Still Life With Bread Crumbs: A Novel Read online

  LEFTOVER TURKEY

  “Can I offer you some leftover turkey?” Rebecca said on Saturday as Jim Bates pulled his truck up her driveway.

  “That’s really nice of you to offer,” he said. “But here’s the deal if you’re a single guy. Every woman in town offers you leftover turkey. It’s turkey fest. Plus, one word: Sarah.”

  “A tray of leftovers?”

  “An entire turkey.”

  “She made you an entire turkey?”

  He nodded.

  “That’s extremely thoughtful.”

  “A twenty-two-pound turkey.”

  Rebecca began to laugh and, in a minute, so did he. Each fed upon the other, until the stuffy cab of the truck, which smelled of tar, glue, and peanut butter, filled with the sound of their laughter. It was somewhat excessive for the situation.

  “Extremely, extremely thoughtful,” Rebecca said, climbing out of the cab of the truck and taking her cameras from the back.

  “I don’t even really like turkey that much,” he said, and they both began to laugh again.

  It had been a good morning’s work. The light was clear and strong despite the cover of the trees, and the big birds, perhaps in response to the cool temperatures, had flown to and fro above them, sometimes dipping and wheeling lower and lower until it almost seemed that they were posing. Jim Bates had squinted at the screen of Rebecca’s camera, looking at a photograph of one of the bald eagles in flight. “That’s a beauty,” he said, and she wasn’t certain if he meant the photograph or the bird, or both.

  “Same time tomorrow?” he said as she headed toward the cottage.

  “One of us should bring turkey sandwiches,” Rebecca said.

  “I shouldn’t have said that about Sarah,” he said. “She’s a nice woman. She made a whole lot of turkeys, a couple for the church, one for me. I’m my own soup kitchen, I guess.”

  “She cooked ours as well. It was too large for the oven here.”

  “That’s a vintage stove you’re working with. And it’s electric. Really sad.”

  “I regret ever making that remark. You will never let me forget it.”

  “Tragic,” Jim Bates said.

  Ben was at the window when she went inside. She put her camera bag on the dining room table.

  “Who was that?” Ben said.

  “The man I work with. He’s a roofer.”

  “You work with a roofer?”

  “He also tracks birds for the state wildlife authorities. I’m taking photographs of the birds for them.”

  Ben put down a sandwich he was holding. Rebecca couldn’t help noticing that it was a turkey sandwich.

  “You’re taking bird photographs for the state?”

  “Why not? It’s a public service.” She knew she was making it sound like the pro bono work she had done from time to time for charities in the city and tried not to dwell on the $400 check she had received the week before, or how overjoyed she had been to see the telltale envelope with the transparent window.

  “So if you take the photographs what does he do?”

  “He tracks the birds with a device that reads their tags. When we find one that hasn’t been tagged, he makes a note of it.”

  “And he’s a roofer?”

  “He is the roofer who took care of the raccoon that was living in the house when I first arrived here.”

  Amanda came in from the bedroom, gathering her tawny hair into a clip. She was wearing workout clothes. She had invited Rebecca to join her in an hour of yoga, but Rebecca had demurred.

  “I’m sorry, but I still can’t understand why he had to shoot the raccoon,” she said, and this time Ben rolled his eyes. “Make fun of me if you want,” Amanda said, draping herself across his shoulders. “I still think it’s barbaric.”

  “He’s a big guy,” said Ben.

  “I got some very good photographs today.”

  “You should have brought him in.”

  “It’s just a job, Benjamin.”

  “Don’t go all Lady Chatterley on me, Mom,” Ben said, disentangling himself.

  “Benjamin!”

  “Just saying. Just saying.”

  “I know I should understand the allusion, but I was an art history major,” said Amanda.

  “There’s no need,” said Rebecca, narrowing her eyes and scowling at Ben.

  “Did I hit a nerve?” Ben said.

  “Is there enough turkey for a sandwich?” Amanda said, and almost despite herself Rebecca started to laugh. “Pay no attention to me,” she said when both Ben and Amanda looked at her. “I’ll have one, too.”

  THE DOG RETURNS, AND STAYS

  The dog came back on Monday. Rebecca was feeling downhearted. She hated to see Ben go, and she always liked to send him on his way with a check. But as he and Amanda loaded the car on Sunday afternoon he had waved her off. “Pop Pop gave me money,” Ben said, and what could she say? That she knew her father was stuck in 1958, that his idea of a munificent gift was a crisp twenty-dollar bill? She wished she had a couple of crisp twenties to keep the singles in her wallet company. “Your mother’s made of money,” her father likes to tell her son. “That’s why she gave up her painting for those pictures she takes, for the money. The dinero. The shekels. The mean green.”

  “They’re photographs, Pop Pop,” Ben says. “Not pictures.”

  “Same difference!” her father always says.

  At dawn she threw the sheets from the guest bedroom into the ancient washing machine and left it to sashay across the basement floor making a clatter. Even down there, with the thick stone walls muffling the outdoor sounds, she could hear the gunshots from the hunters in the surrounding woods. She had almost forgotten the start of hunting season. She didn’t know how long it would go on, what the rules were. Jim Bates would have told her, but he had a way of talking about things, assuming she already understood them, that was flattering but made it hard to ask questions without feeling foolish.

  She knew exactly what a gunshot sounded like now. She knew that it was more than a sound, that it was like thunder or a breaking glass, something you felt inside. The owner of the cottage had had signs posted forbidding hunting on his land, but the years, and the rains, and the seasons had dried, curled, and obliterated them. Each time there was a gunshot she flinched.

  “You’re gonna want this,” Jim Bates had told her when he gave her a big orange vest. “But I’d stay close to home for the first few days. Only the smart guys hang in past Wednesday, and the smart guys know to stay far away from anybody’s house.”

  She was bound and determined to go about her business as though bullets weren’t whizzing through the trees, but on Monday morning, the first morning, when the shooting was fiercest, she hadn’t had to go far at all. As though in response to her son’s wishes she found another cross right away, on the slope not far from the house, and she imagined someone putting it there, and it made her a little afraid. She thought of Ben and Amanda in the back room, of the late lunch at the dining table, of the dishes being washed in the sink after they were gone, Rebecca’s face a little slack and sad, and she could see it all from the outside looking in, the way an eavesdropper would have seen it, the way the person who put the cross there might have. There was no disturbance to the earth, only what seemed to be a deep pillow of leaves, the curling brown remains of this year atop last year and the year before. In the beginning, the soft moss and spongy earth had made her feel as though the ground was porous, unreliable, even alive somehow, but now she was accustomed to it, like breaking in a new pair of shoes, accustomed to the soft snapping sounds of the branches overhead that caught even the softest breezes, and the occasional crash of a deer nearby frightened into haste. Those sounds were her sounds now, embedded inside her so that she did not startle and scarcely noticed. But still she shivered at the idea that someone had been this close to the house, perhaps watching her standing alone, etched black by the lamplight.

  The cross was accompanied by a baby doll in a limp pink dre
ss. Her hair had been shampooed, so that the careful coif of the manufacturer had become a kind of snarled yellow mess. She looked like every doll every little girl had ever ruined while giving her a bath. Rebecca had had one herself. Hanging on the cross was what looked like a doll locket, a heart no bigger than the nail on a pinkie toe. Before she even raised the camera Rebecca knew these pictures would be memorable. The doll was sitting up and staring blankly, its plastic legs akimbo. She photographed it, the orange vest rustling around her.

  Around four every day now she found herself desperate for a nap. Her vision blurred, her mind did, too, as she tried to reread Buddenbrooks and Middlemarch. But she was terrified at the idea of becoming that person, dozing away the afternoon. She usually forced herself to go out again, to bracket her day with hikes, as though she could outwalk her thoughts. The mornings were fine but the late afternoons not so, the light dulled and dimming early. She felt some strange yearning, but she couldn’t decide what it was for. Not for the city: it seemed like another country to her now, remembered, not felt. She knew if she were there, walking past the market with its glistening stacks of fruit that sometimes rolled onto the pavement, stepping into the pharmacy for overpriced shampoo and body cream, passing windows full of nice clothes like the clothes she already has (once she got a linen blouse home only to discover that she owned one almost exactly like it), she would be convinced that she could no longer stand to be away, that she missed it all terribly. But from here that life seemed unreal, like something she saw in a movie. She wondered if that’s how her grandparents had managed to leave the old country behind, whether it had ceased to exist as a discernible thing once it was gone along the watery horizon, whether they had told themselves that someday they would come back to reclaim it.

  She’d been amazed to discover after a while that that was how she felt about Peter, the divorce, not pain but simple dislocation. Her marriage had been like a new silk dress, so beautiful and undulating, except that after a while the edges of the sleeves gray, there is a spot of wine, the hem drags. If her love affair with Peter had stopped after six months it would have been a gorgeous memorable thing. But in love no one ever leaves well enough alone, and so it settles into a strange unsatisfactory kind of friendship or sours into mutual recriminations and regret, the dress pushed to the back of the closet, limp and so unnew, embalmed in plastic because of what it once was.

  The night threw itself over the day fast now, sucked the light in and distilled it to one silvery spot in the sky where the moon hung. Sometimes she found herself hiking back to the cabin in near dark. The only spot of light was the white flag rippling from the roof where Jim Bates had put it up, and the faint glow from deep inside where she left a rickety floor lamp on in the bedroom. It made the day go by, staying on the move, but on the first day of hunting season she knew it wasn’t safe. In the graying day her orange vest had been dampened to an earth tone, not bright enough to make it easy to pick her out from between the trees.

  The dog was on the back steps, his head between his paws. When she saw him her eyes narrowed. The shooting had stopped, and it was silent all around her except for the slapping sound of his long tail against the siding.

  “This is not where you live,” she said.

  He stood.

  “Go home,” she said.

  He sat and looked attentive.

  “I don’t care for dogs,” she said.

  He cocked his head as though he was thinking either, no problem, neither have any of the other people I’ve lived with, or, liar. He settled on the second, stepped forward and sniffed her hand, then licked it and lay down at her feet.

  “You can’t come in the house,” she said, opening the door, thinking of all the leftover turkey in the refrigerator.

  “I think I’ve got a dog,” she said later that week when she called Ben from the service station as she put gas in her car, watching nervously as the total clicked higher and higher.

  “You’re allergic,” Ben said.

  “That’s your father.”

  “I don’t know about that. The new wife has a dog. A spaniel, I think. Or maybe it’s not a spaniel. Maybe it’s one of those hypoallergenic dogs. Did you want a dog?”

  “No. He just appeared. He’s good company.”

  “That’s good. You could use a little company.” Occasionally Rebecca wished her son would not be so very kind to her, as though she was the losing pitcher on a Little League team. She hoped it wasn’t some unconscious retaliation for that, or for his comments about photographing birds, or helping Jim Bates, that made her say, “Amanda seems nice.”

  “Whatever, Mom,” Ben replied.

  SITTING IN A TREE, AGAIN

  Three things happened at the beginning of December.

  The building in which Rebecca lived in New York announced a maintenance increase of 10 percent to replace the roof. (1540)

  The nursing home where her mother lived announced an adjustment in monthly charges based on higher costs of fuel oil and staff salaries. (2210)

  She ran out of firewood.

  Oddly enough, that last seemed the worst, or at least the most real. It reminded her of the time after she had been served with divorce papers and been told Peter wanted a swift resolution in time for a June wedding, his fiancée being four months pregnant—and was it actually semantically possible, she had wondered, to have a wife and a fiancée at the same time if you were not an adherent of one of the hinkier Mormon sects? It so happened that on her way to throw open her door to the dishy Latino process server, she had hit her foot on the stone obelisk which she used as a doorstop—and which, she realized later, she had purchased on her honeymoon, Peter saying, “That is precisely the sort of item that holds you up in customs”—and broken her toe. For a week afterward she had been obsessed with her toe, finding shoes that would not worry it, taping it with clear surgical tape, tracking the slow progression of its color, like a sunset in reverse, from black to purple to yellowy mauve. Her toe stopped her from thinking too much about her future. The firewood did the same for her finances.

  She bought three cords of wood from a man who sold firewood from a truck at the side of the gas station; she knew it wouldn’t last long but she wasn’t carrying the cash for more, and the man had snorted when she asked if he accepted credit cards. When Jim Bates came to pick her up the Saturday morning after and saw the wood stacked by the front door, he all at once looked like the kind of guy you wouldn’t want to cross in a bar.

  “You buy this from Kevin?” he said.

  “I bought it at the filling station. Why?”

  “Don’t buy any firewood. It’s lying all over these woods, just waiting to be split. I’ve got a log splitter. I can take care of it.”

  “Kevin, Sarah’s husband?” she said.

  “Yeah, never mind, I’ll take care of it,” he said, climbing into the cab of his truck.

  The coffee was so sweet this morning that it tasted like melted coffee ice cream, but she needed the warmth up in the tree stand. Heat rises; maybe cold does, too. Rebecca leaned over the big thermos lid so that the steam wreathed her face. Her nose remained numb. Leaning back against the tree trunk, she could feel the bark even through the down parka, the sweater, the long underwear. The long underwear was her Christmas present to herself. The Greifers, the blessed Greifers, who were always first to buy her work, had decided to acquire one of the photographs of the stone wall, although not one of the bigger ones. She suddenly had three hundred dollars in her wallet and ten times that in her bank account, and had started to think about moving back into her apartment after she finished the term at Carnegie Mellon. Thrilled and delighted, that’s what they were at Carnegie Mellon, although still unwilling to increase the stipend. She could tell by the jocular tone of the department chairman’s messages that he was thinking she was a warm woman, well-heeled and well-known and nevertheless trying to squeeze more blood from the stone of the fine arts budget.

  She had written Ben a check, and gotten real
hiking boots. Selling one photograph had given her the illusion of prosperity for a few days. She kept telling herself that it was so much less expensive to live here: she hadn’t bought wine since Thanksgiving, and the two dresses she’d brought with her in case of—well, just in case—stood in the corner of her closet like guests who have come to the wrong party and are backing out the door.

  And then she had heard about the apartment maintenance, and the nursing home fees, and her week of peace was done. Like those things that have frightened you that are written on your body, struggling in deep water or falling off a high ladder, she now realized that she would never be able to look at her bank statement again without that cold feeling in her chest, an accelerated heartbeat. Years ago some young woman in a blue blazer at her branch had asked if she wanted overdraft coverage, and without thinking she had said, “Why not?” Not long ago she had remembered she had it, and felt exultant for a moment, and then crushed that being able to write checks with no money could be cause for celebration.

  “Did you get a deer?” she asked Jim Bates, trying to put money out of her head.

  “I got two,” he said. “A buck and a doe. A ten-point buck. That’s a male deer with ten points on his antlers.”

  “I had figured that out from context. That’s an awful lot of venison for one person.”

  “I’ve got as much for you as your freezer will hold.”

  “I wasn’t hinting at that.”

  “I know. But I give a lot of it away. I’ve got some nice tenderloins for you, and some chops. And ground venison makes a great chili if you know how to cook.”

  “I know how to cook.”

  “There you go.”

  “I’ve acquired a dog,” she said quietly.

  “Did you go to the shelter,” Jim Bates asked, “or did you get some fancy breed of dog? I like a Labrador, myself, but even some of those wind up in the shelter. Otherwise you have to pay upwards of a thousand dollars for a Lab puppy.”

  “He’s definitely not a purebred dog,” she said.