Paradise

MAVIS

The neighbors seemed pleased when the babies smothered. Probably because the mint green Cadillac in which they died had annoyed them for some time. They did all the right things, of course: brought food, telephoned their sorrow, got up a collection; but the shine of excitement in their eyes was clear.

When the journalist came, Mavis sat in the corner of the sofa, not sure whether to scrape the potato chip crumbs from the seams of the plastic cover or tuck them further in. But the journalist wanted the photo taken first, so the photographer ordered Mavis to the middle of the sofa, with the surviving children on either side of their distraught and grieving mother. She asked for the father too, of course. Jim? Is it Jim Albright? But Mavis said he wasn't feeling so good, couldn't come out, they'd have to go ahead without him. The journalist and the photographer exchanged looks, and Mavis thought they probably knew anyway that Frank-not Jim-was sitting on the edge of the bathtub drinking Seagram's without a glass.

Mavis moved to the center of the sofa and cleaned her fingernails of potato chip dust until the other children joined her. The "other children" is what they would always be now. Sal put her arm around her mother's waist. Frankie and Billy James were squished together on her right. Sal pinched her, hard. Mavis knew instantly that her daughter wasn't nervous before the camera and all, because the pinch grew long, pointed. Sal's fingernails were diving for blood. "This must be terrible for you." Her name, she said, was June.

"Yes, m'am. It's terrible for all of us."

"Is there something you want to say? Something you want other mothers to know?"

"M'am?"

June crossed her knees and Mavis saw that this was the first time she had worn the white high-heeled shoes. The soles were barely smudged. "You know. Something to warn them, caution them, about negligence."

"Well." Mavis took a deep breath. "I can't think of any. I guess. I." The photographer squatted, cocking his head as he examined the possibilities.

"So some good can come out of this awful tragedy?" June's smile was sad.

Mavis straightened against the success of Sal's fingernails. The camera clicked. June moved her felt-tipped pen into place. It was a fine thing. Mavis had never seen anything like it-made ink on the paper but dry, not all blotty. "I don't have nothing to say to strangers right now."

For the second time the photographer adjusted the front window shade and walked back to the sofa holding a black box to Mavis' face. "I understand," said June. Her eyes went soft, but the shine was like that of the neighbors. "And I do hate to put you through this, but maybe you could just tell me what happened? Our readers are simply appalled. Twins and all. Oh, and they want you to know you are in their prayers every single day." She let her glance sweep the boys and Sal. "And you all too. They are praying for each and every one of you." Frankie and Billy James looked down at their bare feet. Sal rested her head on her mother's shoulder while she clenched the flesh at Mavis' waist.

"So could you tell us?" June smiled a smile that meant "Do me this favor."

"Well." Mavis frowned. She wanted to get it right this time. "He didn't want the Spam. I mean the kids like it but he don't so. In this heat you can't keep much meat. I had a whole chuck steak go green on me once so I went and took the car, just some weenies, and I thought, well, Merle and Pearl. I was against it at first but he said-"

"M-e-r-l-e?"

"Yes, m'am."

"Go on."

"They wasn't crying or nothing but he said his head hurt. I understood. I did. You can't expect a man to come home from that kind of work and have to watch over babies while I go get something decent to put in front of him. I know that ain't right."

"So you took the twins. Why didn't you take the other children along?"

"It's a weasel out back," said Frankie.

"Groundhog," said Billy James.

"Shut!" Sal leaned over Mavis' stomach and pointed at her brothers.

June smiled. "Wouldn't it have been safer," she continued, "with the other children in the car? I mean, they're older." Mavis slid her thumb under her bra strap, pulling it back over her shoulder. "I wasn't expecting no danger. Higgledy Piggledy is just yonder. I could of went to the Convenience but their stuff sits too long for me."

"So you left the newborns in the car and went in to buy some chuck steak-"

"No, m'am. Weenies."

"Right. Wieners." June was writing quickly but didn't seem to be crossing out anything. "But what I want to ask is, why did it take so long? To buy one item."

"It didn't. Take long. I couldn't of been in there more than five minutes, tops."

"Your babies suffocated, Mrs. Albright. In a hot car with the windows closed. No air. It's hard to see that happening in five minutes." It could be sweat, but it hurt enough to be blood. She didn't dare swat Sal's hand away or acknowledge the pain even slightly. Instead she scratched the corner of her mouth and said, "I've punished myself over that, but that's pretty near the most it could of been. I walked in there straight to the dairy section and picked up two packs of Armours which is high you know but I didn't even look for the price. Some of them is cheaper but just as good. But I was hurrying so I didn't look."

"You were hurrying?"

"Oh, yes, m'am. He was fit to be tied. Spam ain't nothing for a working man to eat."

"And wieners are?"

"I thought about chops. I thought about chops."

"Didn't you know your husband was coming home for supper, Mrs. Albright? Doesn't he come home for supper every day?" She's a really nice person, Mavis thought. Polite. She didn't look around the room or at the boys' feet, or jump at the crashing noise from the rear of the house, followed by a toilet flush. The sound of the photographer snapping his cases was loud when the toilet stopped. "Got it," he said. "Real nice meeting you, m'am." He leaned in to shake Mavis' hand. His hair was the same color as the reporter's.

"Get enough of the Cadillac?" asked June.

"Plenty." He made an O with thumb and forefinger. "You all be nice, hear?" He touched his hat and was gone.

Sal left off squeezing her mother's waist. She leaned forward and concentrated on swinging her foot, only occasionally hitting Mavis' shin.

From where they sat no one in the room could see the Cadillac parked in front of the house. But it had been seen for months by everybody in the neighborhood and could now be seen by anybody in Maryland since the photographer had taken more shots of it than he had of them. Mint green. Lettuce green. Cool. But the color wouldn't show in the newspaper. What would show would be the size, the flashiness of the place where babies had died. Babies forever unseen now because the mother did not even have a snapshot of their trusting faces.

Sal jumped up and screamed, "Ow! Look! A beetle!" and stomped on her mother's foot.

Mavis had said, "Yes, m'am. He come home for supper every day," and wondered what that would be like: to have a husband who came home every day. For anything. After the reporter left, she wanted to go look at the damage Sal had done to her side, but Frank was still in the bathroom, asleep probably, and it wasn't a good idea to bother him.

She thought to clean the potato chip crumbs from the seams of the plastic covers, but where she wanted to be was in the Cadillac. It wasn't hers; it was his, yet Mavis loved it maybe more than he did and lied to him about losing the second set of keys. It was what she talked about last as June left, saying, "It ain't new, though. It's three years old. A '65." If she could, she would have slept out there, in the back seat, snuggled in the place where the twins had been, the only ones who enjoyed her company and weren't a trial. She couldn't, of course. Frank told her she better not touch, let alone drive, the Cadillac as long as she lived. So she was as surprised as anybody when she stole it. "You all right?" Frank was already under the sheet, and Mavis woke with a start of terror, which dissolved quickly into familiar fright. "I'm okay." She searched the darkness for a sign, trying to feel, smell his mood in advance. But he was a blank, just the way he had been at supper the evening of the newspaper interview. The perfect meat loaf (not too loose, not too tight-two eggs made the difference) must have pleased him. Either that or he had reached balance: enough in, enough at hand. In any case, he'd been easy, even playful, at the table, while the other children were downright bold. Sal had Frank's old shaving razor unfolded by her plate and asked her father a series of questions, all starting with "Is it sharp enough to cut…?" And Frank would answer, "Cut anything from chin hair to gristle," or "Cut the eyelashes off a bedbug," eliciting peals of laughter from Sal. When Billy James spit Kool-Aid into Mavis' plate, his father said, "Hand me that catsup, Frankie, and Billy you stop playing in your mother's food, you hear?"

She didn't think it would take them long, and seeing how they were at supper, enjoying each other's jokes and all, she knew Frank would let the children do it. The newspaper people would think of something catchy, and June, "the only lady journalist the Courier had," would do the human interest.

Mavis tried not to stiffen as Frank made settling-down noises on the mattress. Did he have his shorts on? If she knew that she would know whether he was looking to have sex, but she couldn't find out without touching him. As if to satisfy her curiosity, Frank snapped the waistband of his boxers. Mavis relaxed, permitted herself a sigh that she hoped sounded like a snore. The sheet was off before she could complete it. When he pulled her nightgown up, he threw it over her face, and she let that mercy be. She had misjudged. Again. He was going to do this first and then the rest. The other children would be behind the door, snickering, Sal's eyes as cold and unforgiving as they were when she was told of the accident. Before Frank came to bed, Mavis had been dreaming of something important she was supposed to do, but couldn't remember what it was. Just as it came to her, Frank had asked her was she all right. Now she supposed she really was all right because the important thing she'd forgotten would never need doing anymore.

Would it be quick like most always? or long, wandering, collapsing in wordless fatigue?

It was neither. He didn't penetrate-just rubbed himself to climax while chewing a clump of her hair through the nightgown that covered her face. She could have been a life-size Raggedy Ann. Afterwards he spoke to her in the dark. "I don't know, Mave. I just don't know."

Should she say, What? What you mean? What don't you know? Or keep quiet? Mavis chose silence because suddenly she understood that he was talking not to her but to the other children, snickering behind the door.

"Maybe," he said. "Maybe we can fix it. Maybe not. I just don't know." He let out a deep yawn, then, "Don't see how, though." It was, she knew, the signal-to Sal, to Frankie, to Billy James.

The rest of the night she waited, not closing her eyes for a second. Frank's sleep was sound and she would have slipped out of bed (as soon as he had not smothered or strangled her) and opened the door except for the breathing beyond it. She was sure Sal squatted there-ready to pounce or grab her legs. Her upper lip would be raised showing eleven-year-old teeth too big for her snarling mouth. Dawn, Mavis thought, would be critical. The trap would be agreed upon but maybe not laid yet. Her sharpest concentration would be needed to locate it before it sprung.

At the first hint of gray light Mavis eased out of the bed. If Frank woke it was all over. Clutching a pair of red pedal pushers and a Daffy Duck sweatshirt, she made it to the bathroom. She took a soiled brassiere from the hamper and got dressed fast. No panties, and she couldn't go back in the bedroom for her shoes. The big thing was to get past the other children's room. The door stood open and, although there was no sound coming out, Mavis chilled at the thought of approaching it. Down the hall to the left was the little kitchen-dining room, the living room to the right. She would have to decide which way she was headed before she ran past that door. They would probably expect her to go straight to the kitchen as usual, so maybe she should shoot for the front door. Or maybe they counted on her changing a habit, and the trap was not in the kitchen at all. Suddenly she remembered her purse was in the living room, perched on the television cabinet, which, when the set broke, had become a catchall. And the spare keys were pinned under a tear in the purse's lining. Holding her breath, eyes wide to the darkness, Mavis padded quickly past the other children's open door. With her back exposed to that much danger, she felt feverish-sweaty and cold together.

Not only was her purse where she remembered, Sal's galoshes were lying at the front door. Mavis grabbed the purse, stuck her feet in her daughter's yellow boots and escaped onto the front porch. She did not look toward the kitchen and never saw it again. Getting out of the house had been so intense, she was pulling the Cadillac away from the curb when she realized she had no idea of what to do next. She drove toward Peg's; she didn't know the woman all that well, but her tears at the funeral impressed Mavis. She had always wanted to know her better, but Frank found ways to prevent acquaintance from becoming friendship.

The one streetlight seemed miles away and the sun reluctant to rise, so she had trouble finding Peg's house. When, finally, she did, she parked across the street to wait for stronger skylight before knocking on the door. Peg's house was dark, the shade of the picture window still down. Complete quiet. The wooden girl in the petunias, her face hidden by a fresh blue bonnet, tilted a watering can, a family of carved ducks lined at her heels. The lawn, edged and close-cut, looked like a carpet sample of expensive wool. Nothing moved, neither the tiny windmill nor the ivy surrounding it. At the side of the house, however, a rose of Sharon, taller than Peg's roof and older, was shaking. Stirred by the air conditioner's exhaust it danced, roughing blossoms and buds to the grass. Wild, it looked wild, and Mavis' pulse raced with it. According to the Cadillac's clock it wasn't five-thirty yet. Mavis decided to drive around for a while and return at a respectable hour. Six maybe. But they would be up, too, by then and Frank would see that the Caddy was gone. He would call the police for sure. Mavis swung away from the curb, sad and frightened by how dumb she was. Not only was the whole neighborhood familiar with the car, a photograph of it would be in today's paper. When Frank bought it and drove it home the men on the street slapped the hood and grinned, leaned in to sniff the interior, hit the horn and laughed. Laughed and laughed some more because its owner had to borrow a lawn mower every couple of weeks; because its owner had no screens in his windows and no working television; because two of his six porch posts had been painted white three months earlier, the rest still flaking yellow; because its owner sometimes slept behind the wheel of the car he'd traded in-all night-in front of his own house. And the women, who saw Mavis driving the children to the White Castle wearing sunglasses on cloudy days, flat-out stared before shaking their heads. As though they knew from the start that the Cadillac would someday be notorious.

Creeping at twenty miles per hour, Mavis entered route 121, thankful for the shelter of darkness left. As she passed the County Hospital, a silent ambulance glided out of the driveway. A green cross in a field of white slid from brilliant emergency light into shadow. Fifteen times she had been a patient there-four times for childbirth. During the next-to-last admission, when the twins were due, Mavis' mother came from New Jersey to help out. She kept house and minded the other children for three days. When the twins were delivered, she went back to Paterson-a three-hour drive, thought Mavis. She could be there before The Secret Storm, which she had missed all summer long.

At a Fill 'n Go gas station, Mavis checked her wallet before she answered the attendant. Three ten-dollar bills were folded behind her driver's license.

"Ten," she said.

"Gallons or dollars, m'am?"

"Gallons."

In the adjacent lot, Mavis noticed the window of a breakfast diner reflecting coral in the early light.

"Is that there place open?" she shouted over highway truck roar.

"Yes, m'am."

Tripping occasionally on gravel, she walked toward the diner.

Inside, the waitress was eating crab cakes and grits behind the counter. She covered her plate with a cloth and touched the corners of her mouth before wishing Mavis a good morning and taking her order. When Mavis left, carrying a paper cup of coffee and two honey dips in a napkin, she caught the waitress's broad smile in the Hires Root Beer mirror by the exit. The grin bothered her all the way back to the gas station until, stepping into the car, she saw her canary-yellow feet. Away from the pump, parked behind the diner, she put her breakfast on the dashboard while rummaging in the glove compartment. She found an unopened pint of Early Times, another bottle with an inch or so of scotch whiskey, paper napkins, a teething ring, several rubber bands, a pair of dirty socks, a battery-dead flashlight, a tube of lipstick, a Florida map, rolls of breath mints and a few traffic tickets. She dropped the teething ring into her purse, twisted her hair into a sad little ponytail that stuck out from the rubber band like hen feathers, and smeared the stranger's lipstick on her mouth. Then she sat back and sipped the coffee. Too nervous to ask for milk or sugar, she'd ordered it black and could not force herself to take a third swallow. The stranger's lipstick smirked sloppily from the cardboard rim.

The Cadillac drank ten gallons of gasoline every ninety miles.

Mavis wondered whether to call her mother or simply arrive. The latter seemed smarter. Frank may have called his mother-in-law by now or might do so any minute. Better if her mother could say truthfully, "I don't know where she is." Paterson took five hours, not three, and she had four dollars and seventy-six cents when she saw its sign. The fuel gauge touched E.

The streets looked narrower than she remembered, and the stores were different. The northern leaves were already starting to turn. Driving underneath them, in the dappled hall they made, she felt as though the pavement slid forward instead of retreating. The faster she traveled, the more road appeared ahead.

The Cadillac shut down a block from her mother's house, but Mavis managed to coast across the intersection and incline the automobile against the curb.

It was too soon. Her mother wouldn't be home from the preschool till the afternoon children had been picked up. The door key was no longer under the reindeer, so Mavis sat on the back porch and struggled out of the yellow boots. Her feet looked as though they belonged to somebody else.

Frank had already called at five-thirty a. m. when Mavis was staring at Peg's rose of Sharon. Birdie Goodroe told Mavis she had hung up on him after telling him she couldn't think what the hell he was talking about and who the hell did he think he was, dragging her out of her sleep? She was not pleased. Not then and not later when her daughter tapped on the kitchen window looking like a bat out of hell, which is what she said as soon as she opened the door. "Girl, you look like a bat out of hell what you doing up here in little kiddie boots?"

"Ma, just let me in, okay?"

Birdie Goodroe had barely enough calf liver for two. Mother and daughter ate in the kitchen, Mavis presentable now-washed, combed, aspirined and swimming a little in Birdie's housedress. "Well, let me have it. Not that I need to be told."

Mavis wanted some more of the baby peas and tipped the bowl to see if any were left.

"I could see this coming, you know. Anybody could," Birdie continued.

"Don't need more'n a mosquito's brain."

There were a few. A couple of tablespoons. Mavis scraped them onto her plate wondering if there was to be any dessert. Quite a bit of the fried potatoes were still in her mother's plate. "You going to eat those, Ma?"

Birdie pushed her plate toward Mavis. There was a tiny square of liver, too, and some onions. Mavis scraped it all onto her plate. "You still have children. Children need a mother. I know what you've been through, honey, but you do have other children." The liver was a miracle. Her mother always got every particle of the tight membrane off.

"Ma." Mavis wiped her lips with a paper napkin. "Why couldn't you make it to the funeral?"

Birdie straightened. "You didn't get the money order? And the flowers?"

"We got them."

"Then you know why. I had to choose-help bury them or pay for a trip. I couldn't afford to do both. I told you all that. I asked you all straight out which thing would be the best, and you both said the money. Both of you said so, both."

"They're going to kill me, Ma."

"Are you going to hold that over my head for the rest of my life?

All I've done for you and those children?"

"They already tried but I got away."

"You're all I have, now your brothers gone and got themselves shot up like-" Birdie slapped the table.

"They got no right to kill me."

"What?"

"He's making the other children do it."

"What? Do what? Speak up so I can hear what you saying."

"I'm saying they are going to kill me."

"They? Who? Frank? What they?"

"All of them. The kids too."

"Kill you? Your children?"

Mavis nodded. Birdie Goodroe widened her eyes first, then looked into her lap as she held her forehead in the palm of her hand. They didn't talk anymore for a while, but later, at the sink, Birdie asked, "Were the twins trying to kill you too?"

Mavis stared at her mother. "No! Oh, no, Ma! Are you crazy?

They're babies!"

"All right. All right. Just asking. It's unusual, you know, to think little children…"

"Unusual? It's-it's evil! But they'll do what he says. And now they'll do anything. They already tried, Ma!"

"Tried how? What did they do?"

"Sal had a razor and they was laughing and watching me. Every minute watching me."

"What did Sal do with the razor?"

"She had it next to her plate and she was looking at me. They all was."

Neither woman spoke about it again, because Birdie told Mavis she could stay if and only if she never talked that way again. That she wouldn't tell Frank, if he called back, or anybody else that she was there, but if she said one more word about killing she would call him right away.

In a week Mavis was on the road, but this time she had a plan. Days before she heard her mother talking low into the mouthpiece of the telephone, saying, "You better get up here fast and I mean pronto," Mavis had walked around the house, while Birdie was at the Play-Skool, thinking: money, aspirin, paint, underwear; money, aspirin, paint, underwear. She took all she could find of the first two, the checks in two brown government envelopes propped against the photograph of one of her killed-in-action brothers, and both bottles of Bayer. She took a pair of rhinestone clips from Birdie's jewelry box and stole back the car keys her mother thought she had hidden so well; poured two gallons of lawn mower gasoline into the Cadillac's tank and drove away for more. In Newark she found an Earl Scheib paint shop and waited two days in the Y dormitory until it was sprayed magenta. The twenty-nine dollars advertised turned out to be for a standard-size car only. Sixty-nine dollars is what they made her pay for the Cadillac. The underwear and thong sandals she bought at Woolworth's. At a Goodwill she bought a light-blue pantsuit, drip dry, and a white cotton turtleneck. Just right, she thought, for California. Just right.

With a crisp new Mobil map beside her on the seat, she sped out of Newark heading for route 70. As more and more of the East was behind her, the happier she became. Only once had she felt this kind of happiness. On the Rocket ride she took as a kid. When the rocket zoomed on the downward swing, the rush made her giddy with pleasure; when it slowed just before turning her upside down through the high arc of its circle, the thrill was intense but calm. She squealed with the other passengers, but inside was the stable excitement of facing danger while safely strapped in strong metal. Sal hated it; so did the boys when, later on, she took them to the amusement park. Now, in flight to California, the memory of the Rocket ride and its rush were with her at will.

According to the map the way was straight. All she had to do was find 70, stay on it until Utah, make a left on down to Los Angeles. Later she remembered traveling like that-straight. One state, then the next, just as the map promised. When her funds dwindled to coins, she was forced to look for hitchhikers. But other than the first and the last, she could not remember the order of the girls. Picking up girls was easiest. They were safe company, she hoped, and they helped with gas and food and sometimes invited her to a place where they could crash. They graced primary routes, intersections, ramps to bridges, the verges of gas stations and motels, in jeans belted low on the hips and flared at the bottom. Flat hair swinging or hair picked out in Afros. The white ones were the friendliest; the colored girls slow to melt. But all of them told her about the world before California. Underneath the knowing talk, the bell-chime laughter, the pointed silences, the world they described was just like her own pre-California existence-sad, scary, all wrong. High schools were dumps, parents stupid, Johnson a creep, cops pigs, men rats, boys assholes.

The first girl was outside Zanesville. That's where sitting in a roadside diner, counting her money, the runaway appeared. Mavis had noticed her going into the ladies' room, then, quite a bit later, coming out dressed in different clothes: a long skirt this time, and a flowing blouse that touched her thighs. Outside in the parking lot, the girl ran to the Cadillac's passenger window and asked for a lift. Smiling happily, she jerked open the door when Mavis nodded. The girl said her name-Sandra but call me Dusty-and talked for thirty-two miles. Not interested in anything about Mavis, Dusty ate two Mallomars and chattered, mostly about the owners of the six dog tags that hung from her neck. Boys in her high school class or whom she had known in junior high. She'd got two from when they dated; the rest she begged from their families-souvenirs. All dead or missing. Mavis agreed to drive through Columbus and drop Dusty at her girlfriend's house. They arrived in a soft rain. Someone had done the last mowing of the season. Dusty's hair matted in brown licks; the glorified scent of newly cut grass in rain, the clink of dog tags, half a Mallo. That was Mavis' memory of her first detour with a hitchhiker. Except for the last, the others were out of sequence. Was it in Colorado that she saw a man sitting on a bench under pines in a rest area? He ate slowly, very slowly while he read a newspaper. Or before? It was sunny, cold. Anyway somewhere around that place she picked up the girl who stole her rhinestone clips. But earlier-near Saint Louis, was it? — she opened the passenger door to two girls shivering on route 70. Wind beaten, their army jackets closed tight around their chins, leather clogs, thick gray socks-they wiped their noses while their hands were still pocketed.

Not far, they said. A place just a few miles out, they said. The place, a sparkling green cemetery, was as peopled as a park. Lines of cars necklaced the entrance. Groups of people, solitary strollers, all patient in the wind, mixed with boys from a military school. The girls thanked Mavis and got out, running a little to join a set of graveside mourners. Mavis lingered, amazed by the unnatural brightness of the green. What she thought were military students turned out to be real soldiers-but young, so young, and as fresh-looking as the headstones they stood before.

It must have been after that when Mavis picked up Bennie-the last one and the one she liked best and who stole her raincoat and Sal's boots. Bennie was glad to know that, like her, Mavis was going all the way to L. A. She, Bennie, was heading for San Diego. Not a talker, small or big, Bennie sang. Songs of true love, false love, redemption; songs of unreasonable joy. Some drew tears, others were deliberately silly. Mavis sang along once in a while, but mostly she listened and in one hundred and seventy-two miles never got tired of hearing her. Mile after mile rolled by urged and eased by the gorgeous ache in Bennie's voice.

She didn't like to eat at highway stops. If they were there, because Mavis insisted on it, Bennie drank water while Mavis wolfed down cheese melts and fries. Twice Bennie directed them through towns, searching for colored neighborhoods, where they could eat "healthy," she said. At those places Bennie ate slowly, steadily, with repeat orders, side dishes and always something to go. She was careful with her money but didn't seem worried about it, and shared the cost at every gas pump.

Mavis never learned what she planned to do or who meet in L. A. (well, San Diego). "To get it on," was her single answer to Mavis' inquiry. Nevertheless, somewhere between Topeka and Lawrence, Kansas, she disappeared along with Mavis' clear plastic raincoat and Sal's yellow boots. Odd, because Mavis' five-dollar bill was still attached to the gearshift with a rubber band. They had finished the barbecue and potato salad in a tacky restaurant named Hickey's. Bennie's "to go" order was wrapped and sitting on the table. "I'll take care of this," she said, nodding toward the check. "You go on to the toilet before we hit the road." When Mavis came out, Bennie and her ribsto-go were gone.

"How the hell I know?" was what the waitress answered. "She didn't leave even a penny tip."

Mavis fished out a quarter and placed it on the counter. She waited a few minutes in the car before trying to find her way back to sweet 70.

The quiet Bennie left in the Cadillac was unbearable. Mavis kept the radio on, and if one of Bennie's songs came on, she sang too, mourning the inferior rendition.

Panic struck in an Esso station.

Returning the rest room key, Mavis looked through the window.

Beyond, under the fluorescent lights sheltering the pump, Frank was leaning into the Cadillac window. Could he have grown that much hair in two weeks? And his clothes. Black leather jacket, shirt opened almost to his navel, gold chains. Mavis buckled and when the attendant stared at her she tried to make it look as though she'd stumbled. There was nowhere to run. She rummaged the Colorado maps in the rack. She looked again. He was gone. Parked close by, she thought, waiting for her to emerge.

I'll scream, she told herself, pretend I don't know him, fight him, call the police. The car was no longer mint green, but oh God-the license plate was the same. She had the reg. Suppose he brought the title papers. Was there a bulletin out? She could not stand still and there was no retreat. Mavis went forward. Not running. Not tripping. Head down, searching her purse for a twenty-dollar bill. Back in the car, waiting for the attendant to collect the money, she examined her surroundings in the rear- and side-view windows. Nothing. She paid and turned on the ignition. Right then the blackjacketed, open shirt torso appeared in the right-hand mirror. Gold links catching fluorescent light. Hard as she tried to control it, the Cadillac lurched out of the gas lane. Scared now, she forgot what to look for. Junction what? Turn right to go south. No, west. Enter 70 at what? But this was east. Exit ramp goes where? An hour later she was traveling a road already driven twice before. Exiting as soon as possible, she found herself on a narrow bridge and a street lined with warehouses. Secondary routes, she decided, would be better anyway. Fewer police, fewer streetlights. Trembling at every traffic light, she made it out of town. She was on route 18 when night came, and drove on and on until there was nothing but fumes to fuel the engine. The Cadillac neither sighed nor coughed. It simply stopped in a well of darkness, headlights picking out thirty feet of tarmac. Mavis switched off the lights and locked the doors. A little courage, she whispered. Like the girls running from, running toward. If they could roam around, jump in cars, hitchhike to burials, search strange neighborhoods for food, make their own way alone or with only each other for protection, certainly she could wait in darkness for morning to come. She had done it all her adult life, was able to sleep best in daylight. Besides and after all, she was not a teenager; she was a twenty-seven-year-old mother of…

Early Times didn't help. The tears wet her chin, crept down her neck anyway. What it did eventually was knock her out.

Mavis woke felt-mouthed, ugly, unfocused, and knew she was ravenous because the sun, watermelon red, looked edible. The screaming blue horizon that surrounded her was minus invitation or reproach and supported by a billion miles of not one thing. There was no choice. She relieved herself as Dusty had taught her, got back in the car to wait for another one to pass by. Bennie was smart; she never left anywhere without a dripping box of food. Mavis felt her stupidity close in on her head like a dry sack. A grown woman who could not cross the country. Could not make a plan that accommodated more than twenty minutes. Had to be taught how to dry herself in the weeds. Too rattle-minded to open a car's window so babies could breathe. She did not know now why she had run from the gold links coming toward her. Frank was right. From the very beginning he had been absolutely right about her: she was the dumbest bitch on the planet.

During the wait, in which no car or truck or bus approached, she dozed, woke to awful thoughts, dozed again. Suddenly she sat up, wide awake, and decided not to starve. Would the road girls just sit there? Would Dusty? Bennie? Mavis looked closely at the surroundings. The billion miles of not one thing had trees in the distance. Was this grass or a crop of some kind? Every road went somewhere, didn't it? Mavis collected her purse, looked for her raincoat and discovered it was gone. "Christ!" she shouted and slammed the door. The rest of the morning she stayed on the same road. When the sun was highest, she turned into a narrower one because it offered shade. Still tarmac, but not enough room for two automobiles to pass without using the shoulder. When the road ran out of trees, she saw ahead to the left a house. It looked small but close and it took a while for her to discover it was neither. She had to negotiate acres of corn to arrive. Either the house was backwards or it had no driveway. As she drew closer she saw it was stone-sandstone, maybe, but dark with age.

At first there seemed to be no windows, but then she made out the beginning of a porch and saw the reflection of huge windows on the ground floor. Circling to the right, she glimpsed a driveway leading not to the front door but around to the side. Mavis turned left. The grass near the porch was tended. Claws gripped the finials on either side of the stone steps. Mavis climbed the stairs and knocked on the door. No answer. She walked around to the driveway side and saw a woman sitting in a red wooden chair at the edge of a vegetable garden. "Excuse me," Mavis called, her hands funneling around her mouth.

The woman faced her, but Mavis couldn't tell where she was looking.

She was wearing sunglasses.

"Excuse me." Mavis moved closer. No need to shout now. "I broke down a ways back. Can anybody help? Is there someplace I can call?" The woman stood up, gathering the hem of her apron in both hands, and came forward. She wore a yellow cotton dress with tiny white flowers and fancy buttons under an apron of what looked like sailcloth. Her low-heeled shoes were unlaced. On her head a widebrimmed straw hat. The sun was beating hard; a hot wind kicked up, turning back the brim of her hat.

"No telephone out here," she said. "Come inside." Mavis followed her into the kitchen where the woman dumped pecans from her apron into a box by the stove and removed her hat. Two Hiawatha braids trailed down her shoulders. She slid out of her shoes, propped open the door with a brick and took off her sunglasses. The kitchen was big, full of fragrances and a woman's solitary mess.

Her back turned to Mavis, she asked her, "You a drinking woman?"

Mavis didn't know if a drink was being offered or solicited.

"No, I'm not."

"Lies not allowed in this place. In this place every true thing is okay."

Startled, Mavis breathed into her palm. "Oh. I drank some of my husband's liquor a while back, but I'm not what you'd call a drinking woman. I was just, well, wrung out. Driving so long and then running out of gas."

The woman busied herself lighting the stove. Her braids fell forward.

"I forgot to ask your name. Mine's Mavis Albright."

"People call me Connie."

"I'd appreciate some coffee, Connie, if you got any."

Connie nodded without turning around.

"You work here?"

"I work here." Connie lifted her braids from her chest and dropped them behind her shoulders.

"Is any of the family here? Seem like I knocked for the longest time."

"No family. Just her upstairs. She couldn't answer the door if she wanted to and she don't want to."

"I'm headed out by California. You think you can help me get some gas back to my car? Show me the way out of here?" The woman sighed at the stove but didn't reply.

"Connie?"

"I'm thinking."

Mavis looked around the kitchen that seemed to her as large as her junior high school cafeteria and that also had swinging wooden doors. She imagined rooms full of rooms beyond those doors. "You all ain't scared out here by yourselves? Don't seem like there's nothing for miles outside."

Connie laughed. "Scary things not always outside. Most scary things is inside." She turned from the stove with a bowl and placed it before Mavis, who looked in despair at the steaming potatoes, over which a pat of butter melted. The Early Times drunk turned her hunger into nausea but she said thank you and accepted the fork in Connie's hand. Anyway, the smell of the coffee was promising. Connie sat down next to her. "Maybe I go with you," she said. Mavis looked up. It was the first time she saw the woman's face without the sunglasses. Quickly she looked back at the food and poked the fork into the bowl.

"What you say me and you go to California?"

Mavis felt, but could not face, the woman's smile. Had she washed her hands before warming up the potatoes? Her smell was walnuts, not pecans. "What about your job here?" Mavis forced herself to taste a tiny bit of potato. Salty.

"It's by the sea, California?"

"Yeah. Right on the coast."

"Be nice to see water again." Connie kept her eyes on Mavis' face.

"Wave after wave after wave. Big water. Blue, blue, blue, yes?"

"That's what they say. Sunny California. Beaches, oranges…"

"Maybe too sunny for me." Connie got up abruptly and went to the stove.

"Can't be sunnier than here." The butter, salt and pepper mashed into the potatoes wasn't all that bad. Mavis was eating rapidly. "Go for miles and don't see a speck of shade."

"True," said Connie. She placed two cups of coffee and a pot of honey on the table. "Too much sunshine in the world. Vex me. Can't take it no more."

A breeze swept through the kitchen door, displacing the food smell with a sweeter one. Mavis had thought she would gulp the coffee when it arrived, but the satisfaction of the hot, salty potatoes made her patient. Following Connie's example she spooned honey into her cup, stirring slowly.

"Did you think up anything about how I can get me some gasoline?"

"Wait awhile. Today maybe, tomorrow maybe. People be out to buy."

"Buy? Buy what?"

"Garden things. Things I cook up. Things they don't want to grow themselves."

"And one of them can take me to get some gas?"

"Sure."

"Suppose nobody comes?"

"Always come. Somebody always come. Every day. This morning already I sold forty-eight ears of corn and a whole pound of peppers." She patted her apron pocket.

Blowing gently into her cup, Mavis went to the kitchen door and looked out. When she first arrived she was so happy to find someone at home she had not looked closely at the garden. Now, behind the red chair, she saw flowers mixed in with or parallel to rows of vegetables. In some places staked plants grew in a circle, not a line, in high mounds of soil. Chickens clucked out of sight. A part of the garden she originally thought gone to weed became, on closer inspection, a patch of melons. An empire of corn beyond.

"You didn't do all that by yourself, did you?" Mavis gestured toward the garden.

"Except the corn," said Connie.

"Wow."

Connie put the breakfast bowl in the sink. "You want to clean yourself up?"

The rooms full of rooms Mavis imagined to be lying through the swinging doors had kept her from asking to go to a bathroom. Here in the kitchen she felt safe; the thought of leaving it disturbed her. "I'll wait to see who comes by. Then I'll try to get myself together. I know I look a sight." She smiled, hoping the refusal did not signal her apprehension.

"Suit yourself," said Connie and, sunglasses in place, patted Mavis' shoulder as she stepped into her splayed shoes and on out to the yard.

Left alone Mavis expected the big kitchen to lose its comfort. It didn't. In fact she had an outer-rim sensation that the kitchen was crowded with children-laughing? singing? — two of whom were Merle and Pearl. Squeezing her eyes shut to dissipate the impression only strengthened it. When she opened her eyes, Connie was there, dragging a thirty-two-quart basket over the floor. "Come on," she said. "Make yourself useful."

Mavis frowned at the pecans and shook her head at the nutcrackers, picks and bowls Connie was assembling. "No," she said. "Think of something else I can do to help. Shelling that stuff would make me crazy."

"No it wouldn't. Try it."

"Uh uh. Not me." Mavis watched as she organized the tools.

"Shouldn't you put some newspaper down? Be easier to clean up."

"No newspapers in this house. No radio either. Any news we get have to be from somebody telling it face-to-face."

"Just as well," Mavis said. "All the news these days is bad as can be.

Can't do nothing about it anyway."

"You give in too quick. Look at your nails. Strong, curved like a bird's-perfect pecan hands. Fingernails like that take the meat out whole every time. Beautiful hands, yet you say you can't. Make you crazy. Make me crazy to see good nails go to waste." Later, watching her suddenly beautiful hands moving at the task, Mavis was reminded of her sixth-grade teacher opening a book: lifting the corner of the binding, stroking the edge to touch the bookmark, caressing the page, letting the tips of her fingers trail down the lines of print. The melty-thigh feeling she got watching her. Now, working pecans, she tried to economize her gestures without sacrificing their grace. Connie, having launched her into the chore, was gone, saying she had to "see about Mother." Sitting at the table, smelling the pleasure the wind brought through the door, Mavis wondered how old Connie's mother was. Judging by the age of her daughter, she would have to be in her nineties. Also, how long before a customer would come? Had anybody bothered the Cadillac yet? At whatever gas station she got to, would there be a map showing the way back to sweet 70, or even 287? She would go north then, to Denver, then scoot west. With luck she'd be on her way by suppertime. With no luck, she'd be ready to leave in the morning. She would be back on concrete, listening to the car radio that had got her through the silence Bennie left, hours of nonstop driving-two fingers impatiently twirling for the better song, the nicer voice. Now the radio was across a field, down one road, then another. Off. In the space where its sound ought to be was… nothing. Just an absence, which she did not think she could occupy properly without the framing bliss of the radio. From the table where she sat admiring her busy hands, the radio absence spread out. A quiet, secret fire breathing itself and exhaling the sounds of its increase: the crack of shells, the tick of nut meat tossed in the bowl, cooking utensils in eternal adjustment, insect whisper, the argue of long grass, the faraway cough of cornstalks.

It was peaceful, but she wished Connie would return lest she start up again-imagining babies singing. Just as the length of the woman's absence seemed much too long, Mavis heard a car crunching gravel. Then braking. A door slap.

"Hey, old lady." A woman's voice, light, loose.

Mavis turned and saw a dark-skinned woman, limber and moving quickly, mount the steps and halt when she didn't see what she expected.

"Oh, excuse me."

"That's okay," said Mavis. "She's upstairs. Connie."

"I see."

Mavis thought the woman was looking very carefully at her clothes.

"Oh, lovely," she said, coming to the table. "Just lovely." She stuck her fingers into the bowl of pecans and gathered a few. Mavis expected her to eat some, but she let them fall back to the heap. "What's Thanksgiving without pecan pie? Not a thing."

Neither one of them heard the bare feet plopping, and since the swinging doors had no sound, Connie's entrance was like an apparition. "There you are!" The black woman opened her arms. Connie entered them for a long swaying hug. "I scared this girl to death. Never saw a stranger inside here before."

"Our first," said Connie. "Mavis Albright, this is Soane Morgan."

"Hi, hon."

"Morgan. Mrs. Morgan."

Mavis' face warmed, but she smiled anyway and said, "Sorry. Mrs. Morgan," while taking note of the woman's expensive oxford shoes, sheer stockings, wool cardigan and the cut of her dress: summerweight crepe, pale blue with a white collar.

Soane opened a crocheted purse. "I brought some more," she said, and held up a pair of aviator-style sunglasses.

"Good. I got one pair left."

Soane glanced at Mavis. "She eats sunglasses."

"Not me. This house eats them." Fitting the stems behind her ears, Connie tested the dark lenses at the doorway. She turned her face directly to the sun and the "Hah!" she shouted was full of defiance. "Somebody order shelled pecans, or is this your idea?"

"My idea."

"Make a lot of pies."

"Make more than pie." Connie rinsed the sunglasses under the sink tap and peeled away the sticker.

"I don't want to hear, so don't tell me. I came for the you-knowwhat."

Connie nodded. "Can you get this girl some gasoline for her automobile? Take her and bring her back?" She was drying and polishing the new glasses, checking for spots and lint from the towel. "Where is your car?" asked Soane. There was wonder in her voice, as though she doubted anyone in thongs, wrinkled slacks and a child's dirty sweatshirt could have a car.

"Route eighteen," Mavis told her. "Took me hours to walk here, but in a car…"

Soane nodded. "Happy to. But I'll have to get somebody else to drive you back. I would, but I've got too much to do. Both my boys due on furlough." Proudly, she looked at Connie. "House'll be full before I know it." Then, "How's Mother?"

"Can't last."

"You sure Demby or Middleton's not a better idea?" Connie slipped the aviator glasses into her apron pocket and headed for the pantry. "She wouldn't draw but one breath in a hospital. The second one would be her last."

The small pouch Connie placed on top of a basket of pecans could have been a grenade. Positioned on the seat of the Oldsmobile between Mavis and Soane Morgan, the cloth packet emanated tension. Soane kept touching it as though to remind herself that it was there. The easy talk in the kitchen had disappeared. Suddenly formal, Soane said very little, answered Mavis' questions with the least information and asked none of her own.

"Connie's nice, isn't she?"

Soane looked at her. "Yes. She is."

For twenty minutes they traveled, Soane cautious at every rise or turn of the road, however slight. She seemed to be on the lookout for something. They stopped at a one-pump gas station in the middle of nowhere and asked the man who limped to the window for five gallons to carry. There was an argument, peppered with long silences, about the five-gallon can. He wanted Mavis to pay for it; she said she would return it when she came back to fill her tank. He doubted it. Finally they settled for a two-dollar deposit. Soane and Mavis drove away, turned into another road, heading east for what seemed like an hour. Pointing toward a fancy wooden sign, Soane said, "Here we are." The sign read ruby pop.360 on top and lodge 16 at the bottom. Mavis' immediate impression of the little town was how still it was, as though no one lived there. Except for a feed store and a savings and loan bank, it had no recognizable business district. They drove down a wide street, past enormous lawns cut to dazzle in front of churches and pastel-colored houses. The air was scented. The trees young. Soane turned into a side street of flower gardens wider than the houses and snowed with butterflies.

The odor of the five-gallon can had been fierce in Soane's car. But in the boy's truck, propped between Mavis' feet, it was indistinguishable from the others. The gluey, oily, metally combination might have made her retch if he had not done voluntarily what Mavis had been unable to ask of Soane Morgan: turn on the radio. The disc jockey announced the tunes as though they were made by his family or best friends: King Solomon, Brother Otis, Dinah baby, Ike and Tina girl, Sister Dakota, the Temps.

As they bounced along, Mavis, cheerful now, enjoyed the music and the shaved part in the boy's hair. Although he was pleasanter than Soane, he didn't have much more to say. They were several miles away from Ruby pop.360 and listening to the seventh of Jet magazine's top twenty when Mavis realized that, other than the gas station guy, she had not seen a single white.

"Any white people in your town?"

"Not to live, they ain't. Come on business sometime." When they glimpsed the mansion in the distance on the way to the Cadillac, he asked, "What's it like in there?"

"I only been in the kitchen," Mavis answered.

"Two old women in that big of a place. Don't seem right." The Cadillac was unmolested but so hot the boy licked his fingers before and after he unscrewed the gas cap. And he was nice enough to start the engine for her and tell her to leave the doors open for a while before she got in. Mavis did not have to struggle to get him to accept money-Soane had been horrified-and he drove off accompanying "Hey Jude" on his radio.

Behind the wheel, cooling in the air-conditioned air, Mavis regretted not having noticed the radio station's number on the dashboard of the boy's truck. She fiddled the dial uselessly as she drove the Cadillac back to Connie's house. She parked, and the Cadillac, dark as bruised blood, stayed there for two years.

It was already sunset when the boy started the engine. Also she had forgotten to ask him for directions. Also she couldn't remember where the gas station with her two-dollar deposit was and didn't want to search for it in the dark. Also Connie had stuffed and roasted a chicken. But her decision to spend the night was mostly because of Mother.

The whiteness at the center was blinding. It took a moment for Mavis to see the shape articulated among the pillows and the bonewhite sheets, and she might have remained sightless longer had not an authoritative voice said, "Don't stare, child."

Connie bent over the foot of the bed and reached under the sheet. With her right hand she raised Mother's heels and with her left fluffed the pillows underneath them. Muttering "Toenails like razors," she resettled the feet gently.

When her eyes grew accustomed to dark and light, Mavis saw a bed shape far too small for a sick woman-almost a child's bed-and a variety of tables and chairs in the rim of black that surrounded it. Connie selected something from one of the tables and leaned into the light that ringed the patient. Mavis, following her movements, watched her apply Vaseline to lips in a face paler than the white cloth wrapped around the sick woman's head.

"There must be something that tastes better than this," said Mother, trailing the tip of her tongue over her oiled lips. "Food," said Connie. "How about some of that?"

"No."

"Bit of chicken?"

"No. Who is this you brought in here? Why did you bring somebody in here?"

"I told you. Woman with a car need help."

"That was yesterday."

"No it wasn't. This morning I told you."

"Well, hours ago, then, but who invited her into my privacy? Who did that?"

"Guess. You, that's who. Want your scalp massaged?"

"Not now. What is your name, child?"

Mavis whispered it from the dark she stood in.

"Step closer. I can't see anything unless it's right up on me. Like living in an eggshell."

"Disregard her," Connie told Mavis. "She sees everything in the universe." Drawing a chair bedside, she sat down, took the woman's hand and one by one stroked back the cuticles on each crooked finger. Mavis moved closer, into the circle of light, resting her hand on the metal foot of the bed.

"Are you all right now? Is your automobile working?"

"Yes, m'am. It's fine. Thank you."

"Where are your children?"

Mavis could not speak.

"There used to be a lot of children here. This was a school once. A beautiful school. For girls. Indian girls."

Mavis looked at Connie, but when she returned her glance, Mavis quickly lowered her eyes.

The woman in the bed laughed lightly. "It's hard, isn't it," she said, "looking in those eyes. When I brought her here they were green as grass."

"And yours was blue," said Connie.

"Still are."

"So you say."

"What color, then?"

"Same as me-old-lady wash-out color."

"Hand me a mirror, child."

"Give her nothing."

"I'm still in charge here."

"Sure. Sure."

All three watched the brown fingers gentling the white ones. The woman in the bed sighed. "Look at me. Can't sit up by myself and arrogant to the end. God must be laughing His head off."

"God don't laugh and He don't play."

"Yes, well, you know all about Him, I'm sure. Next time you see Him, tell Him to let the girls in. They bunch around the door, but they don't come in. I don't mind in the daytime, but they worry my sleep at night. You're feeding them properly? They're always so hungry. There's plenty, isn't there? Not those frycake things they like but good hot food the winters are so bad we need coal a sin to burn trees on the prairie yesterday the snow sifted in under the door quaesumus, da propitius pacem in diebus nostris Sister Roberta is peeling the onions et a peccato simus semper liberi can't you ab omni perturbatione securi…"

Connie folded Mother's hands on the sheet and stood, signaling Mavis to follow her. She closed the door and they stepped into the hall.

"I thought she was your mother. I mean the way you talked, I thought she was your own mother." They were descending the wide central stairs.

"She is my mother. Your mother too. Whose mother you?" Mavis did not answer, partly because she couldn't speak of it but also because she was trying to remember where, in a house with no electricity, the light in Mother's room came from. After the roast chicken supper, Connie showed Mavis to a large bedroom. From the four cots in it, she chose the one closest to the window, where she knelt looking out. Two milky moons, instead of the one hanging there, would have been just like Connie's eyes. Beneath them a swept world. Unjudgmental. Tidy. Ample. Forever. California, which way?

Maryland, which way?

Merle? Pearl?

The lion cub that ate her up that night had blue eyes instead of brown, and he did not have to hold her down this time. When he circled her shoulders with his left paw, she willingly let her head fall back, clearing the way to her throat. Nor did she fight herself out of the dream. The bite was juicy, but she slept through that as well as other things until the singing woke her.

Mavis Albright left the Convent off and on, but she always returned, so she was there in 1976.

On that July morning she had been aware for months of the sourness between the Convent and the town and she might have anticipated the truckload of men prowling the mist. But she was thinking of other things: tattooed sailors and children bathing in emerald water. And exhausted by the pleasures of the night before, she let herself drift in and out of sleep. An hour later, shooing pullets out of the schoolroom, she smelled cigar smoke and the merest trace of Aqua Velva.