A Patchwork Planet Read online

“How about her.”

  “Did she come down for the dinner?”

  “Nah. Well, she’d already given me my present, see. And besides, I knew I’d be going up there Saturday.”

  “Yes, I looked for you on the train,” she said.

  “You did?”

  “I remembered you always visit her the last Saturday of the month.”

  “This time I drove,” I said. “I generally do, if my car’s not on the blink.”

  “Oh, you drove.”

  “It’s cheaper.”

  “I should do that too, I suppose. If I weren’t so nervous on interstates,” she said.

  I was trying to tighten a screw now, but it kept slipping away from me. Sophia was making me self-conscious. I’m not a bona fide handyman; I do these little fix-it jobs by trial and error. So I looked at her, and she must have understood, because she said, “Well. I’ll let you get on with it.”

  Then she straightened up from the doorway and left, and a moment later I heard her out front, telling her aunt goodbye.

  My second day on the job, Mrs. Glynn had me take her to the grocery store. She was a quicker shopper than the Cartwrights but a much worse back-seat driver. Although we were in my car (she’d given hers up years ago, she said), she slammed a Nike down hard every time we neared a stoplight, and she wouldn’t talk at all but concentrated fiercely on the traffic.

  Even in the store, conversation was tough, because the background noise Made her hearing worse. When I asked her, in the canned-fruit aisle, whether she liked mandarins, she said, “I like any kind of instrument,” and at the register she took offense when the clerk offered plastic or paper. (“Naturally I can pay for it, or why else would I be here?” she snapped.) But we did okay. Used up slightly more than an hour—though I didn’t note the extra on my time sheet—and at the end, she told me I’d been a help. “I hate to rely on Sophia for every little thing,” she said. “Not that she isn’t sweet as pie about it, but you know.”

  Wednesday, I bought a new curtain rod and installed it in her dining room where the old one had started to sag. Thursday, she asked me to pack up those lawbooks of her husband’s. So I drove off to the liquor store for some boxes, and when I got back, I found Sophia in the sunporch. She had her coat off and her sleeves rolled up, and she’d covered the desk with cleaning supplies—rags and a can of furniture polish. “Hello, Barnaby,” she said. “I thought I’d follow along behind you and wipe off the shelves as you clear them.”

  “Oh, I can do that,” I told her.

  “I wouldn’t dream of it! You’re not her housekeeper, after all.”

  “No, but a lot of our jobs edge over into housekeeping,” I said. “We’re used to handling pretty much anything that’s required. I’ll be glad to wipe the shelves.”

  “Well, aren’t you nice,” she told me.

  But when I returned from the car with the second load of boxes, she’d already emptied one bookshelf onto the desk and started dusting. So I gave up. She must have been one of those people who couldn’t bear sitting by while other people worked—unlike her aunt, who was off in the parlor happily talking baby talk to Tatters.

  “I have no idea what to do with these books once we get them packed,” Sophia told me. “I suppose some charity might want them.”

  “I’ll ask Mrs. Dibble. She keeps a Rolodex for things like that.”

  “Uncle George has been dead for twenty years or more, and every book he ever owned is still sitting here. I think all his clothes are still in the upstairs closet too.”

  “That’s nothing compared to some of our clients,” I said. “This one woman, Mrs. Morey: she sleeps with her husband’s bathrobe laid across the foot of the bed, and he’s been gone as long as I’ve known her.”

  “Oh! How sad!”

  “Yeah, well.”

  “You must see so many sad things in this job.”

  “Well, quite a few,” I said. I stopped to consider, bracing a carton of books against my shoulder. “On the other hand,” I said, “I see quite a few happy things too. This same Mrs. Morey, for instance: she just loves her garden. Come spring, you’d think she was in heaven. She says, ‘As long as I can walk out in my garden first thing every morning—take that gardener’s early-morning walk, to check what’s sprouted overnight and what’s about to bloom,’ she says, ‘—why, I feel I have something worth staying alive for.’ ”

  Sophia lifted her dustcloth and turned to look at me. She said, “You’re a very kindhearted person, Barnaby Gaitlin.”

  I said, “Me? I am?”

  Of course, I no longer believed that Sophia was my angel. Not literally, at least. But still, I paid close attention whenever she told me something in that quiet, firm tone of voice.

  Martine said Sophia had designs on me—that she was hanging around at her aunt’s all the time in the hope I’d ask her out. I said, “She’s what?” We were loading the books onto Marline’s boyfriend’s truck when she came up with this. Granted, Sophia had put in several appearances—at the moment, she was in the attic, checking for more lawbooks—but the notion of any romantic interest was absurd. I heaved a box onto the truck bed and said, “Get serious, Pasko. She’s thirty-six years old.”

  “So?” Martine said.

  “She’s a … lady! She works in a bank!”

  “We women can sense these things,” Martine said knowingly. I had to laugh. (She was wearing Everett’s parka today, the hood trimmed with matted fake fur, and her little face poked out of it like some sharp, quick, rodenty animal.) “I saw how she was eyeing you!” she said. “Lolling around the sun-porch, getting underfoot. Asking those made-up questions in that … lilting way of hers. ‘Ooh, Barnaby, do you think they’ll all fit in one truckload?’ ‘Ooh, Barnaby, won’t you strain your back lifting that great heavy box?’ ”

  Sophia had asked nothing of the sort; Martine was imagining things. I said, “You’re just envious, is all.”

  “Envious!”

  “You wish you could act so well bred and refined.”

  “Like hell I do,” Martine said. She started back up the front walk, calling over her shoulder, “So obvious and flirtatious is more like it.”

  “Sh!” I said, glancing toward the house. I caught up with her and said, “She’s being a good niece; what’s wrong with that? Watching out for her aunt.”

  “Committing her aunt to five hours a week just to have you around,” Martine said.

  “Now wait,” I said. “I really need these extra hours, Martine.”

  “Well, sure, you need them.”

  Martine was the only person I’d told about my plan to pay back the eighty-seven hundred. (She’d made a bet with me that my parents wouldn’t accept it—“They’re not exactly poverty-stricken,” she’d said—but that just showed how little she knew Mommy Dearest.) “The question is,” she said now, “does the aunt need them?”

  But before I could argue my case any further, Sophia stepped out the front door. “Guess what, Barnaby!” she called. “In the attic are boxes and boxes of books! More than there were in the sunporch, even!”

  Her voice had a kind of caroling tone—a kind of, yes, lilting tone, I had to admit. And she tipped her head against the doorframe in this picturesque, inviting way and flashed me a white-toothed smile.

  I felt my heart sink. I glanced over at Martine. She didn’t meet my eyes; just climbed the porch steps alongside me. But I saw the smug little kink at the corner of her mouth. I heard the humming sound she made beneath her breath. “Hmm-hmm-111™,” she hummed, high-pitched and airy and innocent, clomping up the steps in her motorcycle boots.

  ON THE LAST Saturday in February, Opal had a ballet recital. This meant I had to share my monthly visit with my mother. Mom phoned and said she’d been sent an invitation. “I’ll do the driving,” she told me. “I don’t trust that car of yours as far as I can throw it.”

  “Or here’s an idea,” I said. “Why don’t I just meet you there?”

  “You mean, not ride up
together?”

  “Well …”

  “Barnaby,” she said. “I would hardly suppose you’re in any position to buy gas when you don’t need to.”

  Which was when I could have told her, “That’s my business, isn’t it?” so she could come back with, “Not as long as you still owe us eighty-seven hundred dollars, it isn’t.” For once, though, I kept quiet. I thought about Opal’s money clip and I held my tongue. This seemed to throw Mom off her stride. She waited just a beat too long, and then she cleared her throat and said, “I’ll pick you up at eight a.m. sharp. You be waiting out front.”

  I said, “Well. Okay.”

  “Don’t make me come into that place of yours and haul you out of bed. Set your alarm clock. Promise.”

  “Sure thing,” I told her.

  I tried to look on the bright side after I hung up. At least now I’d have an ally along—or someone people would assume was my ally. Though myself, I had my doubts.

  Saturday morning turned out so clear that I checked the sky for the color-change trick after I got up, but the sun had beaten me to it. And then I found I was out of instant coffee; so I had to make do with a Pepsi; and then my mother came early. I swear I would have been ready by eight, but she came five minutes before. Stalked across the patio in her brisk black wool pantsuit, all spiny-backed and indignant. “Where are you, Barnaby?” she asked—and this was after I’d opened the door and was standing in plain view.

  “Eight o’clock, you said,” I told her. “What are you doing here at five of?”

  “Well, come along; don’t waste more time arguing,” she snapped, and she turned on her heel and marched off again. She knew she was in the wrong.

  Her car was a Buick, very posh and plushy. Power windows you couldn’t roll down unless she had turned the ignition on. She drove well, though; I had to hand her that. She slung that thing around like a grocery cart—slithered out of town and started cruising up I-95 in no time flat. “Of course, at this rate we’ll hit the recital way too early,” I said when we’d been traveling awhile. “We’ll have to sit there making small talk with Natalie and Mr. Wonderful.”

  “If you didn’t want her remarrying, you shouldn’t have gotten divorced,” Mom told me.

  “Did I say I didn’t want her remarrying? What do I care what she does? I’d just rather not mingle socially with the guy; that’s all.”

  “At least we were invited,” Mom said. “Oh, when I read those letters to Ann Landers, I could cry: those poor bewildered souls who lose all touch with their grandchildren after the divorce. Why should they have to suffer? It’s no fault of theirs if their sons can’t manage to sustain a serious relationship!”

  “You certainly have a way with words,” I told her.

  “Hmm?” she asked, and she veered around a tour bus. “What did I say?” she asked me.

  I kept quiet and drummed my fingers on my knees.

  “I suppose it’s merely your generation,” Mom said in a placating tone. “Everybody in your generation seems to view marriage so lightly.”

  “Generation!” I said. “I don’t belong to a generation!”

  Oops. The trick was to dodge to one side here; resist a head-on argument. I tried for a save. “Anyhow,” I said, “generations nowadays seem to change over about every three years or so, have you noticed? Why is that, I wonder.”

  But Mom refused to get diverted. She said, “Mind you, I don’t exempt Natalie’s parents. Jim and Doris Bassett were at least as much to blame as you two were, I always felt. They actively encouraged that divorce!”

  I just whistled a tune through my teeth and gazed out the side window. We were crossing a body of water. It looked very broad and peaceful.

  “Say what you will,” Mom told me, “but at least your father and I accepted your marriage graciously. I treated Natalie like my own! That’s why she still asks me to Opal’s recitals and such. Even if she does send just a standard mimeographed invitation with my name filled in on the blank.”

  She treated Natalie better than her own, I wanted to say. Miss High-Class Good-Girl Natalie, the daughter of Mom’s dreams. But I let it rest. I watched a train skim across a railroad bridge in the distance, and I pondered whether it really was possible, these days, to get something mimeographed.

  The recital was in the basement of a church on Chestnut Street. We had the devil’s own time finding parking—ended up in a space several blocks away. “Now you see why I wanted to start out early,” Mom told me. She tossed the words over her shoulder as she strode ahead of me, her purse clamped in a paranoid way between her arm and her rib cage. All the women around us looked just like her, tailored and crisp, with shoes that you just knew, somehow, had cost a whole lot of money. All the men were homeless. They sat huddled under ragged blankets on top of the grates in the sidewalk, and I couldn’t help thinking that I had more in common with them than with my mother.

  In the church basement the women were younger, and most of them had husbands in tow. I saw no sign of Natalie or her husband, though—not that I tried very hard. I settled in a folding chair and made a telescope out of my program. (Which did seem mimeographed.) My mother started chattering in this chirpy, chipmunk tone she puts on when she feels ill at ease, giving me a whole rundown of an avant-garde play she’d recently dragged my father to. Maybe the sight of the stage had brought it to her mind. “First the actors came out all bundled up in down jackets,” she told me, “and as the play went on they stripped off a layer of clothes, see, and then another layer, till by the last act they were down to nothing.”

  “They were naked?”

  “It was meant to be symbolic.”

  “They just walked around the stage with no clothes on?”

  “I promise you, it didn’t seem the least bit shocking. These were just ordinary, middle-aged men and women. Some were overweight, even. Your father said he wished the move had been in the opposite direction—adding clothes, not taking them off.”

  I laughed. My mother said, “I don’t know why you menfolk always have to have culture just forced down your throats.”

  Then here was Natalie, wearing a dark-brown dress that made you notice her brown eyes—so secretive and distinctly lidded. “Hello, Mother Gaitlin,” she said. “And Barnaby,” she added. “You’ve met Howard, I believe.”

  Howard stood just behind her, a silver-haired, portly man holding an enormous paper cone of sweetheart roses. He gave a deep nod that was almost a bow, and my mother said, “Yes, certainly,” although I wasn’t all that sure they had met. He and I had, of course, when it couldn’t he avoided. When we accidentally crossed paths exchanging Opal or whatever. I said, “How you doing?” and then raised my chin and squinted at the stage while Mom and Natalie took care of so-thoughtful-of-you-to-invite-us and so-good-of-you-to-come.

  When we were alone again, Mom said, “That went very well, in my considered opinion.”

  I felt extremely tired, all at once. I saw that nothing could be said on this earth that wasn’t predictable. Even the bands of sunlight slanting through the basement windows were predictable, and the milky white swirls on the green linoleum floor, and the clunky-sounding “Teddy Bears’ Picnic” coming over the PA system.

  And the recital: well, you can’t get much more predictable than a children’s ballet recital. The youngest ones were dazed and obedient, milling around in tufts of pink gauze with their eyes fixed trustingly on Madame Whosit in the wings. The middle group—Opal’s group—was a bristle of gawky arms and legs struggling to form a straight line. I hadn’t realized before that Opal was so big for her age. She stood a full head above the others, down at the end, where (I guessed) she was meant to be less conspicuous. When they all set their heels together and pointed their toes sideways, she was the only one with no space showing between her thighs. In each position she teetered a bit after the others had frozen, and I felt certain that the audience noticed.

  But my mother said, “Wasn’t that precious?” applauding with just the tips o
f her fingers once the piece was over.

  Between acts the curtain came down, but you could see it poking out first one place and then another as children jostled behind it. It made me think of a pregnancy—Natalie’s pregnant stomach, the baby’s knee or elbow knobbing the plaid material of her smock.

  Not so long ago, amazingly enough.

  It felt like a lifetime.

  The oldest girls came last and showed us how it should be done, but I was too tired to watch. I let the dancers in front of me turn into a blur, and when the rest of the audience clapped, I just folded my arms and studied the acoustic tiles in the ceiling.

  We met down in front near the stage at the end of the show—Mom and I, Natalie and Howard, Opal still in her tutu. She was hugging the cone of roses. I said, “I didn’t bring any flowers myself. I didn’t have a chance to buy some. I would have, but I didn’t have a chance.”

  Before Opal could tell me it was all right, though, Mom rushed in with, “You were the best of the bunch, honey pie!” The level stare Opal gave her struck me as disconcertingly cynical, till I remembered she always looked that way. It was a hand-me-down from Natalie—Natalie’s calmness, magnified.

  “I messed up on the curtsy,” she said, turning to me.

  “Well, if you did, nobody noticed,” I told her.

  “Madame Stepp’s going to yell at me.”

  “Your dance teacher’s named Madame Stepp?”

  Howard gave a dry cough. “Ah … we had thought we might take Opal to a congratulatory lunch,” he said. “You’re welcome to join us, Barnaby, Mrs. Gaitlin …”

  “Oh, I guess not,” I hurried to tell him. “We should be heading back.”

  No one argued—not even Mom, thank heaven. “Yes,” she said. “I’ve left poor Jeffrey holding down the fort alone!”

  We stood around a moment longer, all of us no doubt picturing Dad in the throes of some kitchen emergency. (Although I knew for a fact that he spent Saturdays at the office.) Then I gave Opal’s shoulder a squeeze and said, “So long, Ope. You did great. I’m sorry I didn’t bring flowers.” And the two of us walked out.