It actually felt grand to be out in the cold night air, just the two of us, our feet knowing the way down the path and over the bridge, the sound of the creek below us flowing under the ice. No one else was out, and the air smelled of coming snow and chimney smoke. We held gloved hands, and a raw wind stung my face. When we heard what sounded like a gunshot, I stopped dead still and grabbed the bridge railing.
“Most likely some hunter grown numb and dumb,” James said.
“This close to people?”
He moved us along the path to where we could see the white-iced lake. “There’s open land not too far, on the next bay. Hunters get all fall, is what it amounts to, deer hunters. Two weeks bow and arrow, couple of weeks off, then two weeks with rifle and two with muzzle-loaders. Sometimes out here you can see a deer, if it’s late, running across the park.”
I looked behind me as we sat close together on a bench near the rocks along the water’s edge, but the woods were still. “My ex had his baby,” I told James. “A boy.”
He took one of my gloved hands and held it in his warm jacket pocket. After a bit he asked, “So, umm, are you okay with that?”
“The thing is, looking at that announcement which my mom for some reason needed to send me, all I could think was that even if that kid never knew a thing about his dad and me, or ever even knew the story of his dad and Millie, his mom, it doesn’t matter. That’s his history anyway.”
“Come on, Janey—.”
“James, everybody had parents. You had parents, whether you knew them or not.”
He took my hand out of his pocket and gave it back. “Okay, all right.”
I let it go. After a time, when we’d begun to feel the chill in our bones, I put my cheek against his and asked, “You want to go back and sniff my t-shirt?”
23
THE FACT OF family being an off-limits topic with James, and the fact that I’d been trying to forget mine was coming, meant it was after James got back from his Thanksgiving campout with Pete and the boys before I broke down and told him the news.
“In two weeks,” I said. “They’ll be here in two weeks.”
“I don’t know about that,” he said, watching the French-speaking trio at the next table all in fir-trimmed parkas. We were having late afternoon lattes in a sort of European café on Church Street, at a window table, looking out at the bundled-up knees and calves of pedestrians on the sidewalk. Sitting inside had its good points after months of having coffee at the warm-weather tables outside. I liked the sound of the door opening and the swoosh of cold air, and then people taking off their coats or parkas and hanging them on racks, blowing on their hands as if they’d just come into a room with an open fire, instead of a large space filled with plants and crowded tables, two steps down as you entered.
“You have to come for the afternoon party,” I said. “Aunt May says we need somebody who isn’t family, somebody my daddy can talk to.”
I’d left Beulah at home, loose on her leash, which she had got used to, turning away and heading for the kitchen when she saw that I was leaving. I’d taken her outside to get busy first, but she liked her backyard less and less as the snow had deepened and grown thick and crusty. She didn’t like it being cold and hard under her feet; she didn’t like the yellow stain, still sniffable, not sinking into the green grass the way it had in summer.
“They’ll have questions,” James fretted, warming his hands on his heavy mug. “Your parents.”
“Don’t I know.” I gave him a smile, meant to convey he didn’t have a clue.
“I mean, they’ll ask me stuff.” Draining the creamy caffeine, he licked the foam from his lips, then stood and fished around in his pocket for a wrinkled bill.
“They will.”
He said over his shoulder as we headed out, “They’ll think—you know.”
I had to laugh. “They will. They’ll think you know whether you come or not. They’ll think you know just because I mentioned your name.”
“Your aunt hasn’t even met me.” Outside, he pulled his knit cap over his ears. Snow stuck to his lashes and nose, then melted off. He’d given me a heavy wool cap, cable knit, and I covered most of my flyaway hair with it. Hair in this climate! No wonder women wore long braids or crew cuts. I’d been wearing mine longer, straight, and the bangs had grown out, making me look pretty organic not to say rural.
“Her loss,” I said, slipping my hand through his arm, squeezing his parka with mine. Strolling in the holiday crowd, we saw nine white men in black tuxedos standing in a row singing madrigals in harmony, while Morgan horses pulled Hanson cabs, and miniature horses with felt reindeer horns towed toddlers in carts up the white-covered brick street. A high wind blew the snow around us in swirls, and we looked in storefronts with ornate displays of Hanukkah candles and manger scenes.
“It’s going to be awkward, me being there,” James groused.
“They’ll think you’re an improvement in my life.” And I hoped against hope this was true. How could they not? But there seemed to be this small-minded loyalty to Curtis on the part of my mom especially, as if he still counted as family.
“You don’t talk about them,” he complained, as if all at once he wanted to hear about my kin. “I don’t even know their names.”
“My mom is Ida Jean; she’s best friends with Madge at the bank, and big at First Methodist. My daddy is Talbot; he works at the hardware and is the very last person in South Carolina who wears a hat every time he goes out.” Could I come up with anything else to say? Were they that pitiful?
Was I?
Last night, I’d baked us a chicken and sliced up the white meat with some pears and wine, really yummy on top of rice. And made the buttermilk pie I hadn’t tried for him before. After Beulah was down, we’d made love on my deconstructed bed, with me rocking away in heavy socks with a sweatshirt around my neck. Cold weather sex. “What do I talk to your parents about?” He stopped on the street while we listened to some street person playing a piccolo in the falling snow.
“Anything.” And I guess that was the truth, since they wouldn’t be listening. They’d just be staring at Mom’s aunt, wondering what was going on with her and that woman, and at my sort-of-sweetie with the straggly face hair and the look of being slightly underemployed, wishing they could turn back the clock to when they had a properly married daughter back home.
“She’s a librarian, your aunt, right?” James started digging around in his parka for his gloves. The street lights had come on—so soon—and it had grown frigid.
“She’s my mom’s aunt, and why don’t you meet her now?” Which all at once seemed a great idea. “Then she’ll already know you when we come for the Christmas party. I’ll ring the doorbell and just ask if I can bring something when Mom and Daddy are here. We won’t go in.”
He stopped and stared at me. “Then what? You tell her, ‘Say hello to James.’ She says, ‘Hello, James.’ Then what?” he looked reluctant tingeing on slightly petrified.
Suddenly cheered, I realized a bribe I hadn’t even tried. “Maybe her mystery writer friend will be there,” I said casually “Bert Greenwood?”
He cut his eyes in my direction with grudging interest. “No kidding? The guy who writes the Private Eyes?”
“I haven’t met him myself yet—.” And that was true as far as I knew.
“I get the students to read this Dutch mystery writer, he’s pretty good. You get a lot of details about the country.”
“We’ll just stay a minute,” I promised. And, happy at the idea, leaned my head back and caught melting snowflakes in my open mouth.
So that’s what we did, we got in my car and drove by the university, the campus already brightly lit, a winter scene, down Black Gum past the synagogue and meeting house, to Larch, the unpaved lane which ran between two fenced cemeteries. Slowing down, I cut my light, which I’d had to turn on when the dusk deepened to twilight, and, pulling to a stop on a snow-covered stretch of yard, set the brake.
&nb
sp; Walking across the crusted snow toward the house, I heard music, faint, drifting across the yard. “Wait,” I whispered, listening. It was waltz music, coming from Aunt May’s house. Quiet as hares we crossed the stretch of drifted white until, through the wide front windows, we could see a couple dancing, round and round as if at a ball. Both wearing long skirts, heads thrown back, arms on waists and outstretched to steer.
“That’s your aunt?” James asked.
“The taller one. And her friend Kitty.”
“That’s neat.”
And through the falling show, with our feet turning to ice, we stood and watched the two women dance.
Soliciting Approval
24
“I DON’T GET it,” Mom said, lugging her suitcase to the bed. “I don’t get the point of Pacific View about a thousand miles from what it’s talking about. I thought you were kidding me, when you sent that postcard when you got up here? Pacific View, Vermont, ha ha. Sort of like Bay of Fundy—where is that?—South Carolina. Or Katmandu, Alabama. You know? That’s what I thought.” Mom had arrived at the Burlington airport in her own interpretation of my telling her people, dressed down in Vermont, and that she’d need something warm.
She’d walked out of the gate in a tight pink t-shirt which said
2 GOOD
2 BE
4 GOTTEN
over mid-calf Capri pants in dark pink, sandals and socks, and wrapped in a huge fake-fur jacket in teddy-bear brown. Did I care how she looked, my mom? How tacky to care. And Daddy. Daddy was looking totally Elks Club (of which, however, he wasn’t a member, belonging rather to the Masons, a classier lodge in his view), in a Tyrolean hat, a reversible muffler, his green car coat over a dress shirt and suspenders. I’d never met them at an airport; I’d never welcomed them to some new place. At home—well, they were just Mom and Daddy.
At the motel, Mom, unpacking her bag, hanging up her other outfits, carried on a running conversation about her friend Madge. “Her daddy, can you believe this, Janey, that fine old man whose deceased wife died two years ago, who is now in a retirement home, a nice place, has got himself a CDC. I bet you don’t know what that stands for, because I didn’t myself. She had to let me know the minute she heard. ‘I’ve got myself a CDC,’ she said he told her. She thought it had to do with his heart, because the connection wasn’t too clear, but that’s what all the old fellows want: a Constant Dinner Companion. Is that grand? Janey? Hey, Talbot. See how lucky you are?”
“Tell me this is a prank.” My daddy fell back on the nearly made bed, fanning himself with a handkerchief. “You planted this, right? My own daughter, having a little sense of humor, trying to get a rise out of her old man.”
Oh, shit. How could I have been expected to expurgate all the chancy items from the local newspaper? There, waving in the air, clutched in my daddy’s sun-spotted hand, was a civil union announcement, on the wedding page, of two nice-looking men, attorneys, and the details of their ceremony at which a judge had presided. I felt as embarrassed as if the newly joined couple stood right here listening to him. Had he talked like that at home? Arid I just didn’t hear him? “Daddy,” I pleaded, “this is Vermont.” Gazing out the north window of their room which faced Pacific Gas, I felt a tinge of nostalgia. A nice view that I now recalled with affection—and tried to focus on.
“Talbot,” Mom scolded, “don’t be having a fit. It’s like kids playing bride and groom. Don’t get your bowels in an uproar.” Though she peered a good long time at the article herself before tucking it in her purse (for Madge?). “Her daddy’s people,” she continued, speaking to me as if there had been no interruption, and I would know the reference, “came from Eutaw—that’s E-u-t-a-w, Alabama. I always thought that had to be an interesting place, because I imagine the same Indians that settled U-t-a-h, the state the Mormons live in, settled E-u-t-a-w.” She transferred Daddy’s shirts and pants to the closet, and tucked his undershorts in a drawer, carrying them carefully so they wouldn’t discomfort him, being all out there in sight, his underwear.
“Two men, I never.”
“Hush, Talbot, you did so ever. Remember that boy from Greenville, had been a Boy Scout?” She sat on the corner of the bed beside him, patting his knee. Speaking to me, she changed the subject. “We brought you the cutest Christmas present, and I want you to open it here, honey, because I cannot wait another minute for you to see it.” She removed a gift-wrapped box from her carry-on cosmetic case—red paper and green ribbon, and handed it to me. Tearing off the wrapping, I held up six hand towels in light green, each embroidered with a dog in a space suit and a name stitched in red: BARK VADER, POOCHES LEAH, HOUND SOLO, ARTWO CANINE (R2K9), LUKE SKYWAGGER, THE EMPIRE BITES BACK. “Aren’t they darling? I know you’ve got this little dog, so we thought . . .”
“Thanks, Mom. I really need guest towels.” I tried to imagine them in my bathroom. “But you didn’t need to do that.” I got up and gave a hug to my mom, a tiny woman in a pink t-shirt.
“We had to get up before breakfast this morning,” my daddy said, raising himself upright on the bed, making amends. “They don’t fly direct up here. We had to change our plane and by that time it had got too late for breakfast. Plus, you know what they served us on the plane? Ask your mother who had her mind set on a catered omelet with a side of sausage. They gave us a teensy bag of pretzels. Seems they’ve invented being allergic to peanuts—peanuts, did you ever?—so they don’t pass them out any more.”
“I thought we could have a sandwich at my apartment, and you could meet Beulah.”
Daddy nodded up and down. “I know, the dog,” he said.
With some regret, I packed them into my car to go to my place. I’d been distracting myself from their talk by figuring that actually I could have lived all year at Pacific View for the same cost as where I was now, since naturally the motel paid its utilities. My first cold-weather electric and gas bills had knocked me out of my chair and left me flat on my back on the kitchen floor hyperventilating. At home I’d paid Greenville Water, WCRS Sewer and Trash, Piedmont Natural Gas, and Duke Electric, every month, and the total came to less than a single gas bill up here. No wonder the landlord with the combed-over hair, Lavoie, had smirked when he told me: We pay the water; you pay the rest.
I thought I’d be okay with bringing Mom and Daddy to my place. It actually looked great this time of year, because you got a bright north light out the locust-view window, and a nice southern sun coming in the front windows. I’d grown to be as comfortable there as in my own skin, so that I no longer remarked on the tiny shared-with-a-dog bathroom, the absence of a room specifically for things which took place in bed, or the chancy encounters at all hours with the upstairs degenerates.
But even driving down the street seemed different, through their eyes. We passed at least half a dozen cars with bumper stickers pertaining to the now-legal civil unions: TAKE VERMONT BACK, TAKE VERMONT FORWARD, TAKE VERMONT FROM BEHIND. Then, parking my car in the plowed driveway and bringing them up the front steps into my apartment, I sort of lost my cool. First Daddy stopped stump-still, staring at the bare nails and hasty carpentry in the makeshift entry. “Honey, where’s the rest of your place? I can’t find the stairs.”
I’d had it all planned. Get them settled down with pimento cheese (homemade with sweet pickle relish), on sourdough from the kiosk, with iced tea, because they drank it summer and winter, extra sweet. Then I’d spread out a fan of brochures: the excursion train to Charlotte to see the snowy countryside and get a glimpse of the village where the mysteries were set. Take a stop at the Magic Hat Brewery. Maybe ride a horse-drawn sleigh through the hilly wooded grounds at Shelburne Farms to the edge of the frost-covered lake, a blanket over our legs.
But Mom didn’t warm to any of it. “Janey, Sugar, we’ve got trains, now don’t take offense, hear, in Carolina, you may remember. And take a sleigh ride? Next you’ll be wanting us to ice skate like in those old paintings, you know, with all the wintery people wrapped in scarves
getting frostbite, no thank you. We want to see what there is to see, if you get what I mean. The shops? I have to get something for Madge that she couldn’t find for herself on the internet in three seconds, at discount, something special also for Pastor Edmunds and her husband, they are very artistic people, which reminds me, by the way, I’d like to see your First Methodist, so I can report to her when I see her what the sermon is for tomorrow up here. The Second Sunday in Advent. That’s going to be a topic from the Gospel of Luke about the signs in the sun and moon and stars, and the sea with the waves roaring—they like to do that one. They like to talk about the signs that the Baby is coming, or sometimes they call them portents.”
I put away the flyers and poured myself a cup of coffee. I’d let Good Dog out of her crate, where I thought she should be when they arrived, in case they made her (as well as her person) build anxiety. Now, happy to be out and to see me again, she sat at my feet, looking up at me and then with interest at the New People—who paid her no mind whatsoever. How could they not exert even the smallest effort to make the acquaintance of my sociable companion? A word, a touch, at the most minimal, so my patient lab didn’t wear herself out waiting for cues. “We’ll go right by the church when we walk Beulah downtown,” I told my mom, thanking the miracle of accidents that the town’s sole Methodist Church happened to be directly on our way.
“You got TV?” Daddy asked, looking around, suddenly waking to the fact he couldn’t locate one.
“No,” I told him, and got up and put on the Dixie Chicks, in case the silence bothered him and having a need to hear them sing about leaving home for wide open spaces. But the phone rang, and they froze while I retrieved the cell from my parka pocket.
“THIS IS ORVILLE,” a voice yelled in my ear. “JANEY? IS THAT YOU?”
“Mr. Sturgis,” I answered, worried but at the same time glad to hear his voice. “Is this you?” I knew he’d got my number from my daddy when he’d called about Bayless’s funeral, and I’d been calling him regularly, keeping up with everybody’s medication, but he’d only called me that one time with bad news.
Year of the Dog Page 10