The Seal Wife - Kathryn Harrison [49]
MIRIAM HANDS HIM a page torn from her notebook, a message written before he arrived.
On Monday, my father is leaving for Talkeetna’s fur fair. (He’s looking for extra pelts to trade at the end of the season, when the Commercial Company buyers come through.) He’ll be out of town for three days at least. I have to run the store, but in the evenings I’ll be free. Will you come to dinner?
Bigelow reads silently while Miriam watches. The note contains none of what Bigelow has come to regard as her conversational pauses—no crossed-out words, no blots or grammatical missteps. Looking at it, especially the use of parentheses, he’s sure that she’s drafted it over and over. Can see her hunched over her desk, a wet lock of hair caught between her teeth.
He opens his mouth to answer, and she puts her finger to her lips, hands him a pencil.
Yes, he writes. And then he writes, I understand. She takes the pencil.
Do you? she writes, and he nods.
Monday arrives, and, after posting his map, Bigelow stops by the store to watch as Miriam waits on people, using a slate and chalk for whatever words a sale requires. It’s unnerving to be in Getz’s General Merchandise without Getz, and Bigelow walks up and down the aisles of shelves, looking into corners, half expecting the man to jump out at him. When he hears the last customer leave, he comes up and leans on the counter. “Well,” he says.
She smiles and reaches for his sleeve, uses it to pull his arm closer.
“Is it—is everything going smoothly?” he asks.
She nods, smiles, tucks loose hair behind her ears.
“Tonight?” he asks.
Tomorrow? She shrugs self-consciously and takes the slate back as soon as he’s read the word. I haven’t had time to plan a meal, she writes, adding in small cramped letters, I want it to be good.
“All right,” he says. “Yes. Eight o’clock?”
She erases the slate with the heel of her hand. Make sure no one sees, she writes. Come around through the alley.
Getz’s back entrance is cluttered with dismantled crates and leaking jars, piles of burlap sacks, flattened and dank and smelling of ammonia. Bigelow hurries past them and into the store, barely illuminated by light from the parlor above. He makes his way up the stairs, each tread creaking under his weight, making him feel conspicuous.
She’s set a small table, pushed aside piano bench and horsehide sofa to accommodate another ladder-back chair. White cloth and white candle, napkin rings, salt cellar—all these unfamiliar things, and Miriam unfamiliar, too, wearing a dress he hasn’t seen before, her hair held back with ivory combs.
Spanish olives, peeled pears in thick syrup, Norwegian sardines, beans in tomato sauce, a bowl of dark cherries, the soft flesh of each puckered with an X from a pitting machine. How many cans has she pilfered from the shelves downstairs? She serves him before herself, and with his fork Bigelow tries to separate cherries from sardines, pears from tomato sauce, before they all run together.
“Well,” he says, trying to sound enthusiastic. And he makes perfunctory compliments—“Pears and cherries!”—but, with Miriam lacking the extra hand conversation would require of her, the only answer is the sound of cutlery.
“Shall I help with the dishes?” he asks, when they’ve both laid down their forks. She gets up to retrieve her notebook from the top of the piano.
Leave them, she writes, and she remains standing. She pulls at his hand until he gets up, follows her through the door that’s always closed during their Thursday visits, a door Bigelow has come to think of as leading into a female Bluebeard’s den: photographs and used wedding bands, empty hats and shoes, suspenders hanging from pegs. But all there is, is an unadorned room filled by a big bed. At its foot there is just room enough to stand.
While he watches, Miriam undresses, the soft light from the parlor enhancing her nakedness so perfectly that she must have rehearsed the