A Patchwork Planet (23 page)

“Sure, at
that
distance,” I told her. I moved the garbage can farther away and reached past her for another ball of yarn. It always soothes my mind if I can get some kind of rumpus going. And Martine was good at that; she was kind of rowdy herself. We started slam-dunking every dispensable item we came across, and maybe a few that weren’t. A jar of buttons, for instance, which burst when it landed with a gratifying, hailstone sound that made me feel a whole lot better.

But then Mrs. Cartwright called out, “Children? What
was
that? Is everything all right?”

We grew very still. “Yes, ma’am,” I called. “Just neatening up.”

After that, I sank into a mood again.

We were dragging an unbelievably heavy footlocker out to the hall when I asked Martine, “Have you ever thought of changing jobs?”

“Why? Am I doing something wrong?”

“I mean, doesn’t this job get you down? Don’t you think it’s kind of a
sad
job?”

She straightened up from the footlocker to consider. “Well,” she said, “I know once when I was taking Mrs. Gordoni to visit her father … Did you ever meet her father? He’d been in some kind of accident years before and ended up with this peculiar condition where he didn’t have any short-term memory. Not a bit. He forgot everything that happened from one minute to the next.”

I said, “Oh, Lord.”

“So he was living in this special-care facility, and I had to drive Mrs. Gordoni there once when her car broke down. And her father gave her a big hello, but then when Mrs. Gordoni stepped out to speak to the nurse, he asked me, ‘Do you happen to be acquainted with my daughter? She never visits! I can’t think what’s become of her!’ ”

“See what I mean?” I said.

“That
kind of got me down.”

“Right.”

“But then you have to look on the other side of it,” Martine said.

“What other side, for God’s sake?”

“Well, it’s kind of encouraging that Mrs. Gordoni still came, don’t you think? She certainly didn’t get
credit
for coming, beyond the very moment she was standing in her father’s view. Just for that moment, her father was happy. Not one instant longer. But Mrs. Gordoni went even so, every day of the week.”

“Well,” I said. Then I said, “Yeah, okay.”

Martine wiped her face on the shoulder of her shirt. Her sleeves were rolled to her elbows, and her house key swung from the wide leather band that circled her wrist. It wasn’t
designed
to circle her wrist. It should have been hooked to a belt loop, but since she didn’t have a belt loop, she wore it like an oversized bracelet instead; and all at once I was fascinated by how she’d come up with this arrangement. The workings of her mind suddenly seemed so intricate—the wheels and gears spinning inside her compact little head.

But when she said, “What,” I said,
“What
what,” and bent to lift the lid of the footlocker.

Just as I had suspected, I found stacks of moldering books cramming every inch. Nothing’s heavier than books. These had bleached-looking covers in shades of pink and turquoise that don’t even seem to exist anymore.
Lets Bake! Fun with String. Witty Sayings of Our Presidents. The Confident Public Speaker.

“Mrs. Cartwright?” I called. “Are you around?”

Of course she was around. She was wringing her hands at the bottom of the stairs, probably longing to come supervise if only her heart had allowed. “Yes?” she said, craning up at me.

“How about those old books in the footlocker? Shall we toss them?”

“Oh, no. My son might want them. Just put them in the basement.”

Yes, and that’s another thing: the possessions choking the basements and clogging the attics, lovingly squirreled away for grown children. The children say, “We don’t have room. We’ll never have room!” But the parents refuse to believe that the trappings of a lifetime could have so little value.

We put the footlocker on a scatter rug and slid it—a trick I’d learned my first day of employment. Martine backed down the stairs ahead of me. Mrs. Cartwright stayed planted in the foyer, tugging fretfully at her fingers as if she were pulling off gloves.

When we got back to the guest room, Martine grabbed a broom while I consulted Mrs. Cartwright’s list. “ ‘Move night-stand in from room across hall,’ ” I read aloud.

“I already did that.”

I stepped aside to let Martine sweep where I’d been standing. She was raising a little dust cloud—too enthusiastic with her broom. Wiry tendons flickered beneath the skin of her forearms. Really her skin was more olive-colored than yellow; or maybe that was a trick of the light. I glanced back down at Mrs. Cartwright’s list. “Did you turn the mattress too?” I asked.

“Not yet,” she said, “because I wasn’t sure what that meant. Turn it? Turn it how?”

“Flip it to its other side,” I told her. “Haven’t you ever done that? It’s usually part of spring cleaning.”

“It isn’t part of
my
spring cleaning. I’ve never turned a mattress in my life. Do you turn yours?”

“No, but I’ve done it lots of times for clients,” I said.

Then—I don’t know why—I started feeling embarrassed. It was something about the word “mattress.” I almost wondered, for a second, if that was one of those words you shouldn’t say in mixed company. (These notions hit me every so often.) I hurried on. I said, “Especially back when Mrs. Beeton was alive. About once a month, I swear, her kids would be phoning up: ‘Help! Get on over to Mama’s! Mama’s talking again about turning her …”’

Maybe I should call it a pallet. Was that too much of a euphemism? Fortunately, Martine didn’t seem to be listening. She had propped her broom in a corner, and she was moving toward the other side of the bed. “In fact,” I told her, “that happens to be how Rent-a-Back began. I bet you didn’t know that. Mrs. Dibble’s mother was turning hers one day, and it got away from her. When Mrs. Dibble came to check on her that evening, she found her flat as a pancake underneath it.”

Martine’s eyes widened. “Dead?” she asked.

“No, no; just mad. Mrs. Dibble said, ‘You should have hired a man to do that,’ and her mother said, ‘I can’t hire a man just to turn one … mattress!’ and Mrs. Dibble said, ‘Well, I fail to see why not.’ And she went home and dreamed up Rent-a-Back.”

“Grab an edge, will you?” Martine asked me.

I did, finally I heaved my side of the mattress upward and came over to the other side to help Martine support it. We were standing so close that I could hear the clink of one overall clasp when she drew in her breath. I could feel that concentrated, fierce heat she always gave off; I could smell her smell of clean sweat.

She said, “How do you get your mouth to curl up at the corners that way?”

“Practice,” I said. And then, “Whoa! Look at the time.” (Although there wasn’t a clock to be seen.) “I promised to meet Sophia for lunch,” I said. “We’d better hustle.”

Martine let her end of the mattress drop. For a moment I had all the weight of it before I let mine drop too.

In the truck, she started a fight. It wasn’t me who started it. She claimed that I had promised to drive her to her brother’s. Her brother’s wife had had a new baby. But I had promised no such thing; this was the first I’d heard of it. “How could she have a new baby?” I asked. “I seem to recollect she was pregnant just a while ago.”

“She
was
pregnant just a while ago. And now she’s had her baby.”

“See?” I said. “This is why I should have got a car of my own. Something used, I could have bought, with the rest of my Sting Ray money. Instead I’m having to split this dratted truck.”

“My heart bleeds for you,” Martine said.

“Besides, a truck’s a problem for old folks to climb into. It’s not appropriate! That high-up seat, and Everett’s silly fur dice—”

All at once, Martine reached over and swiped the dice off the mirror in one quick motion. Just snapped the string that held them, tossed the dice in the air, caught the two of them one-handed, and stuffed them into her jacket pocket.

“Satisfied?” she asked me.

“Well, hey,” I said.

“You think it’s easy for me, letting you keep the truck at your place? Begging you for a ride anytime I need to go somewhere? But
I
don’t have any choice! I don’t come from a fat-cat family! I can’t just waltz out and buy myself a car if I decide a truck’s not ‘appropriate’!”

“You don’t need to bite my head off,” I said.

We had reached her house by now, and I pulled over to the curb. But Martine stayed where she was, poking her sharp yellow face into mine. “I don’t know why I bother hanging out with you,” she said. “You’re sarcastic and moody and negative. You think just because you’re good-looking you can take up with any woman you want. You think you’re so understanding and sweet with those poor old-lady clients, but really you just … hit and run! You have no staying power! You couldn’t stick around even if you tried!”

I was astounded. I said, “Huh?” I said, “Where did all
this
come from?” And when she didn’t answer, I said, “You’re the one who fixed it so you’d have to rely on me for your rides.”

“Now, that is just exactly what I’m talking about,” she said. Making no sense whatsoever.

Then she jumped out of the truck and slammed the door hard behind her.

I took off, with a screech of my tires. I went on fuming aloud as if she were still there. “Maniac,” I said. “Lunatic.” I asked, “Didn’t I say all along this truck scheme would be a pain?”

Anyone who heard me would have thought I was demented.

“W
E ARE PROBABLY
the only family in America eating a potluck Thanksgiving dinner,” my mother said, gazing around the table.

“Oh, surely that can’t be true,” Gram said. “Good heavens! Many’s the time, in the old days, I was asked to bring my marshmallow-yam casserole when Aunt Mary had the dinner at her house.”

“That’s one kind of potluck, Mother. The organized kind, where the hostess assigns a dish to each guest. But I’m talking about the other kind: catch as catch can. Pot
luck
, with the emphasis on ‘luck.’ Who else would be doing this?”

Mom’s own dish was a redundancy; that’s why she was annoyed. She had made one of her famous pumpkin chiffon pies, which turned out to be what Wicky had made too. (Using Mom’s recipe. I could see how that might have been a faux pas.) Also, there was no turkey. At Jeff’s insistence, he and Wicky were hosting the dinner this year, and so everybody assumed that they would supply the turkey. But they hadn’t. Wicky said her oven was too small for a turkey that would feed ten people. It seemed all her efforts had gone instead into the decorations: twists of crepe paper in harvest gold and orange festooning the dining room, and an entire family of Pilgrims marching the length of the table, with lighted candlewicks sticking up out of their heads. Plus, at the start of the meal she had made us all join hands and sing “Come Ye Thankful People, Come.” Except that she and Sophia were the only ones who knew the words beyond the very first line.

Our menu was: two pumpkin chiffon pies, Gram’s marshmallow-yam casserole, Sophia’s Crock-Pot Applesauce Cake, and a salad that Opal had tossed with a vinaigrette dressing. This was nice for Opal, because we were all so glad to see something nonsweet that her contribution was the hit of the day.

Me, I’d chosen the easy way out and brought four bottles of wine. I guess I could have complained myself, since I had specifically purchased a wine designed to complement turkey. But hey. This way, I figured, I would probably get to carry a couple of bottles home with me.

“I did inquire,” my mother was saying. “I asked Wicky at least two weeks ago: ‘Wicky, what
category
of food should I bring?’ But, ‘Oh, whatever you want,’ she said. ‘I’m sure it will all work out.’ ” Mom trilled her fingers in a breezy manner, apparently mimicking Wicky. “ ‘We’ll each of us just
do our own thing
,’ was what she told me. ‘That will be much more fun, don’t you feel?’”

I’d have taken umbrage, if I were Wicky, but Wicky smiled obliviously and handed J.P. a carrot disk from the salad.

“Oh, well,” my grandpa said. “The important thing is, we’re together. That’s what Thanksgiving is all about! Everyone gathered together. Wouldn’t you agree, Jeffrey?”

My father said, “Eh? Ah. Yes, indeed,” and poured himself more wine. He tended to remove himself when Pop-Pop started one of his homilies.

“And we’ve all got our health, knock on wood. Mother’s blood pressure’s under control; my eyesight’s no worse for the moment. Opal is with us this year, and she’s turned into a young lady! J.P.’s been upped to a booster seat____”

Evidently Pop-Pop was proceeding in order around the table. Some Thanksgivings he went by age, but today he began with Gram, at his left (wearing her sequined turkey T-shirt), and then himself, and then Opal and J.P. on his right—J.P. in a miniature business suit, already smeared with pumpkin.

Next came my brother, at the head of the table. “Jeff is on the road to being a stock-market millionaire,” Pop-Pop said, and Jeff leaned back with a genial laugh and laced his hands across the front of his suit. The successful patriarch; that must be the image he was aiming for. I don’t know why I hadn’t understood that till now. The only patriarch in Jeff’s acquaintance had been our Grandfather Gaitlin, a big-bellied man who’d loved a good cigar, which would explain why Jeff was nursing an imaginary paunch and letting his laugh trail off in an emphysemic wheeze. “Well, not exactly a
millionaire
,” he was saying through a smoker’s cough. No wonder he was so keen on hosting all family gatherings!

Pop-Pop moved on to Mom. “Margot here’s the new chairwoman of the Harbor Arts Club,” he said, while Mom gave a Queen Elizabeth smile, first to her left and then to her right. “And Jeffrey, of course, continues to set an example for all of us with his philanthropic activities….” My father winced, bowed, and took another sip of wine.

I never could tell who, exactly, Pop-Pop was conveying his information
to.
We ourselves already knew it. God, maybe? I glanced up at the ceiling.

“Sophia, Miss Sophia, is sharing our Thanksgiving for the very first time,” Pop-Pop said, “but we’re hoping it won’t be the last, by a long shot.” Sophia flushed and directed a smile toward her bosom. She was wearing her hair drawn up high on her head today, which made her look formal and elegant.

“We credit Sophia with helping a certain young man begin to settle down,” Pop-Pop said. “Speaking of who …” And then it was my turn.

“Didn’t I always tell everyone Barnaby would be fine? He’s a good, good boy,” Pop-Pop said, leaning across the table to gaze earnestly into my face. “In fact, I think some might say he’s found his angel. Hah? Hah?” And he sat back and looked around at the others. “Wouldn’t you agree?”

But no one would take him up on that (a Kazmerow had no business tossing around the subject of the Gaitlins’ angels), and so he proceeded to Wicky. “And last but not least, our charming hostess.
Nazdrowie
, Wicky!”

“To Wicky,” we chimed in, raising our glasses. (All except for J.P., who was busy with a marshmallow.) Even Opal shyly held up her Pepsi can. Wicky said, “Oh, go on. I didn’t do anything much!”

I saw Dad give Mom a look from under his eyebrows, warning her not to second that.

If a meal is mainly dessert, it’s hard to know when it’s over. Wicky got up to clear, finally, but she refused all offers of help, and so the rest of us went on sitting around the table. I saw my reserve bottles of wine rapidly disappearing. In fact, I suspected Jeff was getting tipsy. “Pass that bottle on
down”
he said at one point, in his new, fat-man voice. “Who’s hogging the bottle?” And when it turned out to be finished, he sent me for some of his own private stock from the basement. Or the “cellar,” was what he called it. “Fetch me a cabernet from the cellar, will you, Barn? There’s a good fellow.” His accent was becoming just the teeniest bit British.

I rose obediently—I was feeling very sober and responsible, maybe on account of Pop-Pop’s speech—and went through the kitchen and down the stairs to the basement. A fully stocked wooden wine rack sat next to the washing machine. I picked out the most expensive-looking cabernet I could find and climbed the stairs with it.

In the kitchen, Wicky was scraping plates. Her dress was a beige knit, cut narrow as a tube, and she was standing in a way that made her rear end look like two small, tight grapefruits nudging against the fabric. They just called out to be cupped by two hands. They
ordered
it. I got one of my irresistible urges, and I set the wine bottle on the counter and took a step closer.

My mother said, “Barnaby.”

My heart stopped.

I whirled around and said,
“What?
I was just getting wine! Jeff asked me to bring up some wine.”

“Yes, but I don’t think we need it, do you? We’ve all had more than enough,” Mom said.

“Oh,” Wicky said, turning. “Should I be making coffee?”

“Let me do it,” Mom told her. “You go out and sit awhile.”

“Why, thank you. That’s so nice of you!” Wicky said.

Of course, she had no idea that Mom claimed the coffee tasted more like tea when Wicky made it.

I grabbed the wine bottle and started to follow Wicky into the dining room, but Mom laid a hand on my arm “Barnaby,” she said again.

“Yes, ma’am,” I said. I still wasn’t sure if she’d guessed what I’d had in mind for Wicky’s two grapefruits.

“I want you to take this back,” Mom said, and from somewhere in her clothing she brought out a folded powder-blue check.

I said, “Huh?”

“It’s your money.”

“What money?”

She pressed it into my hand. I think it was because it was in the form of a check that I was so slow on the uptake. First I set the wine bottle down on the counter; then I unfolded the check and peered at it for a moment.
Pay to the order of Barnaby Gaitlin, Eight thousand seven hundred and no/100 dollars.

“Why?” I asked her.

“I’ve decided not to keep it.”

This didn’t thrill me as much as you might expect. I went on studying the check, hoping it would tell me something further. The space after
For
had been left blank. If only she had filled it in! I raised my eyes, finally.

“Why?” I asked her again.

“Oh …,” she said, and she turned away and reached for the percolator. “It just seemed the right course of action,” she tossed over her shoulder.

“But you’ve always said I should pay it back.”

“Oh …”

“You said
that
was the right course of action.”

She noisily ran water into the percolator.

“You just want me to stay fixed in my accustomed role,” I said. “You would feel more comfortable if I went on being indebted.”

“Don’t be absurd,” she told me, shutting off the water.

“Now that I’ve repaid you, you’ve got nothing to hold over me.”

“That’s absurd. You can never repay me.”

“Pardon?”

She wouldn’t answer. She made a big show of measuring out the coffee.

“I just
did
repay you,” I said.

She kept her lips clamped shut.

“Eighty-seven hundred dollars,” I reminded her. “Every cent. In cold cash.”

She wheeled on me. She said, “Do you honestly believe
money
will make up for what I went through? Visiting all our high-class neighbors, throwing myself on their mercy, pleading with them not to press charges?”

“I never asked you to do that,” I said.

“ ‘Well, Mrs. Gaitlin, we’ll need to think this over,’ ” she said, putting on a pinched and simpering tone of voice. “ ‘We’ll need to give it some thought,’ they told me. That insufferable Jim McLeod: ‘I doubt if you fully comprehend, Mrs. Gaitlin, what a rare and valuable object that ivory happened to be.’ They loved to see me beg! Upstart Margot Gaitlin. It goes to show, they were thinking: you can take the girl out of Canton, but you can’t take Canton out of the … ‘Just look at her son, if you need proof,’ they said. Oh, always you were
my
son. I suppose I felt that way myself. Jeff was more related to Dad, but you were related to me. You I had to personally apologize for. You think you can repay me for that? You can never repay me. Not with eight thousand, not with eight hundred thousand! Take your money back.”

“Don’t you wish,” I told her, and I ripped the check in two. Then I made confetti of it, ripping it again and again and letting the little pieces flutter to the floor. My mother just stared—her mouth open, a spoonful of ground coffee suspended between us.

I had imagined that we’d been shouting, but when I stormed into the dining room I realized none of the others had heard us. They were still lounging around the table, and all Jeff said when he saw me was, “Where’s the wine, bro?”

“Oops,” I said, and I made a U-turn into the kitchen and retrieved the bottle. It was no affair of mine how much he drank.

The Pilgrim candles were headless now, their shoulders curly-edged bowls of wax. They looked like torture victims. Wicky rose and blew them out, saying, “Let’s adjourn to the living room, shall we?” By the time Mom brought in the coffee tray, I was on the couch, playing a game of cribbage with Opal. I waved the tray off without looking up, and no one thought anything of it.

Opal had learned cribbage just the day before, her first evening at my parents’, but already she was good at it. I felt kind of proud of her. “Fifteen-two, a run of three for five, and his nobs for six,” she said smartly.
I
never remembered to call the jack “his nobs.” I said, “Way to go, Ope,” and she sat back and grinned at me. With her legs tucked under her, you could see that the knees of her black tights were about to develop holes. I found that encouraging, somehow.

I had this sudden, startling thought: Would Opal get a visit from
her
angel, somewhere on down the line?

She was a Gaitlin, after all. Strange to realize that. She did have my last name and at least a few of my genes, even if they weren’t obvious.

Wicky was rocking J.P. to sleep, humming something tuneless. Jeff was poking the fire. (Another patriarchal activity, I guessed.) Sophia sat next to Gram on the love seat, and Dad occupied the one remaining chair. So when Pop-Pop returned from a trip to the John, he had to nudge me down the couch a ways. “Ah, me,” he said, sinking heavily into the cushions. “How’s the car, Barnaby?”

“Um …”

As luck would have it, my mother approached him just then with the tray. “Coffee, Daddy? It’s decaf.”

“Now, what the hell do I want decaf for? What’s the point of coffee if it don’t have any kick to it?”