“It was over before it began.” Grandma’s eyes grew remote. “I don’t remember a thing that happened.”
“On Monday I roller-skated at Chessman Park; on Tuesday I had chocolate cake at home; on Wednesday I fell in the crick.” Tom put the calendar in his blouse. “That was this week. Last week I caught crayfish, swung on a vine, hurt my hand on a nail, and fell off a fence. That takes me up until last Friday.”
“Well, it’s good somebody’s doing some thing,” said Grandma.
“And, I’ll remember today,” said Tom, “because the oak leaves turned all red and yellow and fell down and I made a big fire out of them. And this afternoon I’m going to Colonel Quartermain’s for a big birthday party.”
“You just run and play,” said Grandma. “I’ve got this job in the attic.”
She was breathing hard when she climbed into the musty garret. “Meant to do this last spring,” she murmured. “Here it is coming on winter and I don’t want to go all through the snow, thinking about this stuff up here.” She peered about in the attic gloom, saw the huge trunks, the spider webs, the stacked newspapers. There was a smell of ancient wooden beams.
She opened a dirty window that looked out on the apple trees far below. The smell of autumn came in, cool and sharp.
“Look out below!” cried Grandma, and began heaving old magazines and yellow trash down into the yard. “Better than carrying it downstairs.”
Old wire frame dressmaker’s dummies went careening down, followed by silent parrot cages and riffling encyclopaedias. A faint dust rose in the air and her heart was giddy in a few minutes. She had to pick her way over to sit down on a trunk, laughing breathlessly at her own inadequacy.
“More stuff, more junk!” she cried. “How it does pile up. What’s this now?”
She picked up a box of clippings and cut-outs and buttons. She dumped them out on the trunk top beside her and pawed through them. There were three neat small bundles of old calendar pages clipped together.
“Some more of Tom’s nonsense,” she sniffed. “Honestly, that child! Calendars, calendars, saving calendars.”
She picked up one of the calendars and it said OCTOBER, 1887. And on the front of it were exclamation marks and red lines under certain days, and childish scribbles: “This was a special day!” or “A wonderful day!”
She turned the calendar over with suddenly stiffening fingers. In the dim light her head bent down and her quiet eyes squinted to read what was written on the back:
“Elizabeth Simmons, aged 10, low fifth in school.”
She held the faded calendars in her cold hands and looked at them. She looked at the dates and the year and the exclamation marks and red circles around each special day. Slowly her brows drew together.
Then her eyes became quite blank. Silently she lay back where she sat on the trunk, her eyes looking out at the autumn sky. Her hands dropped away, leaving the calendars yellow and faded on her lap. July 8th, 1889 with a red circle scribbled round it! What had happened on that day? August 28th, 1892; a blue exclamation point! Why? Days and months and years of marks and red circles, and that was all.
She closed her eyes and her breathing came swiftly in and out of her mouth.
Below, on the brown lawn, Tom ran, yelling.
Miss Elizabeth Simmons aroused herself after a time, and got herself over the window. For a long moment she looked down at Tom tumbling in the red leaves. Then she cleared her throat and called out, “Tom!”
“Grandma! You look so funny in the attic!”
“Tom, I want you to do me a favor!”
“What is it?”
“Tom, I want you to do me the favor of throwing away that nasty old piece of calendar you’re saving.”
“Why?” Tom looked up at her.
“Well, because. I don’t want you saving them any more,” said the old woman. “It’ll only make you feel bad later.”
“When, Grandma? How? I don’t understand!” cried Tom back up at her, hurt. “I’ve just got to keep every week, every month. There’s so much happening, I never want to forget!”
Grandma looked down and the small round face looked up through the empty apple tree branches. Finally Grandma sighed, “All right.” She looked off. She threw the box away through the autumn air to thump upon the ground. “I guess I can’t make you stop collecting if you really want to.”
“Thanks, Grandma!” Tom put his hand to his breast pocket where the month of August was tucked. “I’ll never forget today, I’ll always remember, I know!”
Grandma looked down through the empty autumn branches stirring in the cold wind. “Of course you will, child, of course you will,” she said.
Arrival And Departure
No day in all of time began with nobler heart or fresher spirit. No morn had ever chanced upon its greener self as did this morn discover spring in every aspect and every breath. Birds flew about, intoxicated, and moles and all things holed up in earth and stone, ventured forth, forgetting that life itself might be forfeit.
The sky was a Pacific, a Caribbean, an Indian Sea, hung in a tidal outpouring over a town that now exhaled the dust of winter from a thousand windows. Doors slammed wide. Like a tide moving into a shore, wave after wave of laundered curtains broke over the piano-wire lines behind the houses.
And at last the wild sweetness of this particular day summoned forth two souls, like wintry figures from a Swiss clock, hypnotized, upon their porch. Mr. and Mrs. Alexander, twenty-four months locked deep in their rusty house, felt long-forgotten wings stir in their shoulder-blades as the sun rekindled their bones.
“Smell that!”
Mrs. Alexander took a drink of air and spun to accuse the house. “Two years! One hundred sixty-five bottles of throat molasses! Ten pounds of sulphur! Twelve boxes of sleeping pills! Five yards of flannel for our chests! How much mustard-grease? Get away!” She pushed at the house. She turned to the spring day, opened her arms. The sun made teardrops jump from her eyes.
They waited, not yet ready to descend away from two years of nursing one another, falling ill time and again, accepting but never quite enjoying the prospect of another evening together after six hundred of seeing no other human face.
“Why, we’re strangers here.” The husband nodded to the shady streets.
And they remembered how they had stopped answering the door and kept the shades down, afraid that some abrupt encounter, some flash of bright sun might shatter them to dusty ghosts.
But now, on this fountain-sparkling day, their health at last miraculously returned, old Mr. and Mrs. Alexander edged down the steps and into the town, like tourists from a land beneath the earth.
Reaching the main street, Mr. Alexander said, “We’re not so old; we just felt old. Why, I’m seventy-two, you’re only seventy. I’m out for some special shopping, Elma. Meet you here in two hours!”
They flew apart, rid of each other at last.
NOT HALF a block away, passing a dress shop, Mr. Alexander saw a mannequin in a window, and froze. There, ah, there! The sunlight warmed her pink cheeks, her berry-stained lips, her blue-lacquer eyes, her yellow-yarn hair. He stood at the window for an entire minute, until a live woman appeared suddenly, arranging the displays. When she glanced up, there was Mr. Alexander, smiling like a youthful idiot. She smiled back.
What a day! he thought. I could punch a hole in a plank door. I could throw a cat over the court house! Get out of the way, old man! Wait! Was that a mirror? Never mind. Good God! I’m really alive!
Mr. Alexander was inside the shop.
“I want to buy something!” he said.
“What?” asked the beautiful saleslady.
He glanced foolishly about. “Why, let me have a scarf. That’s it, a scarf.”
He blinked at the numerous scarves she brought, smiling at him so his heart roared and tilted like a gyroscope, throwing the world out of balance. “Pick the scarf you’d wear, yourself. That’s the scarf for me.”
She chose a scarf the color of her eyes.
“Is it for your wife?”
He handed her a five dollar bill. “Put the scarf on.” She obeyed. He tried to imagine Elma’s head sticking out above it; failed. “Keep it,” he said, “it’s yours.” He drifted out the sunlit door, his veins singing.
“Sir,” she called, but he was gone.
WHAT MRS. Alexander wanted most was shoes, and after leaving her husband she entered the very first shoe-shop. But not, however, before she dropped a penny in a perfume machine and pumped great vaporous founts of verbena upon her sparrow chest.
Then, with the spray clinging round her like morning mist, she plunged into the shoe store, where a fine young man with doe-brown eyes and black-arched brows and hair the sheen of patent leather pinched her ankles, feathered her in-step, caressed her toes and so entertained her feet that they blushed a soft warm pink.
“Madame has the smallest foot I’ve fitted this year. Extraordinarily small.”
Mrs. Alexander was a great heart seated there, beating so loudly that the salesman had to shout over the sound:
“If madam will push down!”
“Would the lady like another color?”
He shook her left hand as she departed with three pairs of shoes, giving her fingers what seemed to be a meaningful appraisal. She laughed a strange laugh, forgetting to say she had not worn her wedding band, her fingers had puffed with illness so many years that the ring now lay in dust. On the street, she confronted the
