Mrs. Sutcliffe’s foreign voice said, “Mari-et-cha,” giving the name a rich, important sound. She was as kind as could be. When Marietta lived with the Sutcliffes later, she was treated as the daughter of the household, and it was a household just as peaceful and comfortable as she had imagined other households to be. But she never felt like a daughter there.
In Mrs. Sutcliffe’s kitchen, Beryl sat on the floor eating a raisin cookie and playing with the black-and-white cat, whose name was Dickie. Marietta’s mother sat at the table, with a cup of coffee in front of her.
“She was silly,” Mrs. Sutcliffe said. Did she mean Marietta’s mother or Marietta herself? She didn’t have many English words to describe things.
Marietta’s mother laughed, and Marietta blacked out. She fainted, after running all that way uphill, howling, in the warm, damp morning. Next thing she knew, she was taking black, sweet coffee from a spoon held by Mrs. Sutcliffe. Beryl picked Dickie up by the front legs and offered him as a cheering present. Marietta’s mother was still sitting at the table.
HER HEART WAS broken. That was what I always heard my mother say. That was the end of it. Those words lifted up the story and sealed it shut. I never asked, Who broke it? I never asked. What was the men’s poison talk? What was the meaning of the word vile?
Marietta’s mother laughed after not hanging herself. She sat at Mrs. Sutcliffe’s kitchen table long ago and laughed. Her heart was broken.
I always had a feeling, with my mother’s talk and stories, of something swelling out behind. Like a cloud you couldn’t see through, or get to the end of. There was a cloud, a poison, that had touched my mother’s life. And when I grieved my mother, I became part of it. Then I would beat my head against my mother’s stomach and breasts, against her tall, firm front, demanding to be forgiven. My mother would tell me to ask God. But it wasn’t God, it was my mother I had to get straight with. It seemed as if she knew something about me that was worse, far worse, than ordinary lies and tricks and meanness; it was a really sickening shame. I beat against my mother’s front to make her forget that.
My brothers weren’t bothered by any of this. I don’t think so. They seemed to me like cheerful savages, running around free, not having to learn much. And when I just had the two boys myself, no daughters, I felt as if something could stop now — the stories, and griefs, the old puzzles you can’t resist or solve.
AUNT BERYL said not to call her Aunt. “I’m not used to being anybody’s aunt, honey. I’m not even anybody’s momma. I’m just me. Call me Beryl.”
Beryl had started out as a stenographer, and now she had her own typing and bookkeeping business, which employed many girls. She had arrived with a man friend, whose name was Mr. Florence. Her letter had said that she would be getting a ride with a friend, but she hadn’t said whether the friend would be staying or going on. She hadn’t even said if it was a man or a woman.
Mr. Florence was staying. He was a tall, thin man with a long, tanned face, very light-colored eyes, and a way of twitching the corner of his mouth that might have been a smile.
He was the one who got to sleep in the room that my mother and I had papered, because he was the stranger, and a man. Beryl had to sleep with me. At first we thought that Mr. Florence was quite rude, because he wasn’t used to our way of talking and we weren’t used to his. The first morning, my father said to Mr. Florence, “Well, I hope you got some kind of a sleep on that old bed in there.” (The spare-room bed was heavenly, with a feather tick.) This was Mr. Florence’s cue to say that he had never slept better.
Mr. Florence twitched. He said, “I slept on worse.”
His favorite place to be was in his car. His car was a royal-blue Chrysler, from the first batch turned out after the war. Inside it, the upholstery and floor covering and roof and door padding were all pearl gray. Mr. Florence kept the names of those colors in mind and corrected you if you said just “blue” or “gray.”
“Mouse skin is what it looks like to me,” said Beryl rambunctiously “I tell him it’s just mouse skin!”
The car was parked at the side of the house, under the locust trees. Mr. Florence sat inside with the windows rolled up, smoking, in the rich new-car smell.
“I’m afraid we’re not doing much to entertain your friend,” my mother said.
“I wouldn’t worry about him,” said Beryl. She always spoke about Mr. Florence as if there was a joke about him that only she appreciated. I wondered long afterward if he had a bottle in the glove compartment and took a nip from time to time to keep his spirits up. He kept his hat on.
Beryl herself was being entertained enough for two. Instead of staying in the house and talking to my mother, as a lady visitor usually did, she demanded to be shown everything there was to see on a farm. She said that I was to take her around and explain things, and see that she didn’t fall into any manure piles.
I didn’t know what to show. I took Beryl to the icehouse, where chunks of ice the size of dresser drawers, or bigger, lay buried in saw dust. Every few days, my father would chop off a piece of ice and carry it to the kitchen, where it melted in a tin-lined box and cooled the milk and butter.
Beryl said she had never had any idea ice came in pieces that big. She seemed intent on finding things strange, or horrible, or funny.
“Where in the world do you get ice that big?”
I couldn’t tell if that was a joke.
“Off of the lake,” I said.
“Off of the lake! Do you have lakes up here that have ice on them all summer?”
I told her how my father cut the ice on the lake every winter and hauled it home, and buried it in sawdust, and that kept it from melting.
Beryl said, “That’s amazing!”
“Well, it melts a little,” I said. I was deeply disappointed in Beryl.
“That’s really amazing.”
Beryl went along when I went to get the cows. A scarecrow in white slacks (this was what my father called her afterward), with a white sun hat tied under her chin by a flaunting red ribbon. Her fingernails and toenails — she wore sandals — were painted to match the ribbon. She wore the small, dark sunglasses people wore at that time. (Not the people I knew — they didn’t own sunglasses.) She had a big red mouth, a loud laugh, hair of an unnatural color and a high gloss, like cherry wood. She was so noisy and shiny, so glamorously got up, that it was hard to tell whether she was good-looking, or happy, or anything.
We didn’t have any conversation along the cowpath, because Beryl kept her distance from the cows and was busy watching where she stepped. Once I had them all tied in their stalls, she came closer. She lit a cigarette. Nobody smoked in the barn. My father and other farmers chewed tobacco there instead. I didn’t see how I could ask Beryl to chew tobacco.
“Can you get the milk out of them or does your father have to?” Beryl said. “Is it hard to do?”
I pulled some milk down through the cow’s teat. One of the barn cats came over and waited. I shot a thin stream into its mouth. The cat and I were both showing off.
“Doesn’t that hurt?” said Beryl. “Think if it was you.”
I had never thought of a cow’s teat as corresponding to any part of myself, and was shaken by this indecency. In fact, I could never grasp a warm, warty teat in such a firm and casual way again.
BERYL SLEPT IN a peach-colored rayon nightgown trimmed with écru lace. She had a robe to match. She was just as careful about the word écru as Mr. Florence was about his royal blue and pearl gray.
I managed to get undressed and put on my nightgown without any part of me being exposed at any time. An awkward business. I left my underpants on, and hoped that Beryl had done the same. The idea of sharing my bed with a grownup was a torment to me. But I did get to see the contents of what Beryl called her beauty kit. Hand-painted glass jars contained puffs of cotton wool, talcum powder, milky lotion, ice-blue astringent. Little pots of red and mauve rouge — rather greasy-looking. Blue and black pencils. Emery boards, a pumice stone, nail polish with an overpowering smell of bananas, face powder in a celluloid box shaped like a shell, with the name of a dessert — Apricot Delight.