Chapter 1
Pauline
(Cleveland, 1998)

There's a cement path in the backyard that leads to nowhere. It starts out from the porch with purpose, running parallel to the old fence, across the ragged lawn. But then it stops dead, close to nothing, as though it suddenly lost its nerve.

Pauline walks to the last square in the cement. The grass in this empty place is greener and strangely lush. The ground beneath it has subsided into the shape of a faint rectangle: ten feet by twelve feet, easily.

A swimming pool. Filled in after a drowning. Ghosts blanketed with earth. She doesn’t know why she thinks this. She can hear Alex’s voice correcting: it was probably the foundations of a garage.

The house is full of these shabby mysteries. Things that stop where they should start. A bricked-over window in the bathroom. Capped-off pipes and bundled wires. Alex said she was wasting her puny nest egg. If she had to stay, why not get something in better shape—a condo? At least something in a safer neighborhood.

He never understood her reasons. And when she tried to tell him, he’d get all nervous, and then just make another point. But when he gets back, she’ll show him. He won’t believe how much she’s done.

If he comes back. For now it’s best to think he will.

Pauline steps off the cement and feels like the ground might well give way beneath her. The end of the gangplank, the tip of the diving board. But she has to start somewhere, so why not here? She’ll dig a garden, plant some roses, give the path someplace to go.

She takes the old shovel she brought up from the basement. She loops her thumb through the handle, metal hot, wood warm from the sun. Could she have ever used this? Pauline looks at the factory-stamped letters, STANLEY, as though they somehow held the answer. No, she never lifted anything heavier than a reference book. Pauline never saw her so much as break a sweat.

She puts her foot on top of the shovel’s blade, the way you’re supposed to. She’s never gardened anything bigger than a window box, but how hard can it be? Leaning her weight forward, Pauline can feel the grit grind against the rusty metal. She raises her foot again, and this time pushes through.

There isn’t much about the house, this yard that she remembers. More like memories of memories. Pictures redrawn by rote after the originals were lost. This wire fence, yes, she thinks so—this elm tree, could be. But when she looks at the vacant rectangle, it’s like a corner torn out of her recollection. Could something have been built up, pulled down, and covered over, all in less than twenty years? She’s still waiting for the photo albums from storage. To show what she forgot.

She makes another stab with the shovel, and a jolt travels up her arm, jarring her shoulder. The metal’s struck something hard. She scoops up the dry soil and turns it over. She startles to see a shape beneath, gleaming white like bone. She bends down hesitantly to touch it, and sees it’s only rock.

None of this is really what she should be doing. But the inside of the house is too much to deal with. Not just paint, but plaster’s needed. Not just drapes, but doors. Everything’s still in boxes, and the few pieces of furniture she has are spread out like markers in every room. This is the bedroom because it has a bed in it. This is the living room because of the TV and the chair.

Pauline takes the hose and wets the ground to soften it. She doesn’t have a sprinkler, so she makes a spray with her thumb. Rivulets slither through the grass like mercury. A beetle, dark and iridescent, struggles to hang on.

The shovel goes in smoothly now. She turns over the heavy soil and it smells clean and sweet. She’ll be done the digging part well before dinner. Not the whole back corner—she can expand into it later, maybe—but a strip. She’ll make a clearing from the end of the path to the fence, a flower bed. Names of weeds come to her at random: creeping Charlie, plantain, sorrel, but she can’t put together which is which.

The sun is high overhead now, and scattered rocks gleam wet in the soil. She gets down on her hands and knees to collect them, but their beauty evaporates in the heat. Her hair swings loose around her face, and she does her best to push it back with her forearm. Her knuckles itch with mud.

The phone rings once—at least she thinks so—and stops.

Alex? She could have imagined it.

She stands up too quickly, and feels a sudden dizziness. She strains to listen, but the humidity seems to warp all sound. The phone’s sitting in the open kitchen window, and the ringer’s turned up—even from here, she should be able to hear it. She makes her way back to the house, stiff and wobbly on her feet.

A dog barks in the distance, but otherwise the air is still.

It must have been a trick of her ears.

She’s standing near the tap in the side of the house, so she might as well turn on the garden hose. That can be why she came here. She rinses her hands, and a blister she didn’t notice before starts to sting. Maybe she’ll just duck into the kitchen to check the answering machine. He might have left a message. No she won’t. She’ll stay outside and finish here.

Every movement of the shovel hurts now, but she’s reached the point of no return. Coming back to it, everything looks worse than when she started: a ragged trench with dirt strewn round it. Piles of rocks and weeds. Why is she doing this? Clinging so hard to this lost cause? As if a shovel or a paint roller could really bring anything—or anybody—back.

She’s almost reached the fence line. A thin, bent sapling barely two feet high has grown up through the wire, planted haphazardly by the wind. She loosens the earth around it and pulls, but the leaves just strip off in her fingers. She digs deeper, wiggling the shovel’s handle as she goes. But there’s something hard below the surface, too big or too stubborn to budge.

She tests another spot in the ground a good foot away. Clunk. If it's a rock it's a big one. She scoops up some of the loose earth with her fingers, then reaches down the hole to touch the thin, tenacious roots. Yes, there’s a small gap underneath them—a hollow, where everything sprawls outward. Her hand just fits.

She pushes in a little further (should she be doing this?). Before she knows it, her forearm’s halfway in. She feels another wave of dizziness. Her back is locked in a tight, awkward, position, but she’s almost there. A bit of earth gives way, and she lurches forward. Her fingers touch something wide and flat and smooth. She can’t see anything, but she knows there’s more than just rock here. Something cold and hard and glasslike.  Something flat and large. She tests her knuckles against it, rapping gently.

A faint, hollow thunk echoes through the earth like a drum. 

Mae stands with the wash basket on her hip, facing the yard below. The porch, the grass, the clothesline—the rain did nothing to clean any of it, although everything is dripping wet. She takes one of the damp towels and wipes a step so she can sit down. It is this way with her most days now. Only at night does she feel better. She presses her head against the cool pillow and there’s just clear silence and dark. But mornings are like a hangover without anything to drink. She wakes up too early, and the next thing she knows, it’s too late. Frank is in a hurry and there are never enough clean shirts. She cooks breakfast but she cannot eat it herself. She feels too sick.

The last time anything really good happened—no, she can’t say that—what she means is, before she moved to Cleveland and married Frank—was when she first came to Eau Claire and started at Sacred Heart. Before then her life was fairly ordinary. She lived at home in Chippewa Falls, where she went to high school and worked in her parents’ grocery store. She always wore her hair in long, dark braids coiled across the top of her head or in two smooth buns over her ears. But the summer before she came to Eau Claire things began to change. She cut her hair short, for one thing—so short that the back of her neck showed. Her friend Theresa said she looked like a movie star, although Mae was hard-pressed to think of anyone in pictures with such a crooked nose.

The girls at school had all called her Mae for short, so, when she was applying for the job at Sacred Heart, she put down “Mae” in quotes before “Myrtle Sullivan.” She had a new boldness; Eau Claire was like a fresh start. Later Hollis would start calling her Myrtle, though no one else at the hospital did, and ask her to grow her hair. He could not think for the life of him why she would do something so silly as change her name.

She liked it better there than Chippewa. The older girls in her family were all married and had gone on to bigger cities and better things, but for Mae, at least for the time being, this was enough. She could go to the movies in the evenings and she was glad to have a place of her own instead of sharing with her sisters. She already had a few friends in town, a couple of girls she knew from school.

It was a small room, but she kept it neat with its little white coverlet on the bed and a wardrobe with a mirror for her clothes. On weekends, she’d fill a basin with water and a little soap and wash her underwear and stockings, then hang them up to dry. The landlady said she could air them in the backyard, but there were so many people coming and going she was afraid they’d be stolen. Most of the time she strung them up in front of the open window in her room. For dinner she would usually heat up some soup on her hotplate. The landlady served a “supper” at that hour, but it was an extra dollar-fifty a week and just Monday through Thursday nights, never on weekends. The rest of the house was mainly men who could not cook for themselves and were at the mercy of whatever the landlady would prepare, usually stews and hashes and whatnot made from leftovers from the roast she’d cook for her own son when he visited on Sunday night. Mae kept some coffee and a stash of canned goods in her room. Sometimes she’d bring back a bag of jelly doughnuts or a loaf of soft white bread and a hard-boiled egg on her way home from the hospital. She was not much interested in cooking or food but ate with a good appetite whenever she had the opportunity. Other days she just “lived on air” as her mother would call it, nibbling on this and that, but mostly forgetting to eat. She liked bacon sandwiches and liverwurst on toast, but never seemed to get around to buying the things she needed to make them.

She seldom went out for meals with Hollis, but sometimes, when they met at the office he had away from the hospital, he’d bring a bottle of wine and a few meat pastries he bought at the butcher below. She’d look forward to these times, though their meetings were usually short and matter of fact. He didn’t expect her to talk much, but seemed to rely on her to listen. He was always abrupt at the hospital, but here, with his trousers and shirt hanging on the back of a chair, he seemed to have shed some of his authority. He was big-bellied and barrel-chested, but his arms and legs were thin and his neck and face and hands were dotted with russet freckles, making him, even at fifty-two, still look like a bit of a boy.

The truth of it is, she doubts that she could get pregnant again. There were things she wanted to ask Hollis about afterwards, but it was as if there were an agreement between them, now that this had all happened, and nothing would be the same again. She thought of confiding in one of the nurses she was friendly with at Sacred Heart, but she didn’t dare. “What we have done here is illegal,” Hollis said in the car afterwards. “Let’s put this all behind us now.”

There was so much blood, but she did as Hollis told her, staying in bed for most of the day, and making sure to eat something even though she did not want it. He came by the rooming house only once, to take her temperature and her pulse. She had already told her landlady she was not well, and Hollis, after all, was a doctor.

He kissed her on the cheek after he felt her forehead—that was the way he said goodbye, even though she would still see him in the hallways in the hospital during the few weeks before she left for Cleveland. During that time he pretended not to know her. It was easy to make the nurses believe she had been sick with influenza.  Sister Irene told her she still looked pale.

The morning she left, she found an envelope pushed under her door typewritten “Myrtle.” It could only be from him. She had packed up her things in a small suitcase and a blanket box tied with rope. Just clothes mostly, a doll from childhood, some books he had given her, and a set of monogrammed linens from her mother that she never used. She took the envelope and tucked it away in her coat. She would open it later when she had more privacy. Right now she didn’t want to make a scene.

The train wasn’t crowded, so she found a seat far from everyone, and left her coat beside her just in case anyone tried to sit down. She bunched up her cardigan to rest her head against the window. There were miles and miles of rail yard it seemed, derelict land that was neither wild nor inhabited, just weeds and endless junk rusting and rotting into the earth. There was a group of boys on the embankment above, following the broken tracks. One of them dragged a large stick behind him, which he shook in the air the way an ape would, when the train got near. The others made faces and jerked their arms up and down, giving any passengers who might be looking the finger. That was her last glimpse of Eau Claire.

She opened the envelope when they were far from town. The car was nearly empty and the conductor had finished his rounds. There was no note, just a blank sheet of paper folded in three to conceal a twenty-dollar bill. She closed her eyes just to rest them and a burning spill of tears rushed down her nose and into her mouth. This is what she was to him, what it was worth to be rid of her: five weeks’ rent.

She put the money back in the envelope and tucked it into her handbag. She would have to decide what to do with it later because she wasn’t thinking clearly now. Spend it, send it to his wife, throw it away, she didn’t know. She leaned her head against the cool glass of the window. Night was coming and she couldn’t make out much of the landscape with it so dark and the lights so bright inside the train. She might sleep a little now to be fresher when she met her sister in the morning. She unpinned her braids and settled her head back more comfortably. With her hair down, Hollis used to say she looked like an Indian. But enough of that. She’d cut her hair short in Cleveland and everyone would call her Mae.

Things are so much better now is what anyone would tell her. Better than a boarding house and an old married doctor and doing laundry in your room and eating dinner sitting on your bed. She’d been lucky, even blessed. But when she looks down now, she sees the sun on the bones of her hand like an x-ray, and thinks, I do not want to be here or be doing this.

If Hollis were here he would tell her to develop her intellect. But the books people give her are too hard and she does not want them anyway. The romances, the Pearl S. Buck, the heavy Melville, they are all the same to her. She doesn’t feel like reading but she makes herself try, and when her eyes hit the page, she drags them across every word. But the words do not engage with her mind and when she finishes a page or a paragraph or a sentence even sometimes, she doesn’t remember what she just read even though her attention wasn’t wandering. Her thoughts didn’t drift to anything else, but the words just fell away one by one like objects knocked off a shelf.

She does not know how it could be that she could be so bored and so restless and so scared and so lazy all at once. There had been times when she knew had learned something or was ready to learn something and wanted to see and suffer and think about what was to come but now she wanted no more of it. The only thing she could see now was maybe having a child. That would be enough to finish the plan of what was expected of her. She could rest then, find a long breathing place. But she was afraid to try because her insides were probably ruined from what happened in Eau Claire. She had seen enough of it. Miscarriages. Babies born still. She had been careful since, that was never a problem with Frank. But maybe it was not so much the care they took, as the ruined state of her insides.

There is a loud squeak from over the fence and Mae startles, as if shaken from a dream. It is as though anyone could read her mind just sitting here in the open, slouched against the rail. It’s the neighbor’s clothesline that’s making all the noise. With each creak of the wheel, a big white pair of underpants jerks its way a little further towards the end of the lawn. Mrs. Peters is out of sight in the next yard, but from time to time, her thick fingers appear, reaching up with the clothespins.

Mae stands slowly, balancing the basket on one hip. The back of her skirt is stuck to her legs, and the towel she used for the steps is almost black. Mrs. Peters cannot see her, can she? She steps through the wet grass with her head bent low.

Frank’s shirts have been sitting in the basket much too long, and every one of them is full of wrinkles. She shakes out each one and hangs it with two pegs at the collar. Her slippers are soaked down near the toes, and she kicks them off into the grass so her feet are bare.

“Excuse me,” Mrs. Peters calls over the fence, just her rust-brown hair, not her face, showing. “Excuse me, if you hang them that way there’ll be more ironing for you. Put them upside down so they spread, then the collars won’t get so pinched up either.”

Mae feels her neighbor’s flat eyes staring through the fence, and her throat goes hard with anger. “Thank you,” she says hoarsely. She fixes the shirts so they’re the proper way up, and then goes back to the house.

***

She cannot be happy like him. Today is Friday and he is finally home. He is singing and has a bottle of brandy in one arm, a bunch of flowers in the other. Why isn’t she smiling? The brandy was supposed to be something she’d like.

She was shy when they first met, still is, but it doesn’t matter now, not between the two of them anyway. He drew her out of it, right from the beginning. It always took another person to fill in all the gaps, to ask questions, to entertain and talk. She could add things to his jokes. She could answer him back and elaborate.

She was getting her sister Doris’s car fixed when she first met him. It was only a few days after she left Eau Claire, but Doris sent her to the garage with a map and some fussy directions while she took the streetcar to work. Mae would never mention this part now, but that day, she felt like the stuffing had been knocked out of her. Her eyes seemed permanently swollen and she’d start crying again at the drop of a hat. Doris only knew a little about what happened in Eau Claire, but she told Mae she’d already done enough moping around. It was time to do something useful instead.

She remembers holding her gloves together in her hands while she spoke to him. They were alone in the garage with the old Studebaker laid out like a patient on a table. She tried not to smile too widely because of her tooth. She had—still does sometimes—this way of keeping her tongue over the edge of the part she chipped opening a bobby pin. She stood like this listening the whole time, but then he made her smile and she forgot all about it. She sat down when he asked, and put her gloves and purse on the chair beside her. When she stood up, she didn't think about whether her stocking seams were twisted or if the pin in her hem showed. She forgot all about worrying about what she did.

She knew she left her gloves, but she was too embarrassed to go back to get them. There were men working in front of the garage and she did not want to make her way past them again. She wasn't good at parking, or turning tight corners, and it would be blocking the sidewalk just to stop here. The car was fixed, wasn’t that enough?

But he was suddenly there beside her, holding her gloves in his hat like he caught them out of the sky. He brought them to her, right up to the window like a carhop. He held both hands on the brim while she took them. The label inside the hat said Arrow.

The note she wrote him was on stationery that was white with small roses. Thin ink scratched from a speedball pen. Thank you for bringing me my gloves. It was nice to meet you. Nothing more. But in a day he sent one back, black pen on lined paper torn from a notebook.  When I read your note I was so happy I threw all my things out the window. Mae did not think this could really be true, but she laughed out loud at the idea of it. It also said, Will you go to the movies with me? She wore the blue dress she got for her birthday for the occasion. Her stockings bagged at the knees but she tightened the garters so it wouldn’t show.

She told her sister she'd be having dinner at Helen’s, one of her girlfriends from school. This was plainly a lie and it meant going without eating that night. Not even a week away from Eau Claire and already she was sneaking around. But she didn’t want to tell her sister she was seeing a fella, not right away, anyway. She didn’t want to open herself up to questions now.

She met him outside the theater at six o’clock. She told him not to pick her up at her sister’s, though he wanted to. She said she’d be downtown looking for a job all day, so it’d be best just to meet him at the theater. He looked different that night, older than at the garage. She could tell he’d gone to some trouble for her. He had a haircut and his hands were pretty clean now, but for some reason he still needed a shave. There were deep lines in his face that she did not notice before, but he smiled the same big smile. He told her his full name: Francis Joseph Mroz. He said it like M’Rose, though he told her it was “Polack” for frost. He had an older brother, but the rest of his family was gone. He said he’d be twenty-nine in October.

She told him she was twenty-one and that she came from Chippewa Falls. She hoped he would not ask her too much more about herself, at least not right away.

“All right then.” He rubbed his hands together, then laced up his fingers and stretched them backward when they took their seats. Mae did not know what to say and she wished she had eaten more that day because she could feel a little tremble in her hand, a kind of a wobble at the heart of her, in her stomach and in her throat.

“Can you see all the angels up there? Those angels are why this is my favorite theater.”

And it was beautiful—like a theater, well, out of the movies. There was nothing like this in Chippewa or Eau Claire. From where she sat, the deep green curtains looked like velvet, and there were tall pillars and arches painted to look like marble. She kept looking up the whole time they talked, so she didn’t have to face him. There in the balcony front row, even with all the rustling and chatter behind them, it was as if they were all alone.

The movie was called The Awful Truth and it was the most awfully funny picture she’d ever seen. Frank laughed nearly the whole time, from start to finish, with a deep kind of a roar that she could feel through her ribcage. When the little dog found the singing teacher’s bowler hat stashed behind the mirror, he slapped his knee and nearly scorched the crease in his pants with his cigarette. This is the way he’d tell it later, anyway: how he burned his pants on their first date.

When they left the theater, it didn’t matter that it was raining. “It’ll save you calling the fire department,” he said. It was dusk—early yet—although maybe a little late for her still to be at Helen’s.

“My sister’s expecting me back. I can catch a streetcar here.”

“Let me walk you.” He laid his hand lightly on her elbow. “What do you care anyway? You’re a grown woman after all.”

He opened his umbrella, and she leaned in against him, though one shoulder still got wet. She walked along with him this way and pretended not to notice a streetcar was coming, and that the streets were growing dark.

It took nearly an hour to get home, all the way along Euclid. The rain stopped after just a few minutes, but whenever Frank tells the story now, he always says it was a terrible storm. She let herself be led, listening to him talk in his funny, grand way about the city and the things that he loved there, though she knew he was mostly fooling. He told her about the biggest sandwich, the one they serve at Rudy’s and how he ate the whole thing, layers of corned beef and egg salad all together, while the entire restaurant watched. He told her she was the most beautiful girl in Cleveland, far too beautiful to ride the streetcar, and she loved him for it although she knew it was the biggest lie of all.

By the time they reached Doris’s house, it hardly mattered that he went with her all the way up the steps, that his feet thumped hard on the wood planks, that his voice and laugh rang out below the open upstairs window. She meant to say goodbye on the corner, safely away from the porch light, but it was too late for that now. She kissed him softly on the mouth and he pushed in close to her, smelling like damp wool, hair tonic and tobacco.

“Can I see you tomorrow?” He was serious now, but it did not last long. “Better get home now, the wolf’s at the door.” She did not know if he meant himself or her sister.

When she got in, it was nothing like what she was afraid of. Her friend Helen didn’t run into her sister by coincidence on the street or phone out of the blue to ask after her. There were no emergencies, nobody got sick, no one from Eau Claire called with bad news or accusations. And Doris was just sitting at the kitchen table reading. “How was your supper?” she asked, but you could tell she didn’t really want to hear. “Me, I just heated up some of the roast from last night.”

The overhead light burned a hazy yellow and cooking smells still hung close in the air. The curtain above the sink was wet with rain and stuck to the flyscreen. “Close that, would you,” said her sister, pointing. It was an evening like any other since she got here.

But she still thought of Frank. And there, in the guest bed of her sister’s plain house, she tried to hold on to some of the magic of the theater. She pictured him throwing all his things out the window when he got her note. She did not really believe it, but it gave her a little heady rush, and she found herself smiling the next day while she did the breakfast dishes, and while she sat beside her sister, knitting, in the chair that once belonged to their mother.

Jobs were scarce, but there was an advertisement in the paper for a bookkeeper for Archbold’s, a novelty store downtown. She had only been a file clerk at Sacred Heart, but her sister told her she should apply. Doris was the office manager for Bailey Meter Company. They weren’t hiring now, but there might be something soon. Mae did not want to try for the bookkeeper job because she was sure she would not get it. It embarrassed her to walk into all those offices in a city she hardly knew, to stand in line with other girls who were better dressed, and so often younger, just biding their time before they got married. But every morning she fixed herself up so her sister would see her, how she was making an effort. She did the dishes with an apron on, just her slip and a dark wool skirt underneath. She’d leave her blouse, still cooling from the iron, on the back of the kitchen door.

She saw Frank often and, now that a few weeks had passed, she stopped making up excuses. Doris was not surprised. She just shook her head, “You know what I’m going to tell you, so I won’t say it.”

“Don’t worry,” said Mae. Her voice was steady, but she could not meet her sister's eye.

***

 

It’s been some time since they got married and moved here. Since summer faded and the dark months came. It seems she has so little to show for it, just keeping house, waiting for a child to come. Her sister stopped telling her about bookkeeping jobs long ago and it’s been months since she read the classified ads. Now all she has to look forward to are the day’s goings on. Trips to the butcher or the druggist or getting Frank’s shoes repaired. She hardly has the energy for the chores that bring her downtown.

The neighborhood is blanketed with snow and a great sleepiness takes her. She is a watcher now and she finds nothing but small changes: in the crackles of ice on the kitchen windows and in the frozen drifts of snow on the sills. The dying sun warms the living room a little less every day. The uneaten bread and lettuce in the icebox get more tired as the week wears on.

Some days Frank comes home angry. These are changes too, like weather. He throws his hat down on the armchair like a great rude ox, then kicks off his shoes as though they’re insulting him. After that he hardly speaks, just pours a drink and reads the paper for a while. It isn’t until he’s been home for some time that he really cuts loose and the tirades come. They’re all idiots at the garage. He fixes what they break and they break what he fixes. George chewed him out for something that wasn’t his fault. Other times he greets her with a kiss but then disappears upstairs for a nap or a bath. It seems the happier he is, the less she sees of him. But when he’s worse off, he always needs her to be there and take him as he is.

It is a weekday afternoon and she has fallen asleep on the couch with a magazine bunched up beneath her. This is all she knows for sure. She remembers pulling her cardigan over her like a blanket, then rolling over on her front to keep her body warm. She must have slept like this for some time. The sunlight is bright through the open curtains and she thinks for a moment that it is the next morning and Frank did not come home. It is an idea she does not really believe, but she cannot put it out of her head. She reasons with herself. Even she couldn’t be that tired. And there are ways she might be able to tell: she could check the milk bottles on the side porch, or the cars parked on the street. She could turn on the radio or buy a newspaper and look. But when she stands up, the feeling disappears like a dream. She knows only a few hours have passed and the sun has not yet set. The clock says two and it is still the afternoon. Frank won’t be home for hours. There would be plenty of time before she could call him late.

She hears the crunch of snow and footsteps on the porch. The doorbell rings before she can get to the window. She feels a guilty panic. She isn’t in the mood to talk to anyone, and it’s probably just a salesman anyway—she has no friends who would call. She presses her face to the glass and can make out a head of gray hair and a bundle of dark clothing. It is a face she doesn’t recognize, at least not from here. She steps back from the window but the woman has already seen her. She wishes she had thought to put out the light.

She opens the door slowly.

 “Your ashcan rolled into street.” It is an accusation.

“Beg pardon?”

“Your ashcan rolled into street. I put back on curb,” The old woman’s S’s sound like hisses. It is an accent Mae cannot place. She never was good at those things.

“Sorry—it must have been the wind.” She looks over the woman’s shoulder and sees the dented gray can. There is a chill around her ankles. She is still in her housecoat and is suddenly ashamed.

“You are sick?” The old woman’s hands are bare and red and trembling but she speaks quickly and her eyes are sharp.

”Yes,” she lies. “It’s chilly, I should shut the door.”

“I see you before, but you do not see me.” This is also an accusation. “I am your neighbor. I live there.” She points to the house directly across the street.

 “I’m Mae.”

“Goodbye Mae. I see you again.” She turns and shuffles down the stairs. She is a small woman, nothing much to reckon with, a tiny black figure against the still white street.

For the rest of the afternoon, Mae is aware of the old woman and her house with all its windows facing hers. She puts on a dress and apron, her boots and coat, and brings the ashcan back to the porch where it belongs. But she still feels self-conscious, as though she’d been caught in the act. It seems to her she should be doing something else, something to keep busy, but she doesn’t know what that would be. It is as though eyes are watching her even as she is here alone doing the most ordinary things—while she turns the pages of a magazine or kicks at the rungs of her chair. She stays out of the living room with its wide front windows and keeps to the back of the house mostly. She wants to close the curtains but it’s not yet dark.

Just after four, the doorbell rings again. She is in the kitchen listening to the news on the radio. She does not understand it all, but things in Europe are getting worse. Over the sound of the broadcast, the bell rings, and then rings again, and a frail, persistent voice calls her name. It’s that old lady from across the street again, it must be her, and Mae cannot pretend there’s no one home. She turns down the radio and goes to the door.

The woman is carrying something bundled in a small blanket.

 “I do not know if you are sleeping,” she says.

“No,” says Mae, avoiding her eye. The woman unwraps the blanket and takes out an earthenware pot. “This is for you,” she says. The pot is heavy and quite warm. “It makes you better. It is good for everything.” She hands her a paper bag that looks like it’s been cut down from a bigger one. Mae thanks her for this too. It would be more trouble to refuse.

It is a thick brown soup with a layer of grease on the top. When she stirs it she recognizes beef, carrots, and a small, white grain that could be barley. In the bag is a hunk of dark bread. She pulls off a little piece. It is tough and chewy but still good. She pours some of the soup into a bowl and eats it standing there at the counter. When it is gone, she pours a little more and gulps it down with great gusto. She didn’t know she was so hungry. She dips the bread in the thick broth, tearing it piece by piece.

At the bottom of the bowl is a small bone. Not a splinter of beef bone, but a gray, well-shaped bone, round and knobby like a knuckle. Do cows have bones like that? She does not know. At the edge of it there is a deep garnet clot of blood. She taps it with her spoon and it collapses like an egg yolk. A wave of nausea hits her. She has eaten too much too quickly. The grease still coats her mouth and her stomach hurts. She goes to the sink and dumps the rest of the soup from the pot. Chunks of meat clump up in the drain but she doesn’t find any more bones. She cleans up the mess and washes the pot. It is not like anything she’s seen in the stores here: thick and brown and patterned with round leaves and little children holding hands. She turns the lid over and there’s a big chip missing from the inside rim she didn’t notice before. She can’t have broken it—how could that be? She searches through the suds in the sink but finds nothing. She tells herself the chip was already there.

But enough of this. Frank will be home soon and she still hasn’t done the ironing—she’s put it off too long. She hasn’t even thought about dinner and there’s no time to get to the market. She finds a can of beans in the cupboard and there are still eggs and leftover ham in the icebox. It will have to do. She wipes down the counter and opens the window. It’s much too cold but she wants to get rid of the smell of the soup.

Frank doesn’t complain about having breakfast food for dinner. He is hungry and cheerful and goes for seconds. Mae still feels queasy from the soup. She has some dry toast with a little of the beans but stays away from the eggs and meat. She watches Frank cut around the bone in the ham steak. It’s round like a ring with a dab of marrow in the middle. When dinner is finished it’s the only thing left on his plate.

The brown pot—maybe it’s a tureen, she doesn’t know these things—sits on top of the icebox. She expects the old woman will be back for it, but she’s not sure when. She might do better just to return it herself and get it over with. Not tonight, but maybe tomorrow. Surely the old woman wouldn’t come and bother her for it right away.

Frank is already sleeping when she curls up beside him. Her hair is still damp around the temples from washing her face. She always wonders how he can fall asleep so deeply so quickly. Her nights are fitful. It is only during her afternoon naps, when sleep is heavy and irresistible, that she even dreams.

In the morning she feels fresh and rested with no headache. She cooks breakfast and makes Frank a sandwich for lunch. Light streams through the kitchen window onto the table. This is a day where she can get things done. She must, of course, return the pot to the old woman, but there are other things too—things she feels like doing—maybe some of her errands downtown.

She dresses as though she is going into the city, taking care with her hair and putting on a fresh-ironed blouse. She buttons her coat, takes the old brown pot, and heads down the icy steps. She is quick but careful not to stumble or fall.

The stairs to her neighbor’s house haven’t been cleared in some time. There are crusts of frozen footprints: shapes of the old woman’s thick-soled boots and of the frail, three-toed feet of birds. The woman seems different today, smaller, older. Her skin is as thin and sallow as the peel of an onion. Mae explains she has errands to do, but the old woman invites her inside. It is easier to stop in quickly than to say no. And she is curious now.

To her surprise, the woman’s house is no better kept than her own. In fact, it’s worse probably. There’s a strange smell she doesn’t recognize, sweet and cloying like an apple core that’s going brown. But there is another smell too, a fainter one, that reminds her of machine oil or raw meat. Not that the two are alike, really, but it’s what she thinks of. The house is built like hers, but backwards—kind of like a mirror image. The porch is the same with the front door in the middle, but the kitchen is to the left instead of the right, and the staircase up to the bedroom is on the opposite side too. She recognizes the windows with their varnished sashes, the thin baseboards, and the paneled doors, but the wallpaper, the furniture and all the pictures are nothing like she has at home.

“You wait here,” says the old woman pointing to the living room, “I make tea.”

Mae finds herself sitting down obediently. She looks around the room with interest. There is her fireplace, her two windows—her front room in its shape and size—but instead of her lumpy brown sofa she is sitting on a carved wooden bench with a cloth seat. There are framed pictures on the mantle and shelves to the side holding dark little boxes. A layer of dust covers everything like snow. There is an excitement here in this stillness, an odd strangeness, but she does not know why.

The old woman is humming in the kitchen, and her back is turned. She slams the kettle on the stove and curses when the burner does not light. Mae wants to get a closer look at the pictures, the boxes, but she does not. She sits up straighter on the bench, keeping good posture like she did at school.

 “Matches, matches, I need more matches.”

“I—“ Mae starts to answer but the woman is not speaking to her.

Above the sink, she can see a crowd of pots and cups and utensils all hung up on hooks. She leans her head a little to the side to see more through the doorway. There are dark bunches of dried plants tied together with string. It looks like the inside of a gypsy caravan from a child’s picture book.

The old woman turns to her, “Milk?” It sounds like a demand. 

“Yes—yes please.” Mae sees her lift the lid of the brown pot and put something inside it before placing it on a shelf. If the chip were new, Mae thinks, she would probably notice it now.

At last the woman brings her the tea, which she is not used to drinking. There is a plate of sugar cubes and Mae spoons one up awkwardly and drops it with a splash in her cup. The old woman takes a cube with her fingers and places it on her tongue. She drinks the tea, sucking it through the worn place where her teeth have gone dark.

“You have husband,” the woman tells her.

“Yes,” Mae pauses, putting down her cup. “We got married in June and we moved here right afterwards.”

“And no children,” again, this is not a question.

“No, no—I mean, not yet.” She does not want to say any more. “Do you have any—any children?”

“I have daughter,” says the woman.

“And your husband?” she should not have asked this, not yet.

“He is gone.”

Mae does not know if this means he is dead or someplace else, but she is glad to change the subject. Shadows hang in the corners of the room—it’s so much darker here this time of day than it is at home. It must be because the windows are all facing north instead of south.

“How long have you been here—in this house?”

“Oh, I don’t know, how many? How many, many years?” It is like she is asking a question and Mae doesn’t know the answer. There is a dead pause while she sips her tea.

The woman looks at her closely, “How is it broken?”

Mae thinks for a moment she is asking about the pot, but then realizes she means her tooth. She laughs, embarrassed. “When I was younger—it was opening a bobby pin.”

The woman is still staring, not at her eyes or her tooth even, but as though she sees something just behind her, or just next to her, a shadow on the wall. Mae keeps talking, pushed by little rush of nervousness she does not know how to stop. “I came here from Eau Claire—that’s in Wisconsin. My sister lives here—she lives in Shaker Heights. She’s an office manager at Bailey Meter. She was married for a few years but her husband died…”

“You look like my sister so much,” the woman says.

Mae smiles like she does not believe it.

“See, I show you.” She goes to a drawer in the spindly secretary desk and pulls out an envelope.

Inside is a small photograph on thick, yellowed cardboard with leaves and curlicues around it. There are two young women who look to be in their late teens. One is seated and the other, who seems a little older, is standing behind her. They are both odd looking with lean, angular faces, large eyes and dark hair piled on top of their heads. They are not beautiful or even pretty, but there is something about them that makes Mae want to look. She sees something of the old woman, maybe it’s the sharpness of her eyes, or the angle of her nose, in the one who’s standing. But she does not recognize the face of the other one, not at all. And she certainly sees nothing of herself.

“See,” the old woman says, leaning in close to Mae and pointing at the seated girl, “you are her.” Of course she means Mae looks like her. Maybe she is tired today because her English seems to come and go. For some reason it’s never been as good as when she was telling her about the ashcan.

 “Is that you?” Mae asks, pointing to the standing girl.

 “Yes,” says the woman, “she is me.”

The old woman is so close now their thighs are nearly touching. Mae can smell her breath and skin and hair, not unpleasant exactly, but musty and intimate like bedclothes. Mae puts her cup back on the table, moving away a little as she does so.

“Where are you from?” She is thinking about the accent and the peculiar faces and the scrawls in ink at the bottom of the portrait she does not understand.

“I come from Europe,” the woman says, and gets up to put the envelope back in the drawer. There is another dead pause and Mae takes a big sip of tea. She added too much milk and it’s already going cold, but she gulps the rest down quickly and puts the cup back on the table. The old woman leans over and peers at the dregs. Mae wonders if she’s done something wrong.

“It was good,” Mae says. “I mean, I don’t usually have tea but I enjoyed it.”

There is a silence.

“I should be getting back home,” she says, standing up too quickly and knocking the table with her knee. The cup and saucer rattle but do not fall.  “I mean, thank you so much for the tea—and for the soup too. It was—“she thinks of the bone, “it was—beef barley, right?”

The woman nods. “Yes, there is barley.”

Mae pauses. This is her last chance to ask about the chip, but she can’t make herself do it.

“I see you again soon, Mae,” says the old woman.

“Sure,” says Mae. It’s too late, she’s embarrassed to realize, to ask the woman’s name.