loudly he’d never hear me. Jon put his hand over my mouth. “Sh-h-h,” he said. “Please.” Naturally, Jon did not invite me on this trip to see him. I explain all this to the dog now, and he is hypnotized. He closes his eyes and listens to the drone of my voice. He appreciates my hand stroking in tempo with my sentences. Jon pushes the jelly away and stares at me. “Stop talking about something that happened years ago,” he says, and stalks out of the room.
The wood arrives. The firewood man has a limp; he’s missing a toe. I asked, and he told me. He’s a good woodman—the toe was lost canoeing. Jon helps him stack the logs in the shed. I peek in and see that there was already a lot more wood than I thought.
Jon comes into the house when the man leaves. His face is heavy and ugly.
“Why did you order more wood?” Jon says.
“To keep warm. I have to keep warm.”
I fix a beef stew for dinner, but feed it to the dog. He is transfixed; the steam warns him it is too hot to eat, yet the smell is delicious. He laps tentatively at the rim of the bowl, like an epicure sucking in a single egg of caviar. Finally, he eats it all. And then there is the bone, which he carries quickly to his private place under the desk. Jon is furious; I have prepared something for the dog but not for us.
“This has got to stop,” he whispers in my face, his hand tight around my wrist.
The dog and I climb to the top of the hill and watch the commuters going to work in their cars. I sit on a little canvas stool—the kind fishermen use—instead of the muddy ground. It is September—mud everywhere. The sun is setting. Wide white clouds hang in the air, seem to cluster over this very hilltop. And then Jon’s face is glowing in the clouds—not a vision, the real Jon. He is on the hilltop, clouds rolling over his head, saying to me that we have reached the end. Mutiny on the Santa Maria! But I only sit and wait, staring straight ahead. How curious that this is the end. He sits in the mud, calls the dog to him. Did he really just say that to me? I repeat it: “We have reached the end.”
“I know,” he says.
The dog walks into the room. Jon is at the desk. The kneehole is occupied, so the dog curls in the corner. He did not always circle before lying down. Habits are acquired, however late. Like the furniture, the plants, the cats left to us by the dead, they take us in. We think we are taking them in, but they take us in, demand attention.
I demand attention from Jon, at his desk at work, his legs now up in the lotus position on his chair to offer the dog his fine resting place.
“Jon, Jon!” I say, and dance across the room. I posture and prance. What a good lawyer he will be; he shows polite interest.
“I’ll set us on fire,” I say.
That is going too far. He shakes his head to deny what I have said. He leads me by my wrist to bed, pulls the covers up tightly. If I were a foot lower down in the bed I would smother if he kept his hands on those covers. Like grape jelly.
“Will there be eggs and bacon, and grape jelly on toast, for breakfast?” I ask.
There will be. He cooks for us now.
I am so surprised. When he brings the breakfast tray I find out that
Wanda’s
When May’s mother went to find her father, May was left with her Aunt Wanda. She wasn’t really an aunt; she was a friend of her mother’s who ran a boardinghouse. Wanda called it a boardinghouse, but she rarely accepted boarders. There was only one boarder, who had been there six years. May had stayed there twice before. The first time was when she was nine, and her mother left to find her father, Ray, who had gone to the West Coast and had vacationed too long in Laguna Beach. The second time was when her mother was hung over and had to have “a little rest,” and she left May there for two days. The first time, she left her for almost two weeks, and May was so happy when her mother came back that she cried. “Where did you think Laguna Beach was?” her mother said. “A hop, skip, and a jump? Honey, Laguna Beach is practically across the world.”
The only thing interesting about Wanda’s is her boarder, Mrs. Wong. Mrs. Wong once gave May a little octagonal box full of pastel paper circles that spread out into flowers when they were dropped in water. Mrs. Wong let her drop them in her fishbowl. The only fish in the fishbowl is made of bright-orange plastic and is suspended in the middle of the bowl by a sinker. There are many brightly colored things in Mrs. Wong’s room, and May is allowed to touch all of them. On her door Mrs. Wong has a little heart-shaped piece of paper with “Ms. Wong” printed on it.
Wanda is in the kitchen, talking to May. “Eggs don’t have many calories, but if you eat eggs the cholesterol kills you,” Wanda says. “If you eat sauerkraut there’s not many calories, but there’s a lot of sodium, and that’s bad for the heart. Tuna fish is full of mercury—what’s that going to do to a person? Who can live on chicken? You know enough, there’s nothing for you to eat.”
Wanda takes a hair clip out of her pants pocket and clips back her bangs. She puts May’s lunch in front of her—a bowl of tomato soup and a slice of lemon meringue pie. She puts a glass of milk next to the soup bowl.
“They say that after a certain age milk is no good for you—you might as well drink poison,” she says. “Then you read somewhere else that Americans don’t have enough milk in their diet. I don’t know. You decide what you want to do about your milk, May.”
Wanda sits down, lights a cigarette, and drops the match on the floor.
“Your dad really picks swell times to disappear. The hot months come, and men go mad. What do you think your dad’s doing in Denver, honey?”
May shrugs, blows on her soup.
