There Was an Old Woman

Chapter Six


Before Evie left the upstairs bedroom, she took down from the wall the framed Georgia O’Keeffe poster—a white camellia blooming out of a field of pale blue and turquoise—that she and Ginger had picked up at an after-Christmas sale at the Met. She found some duct tape in the kitchen and used it to secure the picture over the broken window. At least that would keep squirrels and wet weather out until she could get the window properly replaced.

Downstairs, she put away the broom and gloves. Her parents’ bedroom and bath were the only rooms left to assess.

She felt her way through the dark downstairs hallway to the tiny room tucked under the stairs, opened the door, and peered in. The familiar room, barely big enough for her parents’ double bed and two bureaus, smelled like a rank subway tunnel. Wrinkled clothing covered the bed. Evie recognized the pink terry-cloth robe she and Ginger had given their mother for a Mother’s Day years ago. More ashtrays on the bureaus overflowed with cigarette butts. Evie raised the window shades and tried to open the windows, but they wouldn’t budge.

Her mother’s bottle of Jean Naté sat on the bureau, as always. Evie unscrewed the top and poured a little into her hands. The scent reminded her of fresh laundry and lemon meringue pie. It was what her mother smelled like after a shower. And sometimes, her father had smelled of it, too.

Evie closed the bottle and put it back.

When she shifted the clothing on the bed, she realized that the bedding beneath was damp and smelled sour. She stripped the sheets. The mattress was wet, too.

Working quickly and trying not to gag, she balled the sheets up with the dirty clothes, hauled the bundle out through the front door, and dumped it by the side of the house. As she stood there, hands on her hips, taking great gulps of fresh air and girding herself for hauling out the mattress, a red sports car rolled up and pulled into the driveway across the street. That house was spruced up and freshly painted in shades of tan, maroon, and a deep green, the bushes in front sculpted into perfect spheres—all that tidiness a tacit rebuke to her mother’s house. A man Evie didn’t recognize got out and looked across the street. He gave her a puzzled look and raised his hand.

Evie turned away and went inside. She didn’t know him and had no desire to explain the mess her mother had made. By the time she’d wrestled the mattress off her mother’s bed, set it on end, and shoved it out the front door, the man had disappeared. She pushed, pulled, and dragged the mattress up the side of the house where she propped it under the bathroom window, leaning the nasty side, soiled and pitted with cigarette burns, against the house.

That’s when she heard a steady drip, drip, drip coming from beneath the house. Under the bathroom. She stooped and looked through a hole in the wood lattice paneling that covered the gap between the house and ground. She couldn’t see anything, but she could certainly smell it. Raw sewage.

Frustration welled up inside her. What next? Evie reached out and yanked on a nearby oak sapling that had already grown a foot tall. But it was too deeply rooted to budge, and all Evie had to show for her effort were fingers scraped raw. The rot in the house was deep rooted, too, nurtured by decades of unhappiness, fertilized with denial.

Evie heard a tentative throat clearing. She pivoted away from the house and the sapling, a little embarrassed to have been caught taking her frustrations out on a weed. Standing on neatly mowed grass beyond her mother’s scraggly yard was a diminutive elderly woman, leaning on a cane. She had on a pink cardigan and a collared blouse with a double strand of fat white pearls around her neck.

Evie brushed away tears she hadn’t even realized she’d shed. “Mrs. Yetner?” Amazing. The old woman was not only still alive but remarkably little changed aside from the cane and the back that was stooped rather than ramrod straight. Evie and Ginger had considered Mrs. Yetner ancient even when they were growing up.

“Ginger?” the woman said. She pulled a tissue from the wrist of her sweater sleeve and dabbed at her nose as she pinned Evie under her sharp, speculative gaze, magnified through thick glasses. “No, of course not. You’re the other one, aren’t you?”