“Very well,” I said, and I turned abruptly, brushed past her, and left her standing in my office.
The next morning I saw that Birdie had come to school with a large brown paper bag, and when she reached inside and removed a shoe box I knew at once what she had done. After the children filed through for breakfast, I retreated to the pantry to open a large box containing eight-pound cans of pinto beans. These I began arranging on a shelf. From the pantry I heard Birdie speaking to the children who came back for second helpings. “There you are, sweetheart.” “I bet you just love pancakes, don't you, honey?” “That sure is a pretty barrette, Lindy.” I afterward busied myself straightening the boxes of gelatin and pudding mix, then checked to see how many packages of paper napkins were on the shelf.
By the time I returned to the kitchen, Birdie was helping Francine prepare the apple cobbler to be served at lunch. I noticed that the shoe box was still sitting in the cupboard where the workers stored their personal belongings, but the lid had been removed, and the box was now empty. Later, when the classes passed through for lunch, I made a point of looking at Jasmine Finney's feet. As I had suspected, the girl wore a brand-new pair of sneakers, huge white ones with purple and pink stripes stitched down the sides. She wore the same malignant expression on her face, however, and as she passed me, I heard the echo of Birdie's gentle, sorrowful words from the day before, like the voice of doves.
“There's just so many problems, aren't there? Some of these poor babies break my heart.”
It struck me as a curious coincidence that the inadequate footwear of a child had recently been brought to the attention of both Birdie and me. I could not help wondering that day what course Birdie would have taken had she been in my place at the traffic light the morning before.
The shoe was still on the striped pole when I drove past the intersection the following two days but was gone by Monday of the next week. I never pass that way now without visions of shoes filling my mindâmy own saddle oxfords of long ago, which I had recalled that day as I considered the matter of gifts; the ragged shoe flung from a car window by an anonymous toddler; the large white sneakers on the feet of Jasmine Finney; Birdie's canvas Keds. And each time I pass the intersection, I pause to contemplate the quiet aggressiveness of one small woman against the problems of the world, then to question the lasting consequence of her good deeds.
I am no longer writing my story by longhand in my red spiral notebooks. Let me explain how this change came about.
Two days ago Thomas came home at one-thirty in the afternoon to search for a receipt verifying the recent purchase of two new tires for his pickup truck, one of which was proving unsatisfactory. He entered through the kitchen door, as he typically does, and made his way directly to his bedroom. I heard him rummaging about noisily, as I suppose all men do, and after many thumps and exclamations I heard him cry, “There she is, by jings!” Had I known what he sought, I would have instructed him to look
first
in the pockets of his overalls, which is precisely where he had located the missing receipt. I never wash a pair of his overalls without checking the pockets, and my search invariably yields candy wrappers, nuts and bolts, loose change, and the like. In many ways Thomas is simply a very tall little boy.
As he passed through the hallway on his way back to the kitchen, he must have glanced into the living room, for he stopped abruptly. I did not look up but was aware of his presence. He inhaled sharply and stood there for several moments before speaking.
“Margaret.” It was not a question but a statement of moderate surprise.
“Yes.” I continued writing, though I later had to delete the entire ungainly sentence and reconstruct the thought more gracefully.
“You mean to say you're sittin' here writin' in those red books of yours
all day long
and nights, too?” His tone was not accusatory; rather, he seemed to be awed by the fact. To this point, Thomas had made no outward sign of noticing my nightly occupation.
I looked up. Thomas was wearing his oldest pair of overalls and a faded but well-pressed red shirt. On the wall behind his head hung a large handmade clock with a triangular wooden frame and hands comprised of flattened nails. Norman Lang, the owner of the hardware store where Thomas rents the space for his vacuum repair business, had custom-designed it for our wedding gift in 1979. Though it violated all principles of aesthetics, I had watched without comment on the day before our marriage as Thomas proudly hung it on a prominent wall in my duplex, where we were to live.
Thomas stood now in the small hallway gazing at me, his hands clasped behind his back, his neck extended forward, his head tilted as though examining an encased museum relic. The triangular clock, positioned as it was behind him, made him appear to be wearing a colonial hat such as those worn in the days of George Washington. The effect could have been comical had I not been annoyed by the interruption.
“Is it somethin' that
needs
to be put down on paper so bad you gotta spend all day and night doin' it?” he asked.
His questioning me thus struck me with sudden force as further evidence of his increasing boldness. A year ago he would not have dared interrogate me so. One of the side effects of a large steady dose of Birdie Freeman has been, I suppose, a diminishing of my customary brusqueness toward Thomas. As a result, he now approaches me more frequently and unabashedly with direct questions and opinions. Of my evolving relationship with Thomas, more will come later.
Though I have tolerated his gradually expanding inquisitiveness, yesterday I was suddenly moved to wrath by his encroachment.
“My time is my own, is it not?” I said irritably. “You see no dust upon the furniture, do you? Your clothes, which you simply drop into the hamper, continue to be returned to your bureau washed and ironed, do they not? You have not yet come home to find your table empty at mealtimes, have you?” My words sounded harsh even to me, and I could not look Thomas in the eye as I spoke them.
The air between us was still, though the small air conditioning unit in the window labored continuously. Thomas took a step forward as if to attempt pacification, then apparently reconsidered. He turned slowly into the kitchen and exited through the back door, closing it quietly behind him.
Feeling chastened by his mildness, as I often do, I tried to continue writing but found my thoughts resistant to molding. At the time, I was endeavoring to recreate my conversation with Birdie concerning her excessive communication with the children in the serving line. For the first time since I began writing my story two weeks ago, I found myself groping for words, or rather, desperately pursuing them. The sentences would form themselves in my mind, appropriately worded, but in the brief moment between the flash of thought and the applying of my pencil to the paper, they would begin to dissipate. I would quickly snatch the ones I could recall but upon rereading a passage would deplore its hollowness.
I struggled on for the better part of an hour before giving it over. If Thomas had not broken my thought, I am quite certain that I could have finished the chapter that afternoon. I suppose this was my first experience with what I have heard labeled as “writer's block,” a term I had previously suspected to be merely a weak excuse invented by slothful writers.
As I recall, I abandoned my writing for a time and spent the next hour in the kitchen making preparations for supper. I do not assemble meals in the hasty, slapdash manner shown on television commercials. My suppers never consist of an indistinguishable sauce poured from a jar over heaps of rice or noodles. Though it was only midafternoon, I prepared the chicken for baking, placed it in a covered dish for the time being, and then set it in the refrigerator. That done, I mixed the batter for a cake of which Thomas was especially fond. Several years ago I had experimented with a recipe for fresh strawberry cake, adapting it from my best recipe for white cake, and Thomas had eaten three pieces the first night I served it.
I was not making the cake, I told myself, as penance for my curt response to him earlier that afternoon; rather, I needed to use some of the strawberries that he had brought home the day before. By now we had already eaten the two pints that Joan had brought us. I placed the cake in the oven to bake, set the timer, and began peeling carrots.
As I worked in the kitchen, my mind returned to my story, and gradually finding myself once again in calm possession of my thoughts, I sat down and opened my notebook around four o'clock to resume my writing but was interrupted shortly thereafter by a telephone call from a representative of Bellaire Marketing Research. It was a woman's voice, inarticulate and poorly modulated. She mumbled her first nameâDorisâand then immediately launched into quite a lengthy introduction of the organization's services, stumbling over a number of words and mispronouncing
subsidiary
and
cyclical
.
When she finally paused and asked if I had three or four minutes to answer a few questions for a survey, I replied, “No, I do not, Doris, and in the future, you would do well to polish your speaking skills before imposing upon the time of busy people. Take your paragraph home tonight and practice it. Get your dictionary out and look up the pronunciation of each word. Record your voice on an audiotape and critique it. When you have perfected your script, you may call me back and perhaps then I will participate in your survey, though this is not a commitment. You might also suggest to your superiors that they simplify the script for the sake of reaching the general public.” I believe in speaking the truth and find myself to be especially frank and sometimes garrulous with telephone solicitors.
I tried again to return to my writing, but within five minutes I was interrupted once more by a telephone call, this one from Thelma Purdue, who occupies the other side of our duplex. She was calling to inform me that the Jansens' dog was in our front yard. “He's done relieved hisself again right by our mailboxes,” she said.
As soon as I hung up, the oven timer sounded. I transferred the cake to a cooling rack, then set the chicken in the oven to bake before I went outside with the intention of driving the Jansens' dog across the street to his own yard, at which time I found that he was already being dragged home by Mrs. Jansen, who was scolding him like a termagant. “You get outta our yard one more time, Pedro, and it's curtains! I mean it! Curtains! The end! Last chapterâall she wrote! I'm sick and tired of chasing all over creation for you! I never wanted to get you in the first place.” I quickly surmised that her harangue was for my benefit, for she undoubtedly knew that I was within earshot. Phyllis Jansen and I had exchanged words on more than one occasion concerning the perambulations of Pedro.
As I was already outdoors, I checked the mailbox and found a telephone bill, an envelope bearing the notation
Open Immediately! You Could Already Be a Millionaire!
(which would be deposited into the trash can unopened), and a mail order catalogue from a company called Just What You've Always Wanted. I flipped through it and saw nothing whatsoever that I wanted.
There was also a new issue of
Field and Stream
, to which Thomas subscribes. One of the lead articles was “Seeking Out the Sweet Spots for Summer Smallmouth.” I paused for a moment to wonder about the writer of such an article. Who was this man? His name was printed below the title: Dallas Kincaid. Were articles such as this one the sole source of his income? Did he have a family to support?
Immediately following these thoughts, I was again struck by my burgeoning interest in the lives of othersâof an obscure writer of an article about smallmouth bass, for instance. I know not to what cause to lay this development except to Birdie Freeman's unrelenting
nearness
, both physical and otherwise.
Clutching the mail in one hand, I stooped to pull several tall blades of grass from around the mailbox post and then turned back to the house. Thelma Purdue accosted me as I mounted the three steps to our front door. I would have groaned aloud had it been of any use. Thelma Purdue is a person whose company I find it difficult to endure. As Thomas says, “That woman can talk the horns off a billy goat.” She opened her door, which is only five or six feet from our own, and hissed at me. Yes, she hissed.
Thelma Purdue never initiates a conversation in a polite, conventional manner. Her customary greeting is a series of sharp, sibilant whistles: “Sss! Sss! Sss!” This is the closest approximation of the sound she makes, although at times she provides variety with “Shh! Shh! Shh!” or “Psst! Psst! Psst!” It is a vile sound and never fails to bring to my mind the sinister character of Gollum in J. R. R. Tolkien's book
The Hobbit
, which, though fantasy has never been my first love in fiction, I read with relish a few weeks after my arrival in Filbert in 1973. Tolkien had died in England only weeks earlier, and as I had never read any of his works, I paid posthumous tribute to him in this way.
I stopped and looked at Thelma, refusing to speak until she did.
“I done told Phyllis that that dog can unlatch the gate hisself. I watched him lots of times just go over and jump up and bat at it with his paws till it flips up. Pokes at it with his snout, too. She don't believe me, I don't guess, or else they'd fix it up with something stronger. Tie it with a rope or something.”
“Yes, I suppose so,” I replied.
“You having yourself a nice summer now school's out?” she asked. “I don't see much of you like I do other summers. You not doing a garden this time?”
“Thomas may plant some late limas and corn,” I said. I glanced down at the pieces of mail in my hand as if to suggest that I had business to which I must attend.