At the Far End of Nowhere

by Christine Davis Merriman

  The weeks and months that follow are a tumble of world-changing, life-changing events. America’s involvement in the Vietnam War continues to expand. Many of my male classmates become soldiers and deploy to Vietnam.

  Paloma has graduated from Bryn Mawr, but she stays in touch. That summer, she sends me letters from Florida, where she’s set to begin college in the fall. She fills me in on all her escapades—she’s hanging out on the beach a lot, doing drugs, making out with some of the college professors, having a blast. She calls me her “sensible and serious, Wendy Darling”; she calls herself “just another Peter Pan, who won’t grow up.” Then, abruptly, the letters stop, and for months, I lose touch with her entirely.

  Like many other guys his age, Spence lets his hair grow to shoulder length. He buys himself a green Plymouth Roadrunner and spends weekends away with a friend, watching stock car races in Pennsylvania or Ohio.

  I begin to lose all sense of time. I stop going to church, stop paying much attention the news. When I’m not cooking, or cleaning the house, or doing laundry for Daddy and Spence, I pass the remainder of summer in other times and other places. I spread Lovenia’s old handmade quilt beneath the red Japanese maple tree, and pass the long hot afternoons communing with some of my favorite muses.

  I imagine what it might be like to be the overworked, exhausted young girl child in Anton Chekhov’s “Sleepy,” whose only respite is to smother the crying baby in her charge. What might it be like to be reincarnated as this same weary young girl in Katherine Mansfield’s “The Child-Who-Was-Tired,” and driven once again to suffocate the screaming infant who will not allow her to rest? Then I remember that once I nearly suffocated in the Oldsmobile, and I wonder how the tiny victim must feel. Am I tormented victimizer or innocent victim, worn-out girl child or murdered baby? For what purpose have I come around again?

  When I read Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, the scene of Levin’s marriage proposal to Kitty jumps out at me. Seated at a table in the drawing room, these two communicate their deepest feelings for each other by writing, with chalk, just the first letters of each word. This magical clairvoyance found only in the closest of relationships is a mirror of what happens when Daddy and I read each other’s mind.

  I read on and on all summer, telling myself that plowed and harrowed, I’m lying fallow now, gathering strength for when the school year comes upon me once again.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  SCHOLARSHIP INTERRUPTED

  I BEGIN college with a full load of classes. To get there, I have to take the bus, then walk blocks and blocks to campus, carrying a satchel full of heavy books. I come home each evening too tired to study. When I do try to read my texts after supper, Daddy frets that I will ruin my eyesight with so much reading. I feel pressured. I know I won’t be able to keep up with all these classes. I officially drop out of a few, but as the first semester is about to end and the first wave of exams arrive, I still feel overwhelmed. I fear I’m about to fail some of my classes. I panic.

  Over the weekend, on a chilly November afternoon, I talk my situation over with Daddy.

  Though the air outside is nippy, I find Daddy stretched out on his back on the red bench in front of his woodshop. Breathing deeply, his legs stretched up over the back of the bench, feet pressed firmly against the shop’s white shingle wall, palms pressed together, and head hanging upside down, he appears to be performing a series of isometric exercises. Seeing me standing behind him, he finishes his current set of presses and releases, swings his legs around, sits up on the bench, and pats the space beside him, inviting me to sit there.

  “A penny for your thoughts, my little squirrel ears.”

  I sit and button my jacket against the cold. “I’m worried, Daddy.”

  “What’s wrong, Lissa?”

  “My exams are all scheduled for next week. I’ve been studying, but I’m afraid I might not pass some of them. There are just too many things to read and memorize all at once. I’m okay with the French and English, but I’m not keeping up with the math and the science. I don’t really want to give up my scholarships, and I sure don’t want to flunk out.” I look over toward the house and notice that the gutters, weighed down with leaves, are sagging, coming loose from the eaves. Nobody’s taking care of these things anymore.

  “Well, you know, Lissa, I’ve been worried about my little girl, too. I’m afraid you may be ruining your health with all this commuting back and forth in cold weather. I haven’t said anything, but I’ve seen you go out in the morning with a wet head. You could come down with a bad catarrh if you keep doing that. I think that’s what killed my brother William. For some reason, in the middle of winter, William loved to strip naked, dive into the river for a quick swim, then run around outside—with his wet hair and his bare feet—to dry himself. Said it was invigorating. Well, William died from a bad catarrh when he was just sixteen years old.

  “Besides, I need you here during the day to take care of me. What if I should fall on the pavement here outside the shop, and hurt myself so bad I couldn’t get up, or cut myself on one of my machines?”

  On Monday, I go to the registrar’s office and say I want to withdraw from college. A tiny old lady in a red suit searches my records, hands me some paperwork in a manila folder, and directs me to the office of the dean of students.

  The dean is a black-suited, middle-aged man. He sits behind a formal desk in an old office with high ceilings and ancient radiators that ping as he gestures for me to take a seat. I sit there for cumbersome moments, nervous as he slowly peruses my paperwork. The silence is broken only by an erratic chorus of frantic pops and pings from the radiator. Finally, the dean looks up and peers across at me over the severe black rims of his glasses.

  “So, Lissa. Why do you want to drop out of college?” The dean poses the question formally, with gravity. He leans in toward me, stretches his arms out to me across the desk, hands solemnly clasped.

  I’m tired and I’m not ready are the answers that come to mind, but the dean’s question has filled the room with a dark threat of impending fatality. I am confused, and fear the irrevocability of my response. All I can think to say is, “I’m not sure.”

  The dean withdraws his arms to the sides of his chair, rolls it back away from his desk, and says, “You realize, Lissa, that most women meet their future husbands in college.”

  His statement takes me by surprise. It makes no sense to me. The last thing I want to do right now is find a husband. That’s not why I came to college.

  “College is just not working out for me,” I say.

  The dean pulls his chair back up to his desk and signs my withdrawal papers. He comes around the desk, hands my folder back, and shakes my hand.

  “Good luck, Lissa. You’re leaving in good standing. Maybe you’ll come back to us one day.” I leave his office feeling relieved, but somehow doomed.

  To keep me content after leaving college, Daddy buys me a subscription to a correspondence course, Benson Barrett’s How to Write for Money Right Away. One of my assignments is to write up some recipes. I find my grandmother Magda’s old recipe book on a shelf in the pantry. Tucked inside the cookbook’s cover is a folded page of yellowed notepaper bearing a handwritten recipe for Sunshine Cake. I submit my grandmother’s cake recipe, along with a recipe I’ve come across for making tortillas from scratch. Encouraged by the positive feedback I get about the tortilla recipe, I move along with my lessons.

  “You see,” Daddy says, sipping iced tea, “didn’t I tell you? It’s not real.”

  It’s July 21, 1969. Yesterday evening, at 10:56 P.M. EDT, Neil Armstrong became the first man to walk on the moon. I haven’t been paying much attention to the news for a while; it’s usually pretty depressing. But today, the news channels are showing footage of what appears to be a major achievement.

  Daddy and I are in the dining/living room, watching hazy images on TV. A man in a cumbersome-looking spacesuit seems to bounce across a pocked landscape. Daddy wears his watchmaker�
�s loupe fastened on top of his regular glasses, moves up closer to the TV, and stares fixedly at a label at the bottom of the screen that says “simulation.”

  “You see,” Daddy says, jabbing at the TV screen with his forefinger. “It says it’s a sim-u-la-tion.” He makes his point by pronouncing every syllable distinctly.

  “I knew they couldn’t put a man on the moon. And they shouldn’t be messing around with the moon like that, anyway.” For Daddy, the man in the moon is an old friend, a soft-faced, wise, luminous fellow who rises outside his bedroom window at night to comfort him. The moon helps him get through those sleepless nights when his prostate won’t let him rest, when frequent, urgent, burning urination keeps him awake at night. He keeps a large tin can (formerly a fifteen-ounce can of Ann Page Bartlett pears) to pee in at night.

  I refill Daddy’s glass of iced tea and start fixing his supper. My mature side is telling me I know better—I know that this first moon landing is real. My child side—the part of me that’s still lovingly entwined with, and obedient to, this old man’s will—is inclined to believe that what Daddy is saying must be true.

  Later, while Daddy, Spence, and I are having supper, Daddy says again that the whole moonwalk was a hoax. “It even said on TV that it was a simulation.”

  I look over at my brother. “Spence?”

  Spence just shrugs and says, “Perhaps.”

  After supper, I ask Spence, “What did you mean by perhaps?”

  “Well, I wasn’t going to try to argue with Daddy. I was working late last night, so I didn’t see any of the live coverage. But they probably used some mockups and simulations to fill in the details. I’m just wondering what they’ll discover when they analyze those moon dust samples they collected. It’s all pretty amazing.”

  After supper, with dishes cleared and the TV turned off, I sit hugging a pillow on the worn-out sofa next to Daddy’s armchair. He rubs doggedly at the frayed arms of his chair, his fingers plucking obsessively at the chair’s yellowed stuffing. From the opposite wall—which is papered with the remnants of a sad, faded, water-stained Victorian floral design—a large portrait of Daddy’s father, Tommy, looks on.

  My grandfather Tommy Power’s dark hair and beard remind me of pictures I’ve seen in schoolbooks of Ulysses S. Grant. But Tommy Power’s features are more handsomely arranged, and his demeanor reveals a certain gentleness not befitting a military man—though according to Daddy, Tommy signed up for the Confederate States Army in Virginia when he was just nineteen.

  Gradually relaxing, Daddy leans back in his chair, closes his eyes, and takes me back with him to a time and place at the far end of nowhere, where everything begins.

  I hug my pillow more tightly and close my eyes for the voyage back in time.

  Here, the wind is ruffling trees, and it is snowing cherry blossoms. Places like Tulip Hill and Coffee Hill ride on dream clouds, and bear remembering. The wind of memory exhales deep whispers from people who also bear remembering. People like Fringe-a-Frock, a sawmill foreman—not a tailor—who exploded, and Urchie, the cousin who perished in childhood and alerted my young father to the notion that he was perhaps clairvoyant.

  Daddy recounts to me his family’s history for the umpteenth time—how he was born in 1878 on Coffee Hill in St. Mary’s County, and grew up on Tulip Hill in Charles County in Southern Maryland. I never tire of hearing it. Daddy has the storyteller’s gift of elaborating upon, embellishing, and carrying the narrative a little further forward with each telling.

  “My pappy daddy—his first name was Virgil, but they always called him by his middle name, Tommy—he was born into a family in Virginia. They lived on a big spread, and had slaves. But then, during the Civil War, they lost everything, and my grandpappy wound up migrating to St. Mary’s County to take up tenant farming. And it was here my pappy had the good fortune to meet up with my mother, Lovenia. Lovenia, you see, was a descendent of folks who sailed over, way back in the 1600s, on the Ark and its pinnace, the Dove. The first thing they did was plant a big cross on St. Clement Island, claim the land for the King of England, hold their first communal Roman Catholic mass, and settle in St. Mary’s County. After Lovenia and Tommy were married, he moved in with Lovenia and her family on one hundred acres of bounty land her grandfather Jesse Thompson had been awarded for his service in the Revolutionary War. Lovenia’s family had turned that land, with its loamy soil, into a thriving tobacco farm.

  “When I was a very young boy, ideas for inventions just started to come to me like magic. I started to conjure up better and easier ways to get the work done. I hated to see my mother work so hard from sunup to sundown, and then, after a long day’s work, have to wear out her hands shelling peas for our supper. For many a day, I sat opposite my mother in the kitchen and made a careful study of the motions of her hands, sizing up just what was required to strip those peas out of their pods.

  “When the other boys were out playing baseball in the meadow after the farm work was done, I went out to the smokehouse to be alone. That’s where I first started to come up with my inventions. I would pace around in a circle and think, and pace some more, and think some more, until I finally figured out just how a machine might do the same job my mother’s hands did. I borrowed some tools from my pappy’s toolshed and put together a wooden contraption that would shell those peas for my mother. That was my first real invention.”

  As the stories go on and on, night after night, after supper, I’m reminded over and over again how my father’s soul was captured at an early age by the power of the steam engine, the beauty of a pocket watch’s workings, and all the fascinating mechanisms that were ushering the country into the twentieth century. Ben Franklin, Thomas Edison—these were Daddy’s childhood heroes.

  Months slip by, and I spend most of my time at home with Daddy. I stopped going to church a while back. I started to feel like a liar every time I had to recite the Apostles’ Creed during the service. I can’t really believe anymore that Jesus “was conceived by the Holy Ghost, born of the Virgin Mary.” I get out some library books on religion and philosophy, but the more reading I do, the more doubts I have. I do still love the Sermon on the Mount, but religion itself is beginning to seem more like self-hypnosis, a palliative measure at best. Just another fantasy, and not even always the best fantasy.

  It’s October of 1969 when I finally get another letter from Paloma. She’s been living in a commune in California and has found her soulmate, a guy named Gary. She’s coming to her mother’s farm in Virginia for her wedding later this month. She wants me to be her maid of honor.

  Daddy is worried about my being away so long in Virginia, but as a wedding gift for Paloma, he makes a mahogany lazy Susan turntable inlaid with roses.

  Gary and Paloma pick me up in their GTO (they call it “The Goat”) and drive me to her mom’s Virginia farmhouse, a grand old place built in the 1700s. Remnants of the original family’s graveyard are still visible in a field near the house.

  Gary gives Paloma’s mom a big hug. He calls her Hippie Momma, and she does look kind of like a hippie with her long straight hair, no bra, no makeup. She’s very informal these days, seemingly laid back, and she still drives her vintage VW bus.

  Paloma’s mom and dad are recently divorced. Her dad walked out to marry his childhood sweetheart, a Texan oil heiress. When Paloma’s dad arrives with his mother to attend the wedding, tensions in the old farmhouse run high. Paloma is furious with her father.

  Gary, who grew up working-class and makes a living driving eighteen-wheelers across the country, popping uppers to stay awake, is as different as a man could be from Paloma’s dad. Her dad is a well-heeled college professor with a PhD in Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry from an Ivy League university. On our first night in Virginia, Gary sneaks out and paints over the VW logo on the front of the bus, transforming it into a peace sign.

  Paloma has her mother put me up in the bedroom that served as the family nursery in American Colonial times. Paloma orients me
to the room. She points to a shadowy corner near the fireplace, occupied by a child-sized wooden rocking horse and a small rocking chair.

  “Those belonged to Sarah and Matthew, two of the original owner’s children.”

  Paloma tells me this room is visited regularly by their diminutive ghosts—Sarah, a four-year-old with long blonde curls who comes back to rock in her old rocking chair, and her brother Matthew—six years old when he died—who loves to tickle guests who sleep in his old bed.

  “I hope you don’t mind, Lissa,” Paloma tells me, “but you’re going to have to share the room with Iris.” Iris is Paloma’s paternal grandmother, a wealthy woman from Texas who owns one quarter of an oil well. Paloma, who took her mother’s side during and after the divorce, goes out of her way to poke fun at Iris.

  “That rich old bag. She must put her makeup on with a trowel. I hope you don’t gag when she chain-smokes and loads her hair with hairspray. She’ll be in Matthew’s bed. She’ll probably have a cow when Matthew tickles her. I’d love to get a picture of that!”

  I laugh at Paloma’s depiction of Iris, and Paloma gives me a big hug. “So glad you could make it, Lissa.”

  I fall asleep wondering if Sarah or Matthew will pay us a visit tonight. In the middle of the night, I wake up. I hear something! I get up and take a quick look around the room. No movement from Sarah’s rocker in the corner, but a curious grating sound is coming from Iris’s bed. I tiptoe over. Nope. No Matthew in bed with Iris. Just Iris, grinding her teeth.

  As soon as daylight wakes me, I make my way to the guest bathroom to take a shower. When I step out of the shower, I’m startled to see Paloma’s dad standing in the bathroom doorway. I grab for my bathrobe, belt it around me, squeeze past him, and hurry down the hallway back to the guest bedroom. I figure he needed to use the bathroom and didn’t realize anyone was in there. But when I mention this to Paloma, she’s furious. “Oh, Jesus! That bastard! Dirty old man. Wanted to get a good look at you naked. You’re lucky he didn’t try to grope you.”