by Mindy Mejia
She was exhausted all the time. I tried to convince her that Elsa needed to sell the property, but she would grind her teeth every time I mentioned it, roll her eyes, and say, “Don’t you think I’ve tried that?”
We couldn’t find anyone to come help Elsa; the only qualified nurse who was willing to drive out to the farm wanted a thousand a week to check in on her and administer her meds.
I looked for a teaching job so Mary could quit the bank or at least scale back to part-time. I was trying to be a good husband. Isn’t that what good husbands do? Except I couldn’t find anything. The only openings were in elementary special ed and I had no experience with behavioral disorders. They wanted me to promise to go back to school for the specialty, but I wanted to teach literature, not social skills.
Then last March, Mary came home with a newspaper clipping. She showed me the ad—Pine Valley High School English teacher, the exact job I was qualified for—and told me that Elsa knew the principal personally and had put in a recommendation for me. The principal was waiting for my call.
God, I did not want to move to Pine Valley. But she looked so hopeful and tired, and I don’t know how it happened but two months later we moved in with her mother and I lost my entire life. Although she said it was only temporary, we both knew that meant we were staying until Elsa died, whether that took months or years. Lately, I hated to admit it, I’d been hoping for months.
The entire summer everything was Elsa, Elsa, Elsa. How was Elsa feeling today? Did she need a new oxygen tank? Could she take a shower by herself? It felt like we did have a baby, except our baby was an old, set-in-her-ways woman with a failing body.
Elsa was grateful, but all her gratitude seemed reserved for Mary. Me, she treated like a mildly irritating foreign exchange student.
It started with the vegetarian thing. She questioned everything I ate, from kale to black bean burgers to tempeh. When I went running, Elsa shook her head like she’d never seen a human move faster than a brisk walk behind a plow. And if I cracked a beer at night, she sniffed and pointedly looked away.
I honestly didn’t care what my mother-in-law thought of me, but she was coming between me and Mary. Every time Elsa cold-shouldered me, she stretched Mary’s peacemaker position a fraction thinner, pulled her daughter a little further away. One day I fixed the fence around her chicken barn while she toddled out after me to supervise, and we even had some good conversation about Mary’s childhood, except by the next week she’d forgotten all about it. The deprivation of oxygen to her brain was robbing her memories, especially the most recent ones, so all my attempts to improve our relationship were pointless.
And then there was the squawking. Even though the chickens were housed on the far side of the main barn, the clucking and rustling and scraping of those birds were omnipresent, no matter what time of day. It was enough to drive anyone insane. There were only about fifty of them, the last of Mary’s father’s flock, but they seemed to provide eggs for half the county. People stopped by all the time to pick up a carton, and Mary personally delivered them to our neighbor, Winifred Erickson, who usually followed Mary right back to our house and chatted with Elsa for hours. Mary collected eggs twice a day, starting at 6:00 a.m., cleaned the nests out, cleaned the floor, and hauled the feed—without making more than a few bucks a day as far as I could tell—and she wanted to talk about not having money?
“Why don’t you get rid of the chickens?” I kept asking her.
“I don’t mind it. I grew up doing this. I just don’t know how Mom managed it by herself.”
“Why do you have to manage it? We can buy eggs at the store.”
“Mom won’t hear of selling them,” she said, which had become her standard line of the summer. Our seventy-three-year-old baby wants this. Our seventy-three-year-old baby won’t tolerate that.
It was creeping into everything. Mary wouldn’t discuss books with me anymore. She said she had no time to read, yet she watched those awful shows with Elsa every night. She didn’t want to drive into the city to see any plays or even spend a night with our friends.
She’d shake her head. “It’s too far, I’m tired just thinking about it.”
Thank God the house got internet service. I set up my computer in a little bedroom upstairs that warehoused Christmas ornaments and dusty cardboard boxes marked with phrases like Uncle Joe’s funeral or Dewitt 1938. That’s where I read, made my lesson plans for the fall, and checked Facebook every night, watching my friends go to bars, literary readings, parties, and conferences.
I wasn’t going to lie; I had a lot riding on tonight’s date. I was desperate to remove our relationship—even for a few hours—from the farm and Elsa, to resurrect the kind of fun, spontaneous times we’d had in college, before grad school and illness had claimed all our Friday nights. Mary liked the idea. She’d been excited when I mentioned it earlier in the week.
“A night out,” I’d said, “before the school year starts. We won’t do a single productive thing.”
She laughed. “Promise?”
Now, driving back to Pine Valley with a silence that was building even higher walls between us, I wondered again where I’d screwed up. Or did she screw up? Any stranger watching us tonight would have been embarrassed at how hard I was trying, but I was obviously trying the wrong things. The wrong movie. The wrong restaurant. Would it have been better if we’d gone to the local Dairy Queen and traded bites of Blizzard while teenagers flirted their way around our booth?
The lights of Pine Valley warmed the horizon, and as much as I hated personification, it was like the town itself was visually shoving the answer down my throat. Yes. Yes, you tried too hard. You wanted a Minneapolis date, but you don’t have a Minneapolis wife anymore.
With that uncomfortable thought in my head, we drove into town, a small grid of streets surrounding one main drag of businesses underneath the soybean plant’s smokestacks on the horizon. A few gas stations, the Dairy Queen, and a CVS pharmacy were the only places still open at 9:00 p.m. on Friday night.
“Can you stop at the pharmacy? I need to pick up Mom’s medicine and some pictures.”
Obediently, I pulled into the parking lot and killed the engine, following her inside. She went to see the pharmacist and sent me to the photo counter in the opposite corner of the store. The salesgirl didn’t notice me approach and I didn’t care enough to try to grab her attention.
I didn’t have a Minneapolis wife anymore.
To say that I wasn’t prepared for this change in Mary was a laughable understatement. It had never occurred to me that I’d need to prepare for it. The trouble with vows was that they were too damn generic. I’d stood in that church a block away from here and repeated, “For better or for worse,” imagining the worst to be Mary laid low with a cute, flu-like sickness requiring chicken soup and boxes of Kleenex. Maybe we’d lose our jobs. Maybe we’d have to deal with infertility. I’d projected every normal scenario into those vows, everything people told me to expect, but the minister never said, “You might move away from everyone and everything you love into a rundown farmhouse in the middle of a desolate prairie, where you won’t have sex or even any conversation that doesn’t revolve around the state of a dying woman who hates you.” No, he’d stood smiling in front of us and said, “For better or for worse.” Better or worse what? I’d agreed to adjectives. I’d happily squeezed Mary’s hands and made vows with unknown placeholders for nouns. For someone who aspired to be an English professor, binding my life to someone else’s with a game of Mad Libs suddenly seemed like a terrible joke.
“Can I help you?”
I blinked. The salesgirl stood on the other side of the counter now, obviously waiting for me to say something.
“Oh. Yeah. Pictures for Mary Lund?”
She promptly went hunting through the bin.
“Nope, nothing for Mary Lund.”
Usually I asked clerks to take a second look whenever the first answer was no. Most of them were young and bumbling
and found the item on the second or even third try. This girl was young but looked like she’d never bumbled over anything in her life. She’d already straightened back up to face me, supremely confident, equally ready to hand me my hat or let me try again. I was the one fumbling now under her attention.
“Um, how about Elsa Reever?”
“You have some interesting aliases.” She grinned this time before diving into the Rs.
“A rose by any other name . . .”
“Would still have pictures at CVS,” she finished, pulling an envelope out of the bin and waving it with a flourish.
“Apparently.”
She rang up the pictures on the cash register. “So, Elsa, did you need anything else today?”
“Um—” I glanced back in the direction of the pharmacy, looking for any sign of Mary. Did she mention anything else? I couldn’t remember, and given the course of the evening, it was probably safer not to spend extra money.
“No, that’s all.”
I handed her my card and watched her complete the transaction. There was something about her: a brightness, a presence. Usually teenagers gave distracted or grudging service in these types of jobs, but this girl was wholly and happily in the moment. A distinct flash of hatred ran through me as I assessed her. Tall and lean, she had a conscious grace about her limbs. Her skin was honey-tanned, her too-wide mouth gleamed with some kind of gloss, and her eyes sparkled with the kind of sly intelligence that said her Romeo and Juliet retort barely qualified as an easy volley on her part. This was a girl who hadn’t made any mistakes yet, one who recognized the world as only a giant cupcake for her careless sampling.
She turned to hand me the pictures and her slyness evaporated. “What’s wrong?”
“Excuse me?” Her sudden concern startled me out of my fixation.
“You. You looked angry.”
What kind of town was this where total strangers called you out on your moods?
“No, I mean, well . . .” I stumbled around my words like an idiot. “I’m not . . .”
“You’re totally angry.” She enjoyed my stuttering, stretching her too-wide mouth wider. “I can see it here and here.” She pointed to her eyebrows and her jaw, imitating me with crossed arms until I dropped mine to my sides.
I shrugged. “Not about the pictures.” Why not admit it?
“Is it one of the aliases?”
“How do you know it’s not you?”
“Duh. We don’t even know each other. Oh, I’m Hattie, by the way.” She reached out a hand and I stared at it a second before shaking it.
“Peter.”
“Hi, Peter. You know what I do with an alias that starts sucking?”
“What?”
“I trade it in for a better one.”
“Yeah, you can do that when you’re sixteen.”
She giggled. “What are you, eighty?”
“Eighty-two.”
“Well, maybe you just need some stool softeners, then. They’re in aisle six.”
I burst out laughing and she nodded like she’d finished what she set out to do, and then Mary appeared with her bagful of prescriptions.
“Ready?” Mary asked.
“Yeah.”
I nodded to Hattie the cashier, who waved at both of us. “Good night. Thanks for stopping in.”
On the way back to the farm, I reached across the seat and laid my hand lightly on top of Mary’s, ready to try again. When we turned onto the gravel road that led to the farm, a light flashed across the sky.
“Look!” I switched off the headlights and hit the brakes.
We watched the shooting star race through constellations until it burned up and was gone. For a moment neither of us spoke. Then Mary turned her palm over so we were holding hands.
“Did you make a wish?” she asked.
“I thought that was for first stars.”
She shrugged. “Maybe it could be for first shooting stars, too.”
“Okay.” I linked our fingers together, happy to play along. “Star light, star bright . . .”
“No, you have to keep it a secret or it won’t come true.”
“Everyone knows that. I was just doing the prologue.”
She smiled and let me finish. Even though we didn’t talk for the rest of the drive, the tension had eased and it started to feel like the night I wanted us to have. I made a wish—silently—as we headed back toward the farm.
After five minutes of winding, gravel hills I pulled into the box of trees sheltering Elsa’s house and barns from the prairie winds. I turned the car off and let my gaze wander, in no hurry to go inside. Mary’s father had done a great job maintaining the place, but three years after his death signs of neglect were starting to show. Paint peeled off the corners of the main barn. Weeds overran the vegetable garden where green beans and peas used to grow in military formation. In the daylight you could see a few gnarled shingles scattered over the building roofs, caused by storm damage that no one who lived here anymore was capable of repairing. Elsa leased the fields to a neighbor, but the land, buildings, and chickens inside this windbreak of trees were still her domain. It made no sense why she wanted to stay here. My mother had moved to a condo in Arizona within a few months of my graduation. Why did Elsa want to grow old in a place that reminded her, with each broken fence and chipped windowsill, of her every disability? It was the worst retirement home I’d ever seen.
One of the barn cats ran through the yard as Mary sighed. I could feel the effect of the farm trickling into her, too, and tried to salvage the good mood.
“Hey.” I jiggled her hand playfully. “Come here.”
I was the one who closed the distance, though, kissing her lightly. She accepted the kiss at first, but her face tilted away when I would have prolonged it. For a moment neither of us moved or spoke.
“I wished that things were different,” she finally said. “On the star. I wished that Mom was healthy.”
“You’re not supposed to tell, remember?”
“It doesn’t matter. It’s not going to come true.” Her voice broke and automatically I reached up, rubbing her shoulder.
“You’re doing too much.”
She shook her head, looking out toward the fields. “They gave me everything. They loved me better than any child could hope for . . . and this is what I can do now, the only way I can show them that love back.”
“We need some help. There are other ways.”
“It’s fine. I’m fine.”
“You can’t even enjoy a dinner away from her. Look what this is doing to us.”
She looked at me then with an expression I’d never seen on her face before. It was cold. My Mary, my sweet and generous, vintage-loving, apple-cheeked Mary looked at me like I was some annoying stray begging for scraps.
“I’m sorry I can’t take care of you right now, Peter.”
“I don’t want you to take care of me. Jesus, I just wanted us to have fun tonight.”
“Don’t say Jesus like that.”
“Are you fucking kidding me?” It wasn’t, maybe, the most eloquent response I could’ve made to an attempt to censor my language.
“My mom”—she shook her head, glancing at the house—“has gone to church every Sunday her entire life. Her faith is important to her. Can you please respect that while we’re here?”
“I don’t see Elsa here now.” But even as I said it, I knew she was. She was everywhere, sitting in the movie theater between us, sniffing at the prices on the restaurant menu, and pinching Mary’s profile tight and unrecognizable here where the ammonia stink of chicken shit seeped in from the yard.
“I’m just saying.”
“Fine.” I got out of the car and slammed the door, which brought squawks from the chicken barn.
The house was dark, with only the stove light on to welcome us back. Elsa must have gone to bed early, maybe trying to be considerate of our date night. Usually Mary tucked her into bed and brushed the wispy strands away from her face
while Elsa looked at photo albums and told stories about people I didn’t know and the two of them laughed and reminisced. There was never a place for me during these nightly rituals.
“I’m going to check on her quick,” Mary said.
“Okay.”
Mary disappeared and I went upstairs to our bedroom. Soft voices drifted up through the heating vents and I could picture Mary perched on Elsa’s wedding quilt as they filled each other in on the last three hours, both of them refusing to look at the empty place on the other side of the bed.
My shooting star wish had been for Mary and me to be happy again. Maybe it would never be like before, but there had to be a new happiness somehow, a way for us to thrive that I couldn’t see yet. I got undressed and lay down, staring at the water-stained ceiling while waiting for Mary to come up, and that’s how I fell asleep. Waiting.
HATTIE / Monday, August 27, 2007
MOST PEOPLE think acting is make-believe. Like it’s a big game where people put on costumes and feign kisses or stab wounds and then pretend to gasp and die. They think it’s a show. They don’t understand that acting is becoming someone else, changing your thoughts and needs until you don’t remember your own anymore. You let the other person invade everything you are and then you turn yourself inside out, spilling their identity onto the stage like a kind of bloodletting. Sometimes I think acting is a disease, but I can’t say for sure because I don’t know what it’s like to be healthy.
The first character I remember playing was Fearless Little Sister.
Even when we were little, my brother, Greg, had all the gleeful meanness of a teenager with a sack of cherry bombs and one of his favorite games was trying to terrorize me. He’d hide things in my room—frogs, chameleons, spiders, snakes, everything in a farm kid’s arsenal—trying to get me to scream and that’s exactly what I wanted to do. Instead, I made myself scoop up each wriggling, disgusting little critter and I carried them back to his room, asking him questions, calm as peaches. Where’d you get this snake? Look at the stripe on its belly. What should I name him?