Beulah Hill

Esther Cohen

We like to believe we know what happened.  That we understand.

Most of the time, we don’t.

My country neighbor Beulah Hill she’d been a nurse at Mount Sinai for many years she came to visit when we moved into our house.  She was wearing an Easter hat, although it was fall.  I went to the door wearing a long purple kimono my friend Lydia Buzio made for me and she looked at the kimono as though she’d never in her long life seen anything like it before, as though she in her navy blue suit and white Easter hat in October was more or less the acceptable norm.

She’d knocked on the front door using the old horseshoe knocker.  No one comes in the front door.  Even the Jehovah’s Witness people who visit every summer know to walk around the side.  Not Beulah Hill, strident, certain in every single opinion she held.

She looked at me as though I’d already done something wrong.

“Are you Catholic,” is the first thing she said.

“No,” I replied.  Not sure whether that was a good or bad answer.

“Thank God,” she said, and then held out her hand.  “I go to the Methodist Church nearby,” was her only explanation.

I invited her into the living room, but she said she’d prefer to sit at the kitchen table.

She was holding a pie plate, and a pie with a recipe card fastened with toothpicks in its center.

The pie was made almost entirely of peanut butter, and was an unexpected brown.  A brown pie.

“You might be able to make this yourself,” she said, although she was correct to seem doubtful.

“Let me tell you about myself,” said Beulah Hill.  “I’m sure you’re curious.”

She was right.  I was.

“My first husband fell off his lawn mower.  That was that,” she said.

He left me with triplets.  Three boys.  You can imagine.”

I wasn’t sure whether she wanted me to ask her for details.  Some do and some don’t.

Beulah Hill seemed more like an Ancient Mariner type.  She had a story to tell the way she

wanted to tell it. My role, from her perspective anyway, was just to listen.

“My second husband died tragically too,” she said.  “He was walking across the street

right by that bridge over there and a truck came out of nowhere.  Another one of those

unfortunate circumstances.  He died right away.  The ambulance came to take him, and the next time the boys and I saw him was at the Ryan Funeral Home.  Do you know that place?”

I did not.

“I’m on number 3,” she said.  “He’s a good man.  About like the others.  He does his job and likes my pies.  What else is there?” asked Beulah Hill.  She did not wait for my answer.