Lipper, Miz, Miz … ?”
“Valor, Mrs. Baker. I’m Robin Valor. Please don’t be embarrassed. At your age, you’ve met so many people. It’s no wonder you can’t always keep them straight.”
Mrs. Baker shook her head. “Perhaps I oughtn’t to say this, Miz Valor, but the truth is I couldn’t keep them straight before I met them.”
The brunette smiled. “It’s Miss, Mrs. Baker, not Ms. I’m an old-fashioned girl just like you, and they say Ms. means a divorced woman working in an office.”
“I’m an old-fashioned girl too,” the old woman said, setting a little tray, with a flowery teapot and matching cups, on a small table. “That’s why I say Miz. Why, we always said Miz when I was a girl. Miz Ledbetter, Miz Carpenter; why I remember Mama talking about them a million times. Excuse me for a moment while I get the water. Kettle’s on.”
She toddled out, and the brunette took a pair of wireframed glasses from her purse, then rose and strode across the room to examine the television. It was still on (though Mrs. Baker had turned the volume all the way down) and showed a gaggle of solemn and rather stupid-looking men in yellow hardhats inspecting an electrical substation. But the brunette paid more attention to the knobs and the back than to the picture on the screen.
“Here we are,” Mrs. Baker announced, returning with the tea kettle. “Good thing I’ve got a gas cook-stove. Stayed on all the time. House didn’t even get cold, even if the furnace fan wouldn’t blow. I’ve got that fireplace, but there’s nothing to put in but paper these days, and I need the paper for Puff’s kitty box.”
“I’ll bet you were brought up in a small town,” the brunette said. “Am I right?”
“Oh, yes.” Mrs. Baker nodded, pouring steaming water from the tarnished kettle.
“Where was that, Mrs. Baker?”
“The town? Oh, here. Right here, except this was a small town then. Mr. Baker and me, we bought this house ten years after we were married. We’d been living in rent. It seemed like such a long time then, ten years. Almost sixty years I lived right here in this house, walking from this parlor to that kitchen.”
“I see.”
“It’s all changed, of course. This was a real nice town. The boys that played in the street, they was full of hell, they’d do anything, but they weren’t mean. They didn’t want to hurt anybody, not really. Just play tricks and have fun. And men used to come selling with a hearse and wagon. Not just milk. Ice and vegetables, and fish when it wasn’t too hot. They don’t do that any more.”
“I don’t suppose anyone does, anywhere.”
“I saw them on the TV, in some other country. But do you know, all those American companies are coming in there too? All the ones that stopped everything here. I saw it, and the TV said the people liked it, and I suppose they were just telling the truth, they really do, or they wouldn’t buy those things. I wanted to yell at them not to do it, don’t you do it, only of course they couldn’t hear me. I would have wrote them a letter, but they couldn’t have read it. Lots of times when I watch the TV, I feel like some kind of ghost.” She retreated to the kitchen with the kettle, leaving a wisp of steam hanging in the air.
The brunette looked speculatively around the room, then shrugged. This time she remained seated and did not take her glasses from her purse.
“They’re all just the same as we were, except slower,” Mrs. Baker continued, coming in again. “Sometimes I think if only the ordinary people here could sit down and talk to the ordinary people there, those people would never let things go the way they are. But look at the way we do here. We don’t try to change the way things are. If one of those boys down the street steals a car, why he goes to prison for years. But if some rich man that’s had everything a person could want all his life steals a million dollars, the only thing that happens is he doesn’t get elected again unless he’s pretty lucky. The comics in the paper have all these men that fight against crime. If they were real, they’d go and find that man and shoot him. Maybe if we were real, we’d do the same thing.”
“I was just wondering,” the brunette said. “You’ve lived here so many yars, Mrs. Baker. Was Mr. Free your neighbor when you moved in?”
“Let me think,” Mrs. Baker said, sitting down. “Goodness, how time fleas, just jumps away whenever you try to catch at it.” She dabbed at one eye with a corner of her robe. “You’ll have to excuse me, Miz Valor. I always cry when I think too much about back then.”
“I don’t care if you cry.”
“It was a lady,” Mrs. Baker said, still blotting her eyes, “that used to give me cookies. Or anyhow one time she did. You know what they say, ‘Let them beat cake.’ Well, they did. Or it did. Maybe it was only once. It was a great bigsugar cookie with a great big raisin in the middle. Except that wasn’t here at all. That was Miz Carpenter down on Oak Street when I was a little girl.”
The brunette glanced at her wrist. “I have to go soon, Mrs. Baker, but before I do, I’d like you to tell me anything you can recall about those four people who used to live with Mr. Free. Perhaps you won’t find that so traumatic.”
“There was nothing foreign about it, it’s just that it makes me sad to think about all those old times. Pretty soon I’ll be dead, and then I won’t feel sad any more, so I figure I’d better get it done now. People always complain if a child laughs or an old person cries, but pretty soon they’re quiet, and that’s for a long time. A lot of children have started to die young again, have you noticed?”
The brunette shook her head impatiently.
“Why, pretty soon people will be saying, ‘Farewell to this vile of tears,’ just like they used to. I don’t suppose you ever read Dickens, Miz Valor?”
“No. Is he a newspaperman? Someone Mr. Free knew?”
Mrs. Baker nodded. “Isn’t it strange that you should mention that! Yes, Mr. Free knew his Dickens well, I think. We used to read him too before we got the TV, and one time I said to Mr. Free—he helped me carry some groceries home—‘Why, thank you, Mr. Free. You’ve been a wonderful help,’ and he said back, ‘What we’ve got to do is keep up our spirits and be neighborly. We’ll come all right in the end, never fear!’ Which wasn’t exactly
