GLASS MEADOW
For William Kotzwinkle and Charles Baxter
Imagine a shady mountain road in early summer. 1954. Dappled sunlight on tall pines, the lovely view of a valley with a bright river rambling through it. And here comes a lone car, its tires squealing a little with each winding of the road. A lime-green ’51 Ford, with a finish that exactly reproduces the trees in its polished depths. In the front seat of this automobile are the eccentric parents of Patrick and Elvin Johnston, brothers. I’m Patrick, twelve and a half years old. Elvin is a year and a half younger. We’re monitoring how close we keep coming to the big drop-off into the tops of trees. We’re subject to the whims of the people in the front seat, whose names are Myra and Lionel.
To their faces, we call them Mom and Dad.
Myra is thirty-six, stunningly beautiful, with black hair, dark brown eyes, flawless skin, and—as we have heard it expressed so often by our ratty, no-account friends at school—a body like Marilyn Monroe. Lionel is younger, only thirty-four—tall, lean, rugged-looking, with eyes that are the exact light blue of a summer sky, and blond hair just thin enough at the crown of his head to make him look five years older. He’s sharp, confident, quick, and funny. He makes Myra laugh, and her laugh has notes in it that can alter the way blood flows through your veins.
Elvin and I have come to believe they’re both a bit off, and there’s plenty of evidence to support our thesis.
But we love them, and they, in their way, love us. It is very important that one does not lose sight of this fact.
So.
We’re on this mountain road, wending upward in the squeal of tires and the wail of radio jazz, while back home in Charlottesville lawyers are putting together the necessary papers to have us evicted from our rented house. The rental is our seventh in the last eight years. Our destination today is a hunting cabin owned by a childhood friend of Myra’s. We haven’t packed a scrap of food or very much in the way of clothing or other supplies.
We woke up with Myra standing in the doorway of our room. “You’re not ready yet,” she said, “are you?”
It was still dark out. “What?” I said. “What?”
“Who is it?” Elvin said.
“We’re leaving for our vacation this morning.”
“Vacation?” I said. She might as well have said we were heading out for a life of missionary work in Pakistan.
Myra and Lionel have never been the type of people to take vacations, per se. They’ve always had a way of behaving as though they were already in the middle of some kind of—well, furlough, let’s call it.
One Sunday morning as we were coming out of church, we saw Father Bauer backing out of the rectory door with a big box. Myra hurried over there, we thought to help him, but she stood silent behind him as he slowly backed through the door, groaning with the weight he was carrying in the heat of the summer day. She seemed merely curious, watching him. As he got free of the doorway, she leaned into him and said, “Hey!” loud, as if he were a long way off. Father Bauer dropped the box on his foot. Then he hopped in a small circle, holding the foot, yowling, “Merciful heaven,” at the top of his lungs.
He said this three times, as Myra, smiling, strolled away from him.
“I saw him hit a boy in the back of the neck yesterday,” she told us. “He’s not a very nice man, even if he is a priest.”
Of course, we never went back to St. Ambrose Church. And she never went back to her job there, as a secretary in the day school.
Myra likes going to new and different jobs, and we’ve already been to many different churches. We’ve attended services in every denomination of the Judeo-Christian South, and two or three of the Middle Eastern and oriental variety as well—these in Washington, D.C., only seventy miles north and east of us on Route 29. Myra doesn’t seem to be looking for anything in particular, either. She wants to experience the ways people find to celebrate having been part of creation, as she once put it. She isn’t really batty in that particular way. Not religious, I mean. She doesn’t think about it. The term creation is a convenient rather than a necessary expression. Her religious feeling is all aesthetics.
Lionel is less impulsive. His lunacy is more studied. He loves orchestrating the impressions of others. Once, with Myra’s help, he got a real estate agent to show us a house that was for sale in our neighborhood. The name he gave the agent was Mr. and Mrs. Phlugh. (“That’s P-h-l-u-g-h,” Lionel spelled it out for the trusting agent, “pronounced the same as the virus.”). As the poor man walked them through the house, Myra began coughing and hacking like a victim of tuberculosis in the last throes of the illness. “Is she all right?” the real estate agent asked.
“She’s done this since I’ve known her,” Lionel said, then coughed himself.
By the time the agent ushered them out of the house, he too was coughing, perhaps in sympathy, though it might also have been the result of anxiety and embarrassment. “Thank you so much,” Lionel said to him, coughing. “But I think we’ll keep looking. I want my house to be a place I can retreat to, you know—like a—like a sanitarium.” He turned to Myra. “Don’t you think, dear?”
“Yes.” Myra coughed. “Like that. Something quiet as a clinic.”
“Right. A clinic.” Lionel coughed so deeply it caused the agent to step back from him. “This is a great house,” Lionel went on, coughing, “but not for the Phlugh family.”
Lionel is a qualified accountant, but he’s currently between jobs, waiting to take up a position with the State Planning Commission. It seems to Elvin and me that they are both perpetually waiting for a new job to start. Lionel’s real passion is playing mandolin in the hillbilly band he started up the year my mother was pregnant with Elvin. One of the other men in the band, the banjo player, a man named Floyd, recently got married and moved to Tennessee to take a job in his father-in-law’s distillery. No one has replaced him, though Lionel has auditioned several players, so the band hasn’t performed in months, and that source of income is dry. The woman Floyd married is a few years older than Floyd, and once Lionel brought her into the house and introduced her to Elvin and me as our real mother. Elvin divined what he was up to almost immediately.
“I knew that,” he said, nodding at the woman.
I was momentarily flustered. Lionel saw it in my face and reached over to take me by the wrist. “Well, we got Patrick anyway.”
Elvin has always been skeptical about everything. When Myra developed appendicitis that year, Elvin thought she was joking and ignored the moaning and crying from her bedroom.
At the hospital, while she was in surgery, Lionel paced up and down the corridors, muttering to himself. No one could approach him or speak to him. And poor Elvin was as miserable as I’ve ever seen a kid be. Finally Lionel came in to where the two of us were sitting in the waiting room and scrunched down in front of Elvin. “Don’t you worry,” he said. “They call this guy Buttonhole Smith. He’ll get that old appendix out and he won’t leave but the tiniest little scar, and Mommy’ll be just like new.”
“Yes, sir,” Elvin said, and started to cry.
“Hey,” said Lionel. “It wasn’t your fault. You hear me, kiddo? Nobody’s at fault here. Every now and then life gets serious on us.”
“It’s above Glass Meadow,” Myra says now, looking at some instructions she’s brought out of her purse. “Past a place called Brighton Farm. Apparently there’s a sign just past the nine-mile post.”
“Whoa,” Lionel says as we surge down a narrow hairpin curve and then shift upward again, heading skyward once more.
Lionel was a gunner on a B-25 during the war. There’s a small star-shaped scar on the fleshy inside part of his left forearm and an oblong indentation on the outside of it, near the elbow, caused by the path of the same tiny piece of shrapnel. Lionel deflects questions about it, usually with other questions: Why do you want to know about the scar? What interests you about it? Do you like scars? Is it the war you want to know about? Which war? Does war inte
rest you? He is capable of making you decide you don’t want to ask another question about anything, ever again.
“Glass Meadow. One mile,” says Myra, sitting forward, reading the sign as it glides by us.
“I never saw the mile post. Or the farm.”
“It said Glass Meadow. That’s what we want.”
“Maybe there’s more than one Glass Meadow.”
“Don’t be ridiculous, Lionel.”
We drive on. We’re quiet now.
On the left, as we come around another curve, is a novelty shop. There are bright tapestries hanging from a rack along the front. On the lawn are a lot of statues, looking like a gathering of little gray people and animals. Lionel pulls in.
“Oh, no,” Elvin murmurs.
“Stay together,” says Lionel. “No wandering off.”
“Where would we wander?” Elvin asks, sitting back in the seat. He’s apparently going to stay right where he is.
“You don’t want to come in, sweetie?” Myra says. But she doesn’t wait for an answer. She’s out of the car and moving swiftly across the lot in the direction of the statues. “Oh, look,” I hear her say.
Lionel has followed her, keeping a small distance. He’s between the little stoop at the front of the place and where Myra has crouched in front of a stone angel.
“I want one,” she says. “Lionel?”
“Where the hell would we put it, sugar?”
“The bedroom. All around the house.”
“What house?” he asks.
She ignores this.
“An angel,” Lionel says. “Any idea what we’ll buy it with?”
“Good looks?” she says, standing and putting all her weight on one leg, so that hip juts out.
Lionel walks into the store, and I follow. “How are you,” he says to the man there, in a voice that is not his natural voice; there’s a heavy, sonorous music in it, a sadness. It causes me to stare at him. “Nice place you have, sir.”
And here’s Myra, lugging her heavy stone angel. She sets it down on the stoop and comes up to where I am, in the doorway. “What’s wrong with Elvin?”
“I think he’s carsick,” I say.
“That’s the thing to do when you’re carsick,” she says, shaking her head. “Sit in the car.” She goes inside and speaks to the proprietor in a soft southern accent—slightly more pronounced than her ordinary speech. “It’s such a lovely day to be up in the mountains.”
I walk over to the car, and Elvin gets out. “They’re cooking something up,” I say.
He says, “Shit.”
We walk up to the far end of the lot, near the road, and look back down the mountain. There’s a cut in the side of the farthest bluff, in the shape of a giant human ear. It makes me feel as though we should whisper.
“They don’t have any money,” he says.
“Maybe they’re gonna rob the place.”
He says nothing for a beat or two. Then we laugh. It is my conviction that seldom has anyone else on this earth ever laughed in precisely that way, with precisely that amount of ironic agreement and rue.
Myra comes out of the shop and bends to pick up the angel. She makes her way across to the car and sets it down, opens the trunk, and with a great deal of effort, lays it in. Lionel hasn’t come out of the shop yet. She turns and waits, leaning on the open trunk, as if she were propping the lid up with one hand. “Honey?” she calls.
Lionel comes to the doorway and waves at her.
Elvin and I walk down to her. She glances at us over her smooth shoulder and smiles. “Where’ve you two been?”
“I’m hungry,” Elvin tells her.
We watch as she closes the trunk and then crosses the lot, makes a little leap up onto the stoop, and with her hands set to block light on either side of her face, peers through the screen in the door. Then she strolls back out to the little gray crowd of statues.
We watch her decide on another one, a deer bending to drink or graze. She picks this one up and starts toward us.
“We don’t have any money,” Elvin says. “I don’t know what she thinks she’s doing. I heard Lionel talking last night. There’s not a penny. We came up here to get away from being served something. ‘They can’t serve them to us if we’re in Glass Meadow.’ That’s what he said.”
The proprietor comes out of the shop with Lionel, and together they walk out to the statues, Lionel protesting all the way. Myra reaches us with the deer and opens the trunk again. Elvin and I get into the back as she struggles to get the deer into the trunk with the angel. Coming toward us, with a statue of a Madonna and child, are Lionel and the proprietor, a man we can see now has tattoos on his forearms and bright red hair. Myra has got the deer packed, and she closes the trunk, then turns to face them. “I guess we can put it in back with the boys,” she says.
Elvin and I look at each other.
“OK, boys,” Myra says, “scootch over.” She opens the door, and the two men step up with their burden. The Madonna looks like Doris Day, and the baby has the face of an old glutton. They get the thing on the seat, and then the men shake hands. Myra closes the door and says, “I don’t know how to thank you.”
“Think nothing of it,” the man says in a voice out of the deep South. He smiles at her, and there is a sorrowful light in his eyes. Myra has that effect on men. But this time, the sorrow I see is for other reasons.
“What’re we gonna do with these?” Elvin says.
Myra waves and smiles at the man as Lionel starts the car. “Thank you,” Myra says. “And God bless you.”
We pull out of the lot, and they start laughing.
“I couldn’t believe he went for it,” Lionel says.
“A sweetie,” says Myra. “A tenderhearted man, I could see it in his eyes.” She lights a cigarette and hands it to him. They look at each other and laugh.
“What did you do?” I say.
“I had him going,” Lionel says. “Didn’t I?”
Myra looks at me. “Your father told that nice man I only had a year to live,” she says. Then she addresses Lionel. “Did you cry?”
“I did,” Lionel says. “Just a touch.”
“Poor man felt so sorry he gave us the statues,” Myra says. “Wasn’t that sweet?”
If this were a fiction, I might be tempted to say here that as she sits laughing about the kind man who believes she has a year to live, Myra is indeed only a year away from the end of her life. But it wouldn’t be true.
“We’ll come back and put some money in his mailbox,” Lionel says, glancing at me in the rearview mirror. “Soon as the new job starts and I get some pay.” This is something they will do, too. Quite gladly, and maybe with a bonus of considerably more than they would have paid. It will be another one of their adventures together. Worth the trouble and the expense. And the man’s life will be different; he’ll have a day when he can tell people he found a fifty-dollar bill in his mailbox.
“I thought he was going to give us the whole store,” says Myra. “Didn’t you?”
“What’re we gonna do with the statues?” I say.
“Sell them,” Elvin says. “And buy some food.”
We come to the sign: Glass Meadow. Lionel makes the turn. It’s a dirt and gravel road, and a column of dust rises behind us. The back of the car is sunk down like the hotrods I’ve coveted at school in the afternoons, and the Madonna with her ugly child in her arms rocks with our motion, as if she’s alive for those few seconds. I’ve got one hand on the rough stone shoulder, trying to steady it. The head is an inch from my ear.
“What’s she telling you?” Myra asks me.
“What about food?” Elvin says.
“Plenty to eat when we get there,” says Myra.
At the end of the deepest part of the shade is light—an open blue space. We come out of the trees into a wide field dotted with yellow flowers. The cabin is at the other end of the field, looking as though it’s about to sag into the tall weeds that have nearly engulfed it. We pull
off the dirt road and into the grass, right up to the porch—briefly I think we’re going to hit it—and when we stop, Lionel turns the engine off and seems to listen. We all watch him. Slowly, almost as if the motion causes him pain, he turns to us and smiles. “Well?” he says. “What’re you all waiting for?”
We leave the Madonna on the seat and file up onto the porch, which is bleached to a tan in the sun, hot and creaky and rickety, with cobwebs everywhere and signs of rodent infestation. Myra produces the key from the bottom of her purse. She opens the door and walks in, and Lionel steps in behind her. It’s hot, airless, tenebrous; the floor sounds as if the wood might break.
“Get some windows open,” Myra says. Lionel does this, winding a squeaky crank. He’s got a look on his face, all concentration.
There’s a ladderlike stair opposite the front door, with silky webs blocking it. The kitchenette contains a small icebox. The door is standing open.
“Great,” Elvin says. “No food.”
“That’s no way to talk,” Lionel says, finishing with the window. “We gotta get into the spirit of things.”
“Oh, for God’s sakes, Lionel,” says Myra from the other side of the room. “That is ridiculous.”
“You said there’d be food up here,” he says.
“I was wrong.” She starts opening and closing cabinets in the kitchenette.
“You know you might’ve checked with Betty about the food.”
“When I came up here with her that time, we didn’t pack food. The place was stocked.”
“That was three years ago.”
“Well, I’m just saying there was food here.”
“There’s no food here now,” Lionel says with emphasis.
“She and Woody were just here in June.”
He repeats the phrase. “There’s no food here now.”
“I thought there’d be food,” Myra says. “When do you want the divorce?”
“Today,” he says loudly. “Let’s make a big goddamn ceremony out of the whole goddamn thing and invite a lot of people with food.”
Someone to Watch Over Me Page 5