by Una Mannion
“Do Amish horses get married?” Beatrice asked, and we all burst into laughter.
“The couple in the buggy, you idiot!” Ellen shouted. Beatrice laughed too. My mother laughed so hard, she struggled to see the road. The sun shone gold on Ellen’s face, and it hit me that she’d hardly left the house this summer. She was afraid.
“I hope we sit with a family that has kids,” said Ellen. “We never get a table where there are other kids. It’s always retired old people.”
“I’ve told you before,” said Thomas, “this is a creepy world without children.”
“Well, they let us in,” said Beatrice from the back of the car.
Marie was sitting in the front. The dinner wasn’t just for her birthday, it was because she was leaving. She was moving in with Rae the following morning and starting her job. I’d thought my mother might resist a little, or tell Marie she wasn’t allowed to go work in some punk record store in the city. I wanted her to do those things, but instead she acted as if this was the most natural thing in the world for Marie to do.
We drove past barns with stars and hexes, Pennsylvania Dutch folk art. Many of the designs had tulips and trees. We laughed at the place names along the route: Paradise, Intercourse, Fertility, Bird-in-Hand. We passed two boys on scooter bikes. They looked like regular bicycles but with no pedals.
“Why can’t they have pedals?” Ellen asked. “I mean, a bike doesn’t use an engine—it’s the human making it move.”
“Is it the gears or something?” Marie asked. “The technology or machinery to make them?”
“I think it’s actually to keep them from going too far, so they don’t have contact with the English,” Thomas answered.
“It’s wrong that their parents don’t want them to be with other American kids,” Beatrice said. “They should be allowed to go where everyone else goes.”
“Yeah, but if you were trying to teach your children self-sufficiency living from the land and they come home demanding Luke Skywalker’s light saber or Malibu Barbie and wanted to spend their chore time talking on a phone to their friends, you might not let them mix either.” Marie had an answer for everything.
“Or putting safety pins in their cheeks and painting their lips black,” Thomas shot back.
“Well, we’re American, and we don’t have any of that stuff,” said Beatrice. “I’ve never even had a Barbie.”
“Yeah, but we have a mother who wishes she was Amish,” said Marie.
“I do sometimes wish I was Amish,” my mom said.
It was something she said a lot, and, looking out at the Amish world, I could see why she liked it so much, everything looked-after and ordered and simple. But she’d never farmed or gardened and hardly cooked. She ran the washing machine and the dishwasher even with only a few socks or dishes. She wasted but didn’t like waste. She was afraid of horses and loved driving. What she wanted to be and what she actually was seemed far apart. I didn’t say that an affair with maybe a married man wasn’t very Amish of her.
We ate with two retired couples from Delaware who all appeared to be wearing the same outfit, variations of blue polyester golf shirts and khaki trousers. We considered the four of them with disappointment as the waitress seated us; they watched Marie with dismay, her white powdered face, black eyeliner, black lips, vintage black dress, the pierced cheek.
“This should be interesting,” Thomas mumbled as we shuffled and shouldered each other, trying to not be the ones left sitting next to the geriatric golf team. Marie and Mom ended up next to them, the rest of us squished together at the bottom end of the table. Ceramic hens and cows hung on the walls behind us; the cloth on the table was checked red and white.
“Look.” Beatrice pointed. “That waitress is Amish.”
“Shh,” said Ellen, elbowing her.
Thomas leaned in. “She’s Mennonite. It’s not the same.”
“She’s wearing a bonnet.”
“But her dress is bright green. I think she’s Mennonite.”
I didn’t know for sure, but I thought Thomas was right. Didn’t the Amish just wear dark colors?
The waitress brought out rolls and apple butter followed by bowls of whipped potatoes, sauerkraut, canned string beans, applesauce, cabbage, pickled beets with red eggs, and plates of meat loaf, pork, and ham. None of us touched the beets or eggs, but we ate everything else until we were full up.
Next to us, Marie struck up a conversation with the people from Delaware. One of them had a granddaughter starting college in Kutztown where Marie had classmates also going. She talked to them, her face animated and polite. I knew by now that they saw her beneath the makeup, her intelligence and her interest in people. I wished I could talk to her before she left, tell her what Sage had done, how afraid I was for her to leave us.
Dessert was shoofly pie with bowls of vanilla ice cream. Marie’s had a lit candle, and we sang “Happy Birthday.” Everyone around us clapped. It was strange to have an audience. Thomas pushed a small, thin package wrapped in a brown Acme bag and masking tape toward Marie.
“Here.”
Marie opened it and pulled out a single. “‘Kill the Poor.’ I’ve wanted this all year. Dead Kennedys.”
Thomas looked utterly delighted with himself, particularly for the effect on the Delaware couples, who were visibly appalled.
“How’d you get it?” Marie asked.
“Jack helped me,” Thomas said. The shoofly crust stuck in my throat, and I had to force myself to swallow. I didn’t think Jack and Thomas talked anymore. “I gave him the money, and he got it in Philly for me. I know you’re about to start working in a record store, but . . .”
“I’ll be broke and working in a record store. Thanks.”
Mom’s gift was a square box, perfectly wrapped with ribbons. Inside was an electric clock with an alarm, “So you can wake up on time in your new life,” she said. My gift was wrapped in black tissue paper I’d taken from a shoe box. I’d gotten Marie fifteen punk pin badges—Ramones, Sex Pistols, The Stranglers, The Clash, Devo. Rae had helped me get them from people at her art college and from shows she went to. Ellen had done a pencil sketch of Marie, just her face, that she had rolled up and tied with a ribbon.
“Oh, that’s incredible,” said the woman next to Marie. “Just like you.” No one could believe Ellen had done it, and my mom held it for a long time.
“There’s mine still,” said Beatrice. She got Marie a Ziggy mug. “It’s for when you have coffee in your new apartment.”
It was dark when we stepped outside. We walked down the lit path to the gift shop. They sold Amish hats, Amish aprons, bonnets, corn dolls, honey, figurines, patchwork quilts, milk soaps, candles, books. I felt sick in the gift shop, the scent of the lotions and soaps overwhelming on an over-full stomach. I went outside to wait for the others, walking around to the side of the small clapboard house in case I threw up. Two girls around the same age as me were already there, smoking. They glanced at me the way other high school girls did, up and down. They wore Mennonite dresses and had white caps pinned to their hair. For some reason, it depressed me. I smoked, too, but I wanted them not to. I wanted them to be wholesome and pure and to fulfill my idea of them.
We drove home, Marie animated and happy next to my mother, Beatrice asleep already in the wayback, Ellen nodding off on Thomas’s shoulder. All of us were together, maybe for one last moment. Marie would leave tomorrow.
Driving through Lancaster in the dark, I remembered my eighth birthday. I had begged to go to the Longhorn Ranch, a Wild West–themed restaurant down on Route 1 based on Buffalo Bill Cody’s legendary place in Nebraska. I had asked for months for the three of us—me, my mom, and my dad—to go, even though Dad hadn’t lived with us for a long time. I remember driving into the parking lot, where, out front, there was a big-as-life plastic bull. The menu was huge and said everything was “Texas size.” When they brought out my birthday cake with a single sparkler, they turned off the lights. All the waitresses and
waiters sang “Happy Birthday” around our table, dressed as cowhands with imitation Stetsons and six-shooter cap guns in holsters slung around their waists. They roared “Yee-haw!” at the end of the song, firing their cap guns in the air and then spinning them on their trigger fingers and putting them back in their holsters. I loved it.
Dad mostly stayed quiet. He said the whiskey menu was good, especially the prices, but the place itself was like a shrine to the worst part of American history.
“Look around you, Libby.” He gestured at the walls with his glass of whiskey. Indian headdresses and buffalo heads hung from hooks. “They obliterate the land and a people, and then display it as wall decorations.”
“Leave it, Martin. She just wants to enjoy this fiasco.”
Sitting in the back of the car that night, looking at the dark shape of my parents in the front, I felt bereft. There was something I understood. That the three of us, or all seven of us, together, happy, was as fake as the waitress with her Philly accent shooting her cap gun and shouting “Yee-haw!” Nothing was real.
Now, on the way home from Marie’s birthday meal, I knew I should grasp this moment, with all of us together, and hold it. But everything spooling around me felt unreal—nothing was what it should be. Us, Marie leaving, me and Sage, Wilson watching us, Barbie Man still out there.
When I called Sage that night, it was late. I could tell she’d been out and was stoned.
“You told your dad. You promised you wouldn’t.” I whispered it.
“What are you talking about? Speak up. I can barely hear you.”
“You told your dad about Ellen and the man in the car.”
“No. I didn’t.”
“You did, Sage. He asked me how Ellen was doing now, and he stared at me, hard and, like, full of meaning. He knows.”
“He doesn’t. I didn’t tell him.”
“You must have. How else could he know?”
Sage started to laugh on the other end, and I wanted to slam the phone down. “You’re out of your mind. I never said anything, so stop accusing me. You are always so paranoid. Even if I did, which I didn’t, it wouldn’t be such a big deal.”
“It is a big deal and the only person who could have told him is you.”
There was a pause on the line. Why was she lying?
“Jack Griffith was in the Sun Bowl tonight,” she said. She was changing the subject, and she was bringing up something hurtful to me.
I hung up on her. I sat there in the dark living room, my hand still on the receiver, and almost immediately the phone rang. I picked it up halfway through the first ring, but so did someone else on another extension. My mother. Neither of us said hello. We just waited.
“You know what? Fuck you, too.” Sage hung up. There was silence. I could hear my mother exhale on the phone.
“Who is this? Libby? Is that you? Marie?”
I pushed down the dial-tone button with my finger and put the receiver back on the cradle without making a sound. I heard my mother open her bedroom door. She walked toward the top of the stairs, and in the hall light her long hair was down and dark and silhouetted around her, and the light hit her white nightgown as if it were illuminated from the inside. She looked like a ghost, sort of there and not there. I couldn’t see her face. I stayed still, watching her from below, until she turned around, and I heard her bedroom door click shut again.
12
Marie left home the morning of the summer solstice, the first day of summer and the longest day of the year. Ellen, Beatrice, and I sat on the top trundle while she packed. She had kept me and Ellen up most of the night after we got home from the restaurant, sorting through her stuff, her clothes and makeup, her books, photo albums, everything. The turntable and speakers were going because they belonged to her, and so all the albums we had inherited would now be useless. Even when we were all in bed and the light had gone out, I wasn’t able to sleep. Sage and I had fought on the phone, Marie was leaving, and I had that feeling again of everything pitching.
Now Marie pattered around the room while we waited for her to toss us a shirt or a skirt or an old pencil case, stuff she wasn’t keeping.
“When will be the next time we see you?” Beatrice asked. She had stacked all her new things in a pile next to her but was worrying her fingers through loops of hair.
“When you come to the city on the train to visit me for a sleepover.”
“Really, Marie? Can we?” Beatrice looked at me. “Will you take us?”
“You can come,” Marie said, “but you’ll have to bring your own sleeping bags and be ready to sleep on the floor.”
“When?” asked Ellen.
“When I get settled. On a day I don’t have work.”
Marie was going through her school things, throwing stuff into a trash bag and setting aside a pile of textbooks and notes for me. Her blazer, sweater, and kilt were still crammed into her canvas school bag with her books and papers. She pulled them out and folded them, presenting them to Ellen on the trundle: the gray, maroon, and black plaid kilt, maroon sweater, and gray blazer with the maroon-and-yellow insignia, the school motto wrapped like a banner around the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus. Marie made a mock ceremony out of it.
“Cor ad cor loquitur—heart speaks to heart.” She dropped her head in mock reverence. “I give these garments to you, Ellen Gallagher, so that you, too, may walk the path of Jesus when in the wilderness that is Catholic girls’ high school.” She passed the uniform to Ellen like an offering.
Ellen solemnly received the bundle of hand-me-downs as if it were a great gift that had cost Marie something. “I will try to follow in your footsteps.”
“Yeah,” I added. “Make as few friends as possible and at all times show general contempt for everyone around you, just like your big sister.”
“I pledge allegiance.” Ellen chanted it, her hand on her heart.
“That’s the gene pool I love,” said Marie. “It’s because you’re too tall and you already have one,” she said, turning to me, as if I had been wondering why Ellen got the uniform instead of me. I had already done my freshman and sophomore years.
Ellen hung the clothes on her side of the closet, using a wooden skirt hanger. She had just one more year in middle school before she came into high school and changed from the pinafore to the kilt.
Earlier, Marie had taken down her Siouxsie poster and rolled it up with rubber bands. Our room looked bare and somehow bigger, as though our voices would echo in it. She had swept all her jewelry into the metal Popeye lunch box she had kept since first grade. Her albums were alphabetically arranged in neat rows in a box, everything facing the same direction. From the shelves she had started selecting her books. The Jane Austen set my mother had given her went into the second box, along with her copies of A Clockwork Orange, Rabbit Redux, and Slaughterhouse-Five. I had tried to read all those books after her but had given up. I wasn’t smart like she was. From the top shelf she took down The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Rock n’ Roll that Dad had given her.
“You can’t take that,” I said.
“It’s mine.”
“But it belongs here.”
“Jesus, what’s wrong with you? It’s mine, and I’m taking it. I’m not coming back.”
“You will. At Thanksgiving and Christmas and next summer and all the times you come back. And the book will be here. At home.”
Marie ignored me and kept sifting through the books and stacking hers into a box. The Nancy Drew complete set was pushed against the back of the bottom shelf, my quartz collection arranged in front. “You can have my half of the Nancy Drews. I bequeath them to you,” Marie said. Neither of us had read them in years.
“Fuck you,” I said, and stood to walk out of the room. “And Nancy Drew,” I added, and slammed the door. The rhyme was an accident and ruined the impact of my exit. I could hear them laughing. I sat outside on the front doorstep. Three trash bags, two boxes, and a little blue suitcase with red trim were lined up on the drivewa
y. I wanted to take that suitcase back, too, and hide it where Marie couldn’t find it. I looked across at the Walkers’ newly shorn grass and perfect flower beds, mulched and layered with dark wood chips. Their grass was still glistening from the automatic sprinklers that came on each morning, quenching their deep-green lawn. Ours looked desperate, bald patches, uneven spurts of yellowed growth and any possibility of green hidden at the root.
If one of the Walker kids was going away, they would have matching luggage, and all the family would be outside helping, and everyone would be happy because they would know it didn’t really mean goodbye, that Harry and Minnie would make sure they saw their child every weekend. They would have barbecues out back to celebrate their kid’s safe return each trip home. But not us. My mother hadn’t even seen where Marie would be living. On the way home from Lancaster, when we passed Thrift Drug, she’d asked Marie if there was something she needed for her new apartment. Marie had said no, but my mom had insisted there must be something. We’d stopped so she could get Marie a tube of toothpaste, as if now Marie would be all set for life.
Marie often said, “Indulge her, she’s trying.” She said we’d made Mom feel helpless the past few years because we were all so capable. But I didn’t feel capable, and we weren’t okay. Thomas was holed up in his bedroom, growing further and further away from everything that was grounded on earth. Beatrice was sitting on Marie’s bed inheriting T-shirts and dresses, completely unaware that the one person who made sure everyone had eaten, and had their work done, who checked if the doors were locked at night, who somehow understood what was wrong with us at any given moment and explained it, was leaving. Instead of being sad that Marie was going, I was angry, angrier than I could ever remember. I wanted to kick something. I hated Sage. I hated my mother. I hated Jack Griffith. And I hated Marie for leaving me alone with all the worry of Wilson, Barbie Man, and Ellen.