A Stranger's House (34 page)

“But go,” Martin said, his voice with that same taut, deep tone.

“Go,” Grady said. He was still looking down. “Go, he says. I'll go. I'll go.” His voice was darker now, harder, and I could hear from outside the midday, mid-December wind hitting through trees, a
sound I'd taken for granted now after all these days I'd worked out here, but a sound that surfaced just then, made its way into my ears as though that clatter of branches were somehow important. I wondered, too, if this were the sound she heard that day.

“So the sister decides she's not going to let it out,” Grady said. “She's just not going to let it out. She's not going to let her brother lay eyes on the baby. She doesn't want that curse, doesn't want that hate on her baby, and so she holds against the pushing. She puts her legs together, and she holds it, she holds it in. She holds it in until finally she passes out, and the baby finally comes, and this baby is born wrong. It's born retarded, and not because of anything that's the matter with its genes, but because it was put through that kind of birth. And there you have him. You have Martin. You have Martin from day one.” He paused again, the only sound the slow hiss of the fire inside the stove, and the black strain of leafless branches against December wind. “Now you know,” he said.

I closed my eyes, because there was nothing for me to do. I had asked. And it had been Martin who'd made him go on, Grady only a sort of interpreter, a speaker for Martin and his history.

Grady moved to stand up, and I opened my eyes. He picked up his plate with the half-eaten sandwich on it with one hand, the empty soda can with the other.

“Wait,” Martin said. “Wait.”

“No,” Grady said, still looking at the stove. “No more.” He looked down at me, his eyes wide open, his hair down in his face. “There's more, by the way. Tons more. But at least I hope you're happy with what you've got. I hope you're happy with the story thus far.”

He looked at Martin. “Now. We have to go back now. I forgot to tell you. We're working an oddball shift tonight. This afternoon. So—”

“Wait,” Martin said, and he was moving, uncrossing his legs, standing. He looked at Grady, then at me. “She can—”

“No!”
Grady shouted, and startled even himself. He seemed to shake with that one word, almost tremble. He blinked twice, and brought his arm out to point at Martin. The soda can was still in his hand. “Now. We—have—to—go—home,” he said, the finger jabbing the air with each word, and things shifted right back then, any authority, any influence Martin may have had just falling away,
Martin almost cowering as his eyes looked down and away from Grady to his own plate and soda can on the floor. He picked them up, and stepped right behind Grady now on his way into the kitchen.

Heat waves still shimmered up from the stove, the world and its physics moving right along as though nothing had happened here. And yet I didn't even know what
had
happened. I only knew now why Martin was as he was, that trauma at birth. I knew, too, that there was something else, some story I would not hear this day, a story I knew I did not want to know.

I looked at the waves of heat, followed them with my eyes, trying to see how far into the air they went, where their influence faltered and disappeared, and I saw the wallpaper above the mantelpiece, that ugly wallpaper, beat and tired and ugly, ready to be torn off. Ready for solvent, for dousing with the sponge, for my scraper. I stood, knowing what I had to do: work. I picked up my plate, and went into the kitchen.

Martin and Grady stood next to each other in there, Grady's arms crossed, Martin's hands at his sides. They were waiting for me.

I dropped my plate into the garbage can, and picked up my purse from next to the cooler. I opened it, peering into it for my car keys.

Grady said, “We can hitch a ride if it's a problem for you.”

“None at all,” I said, and I pulled out my keys and held them up as if they were some sort of trophy. I tried to smile.

 

I knew that things would be changed from now on, that Grady and Martin would be different around me. I had known it from the ride home, Grady in the seat next to me, Martin in the back, huddled in the far right corner so that I could not see him in the rearview mirror. The air had been different, dead and flat somehow, as all three of us thought over the story, me thinking of the small fragment I had, the other two of the rest of it, the huge one, I imagined, of Martin and his life. But the air was dead; for the first time Grady said nothing, made no comments on anything. He was silent, and because of that silence Martin, too, was quiet. I did not know if he were looking out his window or straight ahead or at the backs of our heads or at his hands. I knew nothing. He was just somewhere behind me.

Then I had dropped them off. Grady was leaning out of his open door when I said, “Tomorrow morning?” just to make certain they would return.

“If that's okay with you,” he said. He stood with his hand on the door, ready to close it, waiting for me.

I said, “Fine,” and he pushed it closed. Martin had closed his door, too, and they had both gone in the back door of the Friendly's.

Now here I was, parked on a side street off Route 9, a street a hundred yards down from the Friendly's. I was parked across from a small commons, an area of grass and trees, all dead now, a small monument of some sort erected in the middle of the lot, the lot fronting on Route 9. I was parked, waiting to see what would happen. From where I sat I could see the front porch of the Friendly's;
Miss Flo's was up the street from me, next to it the rest of the small shops—the post office, the drug store, the pizza place—leading up to the corner. From here I had a clear view.

I was waiting for them to leave Friendly's, because I knew Grady had lied. They had no odd-ball shift. It was only his way of getting out, away from the story. I was only waiting, waiting to see what would happen. And I could not say why.

Not ten minutes later, here came Grady, bundled up on his bike, looking up Route 9, pausing, pulling out onto the road off and away from me. Then came Martin, his wool cap on over his ears. He quickly looked at the road and pulled out, now only a few feet behind Grady.

I started the engine, and felt at once idiotic, silly. I felt embarrassed following these two for a reason I did not know, when what I
did
know was that there was work I could do back at the house: wallpaper to be scraped away, more paneling to tear out, more linoleum to break up and remove. But here I was, and I realized I wanted to know more of them, of that story, and thought that if I followed them home this once, saw where Martin lived, and then where Grady lived, I would know something of them, as if views of their apartments would give to me some hint of what they hid.

I waited for one car to go by on Route 9, and another, and then I pulled out and turned left. They turned right at the intersection, there at the pizza place, the red-brick building that seemed the color of blood in the gray December morning. I paused at the light, letting them get as far ahead of me as possible.

Then I turned, and I slowly drove up the street, the two of them clipping along, Martin's legs pumping hard, his head down, Grady's head up, hair flying.

I glanced in the rearview mirror, saw a car behind me. I pulled to the curb, and let it pass.

I followed them, pausing, letting more cars pass, picking up again, all the way to Bridge Street, where they turned right again across from the elementary school. The homes back here were nice, more expensive than anything Tom and I could afford, and I wondered
where Martin lived, wondered if, perhaps, he lived in a single room of one of these homes.

But once they'd ridden a mile or so back toward King Street, the road itself turning slightly, lifting here, falling there, beside us all the way these houses and beautiful yards and trees and patios and garages, we came to another stop light, and I knew then where Martin lived.

In the midst of comfortable, middle-class homes was a large complex of squat, ugly apartments, square, two-story buildings with square windows, siding on the top story, brown brick on the bottom. Lawns were nonexistent, rubbed bare to dirt much like the lawn before Sandra's married-student housing complex over in Amherst. But these apartments had nothing to do with a college.

These apartments were government-subsidized housing, and I watched as Grady and Martin sailed through the intersection, and pulled into the small, paved parking lot before one of the rows of apartments.

I turned right at the light, drove a few yards down, pulled onto the shoulder, and stopped. I left the engine running. They were a hundred yards or so away; I was partially hidden from them by the trunk of a dead tree across the street from me, a tree whose roots cracked the pavement of that parking lot, the broken asphalt heaved up, dead weeds protruding, shoved this way and that by the cold wind and passing cars.

Grady hopped off his bike, popped the front wheel over the curb of the lot, and wheeled it up to one of the black doors of the apartments, Martin behind him. Grady pushed the bike right up to the door; with one hand on the handlebar, he put the other into his pocket and pulled out a set of keys. He found the right one, put it into the knob, and opened the door. He pushed his bike inside, and Martin followed, his front tire bumping into Grady's back tire as they disappeared inside.

Then a light came on inside, and the front door closed. The curtains were open, and I could see inside two silhouettes from where I sat across the street. I saw the two of them in there, watched as two shadows took off coats, settled themselves into where they lived. Then the curtains closed.

They lived there together.

This was what I knew, what I had known longer than I could have said. They were living together, the two of them, here in subsidized housing, where in summer children played in the dirt, where men and women sat outside on hot evenings, tipped back in lawn chairs, beers in hand. This small enclave of poverty in the midst of prosperous Northampton, home of Smith College and two art theaters and Thorne's Marketplace and any number of other cultural centers. Right here was a place I'd forgotten about, a place I never thought of, only drove past sometimes as a quick way through town, a way to avoid the boutiques and restaurants and slow, rich pedestrians on the streets downtown. Here was where they lived.

Yet what I had just seen was no reason to believe that the two were living together. Perhaps Grady had only stopped in to help Martin get a meal together, or to help him pay his bills or turn the heat up just the notch it needed to make the apartment a home. Maybe that was the only reason Grady had stopped in.

But there was the ease with which he had pulled out the keys, one fluid motion into the pocket, locating the key, inserting it and pushing in the bike, Martin clunky behind him. And there was how I had seen him slip off the coat, simply and easily. Only small things, but they told me more than I could have imagined. They told me that they lived here together, and that I didn't need to stay any longer with the car running, their curtains closed, weeds between cracks in the pavement whipped now by a growing wind. I didn't need to see if, in a few minutes, Grady would be pushing his bike back out, peddling off to wherever he lived. Because he lived here.

I could go back to Chesterfield now, back to the house we were trying to make a home by tearing it apart. I could go back to the wallpaper.

I put the car in gear, and I drove. I made it in less than twenty minutes, had the stove stoked and solvent in my sponge and walls wet five minutes later. I was working.

That night, back at the apartment, the same ugly apartment that was not home, that would never
be
home, I cried myself to sleep, Tom next to me, his steady heartbeat there, his presence. I cried
myself to sleep because so much was pounding up against me and on top of me. Too many things: Sandra still pounding away at me, at my heart, digging into me and how I had failed her, and how I had heard nothing from her since the day I left her in the perfusion room, left her with the shattered head of a rabbit I'd killed; Grady and Martin, the story of a woman mad with hate, and the grief I felt at a granite hate that killed Martin at birth, forced him into a world where he would, fifty years later, wash dishes and ride a bike home, following a boy who took care of him, who loved him for no other apparent reason than that the boy's father had befriended the man, and the boy's grandfather hated him; and the grief in me that cried at denying birth, when all I wanted to do—all I
had
wanted to do, before hope had died in me—was to give birth, feel in me the same pushing Elaine had felt, welcome the same force inside me, let it go. And, as usual now that I had quit my job, had filled my days with work on the house with Grady and Martin, I had told Tom none of this, kept the story to myself like some piece of bad news all through dinner, through an evening before the television, through listening to him fall asleep, through his moving toward that soft hush of breath.