What Was Mine: & Other Stories (21 page)

Several days later, the key to the Brunettis’ house arrived in an envelope in the mail, Scotch-taped to the back of a postcard of cows in a field. “Maybe they know they preside over Heaven on Earth!” Lou had written underneath the information printed at the top: that there were 450,000 cows in Vermont. Pia’s note was warm, thanking them several times for picking up the dinner check. Warmer than she had been in person, Fran said sadly, handing the note to Chap. In the note, Pia told them how to open the door, what to do if the sump pump did not come on during a hard rain, and the peculiarities of one burner on the gas stove. There was a P.S., telling them that mosquitoes bit more when the body was warm. After a dip in the stream behind the house, Pia said, they could sit on the banks for twenty minutes or half an hour without being bitten.

When they began to walk around the house, sensing the shape of lamps and fumbling for buttons or switches to turn them on, they noticed, immediately, that the Brunettis had become collectors: of wooden decoys, hand-tinted photographs, glass insulators, silver candlesticks. It was a big house, but so low-ceilinged it felt constricting, in spite of the four-over-four windows that came almost to the floor. For a while, disoriented, they noticed small things; the house had been added on to so many times, the configuration of rooms was impossible to predict. The long span of shelves in the living room sagged from age, not from the weight of books. Lou’s architecture books, many of them oversized, were lined up on the bottom shelves, but the rest of the shelves held only a few paperbacks. As they toured the living room, they found pepper shakers from the fifties: Scottie dogs and pirouetting ballerinas whose craniums poured salt and pepper; seven box cameras in a row; at least a dozen unpaired ladies’ shoes, fancy high heels from the forties; hair combs displayed standing upright in shallow bowls filled with sand; Roseville vases; replicas of the Eiffel Tower. The Italian landscapes both of them had always admired were there, clustered now in the hallway that led to the kitchen instead of interspersed throughout the house.
Mastering the Art of French Cooking
was in the kitchen, but Fran could see no other cookbooks; it looked as if the book had been put in the bookstand and placed in the center of the counter so Fran wouldn’t miss seeing it. More decoys were clustered at the far end of the counter. On the refrigerator, another picture of the intense Anthony stared them in the eye. There was a postcard of the evangelist Matthew (Fran took it off the freezer door and turned it over; it was from a museum in Germany), and several photographs, slightly overlapping, of what was probably the Brunettis’ garden: phlox, gladiolas, columbine, twiggy lilacs.

Chap turned on the faucet, filled a coffee mug with water, and glugged it down. He turned the mug upside down and put it in the dish drainer. It was what he did at home—just upended a glass or mug as if he hadn’t drunk from it. Fran bit her tongue and turned back toward the refrigerator. There was a picture of an elderly lady she did not recognize. Everything was held in place with magnets shaped like clouds. Droplets of rain fell from the cloud holding the postcard of Matthew to the refrigerator. Four differently shaped clouds not in use were lined up vertically next to the door handle. Fran moved them until they were separated by wider spaces, pushing one higher and another lower, the way clouds would really look in the sky.

“It’s certainly not their house in Cambridge, is it?” Chap said.

Outside, moths fluttered against the glass, seeking the light. She saw on the counter a spray can of Yard Guard and another can of Deep Woods Off. A mosquito buzzed her ear. Reflexively, she flinched and ducked. Chap ran toward her, clapping his hands. He was as quick as a snake’s tongue. A bug hardly ever escaped him. At home, if a cricket or a lightning bug got in, she would have to holler out quickly so he wouldn’t kill it. She always got a glass and the notepad they kept by the kitchen phone so she could capture nice insects and release them outdoors. He chided her. “You let in more than you free,” he said. Still, something made her patiently stalk them, and she felt victorious when she pulled her hand back inside after shaking out the glass and finding it empty. That had happened the night before they left for Vermont. “What does your crystal ball say?” Chap had asked, passing by in his pajamas as she was closing the door with her foot and gazing into the bottom of an empty glass. And she had thrown it at him. Not hard—she had more or less tossed it, but it had caught him by surprise; he hadn’t ducked, and it had hit him in the shoulder. He winced, more perplexed than angry. Several expressions crossed his face before he pulled his chin in tight to his throat as if to say: What’s this?

“It looks like one of those antique shops that’s set up to look like somebody’s house when actually everything’s for sale,” she said.

“The decoys must be his,” Chap said.

“Jesus,” she said. “We don’t collect anything. I wonder when they started doing this?”

He leaned against the counter, the moths behind his head like large, durable snowflakes. She thought of Anthony’s letter—the one he had sent about Christmastime, telling her about the new lights the college in town had installed so people could cross-country ski at night. Everything the Brunettis wrote made the town sound idyllic. Cows—whether or not they were presiding over heaven—were not dear to Fran’s heart, but what she had heard about the horses made her curious to see them, and from the photographs on the refrigerator, she could tell she was going to love the garden. She and Chap had enough sunny land behind their house to garden. She wondered why they never had. She began to fantasize that there would be endless herbs. As a child, she had stood in her grandmother’s dill patch, tickling her nose with a stalk of the delightful, feathery stuff, hoping a wind would blow other big stalks her way to touch her legs. She looked again at the picture of the elderly lady on the refrigerator. The woman was eating something from a plate on her lap. It looked like white-frosted cake. Strawberry shortcake? Or a mound of vanilla ice cream? She suddenly wondered if there would be a farmers’ market in town; if there might be special dinners at the firehouse, or even some celebratory day. In the town her grandmother had lived in, they had had an annual celebration to commemorate the day the library opened. She had gotten her first kiss in a rowboat on the lake in that town on the seventeenth anniversary of the opening of the library. Her grandmother’s next-door neighbor had taught her how to spot the constellations.

“You collect cookbooks,” Chap said suddenly. “Isn’t that what you always look for in airport bookshops?”

They were on the Brunettis’ screened porch. It seemed quite large, but she could not put her finger on the light switch. As her eyes focused a little better in the dark, she went toward a cord dangling from a ceiling light. She pulled it and a breeze started up; it was a fan, not a light. Then Chap found the light switch and two sconces flickered bright on the far side of the porch, at each corner. In a few seconds Chap had also pulled the chain on a table lamp, so the porch was almost as bright as the kitchen.

“The place goes on and on,” Chap said.

She looked at him. “A little jealous of the Brunettis’ house?” she asked, raising her eyebrows. He shook his head no, walking toward her.

“Well, maybe in the daylight,” he said, hugging her.

Feeling his body against hers, and feeling his fingertips pressing into her, she said: “Honey, I don’t buy cookbooks for the recipes, you know. I buy them if they have funny old-time illustrations.”

In college, she had intended to become an illustrator. One of the things that had drawn her to Pia Brunetti had been Pia’s love of drawing. Of course she had been very fond of Anthony and might have become the Brunettis’ friend in any case, but one day she had run into Pia at a bookstore when Pia had been staring at a book of Ingres drawings. She did not usually—in fact, ever—run into people in the art section of bookshops. And when Pia began to speak about the drawing she was looking at, running her finger through the air as if lightly shaving a layer from something that could not be seen, she had been moved, and had asked her to join her for coffee after they finished browsing. That was when she found out that Pia was a seamstress, and that she was adept at altering patterns so her creations would be entirely unique. Fran’s own career as an illustrator had gotten derailed in college as she began to study biology in order to do biological drawings. Biology itself became so much more interesting. First biology, then medicine. Then the thought of so many years in medical school (she had already met, and was almost engaged to, Chap) gave her cold feet. Somehow—she herself was not quite sure how—she had decided to teach art to children, though when she went to graduate school she had not specialized in that, after all. She had written her thesis on the use of music in early childhood development, and taken exams, the summer she married, for her teacher’s certification. She had Anthony in class her second year of teaching. By then, the tests she and Chap had undergone had revealed that it was almost certain he and she could not conceive. A more intense feeling for children—children as a category—came over her. She indulged herself and became quite attached to certain children, even fantasizing that they might be hers, though the fantasizing did not extend beyond scenarios she would imagine as she was falling asleep at night. She had a strange reaction to those late-night imaginings. Or at least she thought it must be a strange reaction: both to wish that they extended into her dreams and to luxuriate in the letdown when her eyes opened in the morning. That was where she really might have had a crystal ball: she could tell quickly—so quickly that she thought of it as intuition—if, and in what way, a child was in distress. Anthony was easy to diagnose. Telling the parents in a way that would not offend or frighten them was the only problem. She had been so good at her job that several private schools had tried to hire her away from Bailey, but she had liked her colleagues, appreciated the fact that few administrative meetings were convened unless there was a real need to bring everyone together. But in the fall of her third year of teaching she had begun to have headaches, and in the morning her eyelids were swollen. Chap finally persuaded her to go to the doctor. She had blood tests, and was diagnosed as having mono. A young person’s kissing disease, and her usual outlet of affection, except for kissing Chap, had been hugging the children at school. In fact, although she and Chap made love two or three times a week, they rarely kissed—or only afterward: little kisses she planted on his shoulder; a fond kiss smack in the center of her forehead, before he rolled out of bed. It was his idea, after she spent almost two weeks at home and seemed to enjoy it in spite of her low energy, that she take time off from teaching and indulge her love of drawing. People were too programmed in this society, he said: his salary was quite adequate to support them both. Something persuaded her that he was right. Perhaps she wanted to be flattered and cajoled by the headmaster of Bailey. In the back of her mind she also thought about putting out feelers to other schools—seeing what response she would get if she instigated something, rather than receiving surprise offers. Instead, she walked around the empty house in the day, wearing Chap’s bathrobe, which she appropriated, thinking: This is what solitude is. This is what it’s like to be childless. She enjoyed the misery this provoked, the way she enjoyed, in part, the disturbing dreams. Word got out in the community that she and Chap had inherited money—that she had quit because they now had a great amount of money and because she wanted to follow other pursuits. It was never a surprise to her that adults fantasized as quickly as children, because the converse was true: speculative children inevitably grounded themselves, after a spell, in reality. It was just too frightening to fly by the seat of their pants for too long. They would begin to paint within the borders. Read from beginning to end.

The white wicker furniture on the porch had an opalescent patina. Pink pillows—pink had always been Pia’s favorite color: slightly orangeish pinks, or electric pinks—were banked against the back of the settee. Larger pink pillows were propped against the backs of the four white chairs.

She pulled away from Chap and reached up to try to grab a mosquito that had been buzzing behind her head. He bent to scratch his leg. He and Fran were lingering on the porch because it was a sort of annex to the house. Almost at a glance, they had found that the house no longer had anything to do with their conception of how the Brunettis lived. It was still a mystery to both of them that Lou had resigned from private practice and become co-chair of the architecture department at a small-town college. The house itself, with its unevenly spaced floorboards, sinking shelves, and peeling ceiling, needed a lot of work, but Fran supposed that it was the same situation you always found with doctors: they would not treat members of their own family.

Back in the kitchen, she found that one of the cloud magnets had fallen to the floor after she rearranged them. She pressed it back and followed Chap out of the kitchen, frowning. She felt like a burglar, but one who had all the time in the world to really consider what was of interest.

Chap poked his head into Lou’s study. Fran turned on the light in the bathroom. A framed print of Monet water lilies hung on the wall beside the claw-footed tub. A vase of lavender flowers, dropping petals, sat on a shelf above the sink.

“Look at this,” Chap said.

She walked across the squeaking floorboards and went into Lou’s study. Chap was looking at a child’s drawing of cubes and pyramids seen from different angles. “The Future,” it was titled, and underneath, printed a little lopsidedly, “Anthony Brunetti.” She saw, in her own hand—that slightly calligraphic way of writing—the date: May 1, 1985.

2

Chap stood in the garden. He had tried it the day before, without spraying himself with bug repellent, and had added eight or ten bites on his quickly spotting body. Today he had sprayed himself from head to toe, intent on gathering enough basil for pesto, some arugula and Boston lettuce for salad. He had not been able to find plastic bags in the kitchen, so he had brought his emptied-out duffel bag in which he had transported his summer reading. If a color could have a smell, basil would be the essence of green. He killed a mosquito on his wrist, then turned like a paranoiac: a bee’s buzz had sounded like a tornado of mosquitoes. He did not, of course, try to kill the bee. He bent over and carefully twisted a small head of lettuce from the ground, banging the roots against the duffel bag before dropping it inside. He had been at the Brunettis’ house before, though Fran had no idea of that.