[2016] The Practice House

by Laura McNeal

  Meanwhile, she would ask: “Coffee, iced tea, hot tea, or milk?” and set the cup in its coded position so the girls behind her would know where to pour what.

  Cup upright in the saucer: coffee.

  Cup upside down in the saucer: hot tea.

  Cup upside down, tilted against the saucer: iced tea.

  Cup upside down, away from the saucer: milk.

  Ansel Price had been working there awhile. A salad man, not a chef or a manager, and he was handsome, though Ida thought that was only half the attraction. “The other half is his faraway eyes that all the girls want to get close to,” Ida said. All Ellie knew was that more than one of the girls on her shift had faked an interest in the making of Thousand Isle dressing so Ansel could show them. He sang, too, and played a beautiful old dulcimer that he laid across his lap as he crooned the sentimental old ditty about Harvey Girls and looked into the eyes of all the waitresses who asked him to play when things were slow. Ellie didn’t plan to fall for someone like that.

  Ida married first—a kind, sunny fellow named Hurd who had thick orange hair and took her away to a town he’d heard about that was north of San Diego and where they never had snow or frost or, to hear Ida tell it, unpleasantness of any kind, but Ellie didn’t want to follow unattached. One day, she found herself standing at a window near Ansel Price during a lull. He seemed transfixed—he stared out at the light, swirling snow as if it made him perfectly content. Perhaps that was what had drawn her over. But now the silence, with her standing so close, was discomfiting, and she said, “Good skating weather.”

  The longest moment passed before he freed his gaze from the snow, and then—this all seemed to happen in slow-motion—he was turning and his dark eyes were settling on hers and he was nodding and saying, “Mmm,” which might have meant Yes, it is good skating weather, or I was just trying to enjoy a moment to myself, or I have never seen you in quite this light before.

  She had been thinking of the pond near Shaker Heights where she and Ida used to skate, but now she remembered something else. “But Ernie said they went all last year without finding a frozen pond here.”

  “Mmm,” Ansel said again, and his eyes were fixed so intently on hers, and exerted such an unanticipated pull, that she said, “Excuse me,” and fled back to her tables without another word.

  Three days later when she walked by him in the kitchen, he said, “A word please.”

  It was so odd and formal that she wondered if she’d misheard him. “Pardon me?”

  “I was wondering if you have ever roller-skated?”

  She shook her head.

  “You might like it,” Ansel said.

  That evening after her shift she heard scraping noises in the basement and a soft whirring sound and then music tantalizing enough that when Flora Ambrose came upstairs to say there was a nice surprise waiting for her, she let Flora coax her down to the basement, and there, roller-skating in a nice big oval he’d created through wholesale rearrangement of the crates, was Ansel Price.

  “Care for a turn?” he asked, his eyes bright. The roller skates were the kind that buckled over your shoes, and he’d found a pair roughly her size, which made her wonder when he’d been assessing her feet. He taught her to skate, and then he taught Flora, and then he asked Ellie to go around with him one more time.

  “It’s not quite ice-skating,” she said, and then when she saw a hint of disappointment in his face, she added, “but it’s lots warmer.”

  When the record stopped, Flora wound up the phonograph and put on a new one: a pretty tenor voice singing “Good Night Little Girl, Goodnight.” Ellie and Ansel fell into an easy, graceful rhythm of leaning and pushing and gliding, and she was surprised when the music stopped again so soon, and surprised, too, in looking about, to find that Flora had slipped away, but Ansel Price moved blithely ahead, and as they kept pushing and gliding, she enjoyed the shushing of the skates and, it was true, the warm pressure of his arm. It was so pleasant that she was almost disappointed when he spoke.

  “If a fortune-teller looked into a crystal ball,” he asked in his soft, deep voice, “what would you want to hear about yourself?”

  “I don’t know,” Ellie said. “Anything except, I zee you vashing dishes.”

  Ansel laughed, and they skated on.

  “How about you? Do want to live in some faraway place?”

  He chuckled at that and said, “No, no, I don’t think so.”

  “What then?”

  He started out with his own version of her funny foreign accent: “I zee you in za house where you were born. I zee za wheat growing as far as I can zee.” But as he gracefully crossed one foot over the other on the curves (she still bent her ankles painfully to steer herself), he started to sound more like himself. “A beautiful girl comes home for dinner even though she doesn’t trust you, even though she thinks you’re a bit of a show-off. She watches you with your parents and she thinks maybe you aren’t so bad. She allows one kiss, maybe two. The two of you go for a ride alone in your father’s car—”

  It sounded like Monty Pike on wheels, and Ellie stopped skating, pulling her arm from his so she could sit down on a crate.

  “Are you all right?” he asked.

  “I’m fine,” she said.

  “Maybe the fortune-teller got a little carried away,” he said.

  Ellie said she wondered where Flora had gone, and Ansel hardly said a word while she unbuckled the skates.

  One day not long after the skating, the lunchroom was nearly empty except for a crippled man and his elderly mother. The crippled man was trying to open the ketchup bottle Ellie had brought him, but he couldn’t because his hands didn’t work right, and Ellie didn’t know what she ought to do. While she was standing behind the counter, trying to watch without seeming to watch, wondering if she ought to just take him a different bottle, Ansel came out of the kitchen and she blurted it out to him. He didn’t say anything, but he walked right up to the man’s table. “May I?” he asked. He took the bottle and tried the lid, then tried it again. He shook his head and then took it back to the kitchen. When he came back, Ellie heard him say that he’d had to use the pliers on it.

  “Where are those pliers again?” she asked him a few hours later in the kitchen.

  He looked at her in confusion. “What pliers?”

  She felt herself leaning slightly toward him. “The ones you used to open that man’s ketchup.”

  He relaxed then, and his smile made his handsome face handsomer. “Oh, those,” he said. “Well, those pliers might be hard to find.”

  The next time he asked her to do something, he made sure Flora and Ernie went along. They had to be careful because you could get fired for dating an employee, but Ansel was so aloof she began to wonder if he didn’t care for her in that way. Once when Flora and Ernie were necking in the backseat, she took his hand and said, “So this house you grew up in. What is it like?”

  He told her about his mother, who liked poetry and plays, and who had planned to have a great big family that could put on plays with her and sew the costumes and paint scenery, but he was the only child who survived longer than one year so he played all the male parts and she played all the female ones. She taught him to sing, and his father bought him his fretted dulcimer one time on a trip to Wichita. He didn’t mention that his mother was dead and that his father was losing the use of his arms and legs to some kind of illness. That she saw on her first visit and her second, and the third was for his funeral.

  She liked watching Ansel stand at the edge of his fields, planting his legs and nodding at whatever she might be saying as he stared off, but then she would fall respectfully silent because she could see his thoughts had floated away like leaves from an autumn tree. He loved the place and she married him because she loved him, and because she thought that was enough. She thought she could enjoy as he did the solitude and simple beauty of a white house and a red barn amidst green fields. She liked the fact that his own child hands had hammered t
ogether the gray pieces of wood that formed a ladder up the cottonwood tree, a ladder that she hoped their own children would one day climb. It seemed silly to want money more than she wanted those things, silly to want a big house and mahogany furniture and sterling silver pickle forks.

  Her father tried to intervene. He told her that this would be work. Very difficult work.

  He told her that he knew she wanted mildness and beauty in her life. “You’ve never made your own butter, or milked a cow, or cooked for farmhands. It will not kill you, Eleanor. It will be worse than killing you. I know this. I know that it will.”

  She said, “That’s what you said about being a Harvey Girl, you forget.”

  “I do not forget. It is not the same. That was a job you could quit. A marriage is not that way. Do not marry him now, Eleanor. Please, for me, do not. Give it the time such things need. Let yourself breathe again like a normal person. If in a year you feel the same way, then yes, yes, do what you will. But not now.”

  She did, though. Sometimes she thought she’d done it just because her father had advised against it. That was how it sometimes was, after you’re a child and before you’re an adult. But he’d been right. She loved Ansel, but her father had been right all the same.

  Having children both helped and didn’t help. Even before Charlotte was born she’d begun to wonder if she’d chosen the right man but the wrong place. By the time Clare arrived, she was sure of it, and she began to push Ansel toward a move to California like Ida and Hurd. He could get work as a salad man, then a chef, then a hotelier. He was handsome and competent and assured—he could run any sort of business. Or if he had to farm, he could farm, but in California, where you could farm year-round. Five crops a year on some of the land here! Hurd had written. But Ansel, in so many ways malleable, was not in this. “We’re happy here, aren’t we?” he’d say, and how else could she answer? She said of course they were, because the one indisputable truth was that he was happy here. He was happy to get up before dawn and he was happy to come back from the fields late. He could work for hours on the tractor, work straight through dinner, which she would bring out to him in a basket and wait for him to come to her end of the row and be surprised that it was already two in the afternoon. “What do you do when you’re on your tractor?” she asked one day while she watched him eat. He seemed puzzled. “Do? Well, I’m watching the tractor and the row, and I’m listening to the engine, and I’m thinking what else needs to be done this week and next.” She had fried chicken for him. He held still a half-eaten drumstick, looked at her, and smiled. “And there’s still a little time left over for thinking about my bride.” But she knew that what sustained him was his dreaminess, the way he could sit on a tractor or sit in his armchair and remove himself from the real world. He’d always done it, and always would. He had safe places to go. The Scottish girl did, too, she supposed, the way the girl could dry the same dish for a full two minutes, staring out the kitchen window, lost in her daydreams. But all Ellie ever saw staring out the window was flatness and grayness, and all she ever heard was the hollow sighing of the wind.

  Once the children were born, she had no time to think about anything except the next feeding or batch of wash. The needs of babies and children were immediate and displaced her own. We’ll come to California when they’re older, she wrote to Ida. Right now I can’t go 10 feet without a fresh diaper.

  They got older, and they climbed up Ansel’s cottonwood tree, adding their own pieces of wood to the rickety tree house, and still they went no farther than Wichita. The year that she started feeling peevish all the time, morning to night, was the year Neva was three. Poor Ansel saw it and felt it and wanted to cure it without knowing how. For Christmas, he bought her the radio. Funny that a man who liked plays and singing could be so annoyed by a machine designed to bring plays and singing right into your living room. She knew from the catalogue that it cost $64.64, but from the minute they turned it on, it was clear he viewed it as an intrusion. “Is that all they can do with it?” he asked. “Why don’t they put on real plays?” Some of the music programs were all right with him, but she sensed he preferred to sing himself, with the kids as his chorus. When he came in for dinner, he asked if he couldn’t turn it off, and when it needed tubes, he was slow to order them.

  Ansel could live in his own world, but Ellie needed other voices. She needed them all day long. She needed them because the house that Ansel was born in, the one that had sounded so sweet and comforting in Ernie’s car all those years ago, was as lonesome as the moon. There were no women around who’d grown up in the city. There were no women who’d eaten in or seen a Harvey House. There was no Ida. Ellie had tried to keep standards. Those first years, she’d raised her own turkeys from eggs. She’d cooked Rice Piemontaise, a favorite dish in Emporia, once a week, mincing her own garden onions. One year, she’d sent away for powdered mustard so she could prepare Sauce Robert. One Thanksgiving she’d served both Peach Alexandria and Maple Melange. Everyone pretended to like them, except Clare, who loved mincemeat and, though not saying a word, would suffer nothing else.

  And now, four days from her fortieth birthday and four days from Thanksgiving, they could not afford turkey, dead or alive. The pantry held little more than empty jars. No more rhubarb, plum syrup, or peaches. No more rice. They still had canned apricots and two big sacks of flour, luckily, so she wouldn’t have to grind up the wheat they used for chicken feed just to make cloverleaf rolls. No more bread-and-butter pickles, no ruby beets. Stewed tomatoes they had in abundance so perhaps she would just have to serve those with chicken and potatoes, which was not the right thing at all for Thanksgiving.

  She went back in the house. No one else was there, so she did something she rarely did during the day: she sat down in the chair beside the Tiffany lamp and under the photograph of her father. She took Ida’s letter out of her apron pocket and wished she could write an answer that would make her happy again.

  Dear Ellie,

  Won’t you come for Thanksgiving this year? Heck, come for Thanksgiving and stay till we’re toothless and old. I’m planning to serve dinner out of doors this year—it was too hot last year to eat inside. Too hot! Isn’t that a change from how things used to be. No silver or china and no Marianne to do the hard work but I like it here so well and I know you would, too. My rock and bottle garden is taking shape and that’s where I’ll put the dinner table—I have 75 blue bottles now, if you can believe. Folks drink no end of Milk of Magnesia!

  How is Nevie? Is Charlotte still mopey? I tell you she’d have a grand time of it around here. They’re showing pictures at the Women’s Club on Saturday nights and they have dances in the park. All sorts of nice boys work at the Packing House with Hurd. Clare could work there, you know, unless you wanted him to go to high school after all. It’s not too late! Write and say you’ll have turkey and dressing with us. Plus I will bake a red velvet birthday cake if you come.

  Love and stuff,

  Ida

  Why Ida thought they could just pick up and drive two thousand miles was more than a mystery. It had been three years since Ellie had bought a dress or a hat. Her Holeproof Hosiery was on its second life as material for Neva’s homemade rag dolls. And now there was Aldine. And all because of Ansel’s crazy rose-colored nostalgia for his childhood playacting and singing. Charlotte had seen the advertisement when she’d been cleaning the girl’s room, and they’d read it together. Culturally inclined. Forward-looking. And now here she was, a Scottish Kewpie doll, eating their food and taking her long baths and sitting up front beside Ansel in the Ford when she went in for Christmas shopping, laughing and casting her spell. Clare was smitten of course, and Neva, too. Charlotte wasn’t, though. Charlotte understood the girl’s ways as if they were her own, which in many ways they were. But why she’d read that filthy poem out loud was one more of life’s dark mysteries because, really, it was as if Lottie knew all along what it was and was having her fun rolling the powder keg into the middle of the r
oom, and Ansel—well, he was a man too sure of his self-possession. During his Othello play, she’d watched his eyes following Georgia Waterman around the stage and then when she’d brought it up (knowing she shouldn’t and vowing she wouldn’t and then finally she did) he’d laughed and said, well of course he watched her, she was Desdemona, the wife Othello no longer trusted, but it was all a role, he knew the difference between a play and real life, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, and, besides all that, he said, he’d never been a wandering man.

  Which, truly, she couldn’t rebut.

  Still, he hadn’t sent the Scottish girl back, as he’d said he would, and as he should have done.

  Bringing up Georgia Waterman had been a mistake; she’d seen that clearly. And she’d told herself not to bring up Aldine, either, but of course she had. Ansel was working all the time—strip-listing, working on the machinery, trying to keep the cows standing—but now on Sundays instead of reading he was bringing out his dulcimer, which had seemed a relief after Venus and Adonis, but he was singing foolish songs and goading Aldine to do the same, one song after another after another and then, as what Neva called “the grand finale,” all of them singing that frightful “Bryan O’Linn” that everyone thought such a lark, especially the part about no clothes that they wore, so finally one Sunday night when they were alone in their room, she could contain herself no longer and said quietly, “Funny how so many of the songs turn out to be duets.”

  “Not ‘Bryan O’Linn,’” Ansel said, and she heard cheer come into his voice just from the thought of it. “Besides, they wouldn’t be duets if anyone else would pipe up.”