The Stars Are Fire(3)

“Where did you get this?” Rosie asks as if she were holding a jeweled egg.

“At Gardiner’s. He got a shipment of six. He let me buy one.”



This isn’t true. He gave it to Grace, and she didn’t object.

“He must have a thing for you,” Rosie teases.

Grace stares Rosie down, and then she begins to smile.

“Can you imagine?” hoots Rosie.

“No!” says Grace, laughing. Rosie squeals at the image.

Ned Gardiner must eat half his produce in the back room, they have decided, because he weighs close to three hundred pounds. His soft stomach hangs over his low belt, and Grace often speculates about how he and his wife, Sophia, once a dark beauty but now nearly two hundred pounds herself, manage in bed. Then Grace feels a pang of conscience for having laughed at a man who gave her a grapefruit.

—

“I’ll split it with you,” Rosie says.

“I’ve had my half,” Grace lies. “You go ahead.”

Rosie’s house seems to be full of things, though Grace notes the lack of a high chair, playpen, or Bathinette. Rosie, too, has a toddler and an infant, a familiar configuration in the neighborhood. Claire has Rosie’s toddler, Ian, in a headlock.

—

“Tim says he’s had to go out time and time again to tow cars out of the mud,” Rosie remarks as she slowly sucks each grapefruit section. She closes her eyes with pleasure. Tim owns half of an automobile repair shop on Route 1.

“Gene says the ground is so wet, the farmers can’t set their seeds.”

Grace blows smoke away from Tom’s face and takes another pull. “It will end,” she says without conviction.

—

“Coffee, yes?” Rosie asks when she has thoroughly squeezed the life out of the fruit. Grace notes that there’s a seed stuck in a fold of Rosie’s robe. Eddie, Rosie’s youngest, has begun to cry. Grace wasn’t aware that the infant was in the room. She watches as her friend snatches blankets from the couch and picks up a pink baby, Rosie’s coloring exactly. Grace might so easily have sat on Eddie, she thinks with a blip of horror. Containerize, her own mother once told Grace, as if imparting the secret of sanity. Her mother meant children as well as dry goods.

—



“Tonight’s shopping night,” Grace says to her friend, who has opened her robe to reveal a blond nipple and a blue-veined breast. “Need anything?”

Every Thursday night, payday for Gene, he picks Grace and the children up as soon as he pulls into the driveway, and they go straight to Shaw’s. Steak for that night, calves’ liver, bacon, codfish cakes, puffed rice, tomato soup, bologna, eggs, butter, chipped beef, canned salmon, canned peas, hot dogs, buns, baked beans, brown bread, and Rice Krispies. Gene removes his pay packet from his pocket and counts out the bills and quarters and nickels and dimes and pennies with care. Everything else—milk, bread, hamburger—can be bought at Gardiner’s when needed. Grace tries to have some amount of protein every night, though by Wednesday the meal is Spanish rice with bits of bacon.

“How are you drying the diapers?” Rosie asks.

“I’ve had to hire a service,” Grace confesses, “but I’ll let it go as soon as the rain stops.”

There’s a moment of silence. Tim’s pay packet is not as full as Gene’s. “Jesus, Grace, how can you stand the stink of the diaper pail?”

—

Rosie once told her, without any embarrassment, that she and Tim made love at least once a day. Grace, who immediately felt poorer than Rosie, wondered if that was why her friend always had on a bathrobe. To be ready. One evening, when Grace and Gene were sitting on the porch, she heard a wail from next door that was distinctly sexual. She knew Gene heard it, too, though neither of them said a word. Within a minute, Gene left the porch.

—

Grace’s house is a testament to containerization. A playpen with toys in it sits in a corner of the alcove attached to the living room. The Bathinette can be wheeled to the sink. The bassinet stays in the dining room in a corner. The toddler bed with railings is in the children’s room upstairs, as is Tom’s crib. The old wooden high chair that Grace’s mother used sits just to the right of Gene’s chair in the dining room. The small amount of counter space in the kitchen is free of any flour or utensils. She washes clothes at the basement sink and uses a washboard.



Perhaps because of this, she hates to leave Rosie’s house, with its cereal spilled on the kitchen table, the heap of clothes by the cellar door that the dog sniffs at in search of underwear. The couch is a toss of blankets and pillows and magazines and sometimes a surprise: On previous visits, Grace found a hairbrush and a screwdriver. On the coffee table, cups have made rings, and glasses come off as if stuck. But when she’s in Rosie’s house, she experiences an intensely pleasurable “let-down” sensation in her womb and in her shoulders, not dissimilar to the letting-down of her milk when she briefly nursed Claire. She’d have done a better job of it, she thinks, if she’d lived with Rosie.

In her own house, over the fireplace mantel, Gene has hung an elevation he did of their own property. It’s framed in simple black, and below that hangs a rifle that doesn’t work. She isn’t sure why Gene has put it there, except that it seems to be a common decoration in New England. Around the fireplace stand an old brass bed warmer and a set of fireplace tools. In the winter, she doesn’t feel truly warm until the fire is lit at night and on Sundays. Together she and Gene picked out the wallpaper in the living room, poring through sample books until the patterns began to blur. She made the slipcovers herself to match the green of the toile walls, and she fashioned the cream drapes at the windows. She learned to sew in high school, but she taught herself the more advanced skills. Sometimes Gene had to help because she had trouble thinking three-dimensionally.