“That isn’t true! That’s not a word true!”
“Oh, indeed it is ma’am. We have our heroes in the ranks of Walker Brothers. I’m glad you think it’s funny,” he says sombrely.
I ask him shyly, “Sing the song.”
“What song? Have you turned into a singer on top of everything else?”
Embarrassed, my father says, “Oh, just this song I made up while I was driving around, it gives me something to do, making up rhymes.”
But after some urging he does sing it, looking at Nora with a droll, apologetic expression, and she laughs so much that in places he has to stop and wait for her to get over laughing so he can go on, because she makes him laugh too. Then he does various parts of his salesman’s spiel. Nora when she laughs squeezes her large bosom under her folded arms, “You’re crazy,” she says. “That’s all you are.” She sees my brother peering into the gramophone and she jumps up and goes over to him. “Here’s us sitting enjoying ourselves and not giving you a thought, isn’t it terrible?” she says. “You want me to put a record on, don’t you? You want to hear a nice record? Can you dance? I bet your sister can, can’t she?”
I say no. “A big girl like you and so good-looking and can’t dance!” says Nora. “It’s high time you learned. I bet you’d make a lovely dancer. Here, I’m going to put on a piece I used to dance to and even your daddy did, in his dancing days. You didn’t know your daddy was a dancer, did you? Well, he is a talented man, your daddy!”
She puts down the lid and takes hold of me unexpectedly around the waist, picks up my other hand and starts making me go backwards. “This is the way, now, this is how they dance. Follow me. This foot, see. One and one-two. One and one-two. That’s fine, that’s lovely, don’t look at your feet! Follow me, that’s right, see how easy? You’re going to be a lovely dancer! One and one-two. One and one-two. Ben, see your daughter dancing!” Whispering while you cuddle near me. Whispering where no one can hear me.…
Round and round the linoleum, me proud, intent, Nora laughing and moving with great buoyancy, wrapping me in her strange gaiety, her smell of whisky, cologne, and sweat. Under the arms her dress is damp, and little drops form along her upper lip, hang in the soft black hairs at the corners of her mouth. She whirls me around in front of my father—causing me to stumble, for I am by no means so swift a pupil as she pretends—and lets me go, breathless.
“Dance with me, Ben.”
“I’m the world’s worst dancer, Nora, and you know it.”
“I certainly never thought so.”
“You would now.”
She stands in front of him, arms hanging loose and hopeful, her breasts, which a moment ago embarrassed me with their warmth and bulk, rising and falling under her loose flowered dress, her face shining with the exercise, and delight.
“Ben.”
My father drops his head and says quietly, “Not me, Nora.”
So she can only go and take the record off. “I can drink alone but I can’t dance alone,” she says. “Unless I am a whole lot crazier than I think I am.”
“Nora,” says my father smiling. “You’re not crazy.”
“Stay for supper.”
“Oh, no. We couldn’t put you to the trouble.”
“It’s no trouble. I’d be glad of it.”
“And their mother would worry. She’d think I’d turned us over in a ditch.”
“Oh, well. Yes.”
“We’ve taken a lot of your time now.”
“Time,” says Nora bitterly. “Will you come by ever again?”
“I will if I can,” says my father.
“Bring the children. Bring your wife.”
“Yes I will,” says my father. “I will if I can.”
When she follows us to the car he says, “You come to see us too, Nora. We’re right on Grove Street, lefthand side going in, that’s north, and two doors this side—east—of Baker Street.”
Nora does not repeat these directions. She stands close to the car in her soft, brilliant dress. She touches the fender, making an unintelligible mark in the dust there.
On the way home my father does not buy any ice cream or pop, but he does go into a country store and get a package of licorice, which he shares with us. She digs with the wrong foot, I think, and the words seem sad to me as never before, dark, perverse. My father does not say anything to me about not mentioning things at home, but I know, just from the thoughtfulness, the pause when he passes the licorice, that there are things not to be mentioned. The whisky, maybe the dancing. No worry about my brother, he does not notice enough. At most he might remember the blind lady, the picture of Mary.
“Sing,” my brother commands my father, but my father says gravely, “I don’t know, I seem to be fresh out of songs. You watch the road and let me know if you see any rabbits.”
So my father drives and my brother watches the road for rabbits and I feel my father’s life flowing back from our car in the last of the afternoon, darkening and turning strange, like a landscape that has an enchantment on it, making it kindly, ordinary and familiar while you are looking at it, but changing it, once your back is turned, into something you will never know, with all kinds of weathers, and distances you cannot imagine.
When we get closer to Tuppertown the sky becomes gently overcast, as always, nearly always, on summer evenings by the Lake.
THE SHINING HOUSES
Mary sat on the back steps of Mrs. Fullerton’s house, talking—or really listening—to Mrs. Fullerton, who sold her eggs. She had come in to pay the egg money, on her way to Edith’s Debbie’s birthday party. Mrs. Fullerton did not pay calls herself and she did not invite them, but, once a business pretext was established, she liked to talk. And Mary found herself exploring her neighbour’s life as she had once explored the lives of grandmothers and aunts—by pretending to know less than she did, asking for some story she had heard before; this way, remembered episodes emerged each time with slight differences of content, meaning, colour, yet with a pure reality that usually attaches to things which are at least part legend. She had almost forgotten that there are people whose lives can be seen like this. She did not talk to many old people any more. Most of the people she knew had lives like her own, in which things were not sorted out yet, and it is not certain if this thing, or that, should be taken seriously. Mrs. Fullerton had no doubts or questions of this kind. How was it possible, for instance, not to take seriously the broad blithe back of Mr. Fullerton, disappearing down the road on a summer day, not to return?
“I didn’t know that,” said Mary. “I always thought Mr. Fullerton was dead.”
“He’s no more dead than I am,” said Mrs. Fullerton, sitting up straight. A bold Plymouth Rock walked across the bottom step and Mary’s little boy, Danny, got up to give rather cautious chase. “He’s just gone off on his travels, that’s what he is. May of gone up north, may of gone to the States, I don’t know. But he’s not dead. I would of felt it. He’s not old neither, you know, not old like I am. He was my second husband, he was younger. I never made any secret of it. I had this place and raised my children and buried my first husband, before ever Mr. Fullerton came upon the scene. Why, one time down in the post office we was standing together by the wicket and I went over to put a letter in the box and left my bag behind me, and Mr. Fullerton turns to go after me and the girl calls to him, she says, here, your mother’s left her purse!”