Russell Banks - Trailerpark

Doreen Tiede, who lived with her five-year-old daughter Maureen in number 4, which was diagonally across the park road from Flora Pease’s trailer, put Marcelle on the spot, so to speak, something Doreen could get away with more easily than most of the other residents of the park. Marcelle Chagnon intimidated most people. She was a large, hawk-faced woman, and that helped, and she was French Canadian, which also helped, because it meant that she could talk fast and loud without seeming to think about it first and most people who were not French Canadians could not, so most people tended to remain silent and let Marcelle have her way. In a sense she was a little like Flora Pease — she was sudden and unpredictable and she said what she wanted to, or so it seemed, regardless of what you might have said first. She didn’t exactly ignore you, but she made it clear that it didn’t matter to her what you thought of her or anything else. She always had business to take care of. She was the resident manager of the Granite State Trailerpark, which was owned by the Granite State Realty Development Corporation down in Nashua, and she had certain responsibilities toward the park and the people who lived there that no one else had. Beyond collecting everyone’s monthly rent on time, she had to be sure no one in the park caused any trouble that would hurt the reputation of the park, she had to keep people from infringing on other people’s rights, which wasn’t all that simple, since in a trailerpark people live within ten or fifteen feet of each other and yet still feel they have their own private dwelling place and thus have control over their own destiny, and she also had to assert the rights of the people in the park whenever those rights got stepped on by outsiders, by Catamount police without a warrant, say, or by strangers who wanted to put their boats into the lake from the trailerpark dock, or by ex-husbands who might want to hassle ex-wives and make their kids cry. These things happened, and Marcelle was always able to handle them efficiently, with force and intelligence, and with no sentimentality, which, in the end, is probably the real reason she intimidated most people. She seemed to be without sentimentality.

Except when dealing with Doreen Tiede, that is. Which is why Doreen was the one who was able to put Marcelle on the spot and say to her late one afternoon in Marcelle’s trailer at number 1, “What’s with that woman, Flora Pease? Is she a fruitcake, or what? And if she is, how come you let her move in? And if she isn’t a fruitcake, how come she looks the way she does and acts the way she does?” There were in the park, besides Doreen, Marcelle and Flora, three additional women, but none of them could make Marcelle look at herself and give a straight answer to a direct question. None of them could make her forget her work and stop, even for a second, protecting it. Only Doreen could get away with embarrassing Marcelle, or at least with demanding a straight answer from her, and getting it, too, probably because both Doreen and Marcelle looked tired in the same way, and each woman understood the nature of the fatigue and respected it in the other. They didn’t feel sorry for it in each other; they respected it. There were twenty or more years between them, and Marcelle’s children had long ago gone off and left her — one was a computer programmer in Billerica, Massachusetts, another was in the Navy and making a career of it, a third was running a McDonald’s in Seattle, Washington, and a fourth had died. Because she had raised them herself, while at the same time fending off the attacks of the man who had fathered them on her, she thought of her life as work and her work as feeding, housing and clothing her three surviving children and teaching them to be kindly, strong people despite the fact that their father happened to have been a cruel, weak person. A life like that, or rather, twenty-five years of it, can permanently mark your face and make it instantly recognizable to anyone who happens to be engaged in similar work. Magicians, wise men and fools are supposed to be able to recognize each other instantly, but so too are poor women who raise children alone.

They were sitting in Marcelle’s trailer, having a beer. It was five-thirty, Doreen was on her way home from her job at the tannery, where she was a bookkeeper in the office. Her daughter Maureen was with her, having spent the afternoon with a babysitter in town next door to the kindergarten she attended in the mornings, and was whining for her supper. Doreen had stopped in to pay her June rent, a week late, and Marcelle had accepted her apology for the lateness and had offered her a beer. Because of the lateness of the payment and Marcelle’s graciousness, Doreen felt obliged to accept it, even though she preferred to get home and start supper so Maureen would stop whining.

Flora’s name had come up when Maureen had stopped whining and had suddenly said, “Look, Momma, at the funny lady!” and had pointed out the window at Flora, wearing a heavy, ankle-length coat in the heat, sweeping her yard with a broom. She was working her way across the packed dirt yard toward the road that ran through the center of the park, raising a cloud of dust as she swept, singing in a loud voice something from Fiddler on the Roof —“If I were a rich man…”—and the two women and the child watched her, amazed. That’s when Doreen had demanded to know what Marcelle had been thinking when she agreed to rent a trailer to Flora Pease.

Marcelle sighed, sat heavily back down at the kitchen table and said, “Naw, I knew she was a little crazy, you know, but not like this.” She lit a cigarette and took a quick drag. “I guess I felt sorry for her, and I’ll be honest, I needed the money. We got two vacancies now out of twelve trailers, and I get paid by how many trailers got tenants, you know. When Flora come by that day, we got three vacancies, and I’m broke and need the money, so I look the other way a little and I say, sure, you can have number eleven, which is always the hardest to rent anyhow, because it’s on the backside away from the lake and it’s got number twelve and number ten tight next to it and the swamp behind. Number five I’ll rent easy, it’s on the lake, and nine should be easy too, soon’s people forget about the suicide. It’s the end of the row and has a nice yard on one side plus the tool shed in back. But eleven has always been a bitch to rent. So here’s this lady, if you want to call her that, and she’s got a regular income from the Air Force, and she seems friendly enough, lives alone, she says, has relations around here, she says, so what the hell, even though I can already see she’s a little off, you know what I mean? Not quite right. I figure it was because of her being, you know, not interested in men, one of them kind of women, and I figure, what the hell, that’s her business, not mine, I don’t give a damn what she does or who she does it with, so long as she keeps it to herself, so I say, sure, take number eleven, thinking maybe she won’t. But she did.”

Marcelle sipped at her can of beer, and Doreen went for hers. The radio was tuned quietly in the background to the country and western station from Dover. Doreen reached across the counter to the radio and turned up the volume, saying to no one in particular, “I like this song.”

“That’s ’cause you’re not thirty yet, honey,” Marcelle told her. “You’ll get to be thirty, and then you’ll like a different kind of song. Wait.”

Doreen smiled from somewhere behind the veil of fatigue that covered her face. It was a veil she had taken several years ago, and she’d probably wear it until she either died or lost her memory, whichever came first. Anyone who wished to could see it, but only someone who wore it herself knew what it signified. She looked at her red-painted fingernails. “What happens when you’re forty and then fifty? You like a different kind of song then too?”

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