“I thought Irini played a swell game.”
“Just look at these pants,” said Claire diplomatically, displaying her left knee, which had a grassy blotch about the shape and size of Spain over it. “This particular combination of dirt and grass is never going to come completely clean, I don’t care what you do.”
Maggie Collins writes: “There are four classes of stain removers: solvents, absorbents, detergents, and bleaches. Every homemaker should have at least one of each group constantly on hand.
“When faced with a tough stain, take your time. Success depends largely on having ample leisure to do the work thoroughly. No amateur should begin a ticklish job with chemicals unless she is prepared to ignore the telephone and doorbell.
“And always try cold water first.”
Irini chose to ride on the bus, which didn’t please Holcrow. He took Tracy home instead. The bus ride was a penance and no doubt Irini deserved it. They didn’t discuss her fielding errors. Henry had fallen asleep again. Walter wasn’t speaking to her at all. It was early evening, with the color just falling from the sky and settling its dusky film on the trees and houses.
Norma wound her way back from the park and from there back along the road home. They’d only gone a few blocks when Norma took a turn too quickly. The batting helmets spilled out of the bag, and rolled like drunken bowling balls down the aisle of the bus. Walter rose to gather them up. Norma pulled over off the pavement. They were in a residential area, new houses, old trees. The bus came to a stop. A white dog with liver-colored spots barked at them from the safety of a porch. “It’s all right,” Walter told Norma. He grabbed the duffel, stuffed the helmets back inside. “It’s under control.”
“That’s not why I stopped,” said Norma. “Someone is chasing us.”
Irini couldn’t see out the back. She shoved her own window open and leaned. The driver’s side mirror was round and saucer-sized. Deep inside it was a girl. She ran toward them, a small figure in the exact center of the saucer, with the road twisting behind her and the leaves of the trees tossing above. She was waving one arm in a friendly fashion. They sat and waited until she appeared next, in the bus doorway. She was quite tall, in a print dress that covered her knees and a red bib apron over the dress. Her hair was dark but sun-streaked with red, and curly. She had it tied back from her face with a piece of string. Her legs were bare and surprisingly muscled, like the legs of a ballerina or a long-distance runner. She might have been seventeen or even sixteen years old.
“Are we losing oil or something?” Norma asked, but the girl was breathing hard from her run and it took her a moment to answer.
“I’d like to be on the team,” she said. “I’m a good player.”
“We’re not a real team,” Norma told her. “We’re not a team like that. We’re a mill team. We all live in Magrit. It’s a mill town.”
“I saw you. You need another pitcher. I can pitch.”
“We have a pitcher,” Fanny May told her sharply.
“Lots of girls think they can pitch,” Cindy said. “And then they try.”
“I can play anywhere.”
“We all have to eat Sweetwheats,” said Helen, glancing at Henry to be sure he was still asleep. “It’s not worth it. Trust me.”
“Just watch. Will you watch?” The girl stepped down from the bus and searched the ground. There was gravel along the roadside, but nothing larger. Finally she pulled off one of her shoes. It was a brown loafer, creased as an accordion across the toes.
She straightened up and looked for a target. In the yard in front of her the dog was still barking. It came off the porch, toward the bus. Its walk was stiff-legged; its tail wagged aggressively. The barking was steady and annoying.
The girl turned her right shoulder to the noise and kept going, turned her back. There was a slight pause while the dog growled.
Then she swiveled and kicked forward, pitching the shoe, catching the dog right between its eyes. It yelped once, then closed its mouth with a startled click. The girl removed her second shoe. She and the dog stared at each other. It began to back away; she pitched and it dodged. This time she was a little to the right. Same yelp, though. The dog retreated to the porch.
“She hit a dog,” said Arlys. She didn’t like this. As she spoke, the dog turned its widened eyes to her.
“And it was moving,” said Norma admiringly.
“I could do it again,” the girl told them, “but I only wore two shoes.”
“Can you pitch anything else?” Walter asked. The throws had not just been accurate. They’d been pretty. It was more than pitching; it was dancing.
“You mean besides shoes?”
“I mean besides straight.”
“With a ball, I’ve got a good curve. I’ve got a slider. I’m the youngest of seven children and the only girl. I can throw any kind of pitch you want, Coach.”
“How old are you?” asked Walter.
“Twenty.”
Irini didn’t believe it. Walter shook his head sadly. “Look, I’d love to have you on the Sweethearts,” he said. “Especially if you bat left, too. But we can’t just pick you up on the side of the road. You go home, talk to your parents. If you can get to Magrit, I’ll take a look. You can stay with one of the girls while you try out.”
“You can stay with me,” said Helen. “My mother loves company.”
“I’ll be there,” the girl said. She turned to them, smiling broadly, so that the corners of her mouth dug deep into her cheek. It was an effect like dimples and made her look even younger. “See you all in Magrit.”
The dog came back from the porch, picked up one of the shoes. It made a great show of offering it to her, laying the shoe down, but when she reached, the dog grabbed it again. It grinned at her, growling, tail ticking, just out of reach.
Norma eased back into the street, started to drive and then stopped again. The girl was waving them down. Irini leaned out the window, looking back. “My name is Ruby,” the girl called. “Ruby Red.” Actually the name was Ruby Redd, but of course no one knew that just from hearing it.
Back in Magrit, most of the girls went straight to the sauna, even Tracy, who beat them home and might have been expected to feel uncomfortable over her behavior toward the younger Törngren boy, but apparently didn’t. “I just told Thomas right off not to get fresh,” she said, as if someone had asked. “I just nipped that right in the bud.” No one responded. No one, not even her sisters, mentioned Ruby to Tracy. After they had steamed themselves limp, Mrs. Törngren consoled them with more coffee and some icebox cookies, and then they each went home.
“Are you married yet?” Irini’s dad asked her.
“I thought I was supposed to hit a home run today. I hit two, by the way.”
“You didn’t now?” her father said. “And no one married you on the spot? What kind of men do they have over in Yawkey?”
“Not the best kind,” Irini agreed. “Not the kind we’d hoped for.”
20
Henry was not discouraged by either the poor attendance or the embarrassing defeat. The attendance problem would be easily solved with the ape. He announced that he was giving up on Señora Lagunas. Every condition he met regarding Topsy spawned three new conditions. “Every time I move closer to her, she moves farther from me,” he told the Sweethearts. Clearly Topsy was not coming to Magrit. But he was not giving up on the ape. “I shall simply cast a wider net,” he said. He ran a full page ad in Women at Home. “Ape wanted for loving home and scientific tests,” it read. “Finder’s fee.”
His response to defeat was to tell the girls to double their daily dose of Sweetwheats. They ignored him.
Summer came and went and came and went that year. One warm day in June would be followed by three cold ones. The birds were quarrelsome and peckish and a robin in the Doyles’ backyard went into a nest-building frenzy, starting six nests without ever finishing one. As far as Irini could see, no eggs were laid either. It was an obvious case of acute psych
osis and Irini really didn’t know what to do about it.
Then there was a tragedy concerning the Collinses’ dogs. Perhaps Henry had fed them one breakfast too many. One night they began a tunnel out of Collins House. It was discovered in the morning, discovered in progress and still so small that only the Pomerian—Boston terrier had gotten through. She was on the loose in Magrit for three days, eluding Norma and her dogcatcher net with, Henry insisted, diet-inspired cunning. It was hard not to think he was rooting for a clean escape. But then she chased the Doyle car one night, and Irini’s father hit and killed her. Ada was still in India and hadn’t heard yet. Irini’s father was devastated. “She came out of nowhere,” he said. “Like a little furry tornado. She threw herself at the tire. I never even saw her.”
“It’s not your fault,” Irini tried to tell him, but it drove him to drink.
All in all, summer was not what she had remembered, not what she’d held out for all those snowy Magrit months. Before she was a working girl, summers had been full of slow and sun-stunned days. There had been time to lie on her stomach and eat buttercups, time to read novels that were much too young for her, time to wander up to the falls and out into the woods. What did summer mean anymore, now that she was nineteen and worked for her living? It was nothing but the drudgery of cooking and baseball, baseball and cooking.
The one Saturday they didn’t have a game, the Sweethearts were deployed to Collins House. “Although we missed spring training,” said Helen, “you’ll be happy to hear we’re going to make spring cleaning.” Henry wanted everything bright as a penny for Ada’s return.
“A really deep cleaning,” he instructed them. “If it doesn’t move, scrub it.” He left Fanny in charge, and he and Walter took off at dawn to go fishing north of Upper Magrit. It was 1947 so if you caught a fish you could eat it.
The girls arrived with their aprons and buckets at Collins House about nine. Fanny wrote up a list of chores and then tore it into strips. She dropped the strips into the cut-glass bowl. The one Irini drew said, “Launder bedding. Beat small rugs. Polish copper pots.” She had gotten lucky; it was a relatively easy draw. “Anyone want to trade?” asked Margo. She had gotten the oven and the refrigerator. Helen had windows and toilets. “There is no sense of satisfaction in windows,” she said. “There is no sense of completion,” but Margo said that was only before the invention of the squeegee, so the switch was made.
Irini went into all the upstairs bedrooms and stripped the sheets off the beds. Unmaking was much less exacting and much more pleasurable than making. There was a lesson here and it extended far beyond hospital corners. She tore the bottom sheets loose.
Irini moved quickly through the unoccupied rooms and into Walter’s. Ada had redone the room the moment Walter left for boarding school, so it looked like a guest bedroom, neutral colors, navies and beiges. He had set out no pictures, but there was a large abalone shell on the dresser and inside it a number of letters. His duffel bag sat on the window seat. He had yet to unpack completely.
Walter had not forgiven her. It worried Irini a little, but Walter had a forgiving nature and things were sure to return to normal between them. Anyway, his prolonged snit gave her license to snoop as she certainly would not normally have done. She picked up the abalone shell, removing the letters, which were of no interest to her. The inside was pearled with all the colors of water and sunlight. The outside was stony and rough. It was too large and flat to hear the ocean in. There were three mysterious holes along the edge, holes so even and round they appeared drilled. When she went to put the letters back, she dropped them. Naturally she had to pick them up; she was there to clean. She checked the return addresses. They were all from his mom and sister. Then with no provocation, she checked out the sock drawer. This was the place where she kept secret and personal items, but Walter was determined to bore her; it didn’t even contain socks.
She turned to the bed. The blankets went into one pile; the sheets into another. There was something intimate about dealing with Walter’s bedding. She didn’t want to be caught at it, but before she could finish, Tracy entered with the Hoover. It roared with the sound of a P-38, but that didn’t stop Tracy from talking. “If anyone else wants to pitch, they’re more than welcome to,” Tracy said. “My heavens! It’s not like I’m just dying to pitch or anything.”
“You’re doing okay.”
“What?”
“You’re doing okay.”
It was obviously less than Tracy had expected. She flipped off the Hoover and moved the armchair. “It’s not that easy,” she said. “You can’t just put it over the plate. There’s a lot more to it than that.” There were two pens under the chair. Tracy picked them up and put them in her apron pocket.
“Norma says you’re shaking off her calls,” said Irini.
“Norma has some good ideas,” said Tracy. “But you develop an instinct when you’ve been on the mound for a while.” She flipped the Hoover on again. Irini jumped over its cord and went into Ada’s room.
Ada had made a small territory of her own in Collins House. Several of her painted plates were on the walls—the more edgy, arty ones, the ones with roses the color of sand and ashes. Ada tried to make a statement with her art, and probably she did, it was just that no one in Magrit knew what it was. “It’s not really piece by piece,” she explained to Irini once, at the annual elementary school white elephant sale. Ada was trying to interest her in a gravy boat painted with wilted peonies. “You have to look at the whole body of work. And you have to know something about the tradition. You have to see it as part of a dialogue I’m having with other china painters. Try to see it as both a question and an answer.” Irini bought the gravy boat, but she had never understood art.
In Ada’s room was a set of sterling silver brushes that would have to be polished along with the dining-room silver; and a set of ivory pillowcases, edged with tatting, that would have to be hand-washed. Irini had scarcely collected the sheets before Tracy arrived, bringing with her her own little storm of noise and dust. “Norma likes to mix it up,” Tracy said. “But sometimes it’s more of a surprise if you don’t. You learn how to read the batter’s face as well as his stance. Norma can’t see the batter’s face.” The vacuum came within inches of Irini’s foot. “Has Norma been complaining about my pitching?” Tracy asked.
“Not at all,” said Irini. She scooped up the sheets and moved on to Henry’s room.
She didn’t envy the person who’d drawn the dusting in here. It was the bedroom of a necromancer. There were shells, feathers, skins, rocks, pods, globes, weather maps, and a dozen corked vials filled with nasty-looking fluids. “It’s what keeps Mr. Henry young,” Irini’s dad had told her often. “He’s far too interested to die.” On one wall Henry had mounted a map. The Sweethearts’ upcoming games were marked with green pins, their losses, with pins tipped in black. It saddened Irini to see it. Henry cared more than he was willing to admit.
The Hoover was coming. Irini stripped the bed with lightning speed and started down the stairs with the pile of sheets. She passed Arlys, who was in the hallway wiping down the wallpaper with pieces of fresh bread, according to Maggie’s best advice, and Margo, who was scrubbing the toilets with Coca-Cola. The phone rang.
“Irini,” Claire called from the kitchen. Irini left the sheets in a wanton pile and went to pick up the parlor extension. Fanny was in the parlor, polishing the brass light fixtures with Worcestershire sauce. “Message from your dad,” said Cindy. “He says to tell you he’ll make dinner tonight, since you’re working all day. He says to call if you’ve an objection to macaroni.”
“Sounds great,” said Irini.
Collins House had a completely automatic washing machine. All the women in Magrit had come to look the day Norma hooked it up. It was set in a little stone anteroom off the kitchen, like a throne or a shrine. To get to it Irini had to pass Helen, who was sitting on the kitchen floor surrounded by newspapers. “Don’t try to stop me,” she told Irini. ??
?Don’t try to talk me out of it.” She stuck her head into the oven, but there was no room for her breasts. “Good-bye, cruel world,” she said.
Claire was mopping the pantry. “Go ahead,” she said, before Irini could ask. “But don’t let the dogs in.”
Norma was working outside with the storm windows and since this was a delicate operation, done with tools and ladders, the dogs had been shut up in the washroom. Norma had been hired on a special contract. You didn’t waste a woman with Norma’s gifts merely on cleaning. Or if you did, you gave her the death assignments. You put her on point. Norma was there to climb two stories on a freestanding ladder to take down the fifty-pound entryway chandelier and then put it back, after someone else had washed and polished it into mother-of-pearl. She was there to waltz about the roof, cleaning the chimney and the gutters. She was there to remove the second-story storm windows. Naturally she was paid more than anyone else. She earned it.
Irini fought her way through the dogs to the washing machine. Already the air was full of dog hair. She acquired the same layer of dust she would get again, beating the rugs. When she bent down to load the sheets, the Dane stuck his nose in her ear and made a sound like the ocean.
“Can I wash Ada’s pillowcases in the kitchen sink?” she asked Claire.
“May I,” said Helen.
“Little crowded in the washroom?” Claire said.
“May I wash Ada’s pillowcases in the kitchen sink?”
“Yes, you may.”
The kitchen phone rang. “Irini,” said Claire. Irini took the receiver.
“Your dad doesn’t like the look of the cheese,” said Cindy. “He’s thinking if it bakes forty minutes in a hot oven, it will probably lose those green streaks, but he’s leaning now toward Italiano.”
“Meaning canned spaghetti,” said Irini. “I guess I don’t care.”
“That’s not what he says. He says you’re the fussiest eater God ever set on two legs. That’s a direct quote. He also said to tell you he’s making it from scratch. If you don’t want Italian call him quick and stop him before he kills another tomato. That’s a direct quote, too.”