I drove out Grove Street and on to Minnie Street and saw his house from the back. No lights on there either. I drove around to see it from the front. Did they have to sneak up the stairs and keep the television on? I wondered. No woman with a rear end like a grand piano would settle for that. I bet he took her right up and into the old lady’s room and said, “This is the new Mrs. MacQuarrie,” and that was that.
I parked the car and rolled down the window. Then without thinking what I was going to do I leaned on the horn and sounded it as long and hard as I could stand.
The sound released me, so I could yell. And I did. “Hey Clare MacQuarrie, I want to talk to you!”
No answer anywhere. “Clare MacQuarrie!” I shouted up at his dark house. “Clare come on out!” I sounded the horn again, two, three, I don’t know how many times. In between I yelled. I felt as if I was watching myself, way down here, so little, pounding my fist and yelling and leaning on the horn. Carrying on a commotion, doing whatever came into my head. It was enjoyable, in a way. I almost forgot what I was doing it for. I started honking the horn rhythmically and yelling at the same time. “Clare aren’t you ever coming out? Clare MacQuarrie for nuts-in-May, if he don’t come we’ll pull-him-away—” I was crying as well as yelling, right out in the street, and it didn’t bother me one bit.
“Helen you want to wake everybody up in this whole town?” said Buddy Shields, sticking his head in at the window. He is the night constable and I used to teach him in Sunday school.
“I’m just conducting a shivaree for the newly-married couple,” I said. “What is the matter with that?”
“I got to tell you to stop that noise.”
“I don’t feel like stopping.”
“Oh yes you do, Helen, you’re just a little upset.”
“I called and called him and he won’t come out,” I said. “All I want is him to come out.”
“Well you got to be a good girl and stop honking that horn.”
“I want him to come out.”
“Stop it. Don’t honk that horn one more time.”
“Will you make him come out?”
“Helen I can’t make a man come out of his own house if he don’t want to come.”
“I thought you were the Law, Buddy Shields.”
“I am but there is a limit to what the Law can do. If you want to see him why don’t you come back in the daytime and knock on his door nice the way any lady would do?”
“He is married in case you didn’t know.”
“Well Helen he is married just as much at night as in the daytime.”
“Is that supposed to be funny?”
“No it’s not, it’s supposed to be true. Now why don’t you move over and let me drive you home? Lookit the lights on up and down this street. There’s Grace Beecher watching us and I can see the Holmses got their windows up. You don’t want to give them anything more to talk about, do you?”
“They got nothing to do but talk anyway, they may as well talk about me.”
Then Buddy Shields straightened up and moved a little away from the car window and I saw somebody in dark clothes coming across the MacQuarries’ lawn and it was Clare. He was not wearing a dressing gown or anything, he was all dressed, in shirt and jacket and trousers. He came right up to the car while I sat there waiting to hear what I would say to him. He had not changed. He was a fat, comfortable, sleepy-faced man. But just his look, his everyday easygoing look, stopped me wanting to cry or yell. I could cry and yell till I was blue in the face and it would not change that look or make him get out of bed and across his yard one little bit faster.
“Helen, go on home,” he said, like we had been watching television and so on all evening and now was time to go home and go to bed properly. “Give my love to your Momma,” he said. “Go on home.”
That was all he meant to say. He looked at Buddy and said, “You going to drive her?” and Buddy said yes. I was looking at Clare MacQuarrie and thinking, he is a man that goes his own way. It didn’t bother him too much how I was feeling when he did what he did on top of me, and it didn’t bother him too much what kind of ruckus I made in the street when he got married. And he was a man who didn’t give out explanations, maybe didn’t have any. If there was anything he couldn’t explain, well, he would just forget about it. Here were all his neighbours watching us, but tomorrow, if he met them on the street, he would tell them a funny story. And what about me? Maybe if he met me on the street one of these days he would just say, “How are you doing, Helen?” and tell me a joke. And if I had really thought about what he was like, Clare MacQuarrie, if I had paid attention, I would have started out a lot differently with him and maybe felt differently too, though heaven knows if that would have mattered, in the end.
“Now aren’t you sorry you made all this big fuss?” Buddy said, and I slid over on the seat and watched Clare going back to his house, thinking, yes, that’s what I should have done, paid attention. Buddy said, “You’re not going to bother him and his wife any more now, are you Helen?”
“What?” I said.
“You’re not going to bother Clare and his wife any more? Because now he’s married, that’s over and done with. And you wake up tomorrow morning, you’re going to feel pretty bad over what you done tonight, you won’t see how you can go on and face people. But let me tell you things happen all the time, only thing to do is just go along, and remember you’re not the only one.” It never seemed to occur to him that it was funny for him to be lecturing me, that used to hear his Bible verses and caught him reading Leviticus on the sly.
“Like last week I’ll tell you,” he said, easing down Grove Street, in no hurry to get me home and have the lecture ended, “last week we got a call and we had to go out to Dunnock Swamp and there’s a car stuck in there. This old farmer was waving a loaded gun and talking about shooting this pair for trespassing if they didn’t get off of his property. They’d just been following a wagon track after dark, where any idiot would know you’d get stuck this time of year. You would know both of them if I said their names and you’d know they had no business being in that car together. One is a married lady. And worst is, by this time her husband is wondering why she don’t come home from choir practice—both these parties sings in the choir, I won’t tell you which one—and he has reported her missing. So we got to get a tractor to haul out the car, and leave him there sweating, and quieten down this old farmer, and then take her home separate in broad daylight, crying all the way. That’s what I mean by things happening. I saw that man and wife downstreet buying their groceries yesterday, and they didn’t look too happy but there they were. So just be a good girl Helen and go along like the rest of us and pretty soon we’ll see spring.”
Oh, Buddy Shields, you can just go on talking, and Clare will tell jokes, and Momma will cry, till she gets over it, but what I’ll never understand is why, right now, seeing Clare MacQuarrie as an unexplaining man, I felt for the first time that I wanted to reach out my hands and touch him.
RED DRESS—1946
My mother was making me a dress. All through the month of November I would come from school and find her in the kitchen, surrounded by cut-up red velvet and scraps of tissue-paper pattern. She worked at an old treadle machine pushed up against the window to get the light, and also to let her look out, past the stubble fields and bare vegetable garden, to see who went by on the road. There was seldom anybody to see.
The red velvet material was hard to work with, it pulled, and the style my mother had chosen was not easy either. She was not really a good sewer. She liked to make things; that is different. Whenever she could she tried to skip basting and pressing and she took no pride in the fine points of tailoring, the finishing of buttonholes and the overcasting of seams as, for instance, my aunt and my grandmother did. Unlike them she started off with an inspiration, a brave and dazzling idea; from that moment on, her pleasure ran downhill. In the first place she could never find a pattern to suit her. It was no wonder; there were no patterns made to match the ideas that blossomed in her head. She had made me, at various times when I was younger, a flowered organdie dress with a high Victorian neckline edged in scratchy lace, with a poke bonnet to match; a Scottish plaid outfit with a velvet jacket and tarn; an embroidered peasant blouse worn with a full red skirt and black laced bodice. I had worn these clothes with docility, even pleasure, in the days when I was unaware of the world’s opinion. Now, grown wiser, I wished for dresses like those my friend Lonnie had, bought at Beale’s store.