart,” I said, out loud.
I slept until late afternoon and while I slept I made it a point to dream of my old life, years before. Nellie took the children to the park, the library, and the custard stand in Blackwell. She brought them home and prepared dinner while they sat two inches from the television, farther and farther from Dickens and Shakespeare as the minutes pressed on. Although Nellie had been married to a businessman, she was clearly born to be a farmwife. Dairy farmers need wives who like to cook bacon and make stupendous lunches with at least two starches: warm homemade bread and corn muffins; three vegetables: beans and stewed tomatoes and acorn squash; and slices of hickory-smoked ham glazed with brown sugar and pineapples; and cherry pie with whipped cream for dessert, and chocolates passed at the very end. Peanut butter and jelly were not enough for a man who was feeding the nation. Nellie wore a white lace apron she had brought from home that hung like strings of beads around her neck. Her gray hair was held in a bun by clear plastic hairpins. She was wearing support hose and white cushioned shoes that had been fashioned by a podiatrist. She could tend the dairy farmer, fix him his cocoa on the winter mornings when he came in from chores, kiss his forehead, and sit him down in the La-Z-Boy so he could listen to the weather radio. They could put me up in the attic where I could grow old in peace, shrieking only at night, like Rochester’s mad wife.
At suppertime I came downstairs. Howard was still out with, as we fondly spoke of the herd, “his ladies.” I should have been helping him. The women and children sat and ate and mopped up the sweat rolling down our faces. I took a warm white roll from a basket lined with a red-and-blue-checked cloth. The house was going to rise on a waft of hot air. Nellie would open the oven door just one more time and the blast of heat would dislodge the house from its foundation, and we would sail over Wisconsin and drift south to Kansas. I sank my teeth into the soft doughy roll and it collapsed like a pricked balloon. It was impossible to chew what felt like thick dry cotton in my mouth.
“Excuse me,” I whispered.
“Where are you going?” Emma called. She followed me into the bathroom, watching me spit into my paper napkin.
“I’m sorry, Nellie,” I said, when I’d returned. “I think I’m sick.”
Claire wrinkled her nose and said, “Why did you turn off the television?”
I should say something of comfort: I will stop feeling so sorry for myself tomorrow, I promise; Lizzy prefers heaven to earth; your father’s obsessive devotion to his herd and his crops is nothing compared to his love for you. But I sat at the table without saying a word.
Howard put them to bed. I heard him in Emma’s room, playing his clarinet. He played, “Ain’t Misbehavin’,” while the girls danced around him in their white slips. “Play, ‘Don’t You Touch My Mojo,’ ” Emma shouted. Instead he played the beginning of “Rhapsody in Blue.” The clarinet sounded like a siren from way down at the firehouse, sending out the call for help.
The second morning after the funeral Howard slapped his coveralls on the entry floor. He took the stairs by twos up to the bedroom, the thundering of his boots inspiring fear and trembling just as if he were shouting Fee Fi Fo Fum over the racket of his ascent.
“Alice,” he said, sitting down beside my head, “it’s time to get up.” He didn’t sound angry. He wasn’t shouting. He was never one to pick a fight; if someone asked him, I’m sure he would say we had never had a cross word in our life together. He was looking at me dispassionately, I thought, the way he might watch a middle-aged bank clerk count his deposit. Although I had most often felt that our marriage was safe I, and surely he as well, had grievances, complaints, Theresa assured me, which were normal in any relationship. I had married Howard knowing that nothing made him happier than the sight of milk surging through the pipes to the bulk tank. I suspected, later, that when he had first looked into my eyes, so long and so intently I blushed and felt faint, he was actually thinking of milk price supports. The milk barn was his war. He was the general and the cows were his soldiers. He ran them through their maneuvers twice a day, seven days a week, fifty-two weeks a year. Although I had known the dairy life was his dream when we were married, I did not fully understand the demands of the day-to-day routine. I usually had enough presence of mind to remember how satisfying it was, juggling my jobs, helping to keep Howard’s dream afloat, his idea of the
good life that was far better than any I could have imagined for myself. But I confess that on occasion, in moments of fatigue or worry about money, I lay in bed, plotting his punishment. The children and I would cut him out of our lives, leave him to the cows, if that’s what he wanted. I would cash in our one IRA and go to Greece, walk naked along the white beaches, and not only drink goat’s milk for lunch, but like it, love it! We would be revolted by the sight of the cow for all of our days to come. We would turn brown and dance like Zorba.
“Is there someone you could call, that you could talk to about this, some old friend who could help?” he was asking me. It was such a sensible question, so like Howard to think of the obvious path.
I slunk down under the sheet. My Aunt Kate would have come, if she were alive, and she would have had us cutting up quilt squares on the kitchen table. She would have the sewing machine going at eighty miles an hour while a fragrant concoction with a ham hock simmered on the stove. So that I wouldn’t cry I blurted, “The crazy dentist! I could call the crazy dentist from our folk-dancing days. He had hair like Bozo, honest to God, red tufts that stuck out on each side of his head, and he always wore these horribly greasy checked pants, and the zipper was perpetually half mast, and he never opened his—”
“Alice,” Howard said, “we have to get on with things.”
Things? I wasn’t the least bit interested in things. It’s you I want to talk to, Howard, I might have said, if I hadn’t been so weary, so dispirited. I had disgraced myself so thoroughly that there was not much chance of redemption. Couldn’t he see that I was alone, utterly solitary in that disgrace, as singular as the first village leper? I had been in error for half my life, wrecking whatever came my way. I wasn’t patient and wise with my own children, or the children at school. Our house was sinking into the ground, and I stood watching it crumble around us, without the energy to take caulk and scraper and paintbrush in hand.
“Theresa called a while ago,” Howard said.
That news startled me and I sat up. I couldn’t imagine going to Theresa’s, you-hooing and putting the copper kettle on, sitting down at the oiled butcher-block table, and waiting for her to come down the stairs with her only daughter trailing after her. In all the years we’d lived in
Prairie Center I’d managed to make only one real friend. I didn’t have any reserves for lean times. How would we be neighbors now? I wondered if we’d avoid each other in the grocery aisles, going the long way home so we wouldn’t pass on the road.