Anna Solomon - Leaving Lucy Pear

The scissors thwacked at his ear. Hair fell into his lap.

“Have you gone to Mrs. Cohn yet, to ask her to withdraw her endorsement?”

“I went last week. She wouldn’t come to the door.”

“You can’t blame her for that.”

He lifted his head, to check her expression in the mirror, but she grabbed him by both ears and made him look straight ahead. “So what will you do?”

“What will I do?”

“About Mrs. Cohn.”

“I don’t know. I don’t know what one does.”

“Do you have to know what one does?”

Josiah fingered the fallen hair. It was all different lengths. With Susannah, the entire business took less than five minutes, but Emma was jumping around, seemingly without a system or plan. She was snipping roughly at his sideburns. Susannah used a razor for these. Josiah’s heart pummeled itself in its cage.

“You don’t think,” Emma said. “If you think, you’ll know what to do.”

“I think!” Josiah said, touching his bangs, which felt poufy, like a duckling’s.

“I haven’t gotten to those yet. But I will. I’ll be as thorough as Delilah.”

Josiah nodded. He had forgotten about Delilah, and Samson, too.

“Stop moving,” she said.

He stared at the woods in front of them. He was struck by the constant motion of the leaves and the utter stillness of the tree trunks. It was hard to believe they were attached to each other. His heart felt like the leaves today: trying to fly, flailing. “I didn’t bring you here to scold me,” he said.

“No, you brought me here to offer me a new position.”

“There is a position!” Josiah saw the scissors come for him, open, glinting. “There will be. How cometh the pears?” he asked in a swaggery voice that only made his guilt more transparent.

“They don’t,” she said. “We’ve been busy.”

“I’m sorry. That was stupid.”

“Couldn’t you renounce her or something? Mrs. Cohn, I mean.”

“What, withdraw for her?”

“No, withdraw your acceptance of her endorsement.”

“Disown her.”

“I guess. It sounds awful.”

“It does.”

They were quiet for a minute as Emma cut his bangs.

“You don’t even want to be mayor, do you?”

A wheeze came from Josiah, nothing like the laugh he intended. “I didn’t say that.”

“You probably don’t know it.”

“All I said… My only point… She gave a very nice speech, on my behalf.”

“I read about it, yes. But speeches are what she does. If you wanted to win, it wouldn’t be a question. You’d find a way out.”

At the Gilbert Club, he had watched Susannah watching him from the front row, her face so full of pride it seemed a mockery. After the speech, as he watched her exchange a beaming handshake with Beatrice Cohn, both women had looked at him and waved and he was sure they could see that his suit was in fact too big for him, see through the restrained, closed-mouth smile he’d been practicing in front of Susannah’s full-length mirror to the boy on Mason Street, regarding himself in the tiny, unvented bathroom, making his brothers wait outside, dreaming of nothing but girls, beautiful girls, cute girls, short girls, tall girls, girls with small waists and large breasts or small breasts and large bottoms, all sorts of girls, but never one who lived beyond the neighborhood. The more costumes he wore, the more exposed he felt.

“I don’t know,” he said. Susannah and Beatrice Cohn were mixed up in his mind, their way of waving with their fingers, their sheeny talk. “I don’t know what I’ll do. I expect you hate her.”

“I’m expected to.” Emma tossed the scissors into the front seat and pushed his hair around with her hand. “Done.”

He stretched to see himself, but at the first glimpse of his new bangs — trimmed so close he could see his scalp — he sighed back down onto the leather seat.

“Good choice,” said Emma. “Now. Where’s my job?”

Her voice was firm, but her hand lingered on his head, traced a path down to his neck, drew a cool circle there with her fingertips. He knew each of her calluses now, followed their journey as a record might the gramophone’s needle. He didn’t know the roil inside Emma, how she needed the job for the money, yes, but also to get her out of the house, away from Roland. Barely a week home and already he was inching back into himself, drinking again — he had yelled at Jeffrey until the boy stood on a chair and fetched the liquor from the shelf. The doctor had stopped in and said Roland’s pain should be easing, but Roland said it wasn’t and insisted on taking the nighttime pills. Emma heard him weep in bed. Once she had rolled to hold him and he had rolled to her, his chest to hers, his eyes discomfitingly close and shining in the dark. “I lost my leg,” he said. “I lost my leg, I lost my leg, I lost my leg, Emma-bee,” until, his crying done, he took Emma’s hand and led it to his prick. Now, when she heard him, Emma pretended to be asleep.

Once, before his trip, Roland asked why she wasn’t yet carrying another child. Emma shrugged him off with possible explanations — Joshua was barely three, she was getting older — and hid the diaphragm more securely. But the question, she knew, would not be raised again. During the day, Roland was quiet for long stretches, reading westerns Juliet brought him from the Rockport Library. Then he flashed into rages over a child tracking mud through the house or an empty bottle, rages made scarier somehow by the fact that he had to rage from his chair, which required that they come to him, as witnesses. They could not run away — his missing leg, his piteousness, was their trap. He pulled the children onto his lap and though Emma saw, in his face, a melting sorrow, a desire to be good, he handled them roughly, tickling and tossing them with gritted teeth. All except Lucy, whom he simply held, maybe because he feared losing her. The children would start school soon enough. They would not need Emma’s protection. But what would Emma do?

Emma’s fingers dipped inside Josiah’s collar, scratched.

“When I was a kid,” he said, “I dreamed of a girl like you.”

“An Irishwoman with nine children?”

“Yes. Exactly.” He turned to find her smiling just wide enough that he could see through to her gums. Then he climbed into the back.

That was how they started up again, sometimes in the afternoon, in the woods, sometimes at night, back at the Stanton estate, in the bathhouse. Roland never woke fully. He couldn’t wake, for he continued to take the pills the doctor gave him for night. He said he was still in pain and Emma couldn’t see how to disprove it — twice she had taken the vial to Perkins’s to be refilled.

When they were done, Josiah lay picking tiny hairs off her stomach, fantasizing about making babies with her. There was hair in his mouth, and all over the car.

“You look ten years younger,” Emma said. “She might kill you.”

Josiah nodded. He touched his head. He understood that he looked as vulnerable as a sheep after shearing. His heart bled and thumped.

“Did she lose the baby?” Emma asked.

Josiah nodded. His head rubbed against Emma’s chin, which felt good, and she couldn’t see his tears from here, so he kept nodding. They held each other for a while.

“They need help at Sven’s,” he said finally. “Pouring coffee. Think you could do that?”

Emma sat up. She looked at him with pity. “You have a funny way of saying thank you. But sure. I can do anything.”

Lucy loved the quarry. She loved the thunderous blasts from deep in the pit, the derricks bent like fishing rods, the collective exhale — then applause! — as a mighty block arrived safely on shore. She loved the clinking of the old shims and pen hammers and points and pneumatic drill bits in her carry bag, and she loved making money. She loved the place even more for the fact that she and her brothers were the only children there that summer. At some of the smaller pits, a kid could still drill holes for half a penny, or scoop the drill dust out with a spoon before the men went in with their shims and wedges, or clear brush, but the Finns were done even with that. Their children would write and read. And the big companies were growing wary: they saw the labor laws moving in Washington, beat back yet breathing. So the Murphy kids, because Josiah Story was still in love with their mother, felt special. At times they felt like elves, dashing through the dirt and noise, from the quarries to the sheds, between the blacksmiths and the carvers, as the men coughed up dust and complained, though never about their coughs. The quarry was not the parochial place the local history books would later paint it to be. (Even the derricks were not local but made of Douglas fir shipped in from Washington and Oregon.) The men complained about the Association of Granite Manufacturers, those shit-for-souls men who were on the lobby pot again trying to lower the minimum daily wage, and about concrete and steel, which were taking over the world and would soon kill stone, and, as the summer wore on, about Sacco and Vanzetti, who (as Josiah Story knew) stood in their minds for themselves, not because the quarrymen were anarchists (though some of them were) or Italian (though some of them were that, too), but because they knew if they were accused of a crime, they would be treated like dogs, too.