Authors: Elizabeth Strout
Helen brushed her hand over the book. “It’s about a woman who used to clean houses, and now she’s written a book about everything she found when she snooped.” In the heat, Helen flushed. The writer had found handcuffs, whips, nipple clamps—and things Helen hadn’t known existed.
“Don’t read such a silly thing,” Dorothy said. “That’s what I mean—women telling women to read stupid books when there’s a whole world out there. Here, read this article. It’s related to your sister-in-law’s crisis that Jim was talking about last night.” She stretched out her long arm and handed Helen a section of newspaper from where it lay on the plastic table beside her, adding, “Though, as you know with Jim, he thinks any crisis is all his.”
Helen rummaged through her straw bag. “Well, it’s like this.” She glanced up from her bag and held up a finger. “Jim left Maine.” She held up two fingers. “Bob left Maine.” Three fingers. “Susan’s husband left her
and
Maine.” Helen returned to her bag and found her lip balm. “So Jim feels responsible. Jim has a keen sense of responsibility.” Helen touched her lips with lip balm.
“Or guilt.”
Helen thought about it. “No,” she said. “Responsibility.”
Dorothy turned the page of her magazine and did not answer. So Helen—who would have liked to talk, she felt the bubbles of chattiness rising inside her—felt compelled to pick up the newspaper and read the article assigned to her. The sun grew hotter, and perspiration formed in a line above her upper lip no matter how many times Helen wiped her finger over it. “Goodness, Dorothy,” she finally said, because the article was really disturbing. And yet she felt that if she put it down, Dorothy would see her as a (stupid) superficial woman who had no concern for the world beyond her own. She read on.
The article was about refugee camps in Kenya. Who was in those camps? Somalis. And who knew? Not Helen. Well, now she knew. Now she knew that some of those people living in Shirley Falls, Maine, had first lived for years in dreadful conditions, hardly believable. Helen, squinting, read how the women, in order to gather firewood, had to wander away from the camp, where bandits might rape them; some of these women had been raped several times. Many of their children died of starvation right in their arms. The children who lived did not go to school. There were no schools. The men sat around chewing leaves—
khat
—which kept them high, and their wives, of which they could have up to four, had to try to keep the family alive with the little bit of rice and drops of cooking oil they received from the authorities every six weeks. There were photographs, of course. Skinny tall African women balancing wood and huge plastic water jugs on their heads, ripped tarps and mud huts, a sick child with flies near his face. “This is terrible,” she said. Dorothy, nodding, kept reading her magazine.
And it was terrible, and Helen knew she was supposed to feel terrible. But she did not understand why these people, who had walked for days to get out of their violent country, should make it to Kenya and end up in such hellacious distress. Why wasn’t someone taking care of this? Helen did wonder that. But mostly she didn’t want to read it, and that made her feel she was a bad person, and here she was on a lovely (expensive) vacation and she did not want to feel like a bad person.
Fatuma walks for three hours to get firewood. She always goes with other women, but they know they are not safe. Safe is not a word spoken here
.
And then for Helen, with the heat banging down on her, sunlight shrieking across the bright blue pool, there was a sudden and unexpected feeling of vast indifference. This loss—for it was a loss not to care about the warmth, the bougainvillea, to have this morning dissolve into merely waiting for Jim to return from golf—the loss was enough to feel, in another moment, something close to anguish, and then it rocked back into place: indifference. But it had done damage; Helen shifted on her chair, crossed her ankles—for in that moment of almost anguish her own children seemed lost to her; some brief spasm of her mind caused her to envision herself in a nursing home, her grown children visiting with crisp solicitude while she said, “It all goes so fast”—meaning life, of course—and seeing the look of sympathy on their faces as they waited for enough time to pass so they could leave, their own urgent lives pulling them. They won’t want to be with me, Helen thought, as this very-real-feeling-moment knocked around in her head. Never had she thought this before.
She watched the fronds of a palm tree swirl gently.
Just a silly wives’ tale, women in her book group had told Helen when she fretted about her son—her last child—heading off to college in Arizona. Empty nest is freedom, they told her. Empty nest invigorates women. It’s the men who start to crack up. Men in their fifties have a hard time.
Helen closed her eyes against the sun and saw her children splashing in the play pool in their yard in West Hartford, the moist skin of their little limbs pure as they crawled in and out; saw them as teenagers moving down the sidewalk in Park Slope with their friends; felt them curled up next to her on the couch on the nights when the family gathered to watch their favorite TV shows.
She opened her eyes. “Dorothy.”
Dorothy turned her face toward Helen, the black sunglasses aimed at her.
“I miss my kids,” Helen said.
Dorothy turned back to her magazine and said, “You’re not singing to the choir, I’m afraid.”
4
The dog was waiting at the door, wagging her tail anxiously, a German shepherd with white on her chin. “Hey, pooch.” Bob rubbed the dog’s head, and stepped into the house. The house was very cold. Zach, who had said nothing on the ride home from jail, went immediately up the stairs. “Zach,” called Bob. “Come talk to your uncle.”
“Leave him alone,” Susan called back, following her son. A few minutes later she came down the stairs wearing a sweater with reindeer across the front. “He’s not eating. They put him in a cell, and he’s half dead with fear.”
Bob said, “Let me talk to him.” He added, more quietly, “I thought you wanted me to talk to him.”
“Later. Just leave him. He doesn’t like to talk. He’s been through a lot.” Susan opened the kitchen door and the dog came in, looking guilty. Susan poured dry dog food into a tin pan, then went into the living room and sat on the couch. Bob followed her. Susan pulled out a bag of knitting.
So there they were.
Bob had no idea what to do. Jim would know what to do. Jim had children, Bob did not. Jim took charge, Bob did not. He sat with his coat on and looked around. Dog hair was scattered along the mopboards.
“You have anything to drink, Susan?”
“Moxie.”
“That’s it?”
“That’s it.”
So they were at war, as they had always been. He was captive in his coat, freezing cold, and with nothing to drink. She knew it, and kept him that way. Susan never drank, as their mother had not. Susan probably thought that Bob was an alcoholic, and Bob thought he was almost, but not quite, an alcoholic, and he thought there was a big difference between the two.
She asked if he wanted food. She said she thought she had a frozen pizza. Or a can of baked beans. Hot dogs.
“No.” He was not going to eat her frozen pizza, or her baked beans.
He wanted to tell her that not even remotely was this how people lived, that this is why he had not come here for the last five years, because he couldn’t stand it. He wanted to tell her that people came back to their house after a tense day, had a drink, made warm food. They turned up the thermostat, spoke to each other, called friends. Jim’s kids were always running up and down the stairs: Mom, have you seen my green sweater; Tell Emily to give me the hair dryer; Dad, you said I could stay out till eleven; even Larry, the quietest one, laughing, Uncle Bob, remember that tepee joke you told me when I was real young? (At Sturbridge Village, wriggling themselves into the stocks and pillories: Take a picture, take a picture! Zachary, so skinny that both legs fit into one ankle hold, quiet as a mouse.)
“Will he go to jail, Bobby?” Susan stopped knitting and looked at him with a face that seemed suddenly young.
“Ah, Susie.” Bob took his hands out of his pockets, leaned forward. “I doubt it. It’s a misdemeanor.”
“He was so
scared
in that cell. I’ve never seen him so scared. I think he would die if he had to go to jail.”
“Jim says Charlie Tibbetts is great. It’s going to be all right, Susie.”
The dog came into the room, looking guilty again, as if eating her dog food was something she should be beaten for. She lay down and put her head on Susan’s foot. Bob could not remember seeing such a sad dog. He thought of the tiny yapping dog that lived below him in New York. He tried to think of his apartment, his friends, his work in New York—none of it seemed real. He watched while his sister started knitting again, then said, “How’s your job?” Susan had been an optometrist for years, and he realized he had no idea what it was like for her.
Susan pulled slowly on the yarn. “We baby boomers get older, there’s always business. I’ve had a few Somalians come in,” she added. “Not many, but a few.”
After a moment, Bob asked, “What are they like?”
She gave him a glance as though it might be a trick question. “A little secretive, in my opinion. They don’t make appointments. Wary. They don’t know what a keratometer is. One woman acted like I was putting a spell on her.”
“I don’t know what a keratometer is.”
“Nobody does, Bob. But they know I’m not putting a spell on them.” Susan’s knitting needles began to move quickly. “They might try and negotiate the price, which blew me away the first time it happened. Then I heard that’s what they do, barter. No credit cards. They don’t believe in credit. Excuse me. They don’t believe in
interest
. So they pay cash. I don’t know where they get it.” Susan shook her head at Bob. “Look, they kept coming and coming and there was hardly enough money, well, there wasn’t enough money, and so the city had to get more from the Feds, and really, Shirley Falls, when you consider how unprepared it was, has been great to them. It gives every liberal in town a great cause, which they need, of course—as you know yourself, being a liberal, they always need a cause.” She stopped her knitting. Her face, as she looked up, had a faint overlay of childlike bewilderment and so once again seemed young. “Can I say something?” she asked.
He raised his eyebrows.
“What I want to say, what I notice, and it puzzles me, are the people in town who are so
happy
to let everyone know they’re helping the Somalians. Like the Prescotts. They used to own a shoe shop up in South Market, maybe it’s gone out of business now, I don’t know. But Carolyn Prescott and her daughter-in-law are always taking these Somalian women shopping and buying them refrigerators and washing machines or a whole set of pots and pans. And I think, is there something wrong with me that I don’t want to buy a Somalian woman a refrigerator? Not that I have the money, but if I did.” Susan gazed off into space, then started knitting again. “But I don’t feel like dragging these women around buying them things and then telling everyone I did it. It makes me cynical, that’s all.” Susan crossed her ankles. She continued, “I have this friend, Charlene Bergeron, who got breast cancer, and people offered to help with her kids, take her to treatments. But then her husband divorced her a few years later. And zip. Zero. Nothing. No one stepped forward to help her at all. And it hurts, Bob. That’s how it was for me, back when Steve left. I was scared to death. I didn’t know if I’d be able to keep this place. Nobody offered to buy me a refrigerator. Nobody offered to buy me a
meal
. And I was dying, frankly. I was lonelier than I bet these Somalians are. They have family crawling all over them.”
Bob said, “Oh, Susie. I’m sorry.”
“People are funny, that’s all.” Susan rubbed her nose with the back of her hand. “Some say it’s no different from when the city was filled with French Canadian millworkers speaking French. But it
is
different, because what nobody talks about is that they don’t want to be here. They’re waiting to go home. They don’t want to become part of our country. They’re just kind of sitting here, but meanwhile they think our way of life is trashy and glitzy and crummy. It hurts my feelings, honestly. And they just completely stick to themselves.”
“Well, Susie. For years the French Canadians stuck to themselves too.”
“It’s different, Bob.” She gave a yank on the yarn. “And they’re not called French Canadians anymore. Franco-Americans, please. The Somalians don’t like being compared to them. They claim they’re entirely different. They’re
incomparable
.”
“They’re Muslim.”
“I hadn’t noticed,” she said.
When he stepped back inside from having a cigarette, Susan was taking hot dogs from the freezer. “They believe in clitoridectomies.” She ran water into a pot.
“Oy, Susan.”
“Oy, yourself. God’s teeth. Do you want one of these?”
He sat in his coat at the kitchen table. “It’s illegal here,” he said. “It has been for years. And they’re Somalis, not Somalians.”
Susan turned and held the fork by her chest. “See, Bob, this is why you liberals are morons. Excuse me. But you are. They have little girls here bleeding like crazy, brought in to the hospital because they’re bleeding so hard at school. Or the family saves up the money and has them sent back to Africa to have it done there.”
“Don’t you think we should ask Zach if he’s hungry?” Bob rubbed the back of his neck.
“I’m going to take these up to his room.”
“People don’t say ‘Negro’ anymore, either, Susan, you should know. Or ‘retarded.’ Those are things you really should know.”
“Oh, for crying out loud, Bob. I was making fun of you. Craning your neck the way you did.” Susan peered into the pot on the stove, and after a moment she said, “I miss Jim. No offense.”
“I’d prefer it myself, if he were here.”
She turned, her face pink from the steam of the boiling water. “One time, right after the Packer trial, I was at the mall and I heard this couple talking about Jim, saying he went from being a prosecutor to a defense attorney just so he could take on a big-profile case and make money. It killed me.”