The Memory of Running

by Ron McLarty

  (I hear the phone fall on the table or desk, and I hear crying over it. I wait, but the tears are away and steady. I’m that skinny kid in the kitchen window all over again. I’m the thing that just stopped going over. I wait, and she’s back.)

  Norma: And I’m . . . I’m crying about something that doesn’t concern you. I have a life, you know. I have friends. I could have gone . . . could have gone to that Red Sox game . . . but . . . but . . . I have this big responsibility. Bea raised me, and now I’m taking care because I’m crucial. Because I’m a crucial, necessary person. And you think that you can call and don’t call because Norma’s always, always . . . here.

  (I listen to her sniffles, because she doesn’t put the receiver on the desk. I listen to her and wait.)

  Me: Norma?

  Norma: Uh-huh.

  Me: I’m in a Howard Johnson’s. I treated myself because I needed a shower and I had to get organized.

  (I am hearing a real quiet, even miles away, hundreds of miles, Norma pushes the quiet from East Providence to Gettysburg.)

  Me: I’m in Gettysburg.

  Norma: You’re in Pennsylvania? It’s a lot on a bike.

  Me: Howard Johnson’s. Mostly I’ve slept in fields. I got a little tent and sleeping bag and stuff. I saw a whole herd of deer. Some of them had babies.

  (I try a phony laugh. Norma is quiet for a moment.)

  Norma: Los Angeles is too far. I’ve looked at a map. Goddard said this week will count as your vacation.

  Me: You know what I do at Goddard, Norma? I walk up and down this aisle next to a long table and I make sure the hands of SEAL Sam face inward. Are right. I never thought about my job.

  Norma: I never feel sorry for myself.

  Me: I don’t . . .

  Norma: Even in the morning, when it takes all the energy in the world to get up and get going, I never feel sorry for myself. Because they fall down, I know, they one day can’t get themselves up early, then later can’t get up until ten, then eleven, and all the time saying how hard it is with the chair and . . . and . . . and you have to be . . . you . . .I don’t . . .

  (I wait, but she doesn’t finish. Her breathing may be angry, may have tears, I’m not sure. But, Jesus Christ, I wished I had gone over every day. I wished I had played dolls or puppets or anything this necessary little girl wanted. Bethany looks in my second-floor window and shakes her head. I turn my face to the wall.)

  Me: Gettysburg . . . is beautiful. I’m going to leave tomorrow. I stayed another day and walked around the battlefields. I tried . . . I tried to imagine, like Mom was always trying to get us to use our imagination, and . . .

  Norma: You have a wonderful imagination.

  (I am the phone quiet this time, because Norma is wrong.)

  Me: Anyway . . . I imagined what it would be like to be one of those men.

  Norma: You don’t have to imagine, Smithy. They almost killed you.

  Me: Well . . .

  Norma: You were shot.

  Me: I thought about how minty the fields smelled, and the big sassafras trees have a kind of root beer smell. I mean, fighting and all these good smells. And I took a huge tuna-fish sandwich with me and leaned against this rock in the middle of a field where thirty-five thousand men died in fifteen minutes. I thought how I never wanted anything bad enough to hurt someone.

  Norma: I have.

  Me: I don’t know.

  Norma: I just told you. I made myself, Smithy. I am a sophisticated, useful woman. But I think there’s something I’d be uncivilized for.

  (I wait but can’t ask. I hear some rain against the window.)

  Me: It’s raining outside, Norma. I’m glad I stayed. It’s just that all the dead men—I never thought about it.

  (A heavy rain, and I imagine the boys all soaked and muddy and chapped.)

  I never told anybody. I mean, Mom and Pop, and now I’m old—

  Norma: You’re not!

  Me:—but, Norma, I didn’t really mind being hurt in the army, because I was so afraid all the time. I was a big coward in the army. I never . . . I never told my pop, anybody—I . . . cried sometimes just being . . . away.

  (I think in the quiet. I never thought about it before. That’s why those big pickled eggs and hard pretzels work at night. That’s what the tall glasses of beer do. They take me away from that skinny boy. They take me so far away.)

  Norma: I cry, too.

  (Lightning, thunder.)

  But I don’t feel sorry for myself. I’m sorry I said that about not calling. You don’t have to call. I don’t feel sorry for me, you don’t feel sorry for me. I just . . . I just wanted you to know I’m strong. I do. I make it. I go on.

  Me: I know you do, Norma. I know. I’m very sorry I never came over. After a while it got too hard. I mean . . .

  Norma: I looked through the windows. I hated Pop and Mom too, but when I saw Bethany sometime, I looked away. I guess I wouldn’t have come over for Bethany. Her eyes . . .

  Me: I know.

  (Her anger tightens my hands on the phone.)

  Norma: You don’t know. You don’t know anything. You don’t come over, that’s all. You thought my legs are all there is.

  Me: I don’t . . .

  Norma: You want to hang up. You never call me like you don’t come over, and I love you.

  (I am so disgusting. My stomach oozes over my shorts, and I stand—as if I can escape myself. My body aches, my fat chins, my empty hairless head. A dog. An old mutt wishing he were dead. I cannot speak. Now I am sorry for her, in her necessary, useful, and crucial life. I think of the dead here, and I am so utterly ashamed. All that good life gone, and mine still going. My fat ass, my huge belly, my battlefield sogged down with Marlboro butts and ’Gansett.)

  Me: It’s raining hard now.

  Norma: I got to go. Listen, what I said was something called transposition. I transposed because I was thinking about someone else. That happens. It’s not you. Not you.

  (I wait for a while. Cowards don’t think of things to say. Cowards wait. I hear it all the way here, and it’s a click, made with her finger.)

  26

  “It’s an offer of sorts,” Dr. Glenn Golden said to us, from behind his mahogany desk. “It’s an offer of release. Your release. And it’s given with love. That’s the way I would view it, if Bethany were my daughter. Or my sister.”

  Glenn Golden lounged back in his swivel chair and watched us absorb his assessment. He watched us the way he watched his voice-hearing, sign-seeking, compulsion-heaped patients. I watched my pop. His neck veins were pulsing against the starched white shirt.

  “What are you saying?” Pop asked quietly.

  “I think she loves you all very much,” said Glenn.

  “We know she loves us. You don’t have to tell us she loves us. We want to get her back so we can take care of her.”

  Mom started crying. Pop put his arm around her. I sat against the back wall in a sticky leather chair. The army loomed. I was missing work at the fish market. No Shad Factory.

  “In any delusionary state, a patient often formulates some type of bizarre plan to make everything right. To be a cure-all, if you will, for any problems they may have caused, past or present. Most likely Bethany has such a plan.”

  “What about her voice?” I asked, looking at my feet.

  Dr. Golden turned to me in my back corner and sighed the sigh of a man the voice has hidden from.

  “Bethany’s problems are certainly complex, involving both emotional stress and some imbalance, but her actions are in the range of compulsive, that’s compulsive behaviors, and the idea of some inner thing—a voice, whatever—guiding her is, I’m sorry, absurd.”

  “Look,” my father said, “all we’re trying to do is a little detective work. She’s been gone now more than two weeks. We’re frantic. You can see we’re frantic. If there’s anything you can tell us that might help . . .”

  “I don’t have a clue.” Glenn Golden shrugged, and that shithead told the truth.


  We went home. Pop went back to the maps, and I spread my Raleigh search out past Kent Heights all the way to the Riverside plat. The army was less than a month away, but then it wasn’t like college or anything. It was just “put all your clothes in that Goodwill bin and cough,” so I really didn’t need to prepare, I guess.

  Ide action had turned to sorrow. We ate pretty quiet, and we all went to bed early. People who saw us then will never know how fast me and my pop were or how Mom was in the middle of our family. People who saw us then agreed my sister had killed us. Now that’s absurd, Dr. Golden. I remember lying in my bed reading The Nick Adams Stories, because Nick could throw a beautiful fly and tied his own. I got as far as this story about Nick going with his father to deliver an Indian couple’s baby. The Indian woman cried so much in childbirth, and the Indian man felt so sorry for her he killed himself. I couldn’t read any more. Sad story just to be sad, and, of course, including a doctor.

  Two days after visiting Golden, we got a letter from Rockville, Rhode Island, which is next to Hope Valley and my old Boy Scout camp. It was a very nice letter from a girl named Priscilla, who explained that she had gotten our address from the front of Bethany’s overnight bag. Priscilla told, to whom it may concern, that she was a member of a group dedicated to living life in peace and abiding friendship with the world of man and nature. Man, it seemed, had overdone its part of the balance, and that was why there was the Vietnam War. At least I think that’s what she said. Bethany had heard about them through Grace Episcopal Church’s Young People’s Fellowship, which supported anything that was disgusted with America of the 1960s. Priscilla wrote that while Bethany had been a real asset to the People’s Way (their group), it now appeared that some disturbing little trends had developed in my sister that included screaming at herself in a voice that seemed not of this earth and pulling out her hair. Priscilla gave their address in huge block letters.

  “Hippie commune,” Pop said, folding the letter and putting it in his shirt pocket.

  “Hippies?” Mom asked.

  “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph. Call Golden.”

  Glenn Golden was irritated when he got on the phone. It was early afternoon, and he wanted to get away for some golf.

  “Golden,” said my pop. “We know where she is.”

  “Who?”

  “Bethany. Bethany Ide.”

  “Oh . . . that’s wonderful. Can you bring her in, say . . . a week from tomorrow?”

  “A week from—Listen, I’m not calling to make a goddamn appointment. I want to know what do we do? What? Jesus, Mary, and Joseph.”

  “Well, first of all you don’t yell at me,” whined Golden.

  Pop took a deep breath, and I watched his hand roll into a hard fist, then relax. “Right. Sorry. What?”

  “Do you know what state she’s in?”

  “Rhode Island.”

  “Mental state.”

  “She’s talking to herself. She’s pulling out her hair.”

  “Agitated, then?”

  My pop would have liked to kill him. Another deep breath. Another fist clench. “Yes. Agitated.”

  “Agitated. Agitated. It’s strange, this hair-pulling stuff. I had a boy once who used to pluck out his eyebrows in a rage. Bizarre.”

  “Look, Dr. Golden, I was hoping you could go with us. This is the longest she’s been gone. She obviously hasn’t been taking her medicine.”

  “Go with you?”

  “Yes?”

  “Go with you to actually retrieve her?”

  “Yes, retrieve.”

  “This is, I’m going to say, irregular.”

  “Yes.”

  “Highly irregular. Actually going with you . . . well . . . I’m going to have to look at my schedule, and the . . . well . . . I mean, you aren’t actually thinking of a . . . uh . . . forcible retrieval?”

  Pop let the phone hang by his side and rubbed his eyes. He raised it to talk but at the last second hung up. He dialed Bradley Hospital and told them he’d be bringing Bethany in as soon as he could. At least Bradley was a constant. A real starting point. Or stopping point. Then we all got into the car and drove to Rockville.

  “Rockville’s next to Yawgoog,” I said, wanting to say something. Pop nodded. Mom turned around and smiled.

  Rockville, on the border of Connecticut, was not much more than a post office and a cluster of old houses. At one time there was a rope-and-twine factory, but it burned down, so of course nobody really worked in Rockville. My pop pulled in front of the post office and walked in.

  “I’m looking for the hippies,” he said to a woman in a blue, official-looking hat.

  “Hippies? Well, there’s three sets of them.”

  “The People’s Way.”

  “Know what they did? They think they could put nutrients into the soil by putting their own poop into it. I’m not kidding. Their own poop! I wouldn’t eat one of their squashes if my life depended on it.”

  “Where?”

  “End of that road. Old Methodist church they live in, dirty buggers.”

  We drove down to the church and parked. Pop helped Mother out of the car; then the three of us walked past an unattended vegetable stand that sold oversize zucchini and summer squash, and into the old white church. Most of the pews, except four or five rows, had been removed, and five lines of folding metal beds had taken their place. Each line had seven beds, and each bed was neatly made up with a different color blanket and had a suitcase under it. There were no crosses inside or anything to do with the Methodist Church—instead a large quilt showing many different kinds of vegetables on a white background hung against a stained-glass window behind what once was the Protestant altar.

  “Vegetable is Lord,” a confident, priestly voice said behind us.

  We turned around, and there was this young man, a little fat and short, with long, bushy red hair caked down his neck. He had on a white pair of coveralls that were pretty played out. I guess I had expected robes.

  “Hi, welcome. I’m Thomas.”

  Thomas walked forward and shook all our hands.

  “I’m Thomas for Thomas Jefferson. What we’ve done is take names that we can associate with the time when the country was working toward an agricultural standard. What’s your name?”

  We told him our names.

  “Neat,” he said. “Do you want to buy some vegetables?”

  “No thanks,” Pop said. “We’re looking for someone.”

  Thomas smiled all-knowingly. He sighed heavily and motioned to one of the pews. “Please, sit.”

  We did. Thomas confidently ascended three stairs that led to the sermon podium. He put both hands on it and leaned back onto his right leg.

  “In . . . 1751 a man from Germany by the name of Casper Muller and a hardy band of agro-dreamers left Europe to establish in this fair land a new, nitrogen-rich, self-encapsulating ethnic enclave in complete accord with concepts of Pennsylvania Dutchdom.

  “Passion, weather, barbarism—all combined to deprive the soil of these heroes, but instead the heroes prevailed. We owe so much—so very much—to them. This is the mantle the People’s Way has taken up. A process by which we put a portion of our actual selves back into the earth.”

  “Jesus,” Pop sighed.

  “Other families have come to claim their children, and the People of the Way understand the fears and uncertainties, but please understand that our love and attachments are strong also, and we will struggle passionately to retain any member of our circle.”

  “Where’s Bethany?” Pop said evenly.

  “Bethany? Out back. I’ll help you get her stuff into your car.”

  We left Thomas Jefferson at Bethany’s bed, pushing her belongings into a blue suitcase, and walked through the kitchen into the backyard. The growing field of the People’s Way extended right up against the back steps and looked as if it had been turned by hand. It was late afternoon, and the field was in shade, but the smell was unmistakable and one I didn’t smell again u
ntil the army. Two small foreign cars were parked under a tree, and grass grew up underneath them. Several men and women whacked at the ground with hoes and rakes; still others were hanging wash on a line. I didn’t see my sister. A girl bounced over to us.

  “Hi, I’m Countess Minelli. I brought oregano to this country in 1784.”

  I could see her breasts point up against a man’s denim work shirt. They were not large, but I imagined they were lovely. They were as happy as she was.

  “We’re looking for Bethany Ide,” Mom said sweetly.

  “Bethany is Princess Wincek. She was a Narragansett Indian who taught the first Europeans how to roast corn in its own husk. At first they thought it was too bitter. I think corn is bitter.”

  She had a huge smile that looked like it hurt to stretch her mouth that much. When she shifted weight from her left to her right leg, small hips pointed against her baggy pants and her pretty breasts shifted, left to right.

  “Well, we would like to see her,” Mom said.

  Countess Minelli turned and walked into the field. We followed, carefully watching where we stepped. We passed several outbuildings that looked unused and ready to fall down. Old grapevines completely covered one. Countess Minelli stopped and pointed to the far side of the field, where rows of tomatoes stood staked with sticks. There was a scarecrow in the middle of this portion of field, and Princess Wincek was the scarecrow. She wore a long summer dress that seemed more brown than blue, and her hair fell only on the right side of her head—the rest was bald and scabby where she had torn at it. Her face also had the familiar scars of a few summers ago. Her pose was purely Bethany-perfect, with the left arm up and slanted and fingers splayed up to God. A small breeze puffed dirt at her feet and ruffled the cotton dress but did not touch her stillness.