Frederick Busch - The Stories of Frederick Busch

Otherwise, I thought, I had pretty much caught up on events at the swamp. I stood, and the great blue heron, in all his leathery grayness, jumped slowly into the air and flapped away on wings I would have sworn I heard creaking. I looked at the cloth again and thought again about the rake. This is what can happen, I thought in my father’s tones, when you succumb. You let yourself fall into flesh, and then you see what you get.

After Mrs. Peete’s car had lurched past, returning from the market, I brushed and brushed at my hair with the set of military brushes my father had given me when I went away to school. He had bought me a gray three-piece suit at Brooks in Manhattan, and a leather toilet kit he’d called a Dopp bag, and a set of stubby, wood-handled hairbrushes. He dressed very well, if your taste runs to clean shirts and shined shoes and good suits. He ran his own consulting firm, and he was brilliant, my mother said, and I knew him to be very sharp about numbers and strategy. He was always making plans with me, over the phone, when I was in school, to come up with strategies for dealing with my teachers. I remember how during one of those calls I insisted that all they wanted was for me to read my fucking textbooks . I was almost in tears. After quite a long silence, he breathed out hard, and the noise flooded the receiver and my head. “Strange, how I never thought of that,” he said. “I kept thinking you’d gone stupid,” he said, “but all we’re confronted with here is you’re lazy. Is that right? Or you’re busy curing cancer, and you don’t have time to waste on what the mortals are supposed to do?”

I took a towel and my toilet kit, and I walked across the frozen but softening ruts and wrinkles to the Peetes’. Rebecca’s very old Saab wasn’t parked beside her mother’s sedan, and I was relieved and disappointed. Mrs. Peete, in fawn-colored slacks and a black turtleneck, her slacks tucked into high, black boots — a kind of joke about country manors and those who struggled to maintain them — seemed not to be relieved, and, actually, she appeared to be very disappointed when she opened her door to find me on the old stone stoop.

“Oh,” is all she said.

“Hi. I was wondering if I could use the shower today. Now, actually. If that would be all right.”

“You look like you could use one.”

So much for the military brush.

“I thought you were here for your wages,” she said.

“You don’t pay me wages, Mrs. Peete.”

“Yes,” she said, “that’s right.”

“Though you could , if you really wanted to.”

Her glare was not what you would call the expression of someone receptive to humor. The only time I saw her face in a friendly expression is when she reminded Rebecca, in front of me, of a habit of Rebecca’s former husband, a viola player in Albany. He seemed to like to crack his knuckles, and Mrs. Peete’s square face, with its bulging blue eyes, framed by a coppery color so fake it made the color of Rebecca’s hair look phony, had broken into three sections: the creased forehead notched vertically above the nose, and then the cheeks which dimpled and went red, and then the mouth, lips parted to show her thick yellow teeth in a glaze of saliva.

She waddled ahead of me, as small and chunky as Rebecca was tall and thin. She led me upstairs, on creaking steps, although she knew I knew the way. She pointed to the guest room, where I would change, and from which I would walk, in only a towel, to the adjacent bathroom. She would sit in her own bedroom, down the hall, and would listen. I assumed that’s what she did — listen to the pad of my bare feet, to the sound of the shower or the flushing of the toilet or the scratching of the towel against my back as I dried off. When I was done, she would listen to my return to the guest room and, when she heard my boots on the floor, she would emerge from her room to frown at my cleatmarks — though she’d never asked me to take off my boots — and then she would lead me down the stairs.

The guest room was painted pink, with white woodwork. The bathroom was tiled in white with pink woodwork. The soap was pink, and so was the bath mat, and so were the towels that I was not allowed to use. I tried to think of Mrs. Peete’s pink skin, yards of it, against pink sheets, beneath a pink Mr. Peete, employed, to the moment of his death, as an insurance adjuster. Talk about falling into flesh, I thought. I realized that I’d been singing in the shower about how I was going to board a passenger plane and not come back again. Suspecting that it might be true, and living in hope that it was, Mrs. Peete would have the three-story smile on her face again, I figured.

Downstairs, she led me into the kitchen. I caught a glimpse of the living room, its dark antique furniture, its maroon sofa long enough to use as a lifeboat, and I could see the signs of them both — the scattered magazines and papers of Rebecca, and the basket filled with twine balls on a neat stack of what I knew to be Reader’s Digest condensed novels (all of William Gaddis’s The Recognitions , I thought, but in seven pages). I sat at the kitchen table as she expected me to, with my damp towel and toilet kit on the floor beside my feet, hands folded on the table’s edge, and Mrs. Peete served out — not once engaging my eyes or, so far as I could tell, looking directly at me — a plate of homemade beans and little pork chunks, all of it baked in molasses, and a large glass of milk. I despised milk, but I always drank it at her table.

“I got the wall started,” I said.

“I saw it.”

“It’s a good idea. You’ll like it. You get a feeling of separation, but you still can see what’s going on.”

“Yes. That’s how Rebecca said it. Just exactly like that.”

So she had found a way to make it clear precisely why she hated me. Not only did I look a little alien to her — not quite Martian, but not assuredly not, either — but I was her daughter’s choice of recreational drug. Which was not entirely true, since Rebecca also brought with her, from time to time, for recreational purposes, a little packet of grass that she purchased in Poughkeepsie. At those times, looking at it from Mrs. Peete’s point of view, Rebecca was compounding the crime.

She always poured me a second glass of milk and gave me a plate of her buttery cookies to eat with it. In silence, then, I finished the cookies as she watched me. As she always did when I said my thanks, she replied, “You’re entirely welcome.” This time, she added, “Have a nice week.”

I said, “You can feel a little spring out there.”

“I’m not so sure,” she said.

I nodded, as if to signal that I’d reconsider, and I gathered my bag and towel, and she walked me to the door, perhaps to make certain that I left.

I paused in the foyer and said, “Could I ask you something about the neighborhood?”

“Neighborhood? There’s this and there’s that, across the road.”

“That’s the that I wanted to know about, Mrs. Peete.”

“That’s the that. You went to college to learn how to talk this way?”

I hung my head, because she was gifted in her production of the sound of sneering and facial furrows of disgust. I could not imagine anyone whose pride she wouldn’t erode.

“You know the way to Poughkeepsie? When your car is working?”

“It needs a new battery. It can’t hold a charge.”

“What does that say about you?” she asked.

“I’m afraid to guess.”

Her face writhed and then composed. “This little road, once upon a time, could get you to Poughkeepsie. Parts they don’t keep up anymore, and parts they shut down. But in the 1930s, the 1940s, this was a good road. The motel people lived in this house. One of them’s a ghost. I have seen him, but never mind. I don’t argue about ghosts.”