Love Invents Us - Amy Bloom [7]
Mrs. Hill rested the red hatbox in her purple velour lap, her bony knees hunched up to keep it from sliding to the floor. “Some pretty things in here. If I kept them out, a burglar might get them. No burglar’s going hunting through an old lady’s underthings, through a messy old closet.” I was always looking to justify the mess in my room, too.
Mrs. Hill lifted off the lid and handed it to me, the thick dust rippling slightly.
“What about these, miss? You don’t see these anymore.”
They were eight long silver straws with filigreed hearts at their ends. Mrs. Hill handed them to me one by one, and I ran my fingers over the thin silver lacework around the hearts’ edges. She waved one straw in the air.
“Spoons for iced tea. Plus the stems are hollow, so you can sip too. Wedding present.” She closed her eyes. “Wedding present from Alva and Edna Thomas, he worked with Mr. Hill. Iced tea and strawberry shortcake in the summer. And brandy cup and lemon cake with burnt sugar frosting at Christmas.”
I had never seen anything so fancy and frivolous in all my life. My parents’ house was all handsome, angular teak and tautly rounded leather, and each decorative piece had the added weight of culture or art or good taste. These were just pretty and gay, and as I held them I could feel that if I pressed down any harder at all, the hollow stems would give way.
“Are you going to give them to your daughter?” I asked, sure that the Dr. Vivian Hill in the pastel-tinted eight-by-ten on the mantelpiece, with one manicured hand on the hood of a big white Mercedes, black eyes flatly daring us to wonder how she got from here to there, would not want the spoons, or anything else from this small house with the rutted floors and soiled lampshades. Dr. Hill’s old bedroom was now the storage room—wire hangers, dresses from twenty years ago, shoes slit for corns and bunions and still not right, cat food for the cat that died six months before I came, cookie tins filled with rubber bands and green stamps. The only bit of Dr. Hill left was the graduation tassel used to pull down the window shade. Dr. Hill stayed at the Great Neck Inn when she visited.
Mrs. Hill made a feeble grab for the spoons, snatching at the air to my left. “Give them to Vivian? Why should I give them to anyone? I’m not dead. Gimme those spoons, girl.”
I put all but one of the spoons back into her hands; they stuck out like silver pins in an old brown cushion. She sorted them and wrapped them in the tissue paper. Before she could count them up and accuse me, I handed her the last one.
“Don’t forget this, it fell off your lap,” I lied.
She gestured for the lid. “Next time, we can look at some more treasures,” she said.
I put the red hatbox back and quickly lifted out the striped one. Inside were twelve silver spoons with short, thickly twisted stems, the ends crowned with tiny enameled portraits of long-haired, biblical-looking men. Each little white face was touched with two pink dots for cheeks and pairs of blue or brown dots for eyes. Their hair was several different shades of brown.
“Don’t be goin’ in my things, now.”
“I’m not, I was just trying to get this put back where it belongs. I was tidying up your closet, as a matter of fact.”
“Uh-huh. Snooping and spying is more like it.”
I knew she didn’t mind; it wasn’t like there were millions of people interested in Mrs. Hill’s life, never mind the contents of her closet.
Mrs. Hill had two cookbooks: The Joy of Cooking and The Paschal Lamb, which was put out by the Greater A.M.E. Zion Church of Philadelphia and was almost as long as the gravy-stained Rombauer bible. I read them both, and once Mrs. Hill showed me how to light her chipped gas stove, I was fearless. I didn’t see what harm I could do. No Limoges plates to break, nothing to stain or put back the wrong way, no system to throw out of whack. Mrs. Hill’s spice rack was six tins of Durkee’s in a shoebox on the counter. I put my hair in a ponytail, and Mrs. Hill wrapped