| ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF MARRIAGE by Louise Farmer Smith |
PATRICIA 1960 It looked like the four of us might eat supper without talking about Mother’s situation, but before he picked up his fork, Daddy laid both palms on the table, and cleared his throat in his commanding way, bringing the meeting to order. Although he was a small man, someone had once told him he looked like General Patton and, at times like this I could see him swelling into the belief that he did. He’d left the army as a major, but Olivia and I called him The General. “We’re going to have to stay very organized during the next — well, as long as it takes,” he announced. “What’s she got?” Ernest asked, looking up from his hash. He was twelve, a very tall boy with catsup in the corner of his mouth and the big eyes of a child who expects the grown-ups to clear everything up for him. “Shh, she’s sleeping now,” The General said. I was nineteen, the oldest, and Ernest looked at me thinking I would be the one to tell our daddy that Mama had sobbed off and on all day, gasping as though she were in pain. But I kept quiet. “So we must each volunteer for broader assignments,” The General said. “I’ll do the laundry,” sixteen-year-old Olivia said, grabbing a job she could take care of and take off. “Fine,” I said. “I’ll look after Mother and do the cooking.” “The trash,” Ernest said. “And the mowing. I could mow, right, Daddy?” “Okay,” my father said. “But you’ve got to be a lot more careful with the edger than you have been. What you want is to get a slanted edge to the grass along the sidewalks. Like the bevel on a watch crystal. The edging is as important as the mowing.” “I can be careful. What’s wrong with Mama?” “Ernest,” The General snapped. “This is not the kind of thing— This is not the measles!” Ernest’s pointy shoulders jerked up toward his ears. “I just asked.” “It’s the Change, Ernest,” Olivia said. Ernest’s eyes and mouth opened wide. “She won’t change into anything, will she?” he asked. “She won’t get mean?” “Ernest, that’s enough,” The General said, growing red in the face. “Your mother is simply going through a time when--” He did a little throat clearing, “—when a woman’s family has to make allowances until she’s her old self again.” The General gave Olivia a glare for her contribution to this outbreak. We lived in a very old house my grandfather, Dan Hale, had built on his family’s original claim—living room, dining room, music room and two bedrooms on the first floor, another bedroom up the stairs on the right and an unfinished attic space through a little door on the left. The town and the University had grown toward us through the years, and we were now surrounded by a very ordinary neighborhood. All that was left of the farm was a neglected orchard in back. I was going to be a sophomore at the University next fall, and had the whole summer to get my formerly cheerful and frankly alluring mother back on her feet. It seemed right that I, the oldest, should do it, as I was the only member of the family who could stand to watch her cry. I myself never cried, and, I confess, that summer I couldn’t understand why she didn’t just take a walk around the block to clear her head. Daddy, who had been an Army Ordnance officer in charge of keeping all the jeeps, trucks and tanks running, certainly expected people to shape up, buckle down, and carry on. We kids had been raised that way, each one pulling his own weight. On the other hand, I knew Mother was truly embarrassed to be lying in bed when she wasn’t really sick. Days passed and then weeks as the heat of that Oklahoma summer moved in and stayed. The family tightened ranks, treating each other with greater courtesy, being more careful not to leave a dirty sock on the bathroom floor or a milky glass in the kitchen sink. Every Saturday Ernest mowed and trimmed and mowed again, coming into the kitchen red-faced and shining with sweat, wanting The General to come inspect his slanted edges. My father loved work—pursued it, sucked it toward himself, or manufactured it when it wasn’t readily available. Family legend held that my father could fix a car with wire off a fence post and wasn’t above scavenging at the dump for machinery to repair during his college years. For my parents, Depression survivors, work was the only way out of trouble. But in spite of everything we did, Mother got worse, curling her body away, even from me. The last Saturday in June, as soon as I’d vacuumed and made the Jello, I stuck my head in the front bedroom. “I’m gonna run a quick errand,” I said. Mother, her eyes widening, sat up in bed and gripped the edge of the sheet. Finally she managed a little smile. “Sure, darlin’, take your time.” I rushed to the library and came back with an armload of books. Obviously work was not the answer. Maybe I could read my way out of trouble. The next morning Mama insisted we all leave her and go to church. We sat in our usual three-quarters-of-the-way-down-on-the-left pew, and I realized I hadn’t been out of the house during the day for three weeks. After the benediction, as the organ swelled and the congregation peeled their sweating bottoms off the pews and began to chat, I stood to look around for my boyfriend, Tom, to remind myself what he looked like in the daylight. I tried to glance about inconspicuously. My bosom rose and fell as I scanned the milling congregation for Tom. I was a little self-conscious about having a bust measurement for a girl four inches taller. I stood just as Mother had taught me—waist drawn back taking all the bow out of my spine. Thank heavens the stick-out slips and waist-makers had gone out in high school. Now, in my chemise, standing carefully, bottom tucked under, bosom pulled back, I could still pass for a straight, modest Methodist. Shoot! Instead of Tom, I saw Mrs. Eugenia Pryor coming against the crowd down the center aisle, waving to catch my eye. I pretended not to see her and turned to shepherd my bunch back toward the other end of our pew, but The General, seeing the center aisle to be the most efficient route to the exit, made a two-handed sawing gesture like an M.P. diverting a convoy, and we three kids turned back around to face the oncoming Pryor. “Patricia, dear, we’ve missed your sweet mother,” she said resting her hands on the backs of the pews effectively plugging up our escape route. “The Women’s Society of Christian Service. The Sunday School Committee. We hardly know how to turn the lights on around here without her. How many Sundays has it been?” “Mrs. Pryor,” I exclaimed, “where’d you get that lovely hat?” “Is she sick?” Mrs. Pryor asked. “Oh, she’s all right. This heat is getting to all of us.” “So she’s all right then?” This question she addressed to Ernest behind me. I turned to watch his little Adam’s apple bob. As the official church visitor, the one in charge of knowing what every Methodist was doing on Sunday morning, Mrs. Pryor was also a one-woman cheerleading team for Reverend Mapple, and I knew the only thing that distracted her from other people’s business was an opportunity to promote her man. “I really wish Mother had been here,” I rushed to say. “That sermon! Boy, was he wound up.” “An absolute human dynamo!” Mrs. Pryor avowed, her eyes rising to the stained glass windows. “We are blessed,” I said, turning to push Ernest out the now empty aisle. The General and Olivia had already escaped. That summer Ernest had trouble getting organized. Although he seemed shy about talking to Mother, he also seemed anxious about being away from her for very long. He didn’t fish for crawdads in the University golf course pond or visit the Biology Building to gape at the formaldehyde bottles of two-headed calf fetuses and diseased brains. Olivia, however, didn’t have any trouble being out of the house. Morning after morning I’d come into the kitchen to make breakfast and see her folding up the ironing board, giving me a big smile as she grabbed the hangers of shirts and blouses to deliver to our closets before she sailed out the door with her tennis racket. I heard Ernest quietly phoning his friend R. B., inviting him over to help build an orange crate canoe, a project Ernest had started in our attic last winter after finding a tiny blueprint in Boy’s Life. Ernest put the phone down quietly. “R.B. says oranges don’t come in crates anymore.” “It’s kind of a hot project for summer,” I said. “And when you leave the attic door open, I just about choke on the dust.” “I can’t help that. If I close it, I can’t breathe.” Meals were no problem. There was nothing much to do but check the cans of salmon, tuna, and corned beef hash, the catsup, cereal, and milk. If anyone missed Mother’s cooking, they were too polite to mention it. I carried her meals to their room and arranged the old embroidered footstool, so she could sit up straight on the edge of the bed to eat. I sat on the dresser bench to keep her company. As she struggled to swallow the lunch, we both listened to the bam of Ernest’s hammer in the attic. Lately each blow was answered by a faint shower of plaster in the walls of the bedroom. There were dry pockets in the soft green wallpaper now that were filling up with crumbled bits. Bam, bam, the hammer sounded; shhh, the plaster fell. I glanced up at Mother. “I don’t care,” she said. “He can knock the whole house down as long as he’s happy up there. Where’s Olivia?” “Tennis.” “Good.” Olivia was our golden girl, a blond beauty, tan, and athletic, whereas I was brunette, freckled and couldn’t get enthusiastic about playing anything in the broiling Oklahoma sun. “Mama,” I said and pulled the dresser bench closer to the side of the bed, “didn’t Aunt Fel go through the Change? She’s your own sister. Wouldn’t she know what you should take?” “Oh Fel had a few hot flashes. We laughed. Felicity could always handle everything better than I could.” She put an arm behind to support herself, bowed her head and stared down at the bed. In the noontime heat she appeared to be melting. “I could call her.” “No. It’d just cause a big, you know.” She was afraid Aunt Felicity would tell Grandma Vic whose angina would kick up if she knew her younger daughter was in trouble. I took the plate. She’d eaten almost nothing. “What are all those books?” Ernest asked after everyone else had gone to bed. He had a glass of milk in his hand and stood in the living room in his faded pajama bottoms. From where I sat in my usual corner under the yellow light of the floor lamp, I could watch through the bay window, and had already seen a midnight blue motorcycle slide silently into place under the elm trees that protected our street. “It’s nearly twelve,” I said. “You look dressed up,” he said looking at my plaid Madras sundress. “I’m thinking of turning in soon.” “So, what’re you reading?” In the shadowy corner where he stood, his body was so thin, his chest so hairless, he looked like a turtle without its shell. “This is Freud. I’m reading about hysteria.” “Hysteria like laughing?” I looked at my watch. “It’s long past your bedtime.” “It’s summer.” “Good night, Ernest.” After the last sound from Ernest’s bedroom I waited another twenty minutes before I walked out the back door, down the driveway and climbed on the back of the motorcycle. Tom walked the cycle to the end of the block, and we glided off into the night, not stopping until we coasted to the back door of his boarding house on the other side of town. Inside the house, he carried me up the creaking back stairs, so we’d sound like one person to the ears of his landlady, who slept in a downstairs bedroom. Tom and I had first met in church. He had that rock-solid masculine confidence and good humor small town Oklahoma could turn out when it wanted to. He’d been away in the army since graduating from the university and was now back finishing up law school. He was nine years older than I was, but his big grin and corny humor made him seem like a kid. He laid me out on the bed and slipped off my flats. “So, how’re you doin’?” he whispered as he bent to set my shoes quietly on the floor. I smiled and shrugged, eager to get past the pleasantries he always insisted upon. “Your folks and everybody doin’ fine?” He knew my folks and liked them, and they liked him, but he hadn’t heard about Mother’s collapse, which let me keep my family separate from all that happened in this room. This patchwork quilt I lay on was an island, floating above the dead weight of my life. “Fine, fine, fine, Tom. We’re all just fine.” I was wet and jittery and weary from longing for him all day. He stood by the bed, leisurely assessing my frame, fitting his hand over my hip bone as though figuring how best to get a good grip. That spring I had given up my virginity to Tom without nearly as much moral turmoil as I had anticipated. Then, and each time afterward, he provided Trojan prophylactics and brushed away my offense at his forethought. “A good Boy Scout is always prepared, Patricia.” Tonight the muscle in my stomach tightened, arcing me up to kiss him, but he wouldn’t be hurried. “Patticake, don’t rush us. This is part of it.” Laying one hand on my chest and another on my thigh to flatten me, he stood like a man at an ironing board, coolly assessing his work. I struggled against his pressing palms. He frowned. “Is that nonskid lipstick?” Just like him to joke when I was getting desperate. Like a turtle on her back, I craned my neck. He liked to kiss, and I knew it. Light as a cat he could snuggle, must have been born knowing how, a gift from God like his dimples and his tidy body—just the right height for me—but this cool eye he was putting on made me want to scream. He cupped a hand gently over my mouth, but just then I heard footsteps and jerked my head back to check the door hook he’d installed at my request. Every thump and creak in that old house signaled the arrival of the police and Mrs. Pryor leading the Methodists, come to drag me away for my selfishness. The footsteps passed our door and went on down the hall. Mohammed, one of the hundreds of North African engineering students on campus, kept Mediterranean hours. I was safe, but the floating island was wrecked. I rolled toward the wall, my hands over my hot face. Tom did not protest or cajole. He was up, looking for something in his closet. He came back with an army blanket which he rolled and, with some fussiness, arranged as a pillow against the iron foot board, then, shifting me as though I were nothing more than a sack of feed, he lay himself down on the outer edge of the narrow bed facing me from the other end. I wrapped my arm around his sock feet to help anchor us to the little bed. “Did you hear the one about the guy and girl sittin’ on the fence watchin’ the bull and the cow?” he whispered. “What is it,” I hissed, “with you and the barnyard?” He shrugged and lay his head to the side in a boyish way that always turned me on. “Gee, Patricia, I’m just not up to the classy taste of a county seat girl like yourself.” “Come on. You’re going to be a lawyer in another semester.” “You think lawyers have high minds?” “Well, you can’t tell a joke like that at the country club.” “That’s where I heard it. Professor Rutherford told it. Now the guy and girl are sittin’ on the fence watchin’ the ruttin’, and the guy says, ‘Boy, I wish I was doin’ that.’ And the girl says, ‘Go ahead. It’s your cow.’” I tried not to smile. “Oh, Lordy, Tom, are you just being naughty so I’ll scold you? Don’t make me be your mother.” “Never, Patticake, never.” He rose up on his knees and took my ankles in either hand to drag me down the bed, pulling my head off the pillow, and spreading my legs. “Not what I had in mind,” he said. Throughout the heat of July, Olivia, Ernest and I maintained scrupulous attention to our duties. When I wasn’t sitting by Mother’s bed or cooking, I read up on depression, menopause, existentialism, and psychoanalysis. I consulted the great thinkers I’d heard about as a freshman: Sigmund Freud, Deitrich Bonhoeffer, Paul Tillich, as well as “The Ladies Home Journal.” Daddy, of course, went to work every day as City Engineer, served on the Church Finance Board, and discharged his duties as Republican Town Chairman. At home he repaired the gutters, cleaned out kitchen drawers, and rearranged all the coils of wire and cable into a new pattern on the garage wall. It was hard for someone who’d commanded a whole battalion of men in Korea to settle for being in charge of so few people. He inspected our work, commended us for our performance, shined his shoes, brushed his suits and went to meetings. Sometimes I would see him standing before his highboy mirror carefully arranging his heavy graying curls. The last time I saw him so deeply involved in this activity while Mother lay right there in the double bed they shared, her eyes staring at the ceiling, desperate for relief, I had a vision of clocking him with a monkey wrench. For all my reading I still could not figure out how to help Mother. When I’d come in, her face would be a great puddle, eyes full, cheeks soaked and often panting from a wave of heat generated from inside her. She seemed to be trying hard not to move at all. God, for her was the Great Physician, and she believed if she lay still enough, prayed without demand, hoped without vision, opened her heart to Him, He would take mercy and raise her up. She read from a book entitled, Let Go and Let God. When she was sleeping, I slipped it from her fingers. ‘The only complete and sure cure for your bad nerves, as you call them, is to relax in the hands of God and know that He is now looking after your troubles, that He is now guiding you into the quiet waters of inner peace.’ The book shook in my hand. All my life I’d choked down such language and imposed it on others as I led devotionals at church. But now, standing beside her bed, seeing between her eyebrows the crease that didn’t smooth out even in sleep, I realized my mother’s strengths—determination, initiative, creativity—were being paralyzed by what amounted to religious knockout drops. Surely God didn’t want her mindless, helpless, in total surrender, not even taking responsibility for her own troubles. Surely ours was the God who helped those who helped themselves. I hid the book in the back of my closet. When she stirred, I was standing there. I watched her hand search the bed beside her. “Have you seen my book?” I spoke softly, casually. “You know, Mama, the ideas in that book sound good, but maybe they’re for a person with another kind of problem, someone who’s too high on himself, arrogant, whose ego is getting between him and God’s will. Your poor little ego couldn’t get between you and a breeze.” “No, no. I’ve been too proud,” she blurted, “trying to handle everything myself. For years I’ve been praying God would change Daddy, make him calm, a more loving person.” Her face broke, red and rubbery. “I’m the one who needs to change. I need to learn to wait on the Lord. God promised. Marcus Mapple says we underestimate God.” “But maybe Rev. Mapple meant that another way.” “Oh, please, darlin’, let me have the book. Please.” All I’d ever wanted to be was the one who made her happy. Obediently, I went for the book and gave it to her. Her breathing calmed; she patted my hand to let me know it was all right to leave her alone. I felt dizzy with confusion as though spinning in a swing. As I quietly slipped out of her room, Ernest burst in the front door, panting. “Patty, I need a ride! Fast! They’re unpacking a huge refrigerator in the alley behind the Biology Building.” I grabbed my purse and keys. We piled into the Buick and speeded a few blocks across the campus. Finding the thin slats needed for the canoe walls was getting harder and harder for Ernest, who searched alone through alleys and trash heaps. We got to the alley where he’d seen the refrigerator being unpacked, but the crate was gone. At the far end of the alley, we saw a huge trash truck turning the corner, noisily changing gears, accelerating, bearing away the precious building materials. “Step on it!” Ernest yelled. We were a mile out of town on a two-lane highway before I could pull alongside the speeding truck. Ernest hung out the passenger window, pushing his gangly body up high enough to be seen by the driver. “Stop! Stop! Please!” The driver helped us rip the crate apart to get it into the Buick’s big trunk. At home with a bundle of slats under each arm, I climbed up into the thick heat of the attic. There, between the banks of taped-up boxes, cast-off toys and abandoned art projects, propped on sawhorses and old chairs, running fifteen feet long, was the skeleton of the Orange Crate Canoe. I was aghast. “Big isn’t it?” Ernest said, beaming. “Ernest, it’s huge. Did you know?” He shrugged. “The plans made it look little. I thought, something just big enough for me. But look. We can all get in.” I was looking at it, all right, and it was plain the swell of its widest part could never pass through the little door to the attic. “Ernest, honey, it’s so hot up here. You must roast.” “Yeah,” he made a tiny smile, embarrassed by his situation. “I take off everything but my underpants.” “You don’t have to do this, work in all this heat. You could wait for fall or just chuck the whole project.” “I wanted to, but Daddy said he’d be very disappointed if I didn’t finish what I started.” “Have you shown it to him?” “I’m waiting until I get some of the walls on.” As I pushed through Freud’s An Outline of Psycho-Analysis, reading and rereading the clinical language, looking up in the dictionary at least four words on every page, I’d grown more and more sure that this Viennese doctor wouldn’t give two hoots about the pressures on an Oklahoma woman. But when I came upon the line, “Holding back aggressiveness is in general unhealthy and leads to illness,” I hugged that little library book to my chest. Mama was the perfect example. To her way of thinking the role of women was to be a great sponge of aggression, just soaking up the poison men spewed out, thereby keeping the environment clean and safe for children. The problem was Mama was now over-saturated. She’d always behaved as though the General’s temper, always so close to the surface, was her responsibility. She’d dance around, cooing and patting his sleeve-- ”Now Cecil, don’t concern yourself.” “I’m sorry for this, Cecil,-- “ she’d apologize for the traffic or a story in the newspaper or someone else’s ill-judged comment, trying sweetly, frantically to keep the lid on, never getting angry herself. Aggressiveness in women was, after all, in poor taste. Every time I watched this, I wanted to scream. “Mama, what are you angry about?” I asked when she’d had some morning coffee. “Nothing,” she gasped, stricken I’d suggest such a thing. The room was already hot, and the smell of plaster dust burned my nose. “You’re sure? Something long ago, maybe?” “Oh, darlin’, I had the most marvelous childhood.” She relaxed back on the pillow smiling. “So many sweet people loved me, and my parents had a wonderful marriage. Never once raised their voices in anger.” “Didn’t Grandma Vic ever complain that Granddad wouldn’t get a job?” “Never. Not once. She always took up for him.” I’d heard all this before and knew what was coming, but I listened more carefully this time. “Once, during the Depression,” she began, “times were so desperate. I’ve told you. We had three grown cousins down on their luck living with us. I was in college, working full time, trying to help feed everyone, and I heard about a teaching job Daddy would have been perfect for, but he wouldn’t even go see about it. I yelled at him. ‘How can you just sit there, when there’s no food in this house!’ Mother heard me, and she got up out of her sick bed to come in and say to me, ‘Alice, I’m ashamed of you, talking that way to your sweet father.’” I never liked that little snippet of family history, always told to laud my grandparent’s perfect marriage. “Don’t you get tired of staying quiet when Daddy starts yelling?” A chill passed over her face, and I knew I’d gone too far. I stared at her through the thick air, and she looked back as unsmiling as I was. Finally I asked, “Have you had any dreams lately you can remember?” By the end of July I realized I no longer had any friends. The girlfriends from high school who’d called for a movie or a swim at the beginning of the summer didn’t even call to talk. I wouldn’t, of course, have talked to them about Mama. Everyone knew you weren’t supposed to talk about family matters outside the home. Of course, at our house, we didn’t talk about family matters inside the home either, and the only secrets that were mine to tell were about sins I had committed myself or misfortunes that had befallen me. It was best, of course, not to talk about these either. Poor Ernest banged away every day in an airless attic, as though he was actually going to have something to carry him down a river one day. And my own project—Mother’s recovery—seemed just as doomed. I felt her sinking as though into a subterranean vault, lying still, waiting for the sod to cover her. She spoke sometimes of her beloved grandmother, Olivia Jane Hale, a woman who pioneered first in Nebraska, then in Oklahoma, living in a dugout. Ever since I’d been a little girl, this woman had been my model, a distant star of perfection. “The sweetest creature who ever lived,” Mother said, “What an angel, never raised her voice or argued or spoke ill of anyone, and if someone was criticized in her presence, she would come to his rescue: “Wendell may be a little shiftless, as you say, but he’s so pleasant to be around.” The greatest compliment I was ever given was years ago when my Aunt Fel said of me to Mama, “She’s going to be another Olivia Jane.” Oh no! I thought now. Surely there was another great grandmother back there in time I could take after. I knew nothing about Grandma Vic’s mother except that her name was Margaret and she was from North Carolina. Maybe she was a real southern belle, fiery like Scarlet O’Hara. I lay on Tom with my total, sex-drugged weight, our bare bodies sealed with sweat. There was no breeze through the open window, and we breathed a thick mixture of each other’s odors. “Tom?” I looked up into his eyes. “I need to ask you a question.” “Shoot,” he said. I could hear his heart’s deep, steady ka-thumping and wished I were a girl with nothing on her mind. “How do you feel about anger?” I asked. “I mean people getting really mad, yelling at each other, saying mean, exaggerated, hurtful things.” With both hands he lifted my heavy face from his chest. “Patty, are you angry at me?” “No, never!” “Cause if you are, let’s get on the cycle right now and head for the woods, so we can wrestle and yell.” “Oh, Tom.” I could see it: Tom and me crashing around in the woods, him tearing my clothes and me throwing him off and standing my ground, spitting it all out, every big hurt and petty aggravation about my family, hurled into his teeth—everything, including that excruciatingly long list of those things that weren’t mine to tell. I laid my head back down and panted, my cheek slipping minutely back and forth in the sweat that sealed me to his chest hair. I wanted to marry him right then, and my throat tightened as it might have if I were going to cry. Mother’s crying had dried to a silent, black grief that felt contagious. The other members of the family began avoiding each other. Olivia finished her laundry duties earlier and earlier. Ernest stayed in the attic, sometimes working. I could hardly get out of bed in the mornings. The General did not mention my Malingering. “You’re going to the doctor, Mother!” Freud had completely let me down. His explanation for weak egos in women—that they felt inadequate regarding their plumbing. Ridiculous! “Oh, darlin’, I’d be too ashamed to face Dr. Tilghman.” “So I’ll call another doctor.” “No, no, I just need to be patient and stop telling God what he should--” “Mother, maybe God wants me to decide what we should do.” She looked shocked but didn’t answer back. Dr. Whittle, usually our third choice, put her in the hospital and prescribed sedatives. “We’ve got to help her shut off all this crying,” he said. The General visited her every evening alone. Afterwards, he said he drove around for a long time to clear his head. So I imagined they discussed important matters, things about their marriage. I didn’t ask, of course. When I visited her in the afternoons, she was asleep or too groggy to make much sense. The hospital was on Tom’s side of town, and I always managed to drive past his boarding house, going and coming. I knew I wouldn’t see him, but it was a comfort to see the motorcycle leaning against the garage and think of him at his desk in the back, his sleeves rolled up tight, perhaps stopping now and then to think of us. In the daylight the street looked pretty poor. A few other boarding houses and some bungalows slumped behind unkempt, junky yards. One afternoon as I cruised past the bungalows, I saw my father on a porch, facing the door. I pressed the horn before I saw he was holding a woman’s hands in both of his. I floor-boarded the Buick. Unbelievable! Another woman. Driving around to clear his head, huh? This secret side of him and whatever it meant was what Mama must lay buried under. An outsider might have said I had very little evidence, but that scene at that shabby house shifted so much of what I had taken for granted, I knew there was a lot more to discover. Should I tell Olivia what I’d discovered on Shawnee Street? Shoot, Olivia was probably onto him years ago and knew tons of stuff I didn’t. Keeping it from me could be what kept her step so light. Under the kitchen window in back of our house is a hiding place. As a little girl I discovered if I sat on the box that housed the gas meter, no one could see me when they looked casually from the driveway because of the way the enclosed back porch stuck out. And if someone looked out the window, they would look right over my head. I had remembered this as a high perch from which my legs dangled down, so I was surprised how low it was now. I listened to my father’s car pull in beside the Buick, and I heard him inhale as he opened the screened door to the back porch. His keys dropped, clank, on the dryer as usual. Then nothing. He was searching the rooms, not calling my name, just quietly looking for me. I waited. It was getting towards supper time, and I could hear him begin to open some cans and bang pans, but I didn’t rush in to help, just leaned back on the white clapboards and gazed into the long shadows gathering in the old orchard. The happiest time of my life was the Second World War when my father was away in the Philippines. I was four years old when Mama returned to the house she’d grown up in. Her sister, Aunt Felicity, had moved in as well with her two kids and their little dog, Fluffy because Uncle Harold had shipped out to Italy. We used to play war right there in the orchard. Harold Jr., seven years older than me, taught us to goose step and salute like Nazis and to make the screaming-bloody-murder cry of a kamikaze pilot crashing into one of our carriers. Fluffy went wild when Howard, up in a gnarled old peach tree, bombed us girls with beanbags. Aunt Fel and my mother taught us kids to do the Charleston and play ukuleles. They peeled all the old greasy paper off the walls in the kitchen and put up big, beautiful pink roses. The man at the store had told them that wallpaper was meant for bedrooms, but they put it up anyway and painted the woodwork pink. Then they took Grandmother Brady’s old walnut china cabinet and painted it pink too and the round oak table--pink like a birthday cake sittin’ there in the middle of our rosy kitchen. They said they were wild women. They laughed like crazy and had to put down their paintbrushes to wipe their tears and blow their noses. Scraping sounds of spoons getting the last of the stew out of the bowls let me know it was time to leave the meter box and go inside. I’d heard The General tell Olivia and Ernest I was at my friend Dianne’s. I hoped he thought I had hanged myself. I slipped in the back door and smiled at Olivia and Ernest. My father’s eyes were wide and he was breathing through his mouth. I went to the sink and began to scrub the pan. “Let me do that, Patricia,” he said. “Then we can take a walk.” I hung onto the pan when he tried to pull it away. He raced around the kitchen, snatching the bowls from in front of Olivia and Ernest. I worked slowly at the sink, all but sterilizing each dish before I put it in the dishwasher. “Want a Dairy Queen?” Olivia whispered to Ernest and within thirty seconds the Buick roared out the driveway. My father and I were alone in the kitchen. “Let’s sit at the table, Patricia,” a thin version of his commanding officer voice said, trying to make me a child about to be disciplined. He’d spanked me after I was twelve—old enough to be totally humiliated. “You need to understand some things,” he said. “The city is widening Shawnee Street. As City Engineer I have had to visit every property owner. I can show you the blueprints at the office. Please sit down.” Still facing the sink, I slowly dried my hands on a tea towel. “No,” I said. “Why not? I need to talk to you.” He spoke to my left and when I turned my head away, he danced to my right. “Shawnee is going to become part of Route Nine.” He wasn’t angry. Panic was what I was hearing, and I gripped the cold edge of the sink, fighting the urge to relent and sooth his panic as he expected any of us to do. “The city owns the land the trees are on, but, as a courtesy— You saw me saying goodbye to one of the property owners. Please sit down.” He didn’t know how much I knew, that it was only a glance: His shoulder had been against the screened door. His hat was off, maybe still in the car the city provided to him. He’d held her hands in both of his, his head cocked to the side, a lingering gesture, tenderness I’d never seen. “No.” I still did not turn around. “We can’t just not talk,” he growled. I whirled around. “Sure we can not talk! Nobody in this family talks.” His jaw hinge was working, throbbing like a heart. I’d never yelled at him before. “What do you want me to do?” he begged, palms up. Do? What did he mean? I steadied myself on the back of a chair. He was offering something. Was there anything in the world that would help us? I took a deep breath, then gritted my teeth. “You could be a real daddy to Ernest. He looks up to you, slaves to get your attention and approval. And you do nothing but stay busy, busy, busy. He’s suffering. He doesn’t understand what’s going on with this family. Pay him some attention, for Heaven’s sake!” I was shaking. Daddy eyes were wide and his mouth gaped. “You can start by figuring out how to get Ernest’s canoe out of the attic.” “What’s wrong? Can’t he get it out?” “It’s fifteen feet long and too wide to come out that little door.” “Does Earnest know it’s too big to come out?” “I’m sure he’s figured it out. He’s just working away, embarrassed, hoping we don’t know.” He ran his hand through his curls and patted them into place. “We can’t rip open the floor and spoil the bedroom ceiling. He’ll have to take it apart.” “No. The whole canoe, safely outside. You figure it out.” I left the kitchen.
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