A Patchwork Planet Read online

  The father glanced at us as he came close (at the foreigner’s head bobbing and reeling, and me with my jacket collar flipped up and a wad of cottony white stuff poking out of a tear in one sleeve), and then he glanced away. It made me think of the passport man, refusing to meet my eyes. And that made me think of the woman in the feather coat. Sophia. So honorable, Sophia had been; so principled. So well behaved even when she thought nobody was looking.

  Oh, what makes some people more virtuous than others? Is it something they know from birth? Don’t they ever feel that zingy, thrilling urge to smash the world to bits?

  Isn’t it possible, maybe, that good people are just luckier people? Couldn’t that be the explanation?

  THE COMPANY I work for is called Rent-a-Back, Inc. How I got into it is a whole other story, but basically we provide a service for people who are old or disabled. Any load you can’t lift, any chore you don’t feel up to, why, just call on us. Say you want your lawn chairs piled in your garage in the fall. Or your rugs rolled up and stored away in die spring. We can do that. A lot of our customers have a standing order—like, an hour a week. Others just telephone as circumstances arise. Whatever.

  On the Saturday of my dud trip to Philadelphia, I came home to find a message from my boss on my answering machine. “Barnaby, it’s Virginia Dibble. Could you get back to me as soon as possible? We have an urgent request for this evening.”

  I really liked Mrs. Dibble. She was this dainty, fluttery lady a whole lot older than my mother, but I’d seen her tote a portable toilet down two flights of stairs when we were shorthanded. So even though I wasn’t in such a great mood, I dialed her number. “What’s up?” I asked her.

  “Oh, poor, poor Mrs. Alford,” she started right in. “She needs a Christmas tree put together.”

  “A what?”

  “An eight-foot artificial Christmas tree. It’s in her attic, she says, and she needs it brought down and assembled.”

  “Mrs. Dibble,” I said. “It’s New Year’s Eve.”

  “Oh, you have plans?”

  “I mean, it’s a week after Christmas. What does she want with a tree?”

  “She says her seven grandchildren are stopping by for a visit. They’re spending the night on their way home from skiing, and she wants the house to look cheery, she says, and not old-ladyish and glum.”

  “Ah.”

  Grandchildren ruled the world, if you judged by most of our clients.

  “She needs it decorated too,” Mrs. Dibble was saying. “She says she can’t manage the upper branches, and if she climbed onto a step stool, she’s scared she might break a hip.”

  Breaking a hip was what else ruled the world—the fear of it, I mean. Big bugaboo, in the circles I traveled in.

  I said, “Couldn’t she tell her grandchildren she did have a tree but took it down? Plenty of folks get rid of their trees on December twenty-sixth, tell her!”

  But I knew what Mrs. Dibble’s answer would be (“We’re the muscles, not the brains,” she always said); so I didn’t wait to hear it. “Besides,” I said, “my car is in the shop and I won’t have it back until Monday.”

  “Oh, Martine can drive,” Mrs. Dibble told me. “I thought I’d send the two of you, so as to finish that much faster. Can you do it if Martine picks you up?”

  “Well,” I said. “I guess.”

  “All the others have New Year’s plans. I’ll call Martine back again and tell her to come fetch you.”

  There were eleven full-time employees at Rent-a-Back. That meant nine people that I knew of had New Year’s plans. And these were not particularly successful people. Several might even be looked upon as losers. But still, they’d found something to do with themselves on New Year’s Eve.

  I lived in the eastern part of the city, in the basement of a duplex out Northern Parkway. Martine lived down on St. Paul. It would take her twenty-some minutes to reach me; so I had time to fix myself a peanut butter sandwich. (My only meal all day had been a bag of chips in Penn Station.) Then I grabbed a Coke and went to eat on the patio, where I could see a sliver of the driveway. I never hung around my apartment if I could help it. It was nothing but a rec room, really, which the family above me rented out because they needed the income.

  By now the sky had clouded over and darkened. When the patio lamps switched on, they made a noticeable difference, even though it couldn’t have been much later than four o’clock. The patio had these tall pole lamps that were activated by motion. If anybody came near, they would all at once light up. Then after thirty seconds they shut off again. Usually, I enjoyed teasing them. I would take a step, freeze, take another step…. Once, when the Hardestys were gone and I was grilling steaks with this girl I’d met, I told her there was no way to make the lamps stay lit nonstop (which was a flat-out lie) and we would have to keep moving if we wanted to see what we were eating. So there we were, shifting hugely in our chairs, lifting our forks with these exaggerated gestures that the lamps would be sure to notice. Then after supper we got to making out and the lamps, of course, went dark, and we forgot about them till she stood up to pull her T-shirt off, and whang! they all flared on again. I laughed until my stomach hurt.

  That afternoon, though, I wasn’t feeling so playful. I just sat hunched over my sandwich in a shreddy mesh lawn chair, and pretty soon the lamps clicked off.

  I’d finished eating by the time Martine pulled in. She was driving her boyfriend’s battered red pickup, high off the ground and narrow through the eyes. I set my Coke can in a planter and came around to climb in on the passenger side. “Hey, Martine,” I said. “No date for New Year’s Eve?”

  “He’s in bed with the throwing-up flu,” she said, backing into the street. “What’s your excuse, Mr. Peanut Butter Breath?”

  “I’ve turned against women,” I told her.

  “Ha!”

  She shifted gears and took off.

  Martine drove sitting on a cushion; that’s how small she was. Heaven knows what had possessed her to sign on at Rent-a-Back. She must have weighed ninety pounds at the most—tiny little cat-faced girl with sallow skin and boxy black hair squared off above her earlobes. But tough, I have to admit. A Sparrows Point kid, from steelworking stock. Scraped sharp knuckles on the steering wheel; gigantic black nylon jacket that smelled of motor oil. “How was your trip to Philly?” she asked, and her voice had a raspy scratch to it that made me want to clear my throat.

  I said, “It stunk.”

  “Stunk!”

  “First thing wrong,” I said, “was I had to take the train. Car is acting up again.”

  “What is it this time?”

  “Steering.”

  “Well, it serves you right for owning an endangered species,” she said.

  “Tell that to my grandpa,” I said. “He’s the one who owned it in the first place. You think I’d go out on purpose and buy a Corvette Sting Ray? So I had to plunk down money for a train ticket. Then when I get to Philly, what does Natalie do? Sends me straight back home again. Says she’s decided to stop my visits altogether.”

  “Why, she can’t decide that!” Martine said.

  “She claims I do Opal more harm than good.”

  “You just get ahold of your lawyer!”

  “Right.”

  I actually didn’t have a lawyer, but it seemed like too much work to explain that. Instead I slouched in my seat and watched the scenery slog by: bald brick houses, pale squares of grass, bushes strung with Christmas lights that were just now winking on.

  “Anyway,” I said, “her husband is a lawyer. No doubt they have some kind of fraternity or something, some secret circle she can mobilize against me. Oh, Lord. I don’t know why I ever hooked up with such a woman.”

  “Well? Why did you?” Martine asked.

  “I believe it was her hairline,” I said.

  Martine laughed.

  “Seriously,” I said. “She had this sterling-silver barrette pulling her hair straight back on top so you could see her fo
rehead. Her clean, shiny forehead. It kind of hypnotized me, you might say.”

  Martine swerved around a liquor truck that was parking at someone’s curb.

  “I’ve got to start viewing the whole picture more,” I said. “I can’t go on falling for people’s foreheads.”

  “With me, it’s mouths,” Martine said.

  “Really.”

  I began chewing on a thumbnail, incidentally covering my own mouth with my fist.

  “First time I met Everett, all I saw was his mouth. That curvy upper lip of his. Did I ask if he had a steady job, or whether he was the type who’d want to get married?”

  I said, “Married?” and tucked both fists between my knees.

  “Did I ask why he was still living with his mom, who dotes on him and serves him breakfast in bed and makes his truck payments for him when he can’t come up with the money?”

  “Geez, Pasko,” I said. “I never figured on you getting married, exactly.”

  “Why not?” she asked.

  “Well, I don’t know….”

  “You think I’m not old enough? I’m twenty-six and a half!”

  “Well, sure, you’re old enough, I guess.”

  “Or you think I’m not frilly and girly enough? Not pretty enough? What?”

  “Huh? No! Honest! I think you’re very, um …” It didn’t help that just then she sent me this crosspatch, unalluring scowl, but I said, “Very … attractive! Honest!”

  “Everett says I remind him of a ten-year-old boy.”

  Everett had a point—one of the few times I’d agreed with him. I said, “Hogwash.”

  “When I told him I wanted lingerie for Christmas, he asked if they made black lace training bras.”

  I started to grin but stopped myself.

  “Maybe we should both come up with some New Year’s resolutions,” Martine said. “Promise ourselves we won’t go on acting like such saps.”

  “Well, maybe so,” I said.

  But I guess she could tell from my voice that I didn’t have the heart for it. You get close to being thirty, and these resolutions start to seem kind of hopeless.

  I wished Natalie hadn’t felt called upon to remind me of my birthday.

  Mrs. Alford lived in Mount Washington, in a white clapboard Colonial that was fairly good-sized but shabby, like most of our clients’ houses. (Anybody rich would have hired full-time help, not just Rent-a-Back. And anybody poverty-stricken couldn’t afford even us.) She was watching from behind her storm door, with a cardigan clutched around her shoulders. A woman shaped like a pigeon: tidy little head and a deep, low-set pouch of a bosom. When we started up the steps she opened the door and called, “Good evening, Barnaby! Evening, Martine! Isn’t it nice you could come on such short notice!”

  “Oh, for you, anytime, Mrs. A.,” I told her. I walked past her into the foyer and stood waiting for instructions. Her house smelled of steam heat and brothy foods and just, well, oldness. A Christmas tree wouldn’t fool her grandchildren for an instant. But she was so cheerful and determined, peering up at us half blind and smiling brightly, her hair smoothly combed, her lipstick neatly applied. “The tree is in the attic, in a white box with a red lid,” she said, “and the ornaments should be nearby, but I’m not sure exactly where. I haven’t used them lately, because last year I went to my daughter’s for Christmas, and the year before … Now, what did I do the year before?”

  “Never fear, Mrs. A. We’ll track those suckers down no matter where they are,” I told her.

  “Mind you don’t step through the ceiling, though.”

  “Would we do a thing like that?”

  The way Rent-a-Back operated was, we tried to send each client the same two or three workers again and again. So Martine and I already knew our way around Mrs. Alford’s house. We knew how to get upstairs, and we knew more or less where the pull-down ladder was, above the second-floor hall. But I don’t think either of us had ever been in her attic before. We clambered up—Martine on my heels, nimble as a monkey—into a hollow of cold air and darkness. I groped overhead till I connected with the lightbulb cord, and then all this junk sprang into view: trunks and suitcases and lamps, andirons, kitchen chairs with no seats, electric fans so outdated you could have fit a whole hand inside their metal grilles. None of it any surprise, believe me. I had toured a lot of attics in my time. I said, “Well, there’s flooring in the middle, at least,” and Martine said, “White box, red lid. White box, red lid,” meanwhile maneuvering past a console radio, a standing ashtray, an open carton full of doorknobs. “Here it is,” she said.

  But I had caught sight of something else: a dress form, over by the chimney. It wasn’t an ordinary dress form; not a canvas torso plumped with padding. This was a life-size wooden cutout, head and all, flat as a paper doll. The face was oval and astonished—round blue eyes, two dots for nostrils, and a pink O of a mouth—with brown corkscrew curls painted in at the edges. The arms stuck out at a slant and ended above the elbows; the legs stood in a brace arrangement that kept the figure upright. “Why! It’s a Twinform,” I told Martine.

  “Hmm?”

  “It’s a Gaitlin Faithful Feminine Twinform! Invented by my great-grandfather.”

  Martine glanced over. She said, “Well, how would that be useful, though?”

  “Listen to this,” I told her. I read from the little brass plaque on the base. “ ‘Gaitlin Woodenworks, Baltimore, Maryland. Patent Applied For.’ ”

  “How would you know how big around to sew your dresses?”

  “It’s not for sewing dresses. It’s for putting together your outfit before you wear it. Like, if you’re planning to go to a party or something … Well, it does sound kind of dumb. But once upon a time, you could find a Twinform in every bedroom. Now they’ve disappeared. I’ve never seen one in person before.”

  “Those old-time inventions slay me,” Martine said. “People used to try so hard, seems like. Used to aim for the most roundabout method of doing things. Could you come give me a hand here, Barn?”

  I turned away from the Twinform, finally, and went to help her.

  The Christmas tree carton was a manageable size, with holes at each end to hang on by, but it turned out to be fairly heavy. I said, “Oof!” Martine, though, didn’t make a sound. (Both our girl employees behaved that way, I’d noticed—kept their breaths very even and quiet where a guy would have openly grunted.) “Better let me go first,” I said when we reached the ladder, but Martine said, “What: you think I can’t handle it?”

  “Fine,” I told her. “After you.” And then had the satisfaction of watching her pretend it was no big deal when sixty pounds of Christmas tree hit her in the chest as she got halfway down.

  Mrs. Alford was waiting for us in the living room—her cardigan thrown aside, her speckled hands twisting and pulling and itching to get started. “Oh, good,” she said. “But what about the ornaments, I wonder?”

  I said, “Half a minute, Mrs. A.,” and we lowered the carton to the rug.

  “You did see where they were, though,” she said. “You found the boxes.”

  “We will; don’t worry,” Martine told her.

  “I hope they’re not in the basement, instead.”

  Martine and I looked at each other.

  But no, they were in the attic. When we went back up, we spotted them on top of a disconnected radiator—two cardboard boxes marked Xmas in shaky crayon script. They weighed a lot less than the tree had. We could carry one apiece with no trouble.

  As I was heading toward the ladder, I threw another glance at the Twinform. “Of course, it didn’t allow for Fat Days,” I told Martine, “or Short Days, or any of those other days when women take forever deciding what to wear.”

  Martine said, “What?” Then she said, “I take about two minutes deciding.”

  Which was abundantly obvious, I could have told her.

  By the time we got back to the living room, Mrs. Alford had emptied the tree carton and heaped all the branches in a t
angle on the rug. She said, “Over in that corner is where we always put it. We mustn’t let it block the window, though. My husband hates for the tree to block the window.”

  I’d heard so much of that—the deceased coming back in present tense—I hardly noticed anymore.

  Martine set up the stand, while I fanned out the branches to get them looking more lifelike. It wasn’t the first time I’d put one of these together (a lot of our clients had switched to artificial), but I’d never quite adjusted to how soft the needles were. Each time I plunged my hand in among them, I felt disappointed, almost—expecting to be prickled and then failing to have it happen.

  Mrs. Alford was telling us about her grandchildren. “The oldest is sixteen,” she said, “and I’m sure she couldn’t care less whether I have a tree or not, but the little ones are at that dinky, darling, enthusiastic stage. And they’ll only be here for one night. I have to make my impression in a limited space of time, don’t you see.”

  Then she laughed merrily so we wouldn’t think she was serious, but of course she didn’t fool either of us for a second. She was dead serious.

  This one worker we had, Gene Rankin: he walked off the job after only three weeks. He said he couldn’t stand to get so tangled up in people’s lives. “Seems every time I turn around, I find myself munching cookies in some old lady’s parlor,” he said, “and from there it’s only a step or two to the ungrateful-daughter stories and the crying jags and the offers of a grown son’s empty bedroom.” Mrs. Dibble told him he would get used to it, but she just said that because she didn’t want to train another employee. You never get used to it.

  The tree turned out to be so big that we had to pull it farther from the wall once we started hooking the lower branches on. Martine wriggled in behind it and called for what she needed. “Okay, now the red-tabbed branches. Now the yellow,” and I would hand them over. Mrs. Alford went on talking. She was seated on a footstool, hugging her knees. “When the sixteen-year-old was that age,” she said, “—that dinky, darling age, I mean—why, I set a sleigh and a whole team of reindeer up on top of our roof. I climbed out the attic window and strung them along the ridgepole. But I was quite a bit younger then.”