Phew, says that smile. That was a close call.
Ingrid has good days and Ingrid has bad days, but it really isn’t any of my business which is which, and so I pretend not to see or care. I don’t know much about agoraphobia, but I do know that the mailman brings her mail to her door sometimes, when there’s so much stuffed inside he can no longer close the door. A little neighbor boy lugs her trash bins to the curb. I, or some other twerp like me, run her errands. From what I know, it started with a panic attack at the market in town. It was a Saturday in summer a few years back, and it was crazy busy around here. The market was packed, and so that’s what the rumor mill blames for Ingrid’s very public panic attack. The crowds. It was also hot out, stiflingly hot, hard to breathe. The lines were seemingly endless, swarming with people she’d never seen before and didn’t know. Tourists. Some bystanders saw her grope at her neck, gasp for air; others heard her scream, Go away and Leave me alone, and so they did, phoning 911 to help instead. Don’t touch me! Ingrid purportedly screamed.
The fear of a repeat attack is what keeps Ingrid inside these days. The fear of losing control, the prospect of dying in the local market with everyone watching on, staring, pointing fingers. She’s never said as much, but that’s what I assume. ’Cause that’s the last place in the world I would want to die, at the local market, surrounded by the smell of fish fillets and tourists.
Ingrid takes a bag from my hands and I follow her into the kitchen where, spread across the farmhouse table, is a deck of cards. She’s playing solitaire. How sad. She’s got a pad of paper set beside the cards, ticking off the times she wins a game. She’s up three to one.
Also on the table are all of Ingrid’s beading supplies. The ribbons and the wires and the cords. Beads and clasps. Empty cardboard jewelry boxes. A rainbow of tissue paper. A handwritten list of orders that need to be filled. Trapped at home and yet surprisingly resourceful, Ingrid manages to make her own beaded jewelry and run an online shop. Supplies are delivered to her, while the mail carrier collects the outgoing packages, pint-size jewelry boxes with necklaces or earrings tucked inside. Ingrid makes a living without ever having to step foot outside her home. She tried to show me how to make her jewelry once, a necklace for no one in particular, not as if I had someone to give a necklace to. But still, my bungling hands couldn’t figure out how to bend the wire, how to put on the beads. Ingrid smiled at me sweetly—this was years ago—and confessed that I made a lousy apprentice. After that I stuck to running her errands and delivering her meals. But still, she made me a necklace, nothing girlish or sissified, but rather a shark’s tooth necklace on an adjustable cord with just a few black and white beads. For strength and protection, she told me as she set it in my hands. She said it as if I was in need of these things. Supposedly that’s what a shark tooth represents: strength, protection. It became my talisman, my good luck charm.
I wear it all the time, but so far it hasn’t worked.
Today we shoot the shit. We talk about the Lions’ loss to the Giants last night, the fact that she’s going to bake cookies this afternoon. We talk about the weather, we talk about the gulls. Never heard them so loud, says Ingrid, and I say, Me neither. But of course I have. The gulls are always loud. I think if I should mention the squatters in the yellow house across the street from mine, deciding that no, that’s not the kind of small talk she wants or needs to hear. I help her unpack the sacks, laying the items on the table so that she can put them away. She hands me another twenty for my time. I try to refuse. She shoves it into my hand. I take it this time.
We go through this routine every week.
As Ingrid unpacks the sacks, she hums a song. It’s not one I know, but it’s a gloomy song, a morose song, one that I can’t place, but it makes me feel sad. It’s depressing. It makes Ingrid sad, too. Tired and sad. Her movements are plodding, her posture is slumped. “Can I help you there?” I ask, pulling the empty paper sacks from the countertop and folding them in two.
But Ingrid says, “I’m just about done,” as she sets a box of microwave popcorn on the shelf and closes the pantry door.
“Did you eat lunch, Alex?” Ingrid asks, and she offers to make me a sandwich. I lie. I said I ate. I say no thanks. The last thing I want to be is an inconvenience, or my own charity case, which I already am. It’s hard to say which of us has the more miserable life, Ingrid or me.
And then, for whatever reason, when the sacks are empty and I know I can say goodbye to Ingrid and go, I pick up that deck of cards and start shuffling, anyway.
“Ever play gin rummy?” I ask, and before me, Ingrid relaxes and smiles. She’s played gin rummy before. I know because I’ve played it with her on some other day just like today.
We sit at the table and I deal.
The first game I let her win. It seems like the right thing to do.
The second game I put up more fight, but she wins that, too. Ingrid is quite the cardsharp, drawing and discarding with nimble hands. She stares at me from above the fan of cards, trying to think through what I have in my hands. A queen of clubs, a jack of diamonds. An ace.
She’s also good at meddling, though she does it with such tact it’s hard to get mad.
“You’re working full-time for Mrs. Priddy?” she asks as I shuffle the cards for a third time, and I say, “Yes, ma’am.” She runs her hands through her hair, relaxing the frowziness. She tugs at the robe, making sure it’s tied tight. She slackens in her chair, and yet the signs of stress are still there, in the lines of her face, in the restive eyes. She rises and moves to the two-cup coffeemaker, asking if I’d like some. I say no, and she helps herself to a mug, adding the creamer, the sugar, and again I think of Pearl, of her body rising up out of the waters of Lake Michigan, dripping wet. Since yesterday, I haven’t been able to get that image out of my mind.
“The rest of the kids have gone to college,” she says, as if somehow I’m in the dark about this little fact, the fact that all the kids I grew up with are no longer here. “Not for you?” she asks as I lay the cards out on the table before us. Ten for her, ten for me.
“Couldn’t afford it,” is what I say, but of course that’s not true. Well, it is true—Pops and I couldn’t afford it, but we didn’t need to. I was offered a full ride that I turned down. Tuition and housing included. I said thanks, but no thanks. I’m a smart kid, I know that as much as the next guy. Though not in an ostentatious, inflated kind of way, more of a sly, witty kind of way. I know big words but that doesn’t mean I’m going to use them. Though some of the time I do. Sometimes they come in handy.
“How’s your father?” asks Ingrid in a knowing way, and I say point-blank, “Still a drunk.”
Pops hasn’t been able to hold down a job for years now. Seems you can’t show up at work completely pie-eyed and plastered and plan to still get paid. After the bank nearly foreclosed on the mortgage years ago, I started working part-time for Priddy because she turned a blind eye to the fact that I was only twelve years old. I washed dishes in the back room so that no one would see, and Priddy graciously paid me under the table so the IRS wouldn’t find out. It was another one of those things that everyone in town knew about, but nobody mentioned.
And then I change the subject because I no longer want to talk about my dad. Or college. Or the fact that the rest of the world has moved on, while I’m stuck in a life of stagnancy.
“Supposed to be a cold winter,” I say as the wind turns tight corners around the periphery of the house like a race car driver, brakes squealing, tires shrieking.
“Aren’t they all?” asks Ingrid.