she remembered, she put on a bit of lipstick, though she always seemed to put it on crooked and get some on her teeth. But by this time of day—midafternoon—the lipstick was long gone. She wore round tortoiseshell glasses that magnified her already large and very myopic blue eyes. Overall, since her head was rather small for her height, she worried that she had a vaguely newt-like appearance. She had never worn high heels—she was too tall and besides they were stupid devices to make women into sexual playthings—and this June afternoon she was sporting a favorite pair of deerskin moccasins with thongs that laced up her lower leg, footwear that she had acquired on her prenuptial trip to Mexico with Arthur eight years before. She paused to remember that thrilling and awful year when, after Arthur drove up to Smith to tell her that Teddy had been shot down in Occupied France, they had fallen into each others’ arms and one thing had rapidly led to another. Their month in Acapulco and San Cristóbal was magical, she recalled, and the moccasins always made her think longingly of tequila and of the powerful corn liquor the Indians drank and poured over the saints in their church. Under the thongs, her legs were bare, pale, and stippled with razor bumps, for she assiduously shaved her legs (though not her armpits).
It was half past two when Kitt put on her duffel coat and left her office. She got in the blue 1938 Buick—she and Arthur had had it since before they got married—and drove the fifteen miles south on Route 169 to Buck Hill Road. She parked the ancient sedan on the side of the road a little past their driveway, and then she waited and watched in the rearview mirror until she saw Edith get off the school bus and start to walk up toward the house. She waited a few minutes longer, then quietly got out of the car and followed her, keeping out of sight.
She and Arthur had decided, last night in bed, that Edith deserved a chance at being more independent, as a reward for doing so well in first grade. Kitt could think of nothing more rewarding than more independence from one’s elders. Her own mother had always been and still was smotheringly helpful. So they had told Edith that morning that she didn’t have to to stay with Arthur’s parents after school, as she had done all year, but could come home alone and entertain and take care of herself until Arthur and Kitt came home with Marcus around five thirty. Edith was a remarkably responsible, well-behaved girl on the whole, Kitt reflected, no trouble at all to speak of. The child’s only complaint about school was that she got bored because she was so far ahead of the other children. Really, sometimes Kitt thought Edith was much more of a grown-up than her mother was. Edith seldom had temper tantrums, though her mother knew that her feelings got hurt easily. This morning her face had crumpled at her mother’s “circus clown” remarks about her outfit.
Kitt knew she had been lucky with Edith. Her daughter had a lot of common sense for a seven-year-old and didn’t risk life and limb doing foolish stunts. She was helpful with her little brother and liked to play with him and read to him. Sometimes Kitt felt irritated by how good Edith was and how, when Kitt lost her temper and shouted and threw things at her, she just sat silently, big-eyed, waiting for it to be over.
So Kitt wasn’t really worried about Edith’s being home alone, but still, there she was, home early, surreptitiously watching Edith getting off the bus. Clearly, everything was fine. She was already feeling annoyed with herself for being overprotective—just exactly like my mother—and irritated about having to drive the fifteen miles back to campus to pick up Arthur at five. Once Edith was inside, Kitt got out of the car and walked quickly to the open grassy space around the house, then skirted its edge to the back and darted silently up to the small window on the north side of the new kitchen her in-laws had added in the thirties. The “old kitchen” in the farmhouse was the adjoining long narrow room, with a wide stone hearth and fireplace, and hand-split floorboards. These days the old kitchen was a sort of crossroads for all the house’s rooms. It connected the new kitchen with Kitt’s study, with the parlor where the children’s books and the phonograph were, the stairs to the upper two floors, and the door they most often used to come and go, at the south end of the house.
Kitt pushed aside the pale-pink Cecile Brunner climbing rose and peered through the glass, standing between the house and the old apple tree Edith liked to climb. Its trunk was all but horizontal owing to God knows what early stress. Looking in, she could see Edith standing at the open door of the icebox, musing. She had already kicked off her sensible dark-blue school shoes. After a rather long time, she pulled out a bottle of milk and a jar of Welch’s grape jelly. She got a loaf of Wonder Bread and the peanut butter from the pantry. Thus equipped, she made herself a sandwich and poured herself a glass of milk. She put her sandwich on a plate and sat at the Formica kitchen table to eat it. As she ate, she made faces at herself in the shiny metal toaster.
Once she’d finished off the sandwich, Edith unbraided her tight pigtails and fluffed her wiry red hair. She always complained that braids make her head hurt, and she regularly resisted Kitt’s rough morning plaiting, meant to prevent her hair from “looking like a rat’s nest.” But she would submit when Kitt threatened to cut her hair off short.
Kitt could just make out what Edith was telling her toaster reflection in her high musical voice.
“Baba says I’m pretty. Auntie Grace also said so, but Betsy says she always says that to all the little girls.” Edith stuck out her tongue and tried in vain to touch its tip to her small nose. Then she bared her teeth like a lion. Finally, she made a sad face, the sides of her mouth drooping, then used her thumb and fourth fingers to push them upward into a patently false smile.
“Cheer up, love,” she said in what she wanted to be a Cockney accent.
A more aristocratic accent answered, “Cheer up cheer up cheer up! Have you nothing better to suggest?”
This making faces in the toaster and talking to herself was an odd habit of Edith’s that annoyed her mother. Kitt would tell her, when she caught her doing it, that her face would freeze if she didn’t desist. Kitt had carefully schooled her own face to maintain the expression of supercilious condescension she learned to assume in ballet school. Her inner emotions were visible only in the degree to which she clenched her jaw.
She watched as Edith took a last look at her reflection, patted her plump cheeks, and carried the dish and glass to the sink. She washed them and put them in the drainer. Then she walked out of the new kitchen into the narrow steep stairwell and vanished from Kitt’s sight, presumably to her attic bedroom in the gable of the steep roof.
Kitt felt a bit silly and more annoyed now, thinking there really was no need to watch a child who washed up her dishes without being told, and thinking that she could have had another hour to work on her translations.
Realizing that she was directly beneath Edith’s bedroom window and would be seen if her daughter looked down, Kitt pressed her body against the splintery clapboards. Clearly there was no point in going inside and sneaking up the very creaky old stairs after her daughter and then trying to make up some excuse when Edith heard her. She skirted the old flowerbeds full of tiger lilies, purple irises, Canterbury bells, and hollyhocks the color of oxblood, flowerbeds planted by her mother-in-law and her mother-in-law’s ancestors and now quite weedy. Kitt cared nothing about gardening and knew less. She went around to the the so-called front of the house, the west side, above the road. They never used this door, since everyone came and went through the door into the old kitchen on the south side of the house where the driveway was. A thick band of ancient beeches and maples shielded the front door from Buck Hill Road below. She sat on the wide granite step under the oak lintel, its white paint peeling in long strips, and thought about what to do next. She leaned back against the door and soon was deep in thought about Anna Akhmatova and one of the translations she was working on, the one about Stalin. It was a searing poem, inspired, if that’s the right word, by waiting in a queue with the families of other prisoners, outside the Moscow prison where her only son was held each time he was arrested, before being sent to Siberia. As she was picturing that line at the Lubyanka, Kitt dimly sensed that a peculiar silence had fallen. There was an odd sharp and sour scent, somewhat like ammonia, in the air, and then
