Chapter Twelve
The day the dishwasher was delivered, I began to smell colors. Henry was at work when two guys in uniforms that smelled like black licorice knocked on the front door. They wore white gloves as evidence that they wouldn’t leave a mess behind. And they didn’t. Leave it to me to make my own mess. But they did exactly as they claimed they would. They delivered the appliance and installed it to its specifications. Of course, its specifications were not what I thought they would be.
Harvey and Sal, as their name tags labeled them, unboxed the large rectangle and positioned it in the center of my efficiency kitchen. Then Harvey brushed his white gloves together and said, “All done!”
“I’m sorry?” I looked at the metal rectangle in the middle of the kitchen and thought he meant they had just completed step one of a multistep process.
“She’s all ready for you.”
There must be some mistake. “I thought you were going to install it.”
Sal, the silent one, nodded as Harvey proclaimed, “We did!”
According to their uniforms, these guys were the professionals, and yet they seemed to be missing an important step: the actual installation.
“So you’re going to put it right there.” I pointed. “Next to the sink?”
“Oh, you can push her closer if you want. That’s the beauty of the Mobile Maid; you move her to wherever you want to. When you’re ready to use her,
just attach this hose to the faucet.”
“And the other one, Harv,” the quiet one said beneath his breath. I wondered if he had been instructed to not speak.
“Yes, unless you want a flood, make sure this end of the hose is also in the sink. Oh, and plug her in, but I’m sure a smart lady such as yourself would’ve figured that out.” The guys both chuckled.
“But doesn’t it go there?” I pointed next to the sink again. “You know, into the cabinets?”
“Ah, no, ma’am. Not this here model. Like her name says, she’s mobile.
You can store her wherever you like—in the pantry there if you want. And when you’re ready, just wheel her out.”
The Mobile Maid took up a third of the floor space in my U-shaped kitchen, blocking the flow from the oven to the fridge, the sink to the pantry, creating an island of obstruction.
“Fully automatic, with king-sized capacity,” Sal muttered as if he was reading off an advertisement, but king-size intrusion seemed more like it.
“If you don’t have any more questions, ma’am—”
The first time I was called that, I took a sense of pride in it. I was newly wed and had just arrived in Greenwood when the butcher at the A&P handed me the shaved ham and said, “Have a nice day, ma’am.” At that time, I smiled. I still felt so much like a miss playing the part of a married woman, still wondering what I was even doing with a ring on my finger and a car of my own. Six years later, I couldn’t remember the last time someone had called me miss, and I realized they never would again.
“No, that’s all, thank you,” I told the men as I escorted them to the front door.
I knew Henry would want to give it a good test that night, so I decided to make a real meal, one Wesley would appreciate. I stubbed my toe three times on that monstrosity as I chopped the potatoes and molded the meat loaf. By
the time Henry got home, I was limping.
“Oh, look at that!” He ran his hands over the top of the dishwasher before lifting the lid and looking inside. “King-size capacity, they say.”
I didn’t think he had ever been so interested in the use of dishes before.
Henry couldn’t wait to start the machine after dinner, having read every page of the manual while I set the table. After dinner, the machine chugged to life, causing Wesley to put his hands over his ears and declare, “Too loud!”
“I was telling Gary about this,” Henry shouted.
“Gary?”
“Yeah, ran into him at the mailbox when I got home. Was asking if I’d said anything to Jack yet.” The machine paused before water began to spit out the hose and into the sink. “Think of the time you’ll save!”
The Maid roared again, moving on to the next cycle, so that I had to raise my voice to be heard over it. “I thought it was supposed to be installed.”
“It is.”
“No, into the cabinets. Not the middle of the floor.”
“I got you the mobile one. It was too much to cut into the counter, reconfigure everything. But this one, you can put it away when you’re not using it.”
“Where?”
He shrugged. “The pantry.”
Apparently, he had not set foot in the pantry in quite some time. If he had, he would have realized there was no space for the Maid to fit in there.
“There’s no room.”
He shrugged again. “Just leave it where it is. It’s like extra counter space.”
“More like a tripping hazard.”
There was a time when Henry had found me funny, when he got me in ways few others did, like Mama, who told me not to sass. He used to laugh
with me more. Some of our first nights together in that house, we stayed up late talking, dreaming, laughing together. Each night we were eager to be together, happy he was home, satisfied to be in each other’s company and arms, as if nothing else in the world mattered.
Henry took a drink before setting his tumbler down so hard the ice shook against the glass. “I was just trying to help.”
“I didn’t mean it like that.”
“I remember when you used to be grateful.” He was right. Once upon a time, I had been. “Send it back if you don’t want it.”
I had been grateful when he asked me out, when we went steady, when he proposed, and when we walked down the aisle. I was always thankful. What he didn’t realize was that I wanted more than a dishwasher. I wanted him to understand that without me having to tell him. At one point, he would’ve recognized that truth for himself. But time has a way of changing, a subtle, secret metamorphosis that surprises us later.
That night, the smell of our pink bubblegum sheets woke me after I had only been asleep for an hour. I got up to warm myself some milk and hoped it would calm my senses. As I sprinkled cinnamon on top, I couldn’t help but miss Daddy. I never thought of him in the day. Only in the darkness. After he passed, I missed those stolen moments of just the two of us. It was during one of those moments when Daddy took his last breath. Mama had gone to bed, knowing the end was near but thinking she still had time. I snuck downstairs just in time to hold Daddy’s hand as he exhaled the last rattle. I waited for another intake, a gasp, a huff, something. But only silence came.
I joined Luna out back and watched the wind wave the trees in the breeze.
The first tree I’d fallen in love with was at the back of our property where the creek ran. Its branches reached far, from one bank across to the other. I would spend afternoons sitting in her branches, listening to the water bubble across
the slate rocks on its way to the watering hole. But I don’t like to talk about that pond.
It was your fault.
Sometimes the memories we keep are the ones we’d rather forget. But they have a way of finding us in the night, whispering along the wind so we remember.
Mama had told me not to go. But Georgie begged. Daddy was still with us then, off in the field, and Mama was putting together a pie for after dinner.
We had all heard the news, but I was fifteen at the time, too full of self to listen. They had tried to tell me. I should’ve listened. I had seen what it did to Mary. She had been so healthy one day. And gone the next.
They told us not to be near water, that it seemed to like the water. But this was our swimming hole, the one we played in every summer on days when the heat got so high only cicadas kept on with their usual business. We had tried resting in the shade. We sat in the low branches of the tree, too hot to climb any higher. We listened to the water flow beneath us.
And then Georgie began to ask.
“Can’t we please go?”
“You know what Mama said.”
“I know.”
“Then you know the answer.”
But he kept on asking.
The more I thought of it, the more I listened to that water flowing toward a reprieve, the more I felt a drop of sweat trickle down my neck, meandering along my back and dripping into my underpants, and the more I realized he had a point. There were a lot of things Mama didn’t know. This could be one of them.
We raced to the pond, Georgie giggling with every step. He was only eight
years old, but he could nearly beat me already. I thought that soon enough he would be faster than me.
We heard the others before we could see them. Neighbors had gotten to the pond first. Clothes lay on the banks, shoes kicked off in a hurry to get into the water. Georgie stripped down to his underpants, too young to be self- conscious.
The water felt cool against our skin. We splashed and dove. We laughed and held our breath. We played until our fingers pruned. Then we walked home slowly, letting ourselves dry to hide our disobedience.
But a few days later, Georgie didn’t want to play. He didn’t want to leave the house when Mama said he needed to get some fresh air. Mama soon realized the sweat that trickled down his temple didn’t come from the heat and humidity. It came from a fever.
Mama told me to go outside. And I did. I ran to our tree and I climbed up in her branches, not knowing that Georgie wouldn’t be able to climb again.
Soon, polio would ravage his body, twist his legs, take away his ability to ever run again.
As the doctor asked questions, trying to track his exposure, Georgie revealed our secret from that day.
It was my fault.
I had been the one to take Georgie to the tree, the creek, the watering hole, the place we knew not to go. The place with other kids. Including Jamison down the road, who had taken to bed with polio as well.
That was the last time I remember Mama slapping me. Because then she seemed to care about me. After that day, she gave me silence, not attention.
That was when I began waking in the night, hearing Georgie cry out for Mama, thinking I could hear him even when they sent him away to the paralysis hospital. And that was when I learned to cry silently in the night, only in the dark hours, only in the quiet, so the stillness didn’t betray my
continual attempt at penance, my effort to be the good, obedient girl who was seen, but not heard.
