Anne Tyler - A Patchwork Planet

By the time I got there, Martine had emptied the bureau and started on the closet — knitting supplies and sewing remnants and half-finished squares of needlepoint. “How was Maud May?” she asked, and I said, “Old,” which made her pull her head out of the closet and give me a look. But instead of speaking, she tossed a ball of yarn at me. I dodged, and it landed squarely in the garbage can she’d set in the center of the room. “Ta-dah!” she said.

“Sure, at that distance,” I told her. I moved the garbage can farther away and reached past her for another ball of yarn. It always soothes my mind if I can get some kind of rumpus going. And Martine was good at that; she was kind of rowdy herself. We started slam-dunking every dispensable item we came across, and maybe a few that weren’t. A jar of buttons, for instance, which burst when it landed with a gratifying, hailstone sound that made me feel a whole lot better.

But then Mrs. Cartwright called out, “Children? What was that? Is everything all right?”

We grew very still. “Yes, ma’am,” I called. “Just neatening up.”

After that, I sank into a mood again.

We were dragging an unbelievably heavy footlocker out to the hall when I asked Martine, “Have you ever thought of changing jobs?”

“Why? Am I doing something wrong?”

“I mean, doesn’t this job get you down? Don’t you think it’s kind of a sad job?”

She straightened up from the footlocker to consider. “Well,” she said, “I know once when I was taking Mrs. Gordoni to visit her father … Did you ever meet her father? He’d been in some kind of accident years before and ended up with this peculiar condition where he didn’t have any short-term memory. Not a bit. He forgot everything that happened from one minute to the next.”

I said, “Oh, Lord.”

“So he was living in this special-care facility, and I had to drive Mrs. Gordoni there once when her car broke down. And her father gave her a big hello, but then when Mrs. Gordoni stepped out to speak to the nurse, he asked me, ‘Do you happen to be acquainted with my daughter? She never visits! I can’t think what’s become of her!’ ”

“See what I mean?” I said.

“That kind of got me down.”

“Right.”

“But then you have to look on the other side of it,” Martine said.

“What other side, for God’s sake?”

“Well, it’s kind of encouraging that Mrs. Gordoni still came, don’t you think? She certainly didn’t get credit for coming, beyond the very moment she was standing in her father’s view. Just for that moment, her father was happy. Not one instant longer. But Mrs. Gordoni went even so, every day of the week.”

“Well,” I said. Then I said, “Yeah, okay.”

Martine wiped her face on the shoulder of her shirt. Her sleeves were rolled to her elbows, and her house key swung from the wide leather band that circled her wrist. It wasn’t designed to circle her wrist. It should have been hooked to a belt loop, but since she didn’t have a belt loop, she wore it like an oversized bracelet instead; and all at once I was fascinated by how she’d come up with this arrangement. The workings of her mind suddenly seemed so intricate — the wheels and gears spinning inside her compact little head.

But when she said, “What,” I said, “What what,” and bent to lift the lid of the footlocker.

Just as I had suspected, I found stacks of moldering books cramming every inch. Nothing’s heavier than books. These had bleached-looking covers in shades of pink and turquoise that don’t even seem to exist anymore. Lets Bake! Fun with String. Witty Sayings of Our Presidents. The Confident Public Speaker.

“Mrs. Cartwright?” I called. “Are you around?”

Of course she was around. She was wringing her hands at the bottom of the stairs, probably longing to come supervise if only her heart had allowed. “Yes?” she said, craning up at me.

“How about those old books in the footlocker? Shall we toss them?”

“Oh, no. My son might want them. Just put them in the basement.”

Yes, and that’s another thing: the possessions choking the basements and clogging the attics, lovingly squirreled away for grown children. The children say, “We don’t have room. We’ll never have room!” But the parents refuse to believe that the trappings of a lifetime could have so little value.

We put the footlocker on a scatter rug and slid it — a trick I’d learned my first day of employment. Martine backed down the stairs ahead of me. Mrs. Cartwright stayed planted in the foyer, tugging fretfully at her fingers as if she were pulling off gloves.

When we got back to the guest room, Martine grabbed a broom while I consulted Mrs. Cartwright’s list. “ ‘Move night-stand in from room across hall,’ ” I read aloud.

“I already did that.”

I stepped aside to let Martine sweep where I’d been standing. She was raising a little dust cloud — too enthusiastic with her broom. Wiry tendons flickered beneath the skin of her forearms. Really her skin was more olive-colored than yellow; or maybe that was a trick of the light. I glanced back down at Mrs. Cartwright’s list. “Did you turn the mattress too?” I asked.

“Not yet,” she said, “because I wasn’t sure what that meant. Turn it? Turn it how?”

“Flip it to its other side,” I told her. “Haven’t you ever done that? It’s usually part of spring cleaning.”

“It isn’t part of my spring cleaning. I’ve never turned a mattress in my life. Do you turn yours?”

“No, but I’ve done it lots of times for clients,” I said.

Then — I don’t know why — I started feeling embarrassed. It was something about the word “mattress.” I almost wondered, for a second, if that was one of those words you shouldn’t say in mixed company. (These notions hit me every so often.) I hurried on. I said, “Especially back when Mrs. Beeton was alive. About once a month, I swear, her kids would be phoning up: ‘Help! Get on over to Mama’s! Mama’s talking again about turning her …”’

Maybe I should call it a pallet. Was that too much of a euphemism? Fortunately, Martine didn’t seem to be listening. She had propped her broom in a corner, and she was moving toward the other side of the bed. “In fact,” I told her, “that happens to be how Rent-a-Back began. I bet you didn’t know that. Mrs. Dibble’s mother was turning hers one day, and it got away from her. When Mrs. Dibble came to check on her that evening, she found her flat as a pancake underneath it.”

Martine’s eyes widened. “Dead?” she asked.

“No, no; just mad. Mrs. Dibble said, ‘You should have hired a man to do that,’ and her mother said, ‘I can’t hire a man just to turn one … mattress!’ and Mrs. Dibble said, ‘Well, I fail to see why not.’ And she went home and dreamed up Rent-a-Back.”

“Grab an edge, will you?” Martine asked me.

I did, finally I heaved my side of the mattress upward and came over to the other side to help Martine support it. We were standing so close that I could hear the clink of one overall clasp when she drew in her breath. I could feel that concentrated, fierce heat she always gave off; I could smell her smell of clean sweat.

She said, “How do you get your mouth to curl up at the corners that way?”

“Practice,” I said. And then, “Whoa! Look at the time.” (Although there wasn’t a clock to be seen.) “I promised to meet Sophia for lunch,” I said. “We’d better hustle.”

Martine let her end of the mattress drop. For a moment I had all the weight of it before I let mine drop too.

In the truck, she started a fight. It wasn’t me who started it. She claimed that I had promised to drive her to her brother’s. Her brother’s wife had had a new baby. But I had promised no such thing; this was the first I’d heard of it. “How could she have a new baby?” I asked. “I seem to recollect she was pregnant just a while ago.”