Needful Things

1

Wilma jerzyck did not know her husband, Pete, quite as well as she thought she did.

She went to bed that Thursday night planning to go over to Nettle Cobb’s first thing Friday morning and Take Care of Things.

Her frequent wrangles sometimes simply faded away, but on those occasions when they came to a head, it was Wilma who picked the duelling ground and chose the weapons. The first rule of her confrontational life-style was Always get the last word. The second was Always make the first move. Making this first move was what she thought of as Taking Care of Things, and she meant to take care of Nettle in a hurry. She told Pete she just might see how many times she could turn the crazy bitch’s head around before it popped off the stem.

She fully expected to spend most of the night awake and steaming, taut as a drawn bowstring; it wouldn’t have been the first time.

Instead, she slipped off to sleep less than ten minutes after lying down, and when she woke up she felt refreshed and oddly calm.

Sitting at the kitchen table in her housecoat on Friday morning, it came to her that maybe it was too early to Take Care of Things Permanently. She had scared the living Jesus out of Nettle on the phone last night; as mad as Wilma had been, she hadn’t been mad enough to miss that. Only a person as deaf as a stone post could have missed it.

Why not just let Ms. Mental Illness of 1991 swing in the wind for a little while? Let her be the one to lie awake nights, wondering from which direction the Wrath of Wilma would fall. Do a few drive-bys, perhaps make a few more phone calls. As she sipped her coffee (Pete sat across the table, watching her apprehensively from above the sports section of the paper), it occurred to her that, if Nettle was as cracked as everyone said, she might not have to Take Care of Things at all. This might be one of those rare occasions when Things Took Care of Themselves. She found this thought so cheering that she actually allowed Pete to kiss her as he gathered up his briefcase and made ready to leave for work.

The idea that her frightened mouse of a husband might have drugged her never crossed Wilma’s mind. Nevertheless, that was just what Pete jerzyck had done, and not for the first time, either.

Wilma knew that she had cowed her husband, but she had no idea to how great an extent. He did not just live in fear of her; he lived in awe of her, as natives in certain tropical climes once supposedly lived in awe and superstitious dread of the Great God Thunder Mountain, which might brood silently over their sunny lives for years or even generations before suddenly exploding in a murderous tirade of burning lava.

Such natives, whether real or hypothetical, undoubtedly had their own rituals of propitiation. These may not have helped much when the mountain awoke and cast its bolts of thunder and rivers of fire at their villages, but they surely improved everyone’s peace of mind when the mountain was quiet. Pete jerzyck had no high rituals with which he could worship Wilma; it seemed that more prosaic measures would have to serve. Prescription drugs instead of Communion wafers, for instance.

He made an appointment with Ray Van Allen, Castle Rock’s only family practitioner, and told him that he wanted something which would relieve his feelings of anxiety. His work-schedule was a bitch, he told Ray, and as his commission-rate rose, he found it harder and harder to leave his work-related problems at the office.

He had finally decided it was time to see if the doctor could prescribe something that would smooth off some of the rough edges.

Ray Van Allen knew nothing about the pressures of the real estate game, but he had a fair idea of what the pressures of living with Wilma must be like. He suspected that Pete jerzyck would have a lot less anxiety if he never left the office at all, but of course it was not his place to say so. He wrote a prescription for Xanax, cited the usual cautions, and wished the man good luck and God speed. He believed that, as Pete went down the road of life in tandem with that particular mare, he would need a lot of both.

Pete used the Xanax but did not abuse it. Neither did he tell Wilma about it-she would have had a cow if she knew he was using drugs.

He was careful to keep his Xanax prescription in his briefcase, which contained papers in which Wilma had no interest at all. He took five or six pills a month, most of them on the days before Wilma started her period.

Then, last summer, Wilma had gotten into a wrangle with Henrietta Longman, who owned and operated The Beauty Rest up on Castle Hill. The subject was a botched perm. Following the initial shouting match, there was an exchange between them at Hemphill’s Market the next day, then a yelling match on Main Street a week later. That one almost degenerated into a brawl.

In the aftermath, Wilma had paced back and forth through the house like a caged lioness, swearing she was going to get that bitch, that she was going to put her in the hospital. “She’ll need a Beauty Rest when I get through with her,” Wilma had grated through clenched teeth.

“You can count on it. I’m going up there tomorrow.

I’m going to go up there and Take Care of Things.”

Pete had realized with mounting alarm that this was not just talk; Wilma meant it. God knew what wild stunt she might pull.

He’d had visions of Wilma ducking Henrietta’s head in a vat of corrosive goo that would leave the woman as bald as Sinead O’Connor for the rest of her life.

He’d hoped for some modulation of temperament overnight, but when Wilma got up the next morning, she was even angrier.

He wouldn’t have believed it possible, but it seemed it was. The dark circles under her eyes were a proclamation of the sleepless rug ’ lit she had spent.

“Wilma,” he’d said weakly, “I really don’t think it’s such a good idea for you to go up there to The Beauty Rest today. I’m sure, if You think this over-”

“I thought it over last night,” Wilma had replied, turning that frighteningly flat gaze of hers on him, “and I decided that when I finish with her, she’s never going to burn the roots of anyone else’s hair. When I finish with her, she’s going to need a Seeing Eye dog just to find her way to the john. And if you fuck around with me’ Pete, you and her can buy your goddam dogs from the same litter of German shepherds.”

Desperate, not sure it would work but unable to think of any other way to stave off the approaching catastrophe, Pete jerzyck had removed the bottle from the inside pocket of his briefcase and had dropped a Xanax tablet into Wilma’s coffee. He then went to his office.

In a very real sense, that had been Pete jerzyck’s First Communion.

He had spent the day in an agony of suspense and had come home terrified of what he might find (Henrietta Longman dead and Wilma in jail was his most recurrent fantasy). He was delighted to find Wilma in the kitchen, singing.

Pete took a deep breath, lowered his emotional blast-shield, and asked her what had happened with the Longman woman.

“She doesn’t open until noon, and by then I just didn’t feel so angry,” Wilma said. “I went up there to have it out with her just the same, though-I’d promised myself I was going to, after all.

And do you know, she offered me a glass of sherry and said she wanted to give me my money back!”

“Wow! Great!” Pete had said, relieved and gladdened… and that had been the end of laffaire Henrietta. He had spent days waiting for Wilma’s rage to return, but it hadn’t-at least not aimed in that direction.

He had considered suggesting that Wilma go to Dr. Van Allen and obtain a tranquilizer prescription of her own, but discarded the idea after long and careful consideration. Wilma would blow him out of the water-maybe right into orbit-if he suggested that she TAKE DRUGS.

TAKING DRUGs was for junkies, and tranquilizers were for weak-sister junkies. She would face life on life’s terms, thank you very much.

And besides, Pete concluded reluctantly, the truth was too plain to deny: Wilma liked being mad. Wilma in a red rage was Wilma fulfilled, Wilma imbued with high purpose.

And he loved her-just as the natives of that hypothetical tropic isle undoubtedly love their Great God Thunder Mountain. His awe and dread actually enhanced his love; she wasWILMA, a force unto herself, and he attempted to deflect her from her course only when he was afraid she mi lit inure herself… which, through the mystic 9

transubstantiations of love, would also injure him.

He had slipped her the Xanax on just three occasions since then.

The third-and the scariest by far-was The Night of the Muddy Sheets.

He had been frantic to get her to take a cup of tea, and when she at last consented to drink one (after her short but extremely satisfactory dialogue with Crazy Nettle Cobb), he brewed it strong and dropped in not one Xanax but two. He was greatly relieved at how much her thermostat had dropped the next morning.

These were the things that Wilma jerzyck, confident in her power over her husband’s mind, did not know; they were also the things which kept Wilma from simply driving her Yugo through Nettle’s door and snatching her baldheaded (or trying to) on Friday morning.

2

Not that Wilma had forgotten Nettle, or forgiven her, or come to entertain the slightest doubt as to who had vandalized her bedlinen; no medicine on earth would have done those things.

Shortly after Pete left for work, Wilma got into her car and cruised slowly down Willow Street (plastered to the back bumper of the little yellow Yugo was a bumper sticker which told the world

IF YOU DON’T LIKE MY DRIVING DIAL 1-800-EAT-SHIT).

She turned right, onto Ford Street, and slowed to a crawl as she approached Nettle Cobb’s neat little house. She thought she saw one of the curtains twitch, and that was a good start… but only a start.

She went around the block (passing the Rusk home on Pond Street without a glance), past her own home on Willow, and around to Ford Street for the second time. This time she honked the Yugo’s horn twice as she approached Nettle’s house and then parked out front with the engine idling.

The curtain twitched again. No mistake this time. The woman was peering out at her. Wilma thought of her behind the curtain, I

trembling with guilt and terror, and found she enjoyed the image even more than she enjoyed the one she had gone to bed withthe one where she was twisting the crazy bitch’s noodle until it spun like that little girl’s head in The Exorcist.

“Peekaboo, I see you,” she said grimly as the curtain fell back in place. “Don’t think I don’t.”

She circled the block again and stopped in front of Nettle’s a second time, honking the horn to notify her prey of her arrival.

This time she sat out front for almost five minutes. The curtain twitched twice. At last she drove on again, satisfied.

Crazy broadwillspendthe rest oftheday lookingforme, she thought as she parked in her own driveway and got out. She’ll be afraid to set foot out of her door.

Wilma went inside, light of foot and heart, and plunked down on the sofa with a catalogue. Soon she was happily ordering three new sets of sheets-white, yellow, and paisley.

3

Raider sat in the middle of the living-room carpet, looking at his mistress. At last he whined uneasily, as if to remind Nettle that this was a working day and she was already half an hour late. Today was the day she was supposed to vacuum the upstairs at Polly’s, and the telephone man was coming with the new phones, the ones with the great big touch-tone pads. They were supposed to be easier for people who had the arthritis so terrible, like Polly did, to use.

But how could she go out?

That crazy Polish woman was out there someplace, cruising around in her little car.

Nettle sat in her chair, holding her lampshade in her lap. She had been holding it in her lap ever since the crazy Polish woman had driven past her house the first time. Then she had come again, parking and honking her horn. When she left, Nettle thought it might be over, but no-the woman had come back yet a third time.

Nettle had been sure the crazy Polish woman would try to come in.

She had sat in her chair, hugging the lampshade with one arm and Raider with the other, wondering what she would do when and if the crazy Polish woman did try-how she would defend herse f.

She didn’t know.

At last she had mustered enough courage to take another peek out the window, and the crazy Polish woman had been gone. Her first feeling of relief had been superseded by dread. She was afraid that the crazy Polish woman was patrolling the streets, waiting for her to come out; she was even more afraid that the crazy Polish woman would come here after she was gone.

That she would break in and see her beautiful lampshade and shatter it to a thousand fragments on the floor.

Raider whined again.

“I know,” she said in a voice which was almost a groan. “I know.”

She had to leave. She had a responsibility, and she knew what it was and to whom she owed it. Polly Chalmers had been good to her. It had been Polly who wrote the recommendation that had gotten her out of juniper Hill for good, and it had been Polly who had co-signed for her home loan at the bank. If not for Polly, whose father had been her father’s best friend, she would still be living in a rented room on the other side of the Tin Bridge.

But what if she left and the crazy Polish woman came back?

Raider couldn’t protect her lampshade; he was brave, but he was just a little dog. The crazy Polish woman might hurt him if he tried to stop her. Nettle felt her mind, caught in the vise of this horrible dilemma, beginning to slip. She groaned again.

And suddenly, mercifully, an idea occurred to her.

She got up, still cradling the lampshade in her arms, and crossed the living room, which was very gloomy with the shades drawn.

She walked through the kitchen and opened the door in its far corner. There was a shed tacked onto this end of the house. The shadows of the woodpile and a great many stored objects bulked in the gloom.

A single lightbulb hung down from the ceiling on a cord.

There was no switch or chain; you turned it on by screwing it firmly into its socket. She reached for this… then hesitated.

If the crazy Polish woman was lurking in the back yard, she would see the light go on. And if she saw the light go on, she would know exactly where to look for Nettle’s carnival glass lampshade, wouldn’t she?

“Oh no, you don’t get me that easy,” she said under her breath, feeling her way past her mother’s armoire and her mother’s old Dutch bookcase to the woodpile. “Oh no you don’t, Wilma Jersyck.

I’m not stupid, you know. I’m warning you of that.”

Holding the lampshade against her belly with her left hand, Nettle used her right to pull down the tangle of old, dirty cobwebs in front of the shed’s single window. Then she peered out into the back yard, her eyes jerking brightly from one spot to another. She remained so for almost a minute. Nothing in the back yard moved.

Once she thought she saw the crazy Polish woman crouching in the far left corner of the yard, but closer study convinced her it was only the shade of the oak at the back of the Fearons’ yard. The tree’s lower branches overhung her own yard. They were moving a little in the wind, and that was why the patch of shade back there had looked like a crazy woman (a crazy Polish woman, to be exact) for a second.

Raider whined from behind her. She looked around and saw him standing in the shed door, a black silhouette with his head cocked.

“I know,” she said. “I know, boy-but we’re going to fool her. She thinks I’m stupid. Well, I can teach her better news than that.”

She felt her way back. Her eyes were adjusting to the gloom and she decided she would not need to screw in the lightbulb after all.

She stood on tiptoe and felt along the top of the armoire until her fingers encountered the key which locked and unlocked the long cupboard on the left-hand side. The key which worked on the drawers had been missing for years, but that was all right-Nettle had the one she needed.

She opened the long cupboard and deposited the carnival glass lampshade inside, amid the dust bunnies and mouse-turds.

“It deserves to be in a better place and I know it,” she said softly to Raider. “But it’s safe, and that’s the important thing.”

She put the key back in the lock, turned it, then tried the cupboard door. It was tight, tight as a tick, and she felt suddenly as if a huge boulder had rolled off her heart. She tried the cupboard door again, nodded briskly, and slipped the key into the pocket of her ho ’ usedress. When she got to Polly’s house, she would put it on a piece of string and hang it around her neck. She would do it first thing.

“There!” she told Raider, who had begun wagging his tail. Per 7

haps he sensed that the crisis was past.

“That’s taken care of, big boy, and I must get to work! I’m late!”

As she was slipping into her coat, the telephone began to ring.

Nettle took two steps toward it and then stopped.

Raider uttered his single, severe bark and looked at her. Don’t you know what you’re supposed to do when the telephone rings?

his eyes asked her. Even I know that, and I’m only the dog.

“I won’t,” Nettle said.

I know what you did, you crazy bitch, I know what you did, I know what you did, and I… am going to… get you!

“I won’t answer it. I’m going to work. She’s the one who’s crazy, not me. I never did a thing to her! Not one solitary thing!”

Raider barked agreement.

The telephone stopped ringing.

Nettle relaxed a little… but her heart was still pounding hard.

“You be a good boy,” she told Raider, stroking him. “I’ll be back late, because I’m going in late. But I love you, and if you remember that, you will be a good doggy all day long.”

This was a going-to-work incantation which Raider knew well, and he wagged his tail. Nettle opened the front door and peered both ways before stepping out. She had a bad moment when she saw a bright flash of yellow, but it wasn’t the crazy Polish woman’s car; the Pollard boy had left his Fisher-Price tricycle out on the sidewalk, that was all.

Nettle used her housekey to lock the door behind her, then walked around to the rear of the house to make sure the shed door was locked.

It was. She set off for Polly’s house, her purse over her arm and her eyes searching for the crazy Polish woman’s car (she was trying to decide if she should hide behind a hedge or simply stand her ground if she saw it). She was almost to the end of the block when it came to her that she had not checked the front door as carefully as she should have done. She glanced anxiously at her watch and then retraced her steps. She checked the front door. It was locked tight. Nettle sighed with relief, and then decided she ought to check the lock on the woodshed door, too, just to be safe.

“Better safe than sorry,” she muttered under her breath, and went around to the back of the house.

Her hand froze in the act of pulling on the handle of the woodshed door.

Inside, the telephone was ringing again.

“She’s crazy,” Nettle moaned. “I didn’t do anything!”

The shed door was locked, but she stood there until the telephone fell silent. Then she set sail for work again with her purse hanging over her arm.

4

This time she had gone almost two blocks before the conviction that she still might not have locked the front door recurred, gnawing at her. She knew she had, but she was afraid she hadn’t.

She stood by the blue U.S. mailbox at the corner of Ford and Deaconess Way, indecisive. She had almost made up her mind to push on when she saw a yellow car drift through the intersection a block down.

It wasn’t the crazy Polish woman’s car, it was a Ford, but she thought it might be an omen. She walked rapidly back to her house and checked both doors again. Locked. She got to the end of her walk before it occurred to her that she ought to doublecheck the cupboard door of the armoire as well, and make sure it was also locked.

She knew that it was, but she was afraid that it wasn’t.

She unlocked the front door and went inside. Raider jumped up on her, tail wagging wildly, and she petted him for a moment-but only a moment. She had to close the front door, because the crazy Polish woman might come by anytime. Anytime at all.

She slammed it, turned the thumb-bolt, and went back out to the woodshed. The cupboard door was locked, of course. She went back into the house and stood in the kitchen for a minute. Already she was beginning to worry, beginning to think she had made a mistake and the cupboard door really wasn’t locked. Maybe she hadn’t tugged on the pull hard enough to be really absolutely one hundred per cent sure. it might only be stuck.

She went back to check it again, and while she was checking, the telephone began to ring. She hurried back into the house with the key to the armoire clutched in her sweaty right hand. She barked her shin on a footstool and cried out in pain.

By the time she got to the living room, the telephone had stopped again.

“I can’t go to work today,” she muttered. “I have to… to…

(stand guard) That was it. She had to stand guard.

She picked up the phone and dialled quickly before her mind could start to gnaw at itself again, the way Raider gnawed at his rawhide chewy toys.

“Hello?” Polly said. “This is You Sew and Sew.”

“Hi, Polly. It’s me.”

“Nettle? Is everything all right?”

“Yes, but I’m calling from home, Polly. My stomach is upset.”

By now this was no lie. “I wonder if I could have the day off. I know about vacuuming the upstairs… and the telephone man is coming… but…”

“That’s all right,” Polly said at once. “The phone man isn’t coming until two, and I meant to leave early today, anyway. My hands still hurt too much to work for long. I’ll let him in.”

“If you really need me, I could-”

“No, really,” Polly assured her warmly, and Nettle felt tears prick her eyes. Polly was so kind.

“Are they sharp pains, Nettle? Shall I call Dr. Van Allen for you.

“No-just kind of crampy. I’ll be all right. If I can come in this afternoon, I will.”

“Nonsense,” Polly said briskly. “You haven’t asked for a day off since you came to work for me. just crawl into bed and go back to sleep. Fair warning: if you try to come in, I’ll just send you home.”

“Thank you, Polly,” Nettle said. She was on the verge of tears.

“You’re very good to me.”

“YOU deserve goodness. I’ve got to go, Nettle-customers. Lie down. I’ll call this afternoon to see how you’re doing.”

“Thank you. “You’re More than welcome. Bye-bye.”

“Toodle-oo,” Nettle said, and hung up.

She went at once to the window and twitched the curtain aside.

The street was empty-for now. She went back into the shed, used the key to open the armoire, and took out the lampshade. A feeling of calm and ease settled over her as soon as she had it cradled in her arms. She took it into the kitchen, washed it in warm, soapy water, rinsed it, and dried it carefully.

She opened one of the kitchen drawers and removed her butcher knife. She took this and the lampshade back into the living room and sat down in the gloom. She sat that way all morning, bolt upright in her chair, the lampshade in her lap and the butcher knife clenched in her right hand.

The phone rang twice.

Nettle didn’t answer it.