What Was Mine: & Other Stories (27 page)

He took off one shoe and sock and left them by a tree, because the little piggy that cried “Wee-wee-wee” all the way home was also telling him it wanted to walk barefoot on the grass. When he took off the shoe, he made a mental note of where to find it again. He had left it at tree number fifty. There were exactly four thousand four hundred and ninety-six trees on this road to the reservoir.

Pale white clouds began to turn luminous, becoming the same yellowish color—something like burnt yellow—as the water in town, where the water was shallow as it fanned out to go over the waterfall. The clouds were quickly overlapping. It was as if blotting paper was soaking up all color. From second to second, more brightness faded as a stronger wind blew up. This was the sort of wind that preceded an alien landing. It could be used to advantage, Royce also knew, by criminals, who would step through broken store windows and steal whatever was to be had. In the distance, he heard sirens.

By now, he could see cars parked off the side of the road and, in the distance, the big green hill that led to the water. He looked down and saw that he had cut his toe. He crossed his arms across his chest and marched bravely on. He only stopped when he felt the wind start to lift his hat. He pulled it lower on his forehead, then ran his fingers along his temples to feel the fringe of mashed-down hair.

Several sirens were wailing at the same time. He looked over his shoulder. Two men were hurrying toward their truck: no fire in the distance, no car through which a toppled tree had crashed. He looked at the front of his shirt and thought that the mottled orange and yellow looked like fire. That made him feel powerful again, and he pulled his foot out of his other sneaker and kicked it high, like a football. It landed in the grass partway up the hill. By now the clouds were dark gray against a pale gray sky, and blowing so they twisted one in front of the other. He was a little out of breath from trying to breathe in such wind. He had to duck his head to breathe easily. When he got to his shoe, he sat down for a minute, enjoying the way the raindrops fell, flicking themselves over his body. He touched his hand to the top of his hat. The rain made the same sound falling on his hat that it did when it fell on the roof. He looked at the trees fringing the flat land on which bright green grass grew, now made dusty green by blowing dirt and a lack of light. The grass was newly mowed; something in the air made him sneeze. He sneezed several times in succession, blessing himself after each explosion, yelling God’s name louder each time. His feet were cold, and he thought about going back for the abandoned shoe, but the wind was blowing across the water in the reservoir so enticingly that he was transfixed. It reminded him of what it looked like when his mother peeled Saran Wrap back from a tray of chocolate-frosted brownies.

When the next gust of wind blew the top hat from his head and sent it skipping down the darkening grass, he followed behind, hobbling a bit because of his cut toe. He put his hands over his ears. The sound the wind made, rushing through the trees—a sound like paper being crumpled—muted. The sirens’ wail continued. What do fish hear? he thought.

A couple ran past, a sweater or jacket that was too small held over their heads as they laughed, running from the picnic area. They were the last people to see Royce, and later the girl said she believed that she had seen his hat blow in the water, though she had no reason to concentrate on that or anything else in her desperate rush toward shelter.

Maybe the fish said
glug-glug
. Maybe they talked the way fish did in fairy tales, and said something like: Come into the kingdom of the deep. Or maybe the hat itself started to talk, and that was what made Royce edge into the water, looking back as if taunting someone behind him as he advanced.

The reservoir was posted: no swimming, no boating, no water sports of any kind. No no no no no. Just a beautiful body of water that could magnetize people. Picnic tables to eat at while they enjoyed the view. Little paths that worked their way into the woods like shallow veins running down an arm. A place where lovers could stroll.

The hat was found floating, like a hat in one of the comics Royce loved so much. The shoes were found first, then the hat.

8

All her life Mrs. Brikel had been struck by the way people and things turned up when they were most needed and least expected. Today, just when she was feeling discouraged because her cold had lingered so long, a flower arrangement had been delivered from the local florist—a thank-you from a professor whose paper she had typed the night before on a moment’s notice, staying up until midnight so he could present it today at a conference in Chicago. There were daisies, roses, and three iris in the flower arrangement—a lovely sight to see in midwinter.

Since the publication of Pia Brunetti’s book almost a year before, Mrs. Brikel’s typing services had been much in demand. The acknowledgment in Pia’s book thanked Mrs. Brikel for her dedication and support: when Pia was unable to type for so long after her mastectomy, the entire task of typing the manuscript had fallen to Mrs. Brikel. But who would have done otherwise? It was not as though Pia had not paid her. As well as being an occasion for kindness, it had allowed her to develop her typing skills. She now had a word processor and more work than she had ever imagined. Suddenly she was doing very nicely in terms of income. The previous summer she had planted annuals instead of perennials. The house, if not exactly toasty warm, was quite comfortable since insulation had been blown into the attic and aluminum siding had been installed. If Royce were still alive, it would be much too hot for him in the house. He had sat around in his shirt-sleeves even in winter because he was never cold. The house would seem like a sauna bath to Royce.

Recently a health club had opened in town, and she had been hired to type the information that would be included in the brochure. The young woman who managed the health club, Marsha, had invited her, the week before, to use the facilities. She had ridden the stationary bicycle. At first she had laughed and said she was too old for such a thing, but Marsha’s husband, who was older than she, had proven her wrong by jumping onto one of the bikes and pedaling a mile, grinning, as she protested that she herself was rather uncoordinated. Bicycling was good for the circulation, and although she would feel silly going out on the street on a bicycle, she saw no point in not using one at the health club. Afterward, she would change into her bathing suit and sink into the hot tub’s warm bubbling water, which soothed her shoulder muscles. She had thought about using the sauna, but something about the uncomfortable-looking wood benches and the sharp smell of pine had made her hesitate: perhaps sometime when Marsha had time to join her, she would spend five or ten minutes in the sauna.

It came as no surprise to Mrs. Brikel that the town was changing. Those children she had seen all her life were bound to grow up and have children of their own. Now, instead of rushing off to the city to make their mark, many people wanted to settle into life in a small town. They missed out on something, but they gained something, as well: a sense of the continuity of days; a feeling of belonging.

Chap had written her recently that he was giving serious thought to moving to Vermont. He had always seemed the sort of person who might prosper under the right circumstances. Since his divorce—his wife had run off with another man, at the end of the summer they spent house-sitting for the Brunettis—he had gone through quite a metamorphosis. Now Anthony Brunetti had gone to live with him outside Boston. Lou, after the book’s publication and his separation from Pia, had moved to California. And Pia—of course, Pia was now back in Italy and the toast of the town, as well as being a widely respected feminist author in the United States.

As she was looking for her car keys (she had promised Marsha she would drop off a letter to new members Marsha had given her earlier in the week), a word came to Mrs. Brikel’s mind:
paradoxically
. Typing Pia’s manuscript—or perhaps more exactly, reading the reviews—had provided Mrs. Brikel with quite an education. The reviewer for the
Boston Globe
had said that Pia’s book was about the Americanization of an Italian family. The reviewer wrote that
paradoxically
, only when she learned she had cancer and faced the prospect of death did Pia truly come to have a sense of her own individuality and strength. Mrs. Brikel had read the book twice—reading was quite a different thing from typing a manuscript—and on the second reading, with the help of the newspaper reviews, she began to see more clearly why people thought about the book the way they did. On first reading, she had thought that Pia was writing only about the difficulty of having made a specific transition. It seemed to her that a family would naturally have some trouble adapting to life in a new country. A family, like a small town, was a particular thing: you had to give up something in order to gain something. You had to give up some … what? Some individuality, for the common good. The only part of the book that still seemed puzzling was the part she had typed last, but that came first: the introduction.

In the introduction, Pia had made public a very surprising secret. Typing it, Mrs. Brikel had been uncomfortable. Imagine allowing the world to know that before going on vacation, she had taken the two special brassieres she had had made after her surgery and hidden them in the attic, in a suitcase inside another suitcase, so there was no chance her friends who were house-sitting would discover them and therefore discover her secret. That was not the most shocking part, however. The shocking part was Pia’s admission that she took it for granted her friends would snoop through her house. She spoke of them as if they were burglars looking for silver, or teenagers hunting for the liquor cabinet. Perhaps such things went on more than she knew. She had read letters in Ann Landers from people who claimed to have stumbled upon drug paraphernalia in the apartment of a friend, had overheard girls at school complaining that their mothers read their diaries. Looking through a keyhole had never held any fascination for Mrs. Brikel. Sticking her nose in other people’s business (as her own mother had called prying) had never seemed a way to maintain a friendship. Even when you did not ask, you usually heard more than you wanted to, in Mrs. Brikel’s experience.

She put on her hat and coat and picked up the keys from the little dish on the table in the hallway. It was not really a dish, but a saucer—a piece of Fiestaware in a dark shade of blue that Mr. Brunetti had given her as a little souvenir. She had gone to the Brunettis’ house to return a turkey baster Pia had once loaned her, as Mr. Brunetti had been packing to leave, and he had told her to please just keep the turkey baster. Then he had straightened up—he had been packing things in his study, and his face looked very bad, though perhaps it was just red because he had been bent over for so long—he had straightened up and said he supposed a turkey baster was not really the nicest thing he could think to offer her. Then he had asked what she might really like, and she had understood from the way he looked at her that if she said she would like the living-room sofa, it could have been hers. If she had said that she would like every picture on the wall, or even the china press, and all the china, that would have been hers also. So she had pointed at the closest thing: the piece of unpacked Fiestaware. She was sure that if she did not choose something small, he would insist she take something large and expensive. She tended to like things that were more delicate than Fiestaware, and in fact blue was not her favorite color, but she had been a little unnerved by his expression. So there it was, then—the blue saucer that served quite nicely as a place to keep her keys. As soon as she got a package of Kleenex from the kitchen drawer she would be ready to leave.

But instead of going into the kitchen, she sat down in the living room, luxuriating, for a moment, in the added warmth of her coat in what was finally, after all these years, a perfectly well insulated house. The sun was moving westward. In a couple of hours it would set and sink below the mountains.

She tapped her toes together, and looked at her shoes. They were a new sort of shoe Marsha had told her about that exercised the foot when you walked and resembled a ballet slipper: black cloth, with a small grosgrain bow on top. She liked them so much, and they were so comfortable, that sometimes she forgot where she lived—forgot that outside there was dirty snow, and deep mud where the snow had melted—and she would occasionally start out the door as if she could simply breeze off without a care in the world in her delicate new shoes.

In the spring she would wear them outdoors. She might even ride a bicycle to and from town then, if she built up more strength riding the stationary bike during the winter. What did it matter if you were a little eccentric, if you did not act exactly like everyone else? People were quick to forgive. They forgave you because they were eager to keep things polite and eager to get on with their own lives. On the day of Royce’s funeral, everyone had offered their condolences and admired her for what she had done. They spoke about the lightning that had struck the tree, the sudden storm that had blown up—they said everything they could think to say about what a gray, wild, windy day it had been, while saying nothing about the fact that if the sun had been shining, the flowers blooming, and all of nature glistening in the sunlight, Royce would still have wandered away, taken some crazy idea into his head, and drowned. The only difference might have been that if there had been no storm, someone might have been at the reservoir to hear his cries.

But who knew whether he had made a sound? The only sound might have been the slight stirring of water displaced by a body.

It was very hard to be alone in the world. Not alone as in no-one-in-the-house alone, but by yourself, even when you meant to be. Certain people would be drawn to you and would buzz around as if a quiet person, a woman in late middle age, no longer attractive, could provide them with nectar. Years before, her lover—Royce’s father—had hovered around that way. He was one of those people who would get as close as she allowed. It seemed not quite real now, all those rendezvous, and those late-night whispered phone conversations with him. Surprising and a bit sad, too, that Mr. Brunetti had wanted to confess first his peccadillos, then his absolute shame—his feeling that he could never forgive himself for ruining Pia’s life. Perhaps when sex was not involved it was easier for people to forgive. It had been years before she first had sex with Royce’s father—that had not been the nature of the attraction. And now she was old. Safe, in a way. Though there had been that odd moment the summer Royce died when she and Chap had coffee and the tension between them had been, undeniably, sexual. There was some urge as intimate as sex, though it had nothing to do with sex itself, which had made him confess that she had seen him when he first visited the Brunettis. She would never have remembered. That snowy day, and she had been in such a hurry. But he had wanted her to know that he had been there, a real person, someone she needed to factor into the landscape.