Authors: Elizabeth Collison
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 thingsâthe 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.”