Mrs. Macaulay Saw
Colleen Morrissey I would often go to the Macaulay house, back in the yellow days of middle school, before the Midtown revival, before Farnam Street became this outdoor mall/condo park/night scene, back when the Mutual of Omaha building stuck out alone in a tri-part bump west of downtown like someone giving the finger. When the Midtown neighborhoods south of Dodge still belonged to middle-class Catholics who could still send their kids to the private Catholic grade schools. The Macaulay house was made of deep brown brick, and the rusty metal furniture sitting on the front porch left deep brown stains on your clothes. Inside was a shamble. The purpose of each individual room spilled out into the neighboring rooms because those rooms, like the Macaulays who lived in them, had no sense of boundaries. Light, fragile boxes of tea were stacked beneath the TV stand in the living room. A futon that essentially acted as Mr. Macaulay’s bed stayed in the sun room along with preteen Kevin Macaulay’s ten-pound hand weights. The dining room held a glassfronted hutch where Billy Macaulay’s Star Wars figurines stood alongside Mrs. Macaulay’s dusty doll collection. The Macaulay house was the one where we girls would go. It was the designated place for being thirteen and fourteen during the dilated summers made into stagnant eternities by the lack of cars and money. It was the place for eight-person boy-girl “parties.” On the crumbling front porch in the summer, smells of Mountain Dew and wet cement. In the weird, parallelogram-shaped, shag-
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carpeted basement in the winter, where shelves of sharp plastic toys turned any misstep into an occasion for a wicked bruise. Maggie Macaulay’s room was the place for watching Newsies on her shoebox of an analogue TV/VCR and spilling mint tea over each other, for making Maggie’s bed an iron maiden of lost popcorn kernels and chip crumbs. They lived just south of Dodge Street, where the houses were still nice, but the stone lions on the porch were cracked, and the bricks shed dust. Summer of 2001 found me awkward and alone one afternoon with Mrs. Macaulay—Kathleen—in the Macaulay kitchen. My friends Jen and Sarah and Maggie Macaulay were beyond the wall at my back, in the living room with the TV on. It was commercial time during an airing of 10 Things I Hate About You, and I wanted to be with those babbling girls, but I was in the kitchen with Mrs. Macaulay, waiting for the water in a big pot on the grimy stovetop to boil so we could drop in five packs of ramen noodles. This afternoon I had become the one, the only other one besides Mrs. Macaulay, who could fit into this knock-kneed kitchen to help her make us this snack. She had walked into the living room, crooked her finger at me, and said, “Chelsea, come help.” Rattled by how deliberately I’d been singled out, in the kitchen I leaned against a counter with a cabinet’s cheap handle threatening to crack me in the back of my skull and the clippings on a bulletin board fluttering like a bathing bird on the wall to my right. Mrs. Macaulay was a scary woman. She was large, robust, bigbosomed, a redhead like Maggie but with a spiky-short haircut gelled into crispness. She wore glasses, and when she gave us rides to places, she sang along to the radio in a grand, high, operatic voice, but we didn’t dare laugh at her. I had unwrapped all five of the ramen packages and stacked the little rectangular blocks of dried noodles in an orderly tower on top of one of the flattened wrappers. I couldn’t believe how dirty the kitchen was.
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Kathleen Macaulay scared all of us, the small gaggle of young teenagers who lolloped around her house, but I always had the feeling that she liked me the least, and it might have been because of how bewildering I found her house. It wasn’t solely her house, of course, it belonged to all the Macaulays, and they were all responsible for its state. But like any stupid and selfish child, I attributed the condition of a house to its mother, and my entire sense of safety and wholesomeness and goodness rested on the axis of the clean. The stark. The uncluttered. I spent so much time at the Macaulay house because Maggie Macaulay was the epicenter of everything that shone of growth to me—her boxes of tampons out in the open and her total comfort with cooking and the fact that she did most all the laundry for her family. But every time I was at the Macaulay house, I was always agog at their fascinating messiness. Toothpaste stains all over the upstairs bathroom counter, Maggie’s yeasty-smelling clothes forming a soft layer all over the floor of her cupboard of a bedroom. I think Mrs. Macaulay saw my stares, my long looks, the way I would pick at the rust spots left on my T-shirts from their porch chairs. I couldn’t prevent my nose from wrinkling at rotten potatoes and onions stashed somewhere near my feet when I had to go into their pantry to get the ramen. I carefully opened all the little spice packets and placed them on their sides atop the counter with their open lips tented up so they wouldn’t spill. As I arranged them in a line, I glanced up and saw Mrs. Macaulay watching me. She leaned against the sink, her arms crossed and her back to the window that showed the clutches of their half-dead backyard tree. “Maggie says you’re dating Peter?” she said. “Oh, yeah,” I said. I never talked about dating with any other adults besides Mrs. Macaulay. My parents didn’t know I was “dating”—or rather, that I was meeting Peter in a group at
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the Cinema Center and that I regularly sat next to him during gatherings at the Macaulay house. “Peter’s nice,” Mrs. Macaulay said, “but you know Maggie was dating him before.” Maggie had dated everyone before. Every boy outside of our classmates we knew was through Maggie, like she was our personal shopper. Her yearly attendance at a summer day-camp at UNO partially explained it, but I had no idea where she found the rest of them. “Yeah, but they’re friends,” I said. “Oh, yes, he’s here a lot. He works for me.” Mrs. Macaulay was in charge of her own house-flipping operation, and she had hired a lot of our guy friends to do the grunt work like tearing up carpets and tearing down walls, but we all considered her real job to be the leader of our Girl Scout troop, ever since our Brownie days in second grade. “You know he broke up with Maggie,” she went on, “because he said he didn’t want to date anyone.” “Yeah,” I said. The lid of the pot began to tremble and huff out steam, so Mrs. Macaulay went over and lifted it. I handed her my dried noodle tower, and she dropped the squares into the water one by one. “So where do you think that puts you?” she said. I laughed. “I don’t know.” I laughed because I was only thirteen. I didn’t think about Peter in a real way. Our meetings were not a series of real interactions with causes and consequences. I was thirteen and lonely and Peter wasn’t a specific human being. He was like the figure of my own mother coming up behind me and cutting off my ponytail in a dream, just something representational. And in a dream, you can beg and rant and kiss and hug while the dream figure just smiles like an imp, unchanging. Don’t they say that everyone in your dreams is actually just you? Peter was me, putting my own arm around myself.
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Mrs. Macaulay looked at me over the frames of her glasses. “Well,” she said as she reached for a wooden spoon from where it had been set to dry on a paper towel beside the sink— a spoon that had apparently been there so long that a bit of the towel stuck to it. “Maybe you want to rethink that.” “No thinking during summer break, Mrs. Macaulay,” I said, trying to joke away from the topic. I dared to be a little bit more casual with Mrs. Macaulay in my speech than I was with other adults, taking my cue from the way Maggie talked, but it was always false. I never quite got there the way some of my friends did, as they swore in front of her and even called her “Kathleen” sometimes, when they were really brave. But I didn’t need to think about Peter right then, he with the thin blond hair and the squishy mushroom nose dotted with blackheads. I just needed to think about me, thirteen, unkissed, only child, pre-menstrual, a little fat, and still in the Girl Scouts along with my sort-of-fat friends. She ignored my joke. “You girls,” she said as she broke up the noodle bricks in the pot with sharp jabs of the wooden spoon. She wore a ribbed orange cotton tank top. I could see where her bra straps shaped her back into thick bumps. “You think I like seeing you all be this way about boys? Chickens with your heads cut off.” She turned around and looked at me square on, and I thought, What? You don’t “like”? What do you mean? You are Mrs. Macaulay. You are Maggie’s mother. You are the leader of our Girl Scout troop, and what does it mean for you to say you “like” something? “I care what happens,” she said to me. But it was with such hardness that I didn’t know what the words meant.
That was a late day of summer, and soon afterward I was back in my school uniform—the rough cotton polo shirt and the
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polyester skirt that we rolled up at least twice at the waistband to show off our patchily-shaven thighs. In the first long afternoons of eighth grade, when my brain couldn’t help but become syrupy during science and math, I troubled myself with unaccountable thoughts of Mrs. Macaulay. I had known her since I was six and she’d first supervised the “camping trip” the Brownie troop had taken. We “camped” inside the visitors’ center of Fontenelle Forest, and she’d changed her shirt in front of us when she woke up in the morning like her beige bra and her curdled C-section scar weren’t a big deal. She taught us to scramble eggs over a campfire outside even though there was a kitchen. She was the one who stored all the plastic baggies full of patches and pins in a box shoved into the corner of her dining room, the one who got to collect in her hands the filled-out folders of cookie orders. When it was cookie time, she was full of a small-fry politician’s commitment. Perhaps she admired the Girl Scouts of America. Perhaps she really believed in the teaching of leadership skills and service to young girls. Perhaps she liked the look, especially, of the cookie order forms. There was an image of each cookie at the top set against a mint-green and lavender background, and then falling from those planet-like cookies was a graphing table composed in a pleasing, tight order, and when all the different pens wrote their orders, the points raised indents on the other side of the paper that she could swish her fingers over like Braille. Perhaps, also, she liked having a troop of girls looking to her, always, like the boys she hired for her business. She got experts to do the important stuff like plumbing and electricity, but only needed to bring them in at the last, because all she had to do was find a few boys before their self-ownership kicked in—just like the girls her daughter’s age—and make sure they feared her, and they would do everything the same as a professional crew with less fuss.
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And besides paying them fairly, the only other concession she had to make was look the other way when they used one of the empty houses for their parties. Every once in a while, she would drop them a pointed sentence or two, like, “The smell of dark liquor is easier to get rid of than the smell of clear liquor, you know,” to let them know that they weren’t getting away with anything. Perhaps she knew how different we all were around her. I was different around Mrs. Macaulay. I was brasher. I wore things I wouldn’t have worn in the same way or wouldn’t have worn at all around my own house. The sweaters covering tank tops came off. The lipstick in my pocket came out. Before that afternoon in the kitchen, I had always been the one taking in her house and watching her—the caking of crusted foundation in the hairs of the makeup brushes on the bathroom sink, the tremble of her underarms as she pulled up the window blinds. But she saw me. She saw me unwrapping the Ramen noodles, so neat and tidy. She’d seen me with my parents, moreover, at school functions or the Girl Scout award brunches that wasted Sunday mornings, so she must have seen the change. In everything—my posture, tone of voice. Mrs. Macaulay saw me. “I care what happens,” she said. That afternoon a few weeks before school started, Mrs. Macaulay let me carry the steaming Ramen noodles out to the living room without talking any further. She just let me smile fretfully while she silently handed me the bright plastic bowls she ladled full. The plastic was so thin that my fingers burned, but I held them with my fingertips and said nothing. While we slurped the noodles with forks and then tipped the broth straight into our mouths, Mrs. Macaulay went upstairs with an empty twelve-ounce pop bottle to water the houseplants choking up all the windows. Then when the movie ended we decided to change into our swimsuits to sun ourselves out on the front porch, where
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we were going to spread out towels over a few pocked foam pool loungers and hope that neighborhood boys would wander by. I was the last to change. By the time it was my turn, Maggie, Jen, and Sarah had all moved out to the porch. When I came out from the bathroom, Mrs. Macaulay was heading down the stairs holding the dripping pop bottle. I wore a secretly-owned two-piece, one of those all-wrong outfits bought as though it had the magic to undo its own wrongness. She looked at it—the cheap nylon stretched tight over loose buttocks, digging deep into my hips— and she said, “Chelsea, that’s too small.” But quietly, so my friends couldn’t hear through the flimsy screened front door, making me know that what she disapproved of wasn’t my mottled, floury belly but the cruel clawed thing that made me buy that swimsuit in the first place. In my eighth-grade classroom less than a month later, sitting near the windows in the humid tent of my own clothes, I suddenly remembered this with a sensation like I’d get whenever I’d be lying in my bed at home after school and I’d hear the front door open. Mrs. Macaulay was far from permissive, was actually stricter than my own parents. She could tell on me, of course. This hung, a constant threat, over each of our heads, the girls who came to her house. But she never would tell, would she? We thought we were safe. And sitting there in the classroom heat and sun, I wondered if maybe she liked it too. We, Maggie’s friends, were young girls she could hold close but whose ends she didn’t have to answer for. We were safe. She and Maggie fought frequently, I knew. Not always in front of other people, but sometimes I’d come over with Jen or Sarah or both, and we could just tell that they’d been in the middle of it and had only stopped because of the doorbell. We could just tell. And we’d sit really quietly on the couch in the living room
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watching TV while Maggie palpably fumed and Mrs. Macaulay loudly flipped through business papers ten feet away in the dining room. It seemed so strange to me because even though Maggie Macaulay was the living symbol of independence, she and her mother always actually seemed to be wrestling over the same being, the same space. One would have a little more claim over the single personhood one day, and the next the other would yank the balance her own way. I never fought with my mother. We never got that far.
In the last week of the following March, I rang the Macaulay doorbell. I knew Maggie had soccer that afternoon, but when Mrs. Macaulay opened the door, I said, “Is Maggie here?” Mrs. Macaulay looked annoyed in the way she did whenever she was confused or angry or listening. We girls hardly ever just showed up at each other’s houses anymore. We were getting too old for that. “She’s at soccer practice, Chelsea,” Mrs. Macaulay said to me, and she looked past me for my mom’s car. “Did you walk here?” “Yeah,” I said. “It’s not that far.” “But you crossed Dodge.” Dodge was the busiest street in the city, even here in Midtown. “There’s a crosswalk at fifty-second,” I said, even though of course she knew that. “Well, she won’t be back for at least an hour—but you can come in. I’m just getting the cookie orders together, actually. You can help.” I followed Mrs. Macaulay through the living room and into the dining room where indeed the scanty pile of cookie order forms lay on the table, along with a cordless phone, a stack of Highlights magazines (maybe Billy Macaulay’s), a half-full laundry basket, and half a cup of mint tea. I sat down across from Mrs.
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Macaulay and watched her go through and alphabetize the short stack of order forms. There were only nine of us left in the troop because we were in eighth grade for God’s sake. I watched her fingers, thick but tapering to points at the ends, watched her gaudy diamond wedding ring flash in the dirtywindowed sunlight, and I found myself crying. Mrs. Macaulay’s fingers abruptly halted in the middle of their brisk organizational movements, and she looked at me like I had just said something disrespectful. “What’s the matter, Chelsea?” “I don’t know,” I said, my words punctuated by spasmodic hitches, “I don’t know what’s the matter.” “Breathe,” she said. I tried to take deep breaths, but the exhalations just turned into prolonged, muted cries. I couldn’t help it. “Chelsea,” Mrs. Macaulay said. “Calm down.” “I’m trying, Mrs. Macaulay. Everything is so, so bad.” “What’s bad?” “Everything.” I put my head down on top of my hands on the tabletop. I heard Mrs. Macaulay get up, and my body tensed for the expected touch on my back, but a moment later I heard and felt the small thud of a cup of water on the table near my right hand. I looked up and drank some of it while Mrs. Macaulay stood off to the side. Never touching me.
She had me come down to the basement with her to pull the wet clothes out of the washer. We did it in silence, me still riding out the last wounded little sobs. Then we went outside to the backyard where Mrs. Macaulay was going to hang up the clothes to dry even though it was still chilly and the trees barely even had
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buds. This was another thing—the clothesline. I’d never seen one used until the Macaulays. The only exposure to clotheslines I’d had were in cartoons, and they were always choking someone in the middle of a chase. Mrs. Macaulay didn’t ask me to help her. I just watched her hang up the wet clothes and intermittently looked around the backyard. It was empty except for a few Fisher Price toys. A bright yellow plastic lawnmower lay on its side, a web of dirt stains covering it like it had been snowed over a few times. Billy, the youngest Macaulay child, was seven, too old for this toy. The garage was made of the same disintegrating brown brick as the house, and the driveway was more like a field of stepping stones. I watched Mrs. Macaulay as the wind chilled the damp streaks left on my cheeks. I looked at her face. I wondered why she was wearing so much makeup even though she probably hadn’t left the house that day. I wondered why she cut her hair so short and why she seemed like so much more of a real person than my own mother, who only ever seemed to operate in one distant mode, like a machine with only one setting. I had actually heard Mrs. Macaulay scream. I had actually seen Mrs. Macaulay wet-haired and wrapped in a towel as she came out of the bathroom, all steam and skin and humanity, more naked than my own mother would ever be.