Stone Diaries, The - Carol Shields [101]
When I married Dick Greene back in 1927 I thought I was getting a strong husband. He was straight-backed, his shirts tucked neatly into his slacks, his shoes glossy. The man played tennis. He swam for Indiana Varsity. His face was tanned and finely shaped, and I used to adore watching the way his mouth sometimes sagged open when he was listening to someone speak. That slackness of jaw held me for years in a rich, alert, concentrating innocence. He had a fastidious almost humble way of shifting his broad shoulders, as though he had them on loan, as though they were breakable.
I was the breakable one. Women always are. It’s not so much a question of one big disappointment, though. It’s more like a thousand little disappointments raining down on top of each other.
After a while it gets to seem like a flood, and the first thing you know you’re drowning.
Cora-Mae Milltown’s Theory
The poor motherless thing. Oh my, I remember to this day the first time I laid eyes on her. Eleven years old, her and her father driving up to the Vinegar Hill place in a taxi cab, and myself still up to my elbows in soap and water, not half ready for the two of them, I hadn’t even started on the kitchen. Where’s your missus?—that’s what I was about to say, but thank the Lord I buttoned my lip, because there wasn’t any missus, she’d gone and passed away years before, the life went out of her giving birth to this washrag of a girl.
It was Mr. Goodwill himself who told me the story. A tragedy. That was after I got to know him better.
Coming from Canada like he did, he wasn’t used to coloreds, and he talked to me straight out about this and that and everything else too. "Cora-Mae," he said, "my girl needs a woman in the house, she needs to learn things, she’ll be wanting a bit of company when I’m not here. First her mamma died, you see, and then an old auntie who took care of her up in Canada, and now she’s got no one in the world, only me."
That’s how I came to be working for Mr. Goodwill by the week instead of just Wednesdays the way the company said. That’s the Indiana Limestone Company, I’m talking about, they’d hired on Mr. Goodwill and brought him all the way down to Bloomington. A widow-man and his little girl. Now this would be round about 1916, when Orren was overseas, his leg all shot to pieces, only I didn’t know it then. That very fall our own Lucile was six years old and starting school, and so I said yes, to Mr. Goodwill, I’d come by early and get breakfast cooking and see that the child was dressed nice and clean for school, and look to the house and the wash and all. Two dollars a day he paid me, three dollars after they moved into the big house, and that was good pay for colored help then.
They treated me nice. Mr. Goodwill had a jokey way about him.
Sometimes he’d go and leave a sack of fresh doughnuts on the kitchen table. "What’s this?" I’d say, and he’d say, "Why, someone must’ve left those there for you, Cora-Mae, a little treat to go along with your coffee."
I’d start in on the dusting and the beds and I’d wax the furniture if it needed doing and after that I’d sit myself down with a cup of coffee and a doughnut, taking my ease. If the girl was home from school for some reason she’d sit next to me and have herself a doughnut too and a big glass of milk. Once she turned and said to me, "How come you eat your doughnut with a fork, Cora-Mae?" "I don’t know," I said back, and I didn’t. "I never saw anyone eat a doughnut like that," she said, all puzzled-like, and I couldn’t guess her meaning, if she thought I was ignorant, if she was being fresh or just curious the way my Lucile always was. I held my tongue and tried not to scold or fret too much over the things she’d do. I’d say to myself, remember this poor child is motherless, and there’s not one thing worse in this world than being motherless.
I still think that way in my mind. My Lucile lives way out there in California now and has her own family and a beautiful home of her own, ranch style, and I haven’t seen her for, oh, six or seven years. She hardly ever sits