By an hour later that afternoon, the rain had stopped and the sun was coming out in spots, dappling the windowpane. That was too bad, actually, because I had already created a fantasy of just how I was going to meet Maggie: Two strangers, we’d be separated by splintering sheets of rain and we’d steer through the glistening mists with the wet prows of our baby strollers to join hands over the children’s heads in a rainbow of friendship, I thought. But by the time I dressed Toby up in two sweaters and his nor’easter hat, Debbie was sweating under her raincoat and the rain had stopped, the birds had started squeaking and chirping, and the sun kept flashing out, then disappearing. To make matters worse, the gardening neighbor saw me as I was unfolding Toby’s stroller on the side porch and waved her trowel at me before I could pretend I hadn’t seen her. She had been kneeling at the edge of her garden, digging up potatoes, and if the stroller hadn’t rusted closed in the rain, I might have been able to open it up and get out to the bus stop alone, before she ever saw me. But from my crouching position beside the stroller, I could see her stand up and brush the mud off her knee pads and by the time I broke the hinge off and opened up the stroller, she was already cutting across my side yard, stuffing her gardening gloves into her jacket as she walked.

She was wearing toilet plungers on her knees.

“Hi, y’all!” she said, rattling the screen door that I’d just locked when I saw her coming. She’d told me her name before, and I couldn’t remember it now. I wanted to write “Go away” in the dust on the porch floor, but instead I smiled and said hello without getting up.

“Knock, knock … it’s locked,” she said, rattling the door again, and Debbie ran over and pushed up the latch. “I hardly ever see you outside,” she said, and when she stepped up to the porch, the plungers dimpled and puckered against her chinos. She saw me staring. “You’d be surprised how comfortable they are … I even forget I’m wearing them sometimes,” she said. “They last for years.”

“Did you buy them somewhere?” I asked, listening for the bus to enter the neighborhood and hearing, instead, the tiny high-pitched squeal that meant I was getting a headache.

“Heck no—I made them myself! A couple of straps from the five-and-ten, twist out the wooden handles, of course, but that’s common sense—anyone could do it—Hey, wait –am I keeping you from something? You all look so spiffy! What’s the celebration?”

“Mommy’s going to talk to the new lady at the bus stop,” Debbie said before I could. “She’s been getting cleaned up the whole morning. She’s got her new knee socks on, from Korvette’s. Like mine. Mine are white. Mommy’s are brown.” “Well then! This must certainly be a red-letter day for all of you,” the gardening neighbor said. “C’mon—I’ll walk you to the bus stop, keep you company while you wait. I’d like to meet this person myself.”

“Goodie, goodie!” Debbie started. “We can all play hopscotch.”

“You can play hopscotch, I have to rock Toby so he doesn’t scream and wake up the whole neighborhood,” I said.

“Spoil-sport! You never play with me—you always have to rock that stupid creepy baby. Nobody ever plays with me.”

“C’mon, kid, if I can remember how it goes, you’ve got yourself a game,” the gardening neighbor said, and Debbie ran into her room for chalk as we started down the street. When we got there, the giant tree was still dripping from the rain, and it seemed as if even the weather had gotten excited at seeing me outside and uncovered, there on the corner. The sun was showing off for my benefit, flashing in my eyes until they watered, making my headache worse. I kept staring down the street in the direction of Maggie’s house, watching for her so I’d be the first to spot her. But it also meant that I was staring directly into the sun, and the dappled light that was glittering off the millions of drops of rain on the thousands of wandering leaves on the tree above my head was shooting into my eyes with a machine-gun staccato and beating tempo with the changing wind. And each time the sun came out full blast, it would turn the windows in my kitchen, which I could see clearly from where I stood, into burning squares of white fire. They were burning like welder’s flames, too bright to look directly into, and I felt as if I were melting down there on the pavement, under a magnifying glass that tilts to catch the sun in a laser beam.

And then, when the wind lifted and softened, there would come this unbelievably sickening smell of vomit, which would get worse with each back-and-forth movement I gave Toby’s stroller, keeping time with Debbie’s singing, keeping him asleep. Who could stand this smell? And where did it come from? I looked warily at the gardening neighbor, who was kneeling on the sidewalk a few feet away, drawing hopscotch with Debbie. Was it here earlier when Maggie stood here? Did she make it? It wasn’t coming from Toby—I felt into his diaper and he was clean for as far as I could stick my finger—so where was it coming from?

“Does your bus stop always smell this bad?” I called to Debbie, who was plowing big piles of leaves at the curb into the storm drain. She didn’t hear me—now that she’s big enough to walk away, she does.

Was it coming from me?

She was singing as she pushed piles of leaves ahead of her with her new saddle shoes, piles wet and heavy as giant tea bags.

Singing: “The eensy weensy spider went up the spider spout … “

I always had to wear saddle shoes to school, and it’s interesting, considering how many ways I invented to rip the soles off of them, to think that now I see them as the prettiest shoes a kid can wear, and so I keep buying new pairs for Debbie each time she grows out of the old ones.

The gardening neighbor joined in the singing: “Down came the rain, and washed the spider out … “

It’s funny, but once you own a house, you start noticing all those little things like rainspouts, and where the rain runs as it leaves the roof. Rather than sitting by the window and watching the rain coming down, now I worry if the rainspout is clear of dead leaves and will it carry the rainwater away from the basement so the boxes with my Ben Casey and Dr. Kildare collections won’t get soaked and ruined. I wish I were back home by my window right now, instead of under this dribbling tree.

“Out came the sun, and dried up all the rain,” they sang together. It’s awful being splatted by these last drops of wind spit once it’s stopped raining, and they always hit me right on top of my head where I’ve parted my hair. And this miserable, pukey smell that’s here—I should be home. The reason I most hate to go outside is that I’ve always been afraid of the wind. I’m ashamed to admit it, but it’s true. Personally, I prefer there to be a pane of glass between me and the wind, so that by seeing what’s hitting the glass, instead of me, I can safely see what’s usually invisible.

“Come on, Mommy—sing the spider song.”

“Sing, sing! And the eensy weensy spider came up the spout again!”

Up, down, back, forth—with each line of the song, with each rock of the stroller, each step in the hopscotch, and each car that swished by, I could feel my thoughts shift and bend, turn and fold back, and I saw my scene of a rainbow friendship with Maggie fly away like an origami bird. She probably isn’t even coming … and if she does, she’ll probably think I made the bus stop this stinky. It’s funny; I thought I really knew all about this bus stop because I’d watched it for hours and hours from my kitchen window, and yet I didn’t know the most important thing about it—this comprehensive quality that completely obliterates all the others—this stink, this horribly rotten smell. I’m as bad as my begonias dying at the window—just a sliver of glass away from the real thing.

I really get bored with the outside, because there’s never anything to do except look around. Nature is so messy, especially after a rain. There is mud splashed up on the sidewalk, wet soggy leaves and twigs have fallen everywhere, and the street mail, what little there is in a neighborhood like this, is ruined. I should tell the gardening neighbor about street mail—it would give her something else to do beside draw lines on the sidewalk with Debbie, but I know what her reaction would be—she’d think I’m as weird as she is.

“Did I hear you correctly? Did you say ‘street mail’?” Jack asked me when I first told him. He really doesn’t think I’m all that normal—he’s just about come right out and said as much. I can’t decide whether to try and act normal and dull for his benefit, or to spice things up for both of us by telling him some real dirt. In fact, if I don’t get over this little problem of being frigid, he’s told me I should seriously consider seeing a psychiatrist. I figure that sort of thing would cost about the same as a new bedspread and curtain set for our bedroom, which would certainly cheer me up a little. Then, depending on how crazy I turn out to be, we could buy a new rug, or even a brass bed with the same amount of money. It’s all the same to Jack, he said, because he’s on the road so much that he just wants to be comfortable when he comes home.

But the street-mail thing is authentic; I can vouch for it. It’s one of those things in life that are based on the premise that you have nothing to lose, like Pascal’s theory about believing in God: You might as well, because if there is a God, then you’re covered; if not, what’s it matter? Who’s to care? It’s the same thing with street mail. In this world of infinite possibilities, countless permutations (of course I’m not crazy—this is the language of a sane person), and multiple choice, there is a chance that there is no chance.

I mean, what have you got to lose? If you don’t believe in this theory, you simply have the regular litter of the world around you. If you do believe in it, you have street mail, personally addressed to you. Paper clips mean you should be collecting something, tying up loose ends, making some kind of connection between things. I usually find a paper clip when I feel that my world is coming apart, or a straight pin will say the same thing, since that’s a masculine paper clip. Money is clearly and simply a reward, always showing the true worth of any job that you’ve recently completed. I always find money when I clean the house; for example, sometimes two cents in the bottom of the washing machine, a quarter in the couch cushion, a nickel when I weed. God does not believe in a minimum wage, of course, and remember, you can find street mail everywhere—inside as well as outside. Book markers and holy cards are inspirational, and reading other people’s marketing lists and unpaid bills is an important way of finding a common denominator in the human condition. Mittens and winter hats are the way God takes care of you—you just pick them up and wash them, and you’re warm—remember the lilies and the birds never needing to buy clothes? If you happen to see a lot of the same kind of thing drifting by, bottle caps or rubber bands, for instance, and you can’t see any reason for picking them up and yet you can’t get over how many of these things you see, then it’s simply a metaphoric message about something very particular to your life and you just have to file it away until you make some sense of it. God loves to hide behind a metaphor.

Being sensitive to street mail makes you look at life as if it were a game in which you have an active role and the clues to your next move are always right there in front of you. You simply have to learn how to read them. But you must never try to force the game along—the best thing you can do is to ask for a new piece of mail when you’re needing some direction and then promise that you’ll read it and abide by it when it comes. Sometimes abiding by it is the more difficult part of this bargain, especially when the message says to stop doing something that feels really good.

Unfortunately, as I said, the rain had wrecked the possibility of any mail on this corner, so I was left merely to look around me, rather than do something concrete. Jack and I are alike on this—we both hate to just look at the outside. On our last vacation to Canada, I noticed that we were never content to just look out the car window at the scenery rolling by. No, we had to talk about owning it, reproducing something like it in our own back yard, or try to take it home by taking pictures of it, drawing it, writing about it, or even pressing pieces of it in the AAA Travel Guide. Perhaps it’s because we’re just starting out in adult life that we want to take things—maybe maturity is when you can admire something for itself and not want it for yourself. Or maybe you grow up when you stop taking and start giving back.

And I wasn’t finished being mad at Jack, I realized, while I stood there in the shooting sunlight and the vomit fumes. Little thoughts of revenge because he was gone again kept imploding inside my head like dumdum bullets every time I saw any station wagon like ours pass by on the main road. I thought of Jack’s flat hands, hairless on the steering wheel, and the balding back of his head as he drove away. I ignore the baldness except when I’m mad at him, and then it’s the first in the long list of things I think about that encourages me not to care if we stay together or not.

Such a list is important—it keeps things in perspective. Another thing I do is watch him talk with his head upside down in my lap. He thinks I’m being very loving and attentive as he lies there and talks, but what I’m actually doing is watching his lower jaw move in and out, protruding and distorted, and it’s a simple matter then to think he’s homely and alien.

“Mommy! You should see your face—it’s all white with two big red circles on your cheeks!”

“I don’t feel so well, Deb. Mommy’s getting a little cold,” I lied, taking out my pocket compact to look at my face. I never tell her about these headaches—I don’t want them to be hereditary. She was right about the cheeks, though.

“Are you gonna throw up?” she asked, jumping in place.

In the corner of the mirror I saw a new car turn into our development, while I rubbed at my Natural Wonder blusher to get some of it off. I tipped the mirror over to watch Debbie—she was easier to deal with when I had a headache if I put her into the mirror, but she and the gardening neighbor had done their final hop out of my line of mirror vision and had moved over beside me as the car slowly approached. We were lined up, waiting, like the last lonely members of a Cargo Cult while the shiny car came closer.

“I’m sweaty hot!” Debbie was saying, peeling off her raincoat. “You should be a horse, Mommy.”

“Whew!” The gardening neighbor said. “It’s the berries.”

“Why, for God’s sake?” I asked, but all conversation was suspended as the car, a cream-colored Mercedes, rolled up close to us and stopped. I looked down at it and saw my own face rolling out of sight as the window smoothly disappeared into the cream door, and then in place of me I saw the most handsome male face I think I’ve ever seen in my life up close.

“Hi!” Debbie said.

“Hubba, hubba!” Whispered the gardening neighbor, rubbing her plungers together.

I could tell by his clothes that here was no ordinary college graduate of, say, 1964 to 1966. This was the Ivy League! Smiling, of course, and he was wearing my favorite color of blue Oxford cloth, a buttondown-collared shirt which was loosened at the neck, and a brown plaid tie that was fatly knotted and pulled over to one side. Blue, rolled-up sleeves, dark hairy arms, one bent elbow up and out of his window, the other curved on the back of the empty passenger seat, and unfortunately for me, I pictured it curved around my shoulders, which is probably where all the trouble began, as I look back. His brown corduroy jacket was folded beside him on the seat, because it was getting warm with the sun out. I wanted him to take me home, away from all this, and his legs were open and bent softly, and I could see the shape of his raised knee under the worn tan fabric. He had brown curly hair and perfect white teeth, blue-tinted, horn-rimmed aviator sunglasses, long fingers, and I think he said something about had the bus come yet?

“No,” Debbie said, and the gardening neighbor’s whispered “Who, who is he?” floated up into the trees.

He was somebody’s father, Hunk or Chunk, I think he said, brown leather belt with a brass buckle on it like the kind that used to be on the old Flagg Flier shoes—one flip and it’s opened, and I rarely notice such details, it’s just that with a headache coming on, I’m usually more sensitive—thin lips, very thin, hair curling around his earlobes, music and pipe smoke curling out and around his window and past my hair, and arms … and then he rolled the window back up, my face was back on the glass, and he was gone, leaving me up to my knees in vomit fumes. The gardening neighbor’s voice trailed after him, wrapped around the cream rear end of his car like the moan after an ambulance.

“Wow,” she said, as the car went down the street under an arbor of trees and disappeared. I looked up and saw that the trees there were shades of red and yellow. Had they just done that, or were they like that yesterday? Since I couldn’t see them from my kitchen window, it looked as if they had just blushed and lit up when he passed under them. I looked down and saw that I was standing in a pinkish, yellowish pulp that, if it wasn’t my emotions made flesh, must have dropped out of the tree above my head. A few berries, dull and about the size of fat, rotting Bing cherries, had fallen into Toby’s stroller while he slept. They were mashed like chewing gum on the sole of my shoe.

It was a real housewife shoe, with a rope wedgie sole. I had dressed to appeal to Maggie, not to this Hunk. I was wearing my yellow London Fog raincoat, which was boxy-shaped, so I wouldn’t seem particularly threatening, and jeans, just in case she might think the raincoat was too matronly. I had washed and curled my hair, but rather than appear too flashy, I pulled it back with a tortoise-shell barrette, because everyone agrees with tortoise shell. In case she was really rich, I wore the pale-colored turtleneck that my mother-in-law gave me, so I thought I had myself covered no matter what kind of woman she was, and that we’d seem to have something in common no matter how she dressed. I had been dressing as if I were walking through a tube from my house to this bus stop and the only other person who was going to enter the tube was Maggie and her baby stroller. But I would have dressed quite differently for a man. I took the barrette out because it was beginning to pull the skin of my temples back so that my face seemed stretched across one of Aunt Ruth’s embroidery hoops. The headache had now spread to my arms, and I needed all my strength to rock Toby and keep him asleep. When the bus finally came, it slowed and squealed to a stop like a bull elephant, sneezed open its long doors, and Debbie got on. She ran to the back of the bus as it rolled away and waved goodbye out of the fumy black window glass.

“Because horses can’t throw up, silly!” she called over her shoulder as she ran away.

“You’d better go home—you look sick,” the gardening neighbor said as I tilted the stroller down the curb. “Too much excitement for one day, huh?” 🏠

☜* previous Chapter Four 🏠

next *☞ Chapter Six 🏠