I USED TO ENJOY Mondays on the island. The weekend guests would be gone, and everyone who remained — guests, staff, owners — would feel liberated by their departure, enough to be lazy all day, figuring that there were four more before the next weekend arrived. That was in the days before the dredging, of course, and in the days when I still expected the hotel to succeed eventually. Even under the present conditions, however, this Monday was like one of those, and the group that gathered for my reading of episode twenty-one of Dead Air, “A Salesman Calls,” was so relaxed that Artie and Clark fell asleep.
ONE SATURDAY MORNING thirty-seven years ago, I went to the Jerrolds’ house in the hope of selling one of the flying-saucer detectors I had made. Mrs. Jerrold’s husband was often away; I suspected that he was a spy. I hoped that fear of flying saucers might be keeping Mrs. Jerrold awake, as it had kept my mother awake, and that she might buy a flying-saucer detector to relieve her anxiety, as my mother had.
Junior Jerrold was in the side yard, sitting in the sun, eating a cruller. He had an entire box of crullers beside him. The Jerrolds were, like my family and most of the families in Babbington, patrons of Yummy Good Baked Goods, which were delivered by a man whom the children of the town called Mr. Yummy. I paused, hoping that Junior might offer me one of their crullers. He didn’t. After a while, I asked for one. “Ask Mr. Yummy,” he said. “He’ll give you one, but you have to eat it outside, because of the sugar.” The crullers were covered with powdered sugar, and so was Junior. I could see the wisdom of eating the crullers outside.
I went to the back door. The house was quiet. No one was in the kitchen. Mr. Yummy’s tray of baked goods was on the counter, at the end of the counter, on the corner, set there at an angle, so that the corners of the tray projected over the edges of the counter. There was something odd about this, odd enough that I felt that looking through the screen door, noticing the empty kitchen and the abandoned tray, felt like something that I shouldn’t do. Visible above the low rim of the tray were loaves of bread and boxes of doughnuts, crullers, cupcakes, and cookies, including my favorite, a glazed cruller twisted into a pretzel shape.
I heard a laugh, from upstairs, Mrs. Jerrold’s laugh, then light and rapid footsteps, and then Mrs. Jerrold spun around the corner of the living room, laughing, singing. She was wearing a shirtwaist dress. It had buttons up the front, but only a few of the buttons were buttoned. It had a belt of the same fabric as the dress, but the belt wasn’t buckled or tied. It hung from its loops, the ends dangling at the sides of the dress. Mrs. Jerrold was barefoot. I had never seen her barefoot before.
When she saw me standing at the door, she cried “Peter! What are you doing here?” Her hand fluttered to the neck of her dress.
“Well,” I said, a little rattled, but moving right into my sales pitch, “I was wondering if you have trouble sleeping at night.”
“What?” she said. She came to the door.
“My mother was having trouble sleeping,” I explained.
“But what makes you think that I do?”
“Oh,” I said, “well — ” The only answer that came to me quickly was the truth, that I had seen her standing in her window the night before, naked, so I said nothing.
“You haven’t been peeking through the windows, have you?” she asked.
My mouth fell open. I stood there, sweating.
“I’m only kidding,” she said. She was in a very good mood, playful. She pushed the door open, put her hand on my shoulder, brought it up to my ear, and gave my ear a tug, pulling me into the kitchen and, an instant later, pulling me against her, hugging me to her chest, against her breasts. I felt embarrassed and awkward, and delighted.
“Oh, my God,” she said suddenly. “What am I doing?” She released me, pushed me from her, held me at arm’s length, laughed nervously, and said, “What are you doing here? Did you want to use the tape recorder?”
This seemed like the easiest way out, so I said, “If it’s okay.”
There were footsteps on the stairs, heavy footsteps.
“It’s fine,” she said, hurriedly, pushing me back out the door. “It’s okay, but — ”
“I guess you’re busy,” I said.
She raised her eyebrows and gave me a helpless look. “Yes,” she said.
“Shall I come back later?” I had seen door-to-door salesmen say this on television, when the lady of the house was trying to push them away.
“Yes,” she said. “Later. Come back later.”
“This afternoon?”
“Yes. This afternoon.”
“Okay,” I said. I went down the porch steps, around the corner of the house, and into the side yard, where Junior was scratching in the dirt.
“Is Mr. Yummy finished?” he asked.
“Almost,” I said, without giving a thought to what, exactly, that might mean.
[to be continued]
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