The Girl Who Trod on a Loaf Read online

  III

  SUMMER ENDED. The twins returned to school, to the fourth-grade classroom of a Mr. Ayres, whose bald head Ruby said—no doubt under Helle’s influence—shone like a Magic 8 Ball, despite Flo’s claim that the only image of the future you could read there was one in which miserable children endlessly recited the names of state capitals. Boise, said Flo. Pierre, Augusta, Septembra. Meanwhile, heavy winds blew in out of the west, blowing the red and yellow maple leaves from the trees, causing the responsible citizens of Canaan to rake them into piles along the curbs in front of their houses and then set them on fire, filling the air with black flecks, with that blade-sharp smell decaying matter releases as it turns to char, the smell our ancestors hoped might ward off the coming darkness. You could feel the dark’s approach since the seasons, unlike so many other things in life, are sequential. Fall arrives and you know that soon enough the kitchen will be cold when you get up in the morning, frost branching across the windows. Then, after a while, the sun will rise and the frost’s pinions will melt, feather by feather, clear drops of water forming at their edges.

  I never bothered to burn the leaves in my yard, mostly oval leaves with toothed edges that drifted down from three tall, shaky poplar trees. Meanwhile, a single cramped and furious apple tree continued every summer to put forth approximately ten cramped, wormy apples, the kind of bad fruit that attracts ants and wasps. Why burn the leaves, I thought—what good would it do? Why shave your legs or wash a dish? But for some reason the twins got it into their heads that year to rake the leaves into an enormous barrow at the front door, a shifting pile through which we had to tunnel in order to leave or enter the house; for a few days, a layer of brownish-gray flakes covered our floors, clung to our hair and clothes. Then, one afternoon, I came back from the diner to find the barrow replaced by two harvest figures, propped in webbed aluminum lawn chairs on either side of the door.

  Harvest figures are made by stuffing leaves into cast-off clothing. Sometimes a pumpkin or a Hubbard squash serves as the head, sometimes a leaf-stuffed nylon stocking. A phenomenon of northern New England or upstate New York, these figures are generally seated on porches or hanged in effigy from trees, their presence a kind of economic indicator. In the town of Canaan, for example, you would never expect to find harvest figures along Broadway or on Rose Hill. Nor would you expect to find them dressed like the figures guarding my door. The man wore a black velvet singlet and short, puffed black satin pants, scarlet hose and black, thigh-high boots; a scarlet cape hung over his shoulders, and a scarlet, black-feathered cap was set at a rakish angle on his grinning pumpkin head. The woman was wearing a violet silk gown bisected from neck to hem by a row of small midnight-blue bows; on her feet, a pair of midnight-blue slippers embroidered with silver flowers; and on her scowling pumpkin head was fixed a hat of lighter blue, a backward-drooping protuberance resembling a cocoon, from which depended a flower-embroidered veil. Elegant and vaguely sinister, these two sat at my door, staring at the road, as if at any minute they’d get up and begin inching toward town.

  This was typical of the way things happened that fall: just when I’d managed to fool myself into thinking that nothing had changed, I’d open the refrigerator and be confronted by the sight of a whole smoked salmon on a Royal Copenhagen serving platter, garnished with sprigs of dill and spring onions, wedged between an unlidded plastic carton of welfare milk and a carelessly ripped-open package of welfare cheese slices, the top slice already verging on brown. Or the record on my turntable—presumably Dion and the Belmonts—would instead be Elisabeth Schwarzkopf singing Donna Elvira’s opening aria from Don Giovanni, the basic message being that when she finds the man who betrayed her trust, she’ll rip his heart out. Of course I didn’t know this the first time I heard the record, nor did I realize that the female harvest figure was wearing the costume of some former, probably long-dead Donna Elvira. Helle, it turned out, had a steamer trunk packed full of such costumes—she eventually confessed to me that the night we’d met she was dressed as Violetta. The twins had made the figures, but Helle had come up with the idea. Donna Elvira and Don Giovanni, an old married couple taking the air, right before the wife slits open her husband’s chest. Imagine her disappointment when all she finds inside is dead leaves! What it also took me a while to realize was the significance of Helle’s choice of costumes and her choice of records.

  But that fall I was too preoccupied to catch the drift of her meaning. The truth is, it seemed to take all of my concentration just to keep each day divided into a series of discrete compartments, to make sure that the obviously hostile elements in my life wouldn’t get a chance to commingle. What if they compared notes or, worse yet, formed their own alliances behind my back? The twins, Helle, Sam—even good-tempered Kosta Pappadiamantis, my boss at the diner? I knew I was courting disaster, but even at the time I believed that all courtship came to naught.

  On the morning of the party I woke the twins at six, as usual, and got them ready for school. Flo was a light sleeper whom you could rouse merely by staring at her broad, grave face or by reaching out your hand to retrieve a strand of brown hair caught in her mouth during the night. Her sheets were always tumbled and damp; she had no affection for the stuffed animals she’d taken to bed with her, having selected them haphazardly and then kicking them onto the floor. The twin who had nightmares, who walked in her sleep, she was relieved to get up in the morning. Whereas frail, dreamy-looking Ruby claimed never to dream. I’d have to shake her hard before even one yellow-green eye would open; until she was twelve, she remained faithful to one doll, the lumpish Marybell. Thus Ruby slept in the top bunk, Flo in the bottom—even though Flo claimed this arrangement was unfair, even though I knew she was right, and that by insisting on it I was contributing to her sense that there was something undesirable, maybe even dangerous, about being large and restless.

  My twins! How often I’ve thought that anyone looking for an argument against astrology need look no further: born in the same place, obviously, within minutes of each other, yet my twins couldn’t be more different. Although I also couldn’t overlook the conversation I once had with a woman at the diner—a thick middle-aged woman, the eccentric tweed-dressed wife of an auto parts dealer, and a confessed believer in astrology—who attributed this difference to the fact that Flo and Ruby were Librans, a delicately balanced set of scales. Each twin could assemble her own set of characteristics in an individual pan, and there wouldn’t be any problem unless one set turned out to weigh more than the other.

  So I watched them standing together at the bottom of our driveway, waiting for the school bus, Flo like a miniature sailor in her favorite flannel-lined jeans and navy-blue sweater, Ruby in one of the fanciful and ever-changing outfits she’d pull together at the last minute—on this occasion my India-print shirt, hanging down below her knees, cinched at the waist with a silver-studded, red-leather dog collar. Lily’s collar in fact—for Lily was the dog we had back then, a gentle creature with the masked face of a wolf, with the two little dots of white fur called “angel eyes” on her brow, which are supposed to protect a house from evil. When the bus pulled up, Lily was lying beside me on the stoop, where I sat drinking coffee in my nightgown, both of us flanked by the crepitating Don and his angry girlfriend. An embarrassing spectacle, as Flo complained later, adding that I could at least wear a bathrobe. Bill Beck said he could see my tits. Then the red stop sign sprang out from the side of the bus, the red lights flashed, the driver tilted his head to follow the twins’ progress down the aisle in the rearview mirror, gave me a brief wave once he saw they were seated, and the next thing I knew they were gone.

  It was going to be a beautiful day, I thought; to the east, thousands of rose-colored pieces of sky were held together by a complicated fretwork of branches, and the air was oddly mild, almost like spring. A beautiful day for a birthday party, even though I was stone broke, even though Lily was panting heavily and there was a smear of what looked like blood on her muzzle, as if s
he might once again have gotten into Lyle Judkins’s chicken coop, and I might once again end up being asked to pay for what she’d eaten. Her ribcage heaved up and down, and her eyes, under their closed lids, jerked back and forth, the eyes of a hungry dog looking for chickens. Was that a pinfeather clinging to her serrated black gum? Seven hours in the diner, I thought, an hour at the supermarket, back home in time to meet the bus. The party was to begin at four. William was the only guest, although he’d be accompanied by his great aunt Helle. Of course there was no question of seeing Sam. The phone rang and rang but, in case it was Judkins, I didn’t answer it.

  It was his land that surrounded my house; his cornfield on the other side of the road, where a week earlier he’d driven back and forth in a huge yellow machine, roughly chopping off the cornstalks, hauling them away to the dark blue silo whose domed top I could just see against the horizon, beyond the rows upon rows of shin-high sticks, their tips angled into points, like headhunters’ weapons. A black pickup drove by, its headlights still on, and suddenly the whole field stirred, the comprehensive violet-gray color of predawn breaking apart as hundreds of white birds, those landlocked gulls you see wheeling over town dumps, rose into the slowly brightening sky. They flew up all at once to the same height, hung there momentarily in an undulant, squealing cloud, then dropped back to the ground, no longer in unison but intermittently, plop plop plop, like fat white raindrops.

  The meadow to my right, sloping down toward the cedar woods, belonged to Judkins, as did the little stream which had its source somewhere in those woods, looping around behind my house until it emerged to the left as a wide and lively creek, bordered on both banks with black willows and cattails—a soggy area I called a bog until Helle corrected me. Sometimes Judkins grazed his cows in the meadow, and once he drove a backhoe into the woods in an apparent attempt to reroute the stream and reclaim the land for pasture. How many acres did the man need? Judkins, I assumed, was in his late fifties, and still handsome in a ruddy, raw-boned way; whenever he had to talk to me he traded on those looks, his banter sly and flirtatious with an ugly undercurrent of utter contempt, as if I were such an easy target that seducing me wouldn’t be worth his time.

  Oh, I’d never liked Lyle Judkins, but on that particular morning I nursed my dislike until it grew into hate. I imagined him standing there, smug, by the phone in the kitchen his poor wife kept sparkling and polished for him, his one hand jingling coins in the pocket of his overalls, the other dialing, as his wife loaded his breakfast dishes into the dishwasher. And it seemed to me that if you were to put one of those coins in your mouth, all you’d be able to extract from it would be the dull and bitter flavor of avarice. Once upon a time, I thought, you could walk out in the morning unhampered by a pointless urge to define land in terms of territory, to make every inch of the world familiar. Blackberries and sweet corn, hazelnuts and wild asparagus, a bird flying up out of a thicket, an arrow’s quick release …

  Eventually my hatred assumed the contours of a plan, which my hours at the diner—shuttling among strangers, removing their half-eaten meatball grinders, their soup bowls viscid with chowder, their moist cigarette butts, their parsimonious tips—did nothing to dissipate. By the time the man in the plaid suit yelled “Over here, doll,” and then explained that his fork had a bent tine, I was more than ready. Of course, looking back, it’s easy enough to see how hypocritical my plan was at its heart—I was reviling the very tendency to division that was my own guiding principle—but at the moment all I saw was a world divided into squares, a criminal insistence on territory.

  By two o’clock, when I left work, it was almost hot out, the sun shining in a deep blue sky, the only cloud in sight rising from the exhaust fans above the roof of the silver, toaster-shaped diner. I’d changed from my waitress uniform into a blue-flowered dress; it had been years since I’d done this kind of thing, but I remembered how important it was to divert the attention of the checkout clerk. Would the tall red-haired boy with the drooping lower lip be on duty? The old man with either an accent or a speech impediment, who always sported a carnation in his buttonhole? That was the first thing I made sure of inside the supermarket, that at least one of the clerks was a man. Otherwise, prettiness becomes a liability, and even fingers as nimble and fleet as a magician’s will do you no good.

  There were only a few other customers, all of them women, many with toddlers strapped to their carts, mid-afternoon not being a prime shopping time at most supermarkets. Casually I wheeled my cart down the front aisle and into the section on the far right where the baked goods, resolutely unfragrant in their plastic bags and waxy boxes, sat on metal shelves in the bright fluorescent light. Loaves and loaves of bread, white and whole wheat and oatmeal and cinnamon raisin; coffee cakes drizzled with calligraphic icing; sugar-powdered doughnuts with little red wounds in their sides; crullers like elaborately turned and varnished wood … but where were the cakes for special occasions, the big three-layered birthday cakes? I finally tracked them down, on the top shelf of a detached central counter. Over my shoulder I had slung a large straw basket of the sort women brought along to Pocket Lake, only my basket didn’t contain sandwiches, paperback romance novels, suntan lotion, car keys. My basket was empty, and my tongue felt small and rough in my mouth, like a cat’s.

  I’ve shoplifted all sorts of things. Once I even plucked a blue parakeet out of a crowded cage at Woolworth’s and carried it, chirping and nipping, its claws digging into the palm of my hand, right past the cashier. Why did I do this? To see if it could be done, I guess. Or maybe just to watch the bird fly into the overcast sky above the dull gray sidewalks and parking meters, to watch it turn to a little blue dot and disappear like a released balloon. I didn’t want a pet and never had liked parakeets. But these cakes were bigger than I’d thought. And although my basket was flexible, positioning the cake so it wouldn’t get damaged wasn’t going to be easy. Of course I could pay for the cake and steal everything else. I knew I had to pay for at least one item, in order not to look suspicious. But it was the cake I wanted to steal, not the ice cream or hats or candles or paper plates. I wanted to steal that cake on behalf of the twins; I wanted to steal it as an affront to Lyle Judkins and everything that he stood for—his backhoe, his chickens, his silo, his pocket full of jingling coins, his egg-yolk-encrusted plate being hosed down by his dishwasher, his exhausted wife, his slyly smiling mouth. A chocolate cake, the twins’ favorite, with red roses on the vanilla frosting, and a message piped on in green to match the stems and leaves. I hesitated for several minutes, staring at the box, lifting it up and putting it back down, lifting it up and putting it back down, testing its size and bulk—struggling not to keep looking into the nearest of the convex mirrors with which the ceiling was studded, as if into one of the manifold eyes of an omniscient god.

  And then, just as it happens at the opera, a miracle! Next door to the supermarket, in front of the bottle redemption center, a man in a gold Eldorado with Missouri plates—the gourmand in the plaid suit, as it turned out—was trying to angle his car into a parking space several sizes too small, and rammed backwards into a telephone pole that also served as support for a major power line. For ten minutes the supermarket was plunged into semidarkness. The music stopped and the cash registers wouldn’t work; the only thing you could hear was the squeaking wheels of the shopping carts and, if you were near the fish counter, the faint tapping of lobster claws on glass. Shoppers peered deeply into bins of peaches, looking for that blush which signifies ripeness; they squinted, trying to make out the expiration dates on yogurt containers.

  Exactly like in an opera: at any moment tongues of flame can lick out from the firmament; at any moment we can trick ourselves into thinking justice is being done. I lowered the cake into my basket, taking time to adjust it carefully, wedging it in place with a pair of quilted oven mitts. By the time the power came back on I was standing in the ten-items-or-less line, and the tall red-haired boy was ringing up my purchases. “Looks like
someone’s having a birthday,” he remarked, sliding the strawberry ice cream into a clear plastic bag, then putting it into a larger bag of brown paper along with the pink party hats. When I told him he’d make a good detective, he ducked his soft pale chin down into his soft pale neck and blushed.

  THE PARTY BEGAN at four o’clock, as planned. Helle arrived looking like a lit candle in a long gown of form-fitting white jersey (Lohengrin?), a garnet choker around her neck, elaborate garnet earrings dangling from her earlobes, the usual knob of hair at her neck contained in a dark red, lattice-weave snood, a surprising red day pack strapped to her back. Because the last traces of my own anger had evaporated the minute I saw the livid face of the man in the plaid suit watching as a tow truck bore away his golden car, I didn’t know what to make of her mood. Maybe bad moods got passed around, I thought, like recipes and head colds. But even as she came marching up the driveway holding William’s hand, stopping to kick irritably at a mullein plant, dislodging from its flannelly leaves a little cloud of dust, you could tell something was bothering Helle. There was a moment, after William had run in ahead of her and she stood regarding the harvest figures, when her expression brightened. But the frown returned as soon as she came through the door, shrugging off the day pack and saying “Til lykke med fødselsdagen” so it sounded less like “Happy birthday” than a curse.