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 ecru lace. She had a robe to match. She was just as careful about the word
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.
I had heated some water on the coal-oil stove we used in summertime. Beryl scrubbed her face clean, and there was such a change that I almost expected to see makeup lying in strips in the washbowl, like the old wallpaper we had soaked and peeled. Beryl’s skin was pale now, covered with fine cracks, rather like the shiny mud at the bottom of puddles drying up in early summer.
“Look what happened to my skin,” she said. “Dieting. I weighed a hundred and sixty-nine pounds once, I took it off too fast and my face fell in on me. Now I’ve got this cream, though. It’s made from a secret formula and you can’t even buy it commercially. Smell it. See, it doesn’t smell all perfumy. It smells serious.”
She was patting the cream on her face with puffs of cotton wool, patting away until there was nothing to be seen on the surface.
“It smells like lard,” I said.
“Christ Almighty, I hope I haven’t been paying that kind of money to rub lard on my face. Don’t tell your mother I swear.”
She poured clean water into the drinking glass and wet her comb, then combed her hair wet and twisted each strand round her finger, clamping the twisted strand to her head with two crossed pins. I would be doing the same myself, a couple of years later.
“Always do your hair wet, else it’s no good doing it up at all,” Beryl said. “And always roll it under even if you want it to flip up. See?”
When I was doing my hair up — as I did for years — I sometimes thought of this, and thought that of all the pieces of advice people had given me, this was the one I had followed most carefully.
We put the lamp out and got into bed, and Beryl said, “I never knew it could get so dark. I’ve never known a dark that was as dark as this.” She was whispering. I was slow to understand that she was comparing country nights to city nights, and I wondered if the darkness in Netterfield County could really be greater than that in California.
“Honey?” whispered Beryl. “Are there any animals outside?”
“Cows,” I said.
“Yes, but wild animals? Are there bears?”
