Saint Maybe - Anne Tyler [123]
When she returned to her grandparents’ bedroom, she found Agatha looking equally defeated. She was standing in front of Bee’s closet, facing a row of heart-breakingly familiar dresses and blouses. Crammed on the shelf overhead were suitcases and hatboxes and a sliding heap of linens—the linens moved last spring from beneath the leaky roof. It showed what this household had descended to that they’d never been moved back, except for those few items in regular use. “What are these?” Agatha asked, taking a pinch of a monogrammed guest towel.
“I guess we ought to carry them to the linen closet,” Daphne said.
But the linen closet, they discovered, had magically replenished itself. The emptied top shelf now held Doug’s shoe-polishing gear and someone’s greasy coveralls and the everyday towels not folded but hastily wadded. And the lower shelves, which hadn’t been sorted in years, made Agatha say, “Good grief.” She gave a listless tug to a crib sheet patterned with ducklings. (How long since they’d needed a crib sheet?) When they heard Thomas on the stairs, she called, “Tom, could you bring up more boxes from the basement?”
She pulled out half a pack of disposable diapers—the old-fashioned kind as stiff and crackly as those paper quilts that line chocolate boxes. From the depths of the closet she drew a baby-sized pillow and said, “Ick,” for a rank, moldy smell unfurled from it almost visibly. The leak must have traveled farther than they had suspected. “Throw it out,” she told Daphne. Daphne took it between thumb and forefinger and dropped it on top of the diapers. Next Agatha brought forth a bedpan with an inch of rusty water in the bottom—“That too,” she said—and a damp, cloth-covered box patterned with faded pink roses. “Is this Grandma’s?” she asked. “I don’t remember this.”
Both of them hovered over it hopefully as she set the box on the floor and lifted the lid, but it was only a sewing box, abandoned so long ago that a waterlogged packet of clothing labels inside bore Claudia’s maiden name. There were sodden cards of bias tape and ripply, stretched-out elastic; and underneath those, various rusty implements—scissors, a seam ripper, a leather punch—and tiny cardboard boxes falling apart with moisture. Clearly nothing here was of interest, so why did they insist on opening each box? Even Agatha, common-sense Agatha, pried off a disintegrating cardboard lid to stare down at a collection of shirt buttons. Everything swam in brown water. Everything had the dead brown stink of overcooked broccoli. It was amazing how thorough the rust was. It threaded the hooks and eyes, it stippled the needles and straight pins. It choked the revolving wheel of the leather punch and clogged each and every one of its hollow, cylindrical teeth.
Daphne thought of the dress form in the attic storeroom—Bee’s figure but with a waist, with a higher bosom. Once their grandma had been a happy woman, she supposed. Back before everything changed.
“Will these be enough?” Thomas asked, arriving with two cartons. But Agatha flapped a hand without looking. “Shall I pack these things on the floor?” he asked.
“Oh, don’t bother,” Agatha told him, and then she turned and wandered toward the stairs.
“Just leave them here?” he asked Daphne.
“Whatever,” Daphne said.
In fact they remained there the rest of the day, obstructing the hall till Daphne finally stuffed them back in the closet. She piled everything onto the bottom shelf, and she set the cardboard cartons inside and closed the door.
“I dreamed this high-school boy was proposing to me,” Agatha said at breakfast. “He told me to name a date. He said, ‘How about Wednesday? Monday is always busy and Tuesday is always rainy.’ I said, ‘Wait, I’m … wait,’ I said. ‘I think you ought to know that I’m quite a bit older than you.’ Then I woke up, and I laughed out loud. Did you hear me laughing, Stu? I mean,