Peter Straub - If You Could See Me Now

I looked down at the thin hunched figure in the outlandish clothes. “Did you mean to tell me that you talk to my grandmother? To Jessie?”

She smiled making her face look Chinese. “I meant that she talks to me. Isn’t that what I said?” But before I could respond, she said, “She is watching you, Miles. Jessie always loved you. She wants to protect you.”

“I guess I’m flattered. Maybe-—” I was going to say, maybe that’s why I dreamed about her, but I was hesitant to describe that dream to Rinn. She would have made too much of it.

“Yes?” The old woman was looking alerted to a current inaudible to me. “Yes? Did you say more? Often I don’t hear properly.”

“Why did you think I would get involved with Alison Updahl? That was a little farfetched even for me, don’t you think?”

Her face shut like a clamp, losing all its luminosity. “I meant Alison Greening. Your cousin, Miles. Your cousin Alison.”

“But—” I was going to say But I love her , but shock choked off the startled admission.

“Excuse me. I can no longer hear.” She began to move away from me, and then stopped to look back. I thought the milky eye was turned toward me. She appeared to be angry and impatient, but inside all those wrinkles she may just have been tired. “You are always welcome here, Miles.” Then she carried her basket and mine back up to the little house darkened by trees. I was already past the church on the way home when I remembered that I had intended to buy a dozen eggs from her.

I parked the car in the gritty driveway and went along the porch and through the front room to the narrow staircase. The house still felt damp and cold, though the temperature was now in the upper seventies. Upstairs I sat at my desk and tried to think. D. H. Lawrence seemed even more foreign than he had the previous day. Auntie Rinn’s final words about my cousin both thrilled and upset me. To hear another person allude to Alison Greening was like hearing someone else recount your dreams as his own. I riffled the pages of The White Peacock , far too nervous to write. Mention of her name had set me on edge. I had used her name as a weapon against Duane, and Rinn had used the same trick on me.

From downstairs I heard a sudden noise: a door slamming, a book dropped? It was followed by a noise of shod feet hushing across the floor. Alison Updahl, I was sure, come around to flirt while expounding her boyfriend’s crazy philosophy. I agreed with Rinn, Alison was a far more agreeable person than she wished anyone to know, but at that moment I could not bear to think of anyone casually usurping my territory.

I thrust my chair away from the desk and went thundering down the narrow steps. I burst into the living room. No one was there. Then I heard a rattling noise from the kitchen, and imagined her nosily exploring the cupboards. “Come on, get out of there.” I called. “You tell me when you want to come over, and maybe I’ll invite you. I’m trying to get some work done.”

The clattering ceased. “Get out of that kitchen right now,” I ordered, striding across the room toward the door.

A large pale flustered-looking woman appeared before me. wiping her hands on a towel. The gesture made her large loose upper arms wobble. Horror showed on her face, and in her eyes, magnified behind thick glasses.

“Oh my God,” I blurted. “Who are you?”

Her mouth worked.

“Oh my God. I’m sorry. I thought you were someone else.”

“I’m—”

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry. Please sit down.”

“I’m Mrs, Sunderson. I thought it would be all right. I came in to do work, the door was open… You’re — you’re Eve’s boy?” She backed away from me, and almost fell as she stepped backwards over the step down into the kitchen.

“Won’t you please sit down? I’m honestly sorry, I didn’t mean to—” She was still retreating from me, holding the dishtowel like a shield. Her eyes goggled, the effect made even worse by her glasses.

“You want cleaning? You want me to clean? Duane said last week I should come today. I didn’t know if I should, what with, I mean since we, since this terrible… but Red said I should, take my mind off, he said.”

“Yes, yes. I do want you to come. Please forgive me. I thought it was someone else. Please sit for a moment.”

She sat heavily in one of the chairs at the table. Her face was going red in blotches.

“You’re very welcome here,” I weakly said. “I trust you understand what I want you to do?”

She nodded, her eyes oily and glazed behind the big lenses.

“I want you to come early enough to make breakfast for me, wash all the dishes, and keep the house clean. At one I’ll want lunch. Is that what you agreed to do? Also, please don’t bother about the room I’m working in. I want that room undisturbed.”

“The room…?”

“Up there.” I pointed. “I’ll be up and working most mornings when you arrive, so just call me when you have breakfast ready. Have you ever done any work like this before?”

Resentment showed in the puffy face for a moment. “I kept house for my husband and son for forty years.”

“Of course I should have thought. I’m sorry.”

“Duane explained about the car? That I can’t drive? You will have to do the shopping.”

“Yes okay I’ll go out this afternoon. I want to see Arden again anyhow.”

She continued to stare dumbly at me. I realized that I was treating her like a servant, but could not stop. Embarrassment and a fictitious dignity made me stiff. If she had been the Woodsman, I could have apologized,

“I said five dollars a week?”

“Don’t be silly. You deserve seven. I might as well give you the first week’s wages in advance.” I counted seven dollar bills out onto the table before her. She stared resentfully at the little pile of Mils.

“I said five.”

“Call the extra two dollars hardship allowance. Now you don’t have to worry about making breakfast this morning since I got up early and made my own, but I’d like lunch somewhere around one. After washing the lunch dishes, you’ll be free to leave, if the downstairs rooms look clean enough to you. All right? I really am sorry about that shouting. It was a case of mistaken identity.”

“Uh,” she said. “I said five.”

“I don’t want to exploit you, Mrs. Sunderson. For the sake of my conscience, please take the extra two.”

“A picture is missing. From the front parlor.”

“I took it upstairs. Well, if you will get on with your work, I’ll get on with mine.”

July 18

People who act like that aren’t right in the head. He was like a crazy man, and then he tried to buy me back with an extra two dollars. Well, we don’t work that way up here, do we? Red said I shouldn’t go back to that crazy man, but I went right on going back, and that was how I learned so much about his ways.

I wish Jerome was alive yet so he could give him what-for. Jerome wouldn’t have stood for that man’s way of talking nor his ways of being neither.

Just ask yourself this — who was he expecting, anyhow? And who came?

I sat dumbly at my desk, unable to summon even a single coherent thought about D . H. Lawrence. I realized that I had never liked more than two of his novels. If I actually published a book about Lawrence, I was chained to talking about him for the rest of my life. In any case, I could not work while imagining that guilt-inducing woman shifting herself about through Duane’s furniture. I bent my head and rested it on the desk for a moment. I felt Alison’s photograph shedding light on the top of my head. My hands had begun to tremble, and a vein in my neck pulsed wildly. I bathed in that melting, embracing warmth. Application of you know what. When I got up and went back downstairs, I found that my knees were shaking.