Old Wives’ Tales
by Colin Alexander
“Married off to husband number one, Maurice, at fourteen. Me and this oaf of a man, nothing but the farmhouse and corn as far as you could see. No one to hear me scream but pigs and chickens.”
I combed Beatrice’s hair with one hand, tortoise shell hair pins in the other. Her hair was bone-white, striking against tan skin. She loved the heat, often asking me to wheel her outside to the wraparound porch for our chats. This morning, unseasonal summer rain kept us bedroom-bound. Beatrice’s crooked smile, courtesy of the stroke, told me she was going to confess to yet another murder.
“Your parents?” I asked.
“He broke my arm first time I tried to call,” she said. “Never quite set right.” She lifted her right arm by way of example, the elbow never traveling beyond shoulder height.
I placed the last hair pin against her scalp, then leveled her chin with two fingers to see everything was symmetrical.
“Makeup?” I asked.
“Lips and cheeks,” she said. “New inmates arrive today. Might find one worth talking to.”
“Husband number four?” I asked.
She half-smiled, unwrapping a butterscotch candy from the crystal bowl on her vanity.
“Five,” she said.
I nodded, taking the silver compact and brush from the nightstand.
“How’d you get off the farm?” I asked.
“Got Maurice drunk ‘til he passed out. Man was a brute, weighed at least two-fifty, and I was just skin and bone then. Shoved him onto a board, then dragged him to the well.”
“How’d you get him inside?” I asked, dusting her cheekbones lightly.
“I just really, really wanted it,” she said.
“Least it was quick,” I said, snapping the compact closed. “Falling and all.”
Beatrice shook her head.
“Fall just woke him,” she said. “Screamed at me for days.”
I nodded again.
“Don’t forget the lipstick,” she said, pursing her lips. “Husband number five could be right around the corner.”
Maurice might have been her first husband, but he wasn’t the first murder Beatrice had told me about. Bruce, her neighbor in Chicago, had beaten his kids.
“Stopped hearing little Sandy playing piano. Joan, her mother, told me she was in hospital again. Bruce wasn’t gonna change.”
She’d waited until the first snow, “when the roads got real icy,” then severed his brake line.
“Week later, heard ‘Moonlight Sonata’ through the alleyway. Sandy went on to tickle the ivories on cruise ships. Got postcards for years.”
Then there was the landlord who collected first and last from tenants without papers, then called immigration so he could re-rent the unit.
“Turned the power back on while he was rewiring a unit. Smelled like greasy BBQ.”
I’d lost count at twelve. I wasn’t sure I believed this brittle, birdlike woman could take a life. More likely, her tales were a ploy to lure me back to her room, same as the expensive butterscotch. Even if true, time had surely defanged her. Multiple strokes had left her chairbound. While she could only lift her right arm to her shoulder, she couldn’t move her left at all.
Like a bell around a cat’s neck, I heard the click-click of the lozenge on Mr. Kaufman’s teeth before the wave of medicinal cherries entered the room.
“Stuffy in here!” said Mr. Kaufman, the manager of Shady Oaks. Without asking, he moved to open the windows, girth brushing up against my all-too-thin scrubs. Though I no longer flinched, Beatrice’s perpetual frown twitched.
“Mr. Wheedle’s toilet’s clogged,” said Kaufman, plucking one of the butterscotch candies from Beatrice’s bowl. “Bring gloves.”
Kaufman set schedules, and I needed the work. I had my own mother’s atrophy to attend; there were no fancy rest homes in her future, just my sagging box spring while I slept on the yellow corduroy loveseat, waking to parallel lines on my face like freshly tilled farmland.
“Kaufman giving you trouble?” asked Beatrice as I kneeled before her, finishing the second layer of blackberry lacquer on her toenails. She didn’t need her toes painted so often, but I could see her whole body relax when I rubbed her bunions after the paint dried.
I stopped, turning away for a moment to wipe my face with the back of my hand, careful to avoid remnants of polish on my palm. While only half of her face moved, Beatrice’s gray-green eyes darted away from the bathroom mirror, boring into mine.
“Lot of turnover with the female attendants,” she said. “You’re not the first.” This time, it was Beatrice’s fingers grazing my chin, holding my gaze level.
I’ve replayed our conversation in my mind, over and over. Was Beatrice really the first to bring up Mr. Kaufman, her gray-green eyes clocking every movement of his hands, her ears hearing the click-click of his cherry lozenges as he inserted himself into quiet rooms? Or had I spoken his name, inserting it casually into conversation about makeup and elderly suitors, saying it like a quiet prayer to a many-limbed deity atop a pile of bones, arms clutching scimitars and flails, tongue split like a snake?
Mr. Kaufman was found splayed out face down in front of a glass display brimming with painted teacups, veins of his eyes ropey and red as if infused with cherry syrup from the lozenge found bulging in his throat. I knew, as soon as I spoke his name aloud to Beatrice, his days were numbered. Old gods don’t simply wake up after millennia to find their faces carved in sandstone by virtue of staying alive. The elderly earn the scars and wrinkles of age by removing impediments, allowing themselves to continue forward while others fall away.
I didn’t attend Mr. Kaufman’s funeral. Instead, I picked Beatrice a bouquet of wild yellow bird’s foot, and we spent the day together on the porch, soaking up what was left of the jammy sunset. It was only when leaving I noticed the fancy butterscotch candies on her vanity had disappeared, replaced by a cheap tin of cherry lozenges.
The Molotov Cocktail 