What We Keep - Elizabeth Berg [6]
The screen door banged behind me. I stretched, searched the backyard, found nothing. Then, though I doubted the spider would be so public, I went into the front yard, and there it was, an orange monstrosity of a truck, backed up over the lawn to the front door of the house beside ours.
Mrs. O’Donnell lived next to us, and I had supposed she always would. She was a widow of indeterminate age. She was slow-gaited, but not dependent on a cane; she dressed in clothes that were dowdy but not quite grandmotherly; and she had a voice that was thin but not quivery. She wore thick bifocals with pale-blue frames, one side repaired—apparently permanently—with a tiny gold safety pin. Every spring she gave herself home permanents that were an advertisement against them: her steely gray hair reminded me of Brillo pads, minus the thrill of the hidden soap. She wore a dark-pink lipstick that disappeared from the middle of her mouth and caked at the edges of it, and excessive amounts of rouge that on anyone else my mother would call suggestive. With the exception of our annual Christmas cookie exchange and the halfhearted ritual of waving when we saw each other coming and going, she mostly kept to herself. I never saw anyone come to her house, except for her nephew Leroy, who was a cop. He would visit irregularly in his show-off work car, pull up in front of her house at an angle that suggested extreme emergency. He exited his vehicle with difficulty; his belly got in the way of the steering wheel. Sometimes when he left the house he would be carrying a brown paper bag folded over neatly at the top. I had no idea what was in there, but I liked to think that it was fried chicken, wrapped up in aluminum foil. A leg and a breast, which Leroy would eat while he sat in his car, waiting for speeders, longing for salt.
Last summer, for a few fever-pitched weeks, I had entered into the business of making and selling pot holders. Mrs. O’Donnell was my first customer. She bought a couple of the rose-and-green ones—my favorite, as well—and then invited me in for Rice Krispies treats. After she’d given me an impromptu tour of her house, we sat down together at the kitchen table. Then we both seemed to realize we had nothing whatsoever to say. I noticed faint brown stains on her tablecloth, next to an embroidered picture of three gray kittens in a basket, whose blue eyes seemed sad to me, lost and pleading.
“Oh, well,” Mrs. O’Donnell finally said softly, looking up from her lap. I saw that her eyes were moist and that she had what appeared to be a bit of an infection in one of them.
I didn’t want the treat anymore. Pinkeye had broken out spectacularly last spring in my elementary school. I was one of the few spared, and I didn’t want to take any chances now. I looked around in a way I hoped didn’t seem desperate, and finally commented on a rooster clock hanging on the kitchen wall. It was a black rooster, tail feathers drooping forlornly, comb and wattle faded to a dusty pink. The round face of a clock was trapped forever in his center—he would never seduce hens, or exuberantly salute the morning. Though I knew full well he was plastic and never stood a chance for such things, I nonetheless regretted for him this awful loss. The clock said 1:47, though the time was around ten-thirty.
“That’s really nice,” I said, smiling and nodding at the rooster.
“What is?”
I pointed behind her, and when she turned to look, I slipped the Rice Krispies treat into my shirt pocket.
“Would you like that clock?” Mrs. O’Donnell asked.
“Oh!” I said. “No, thank you; you keep it, I couldn’t take that.”
“To tell the truth, I’d forgotten I even had it. You’re welcome to it.”
“Oh,” I said. And then, after a pause, “Uh-huh.” Finally, “Thank you, that’s very nice of you, but really …” I so very much did not want that clock. I knew it would be sticky with old grease, that there would be nothing at all I could do with it, not even take it apart to have a look