[2016] The Practice House

by Laura McNeal

“Who went to Mr. McNamara.”

  “I didn’t know that.”

  She seemed to soften a bit. “It’s not a bad thing, Ansel. With my money and what Charlotte will soon be making, which is good money, by the way, real good money for a girl her age, and with every little bit you and Clare make we’ll soon be able to rent a place of our own.”

  Ansel said nothing. There was nothing to say. He didn’t know if it was worse to hear her say it or to realize she was right. Every little bit you and Clare make. He looked off, saying nothing until she went away. He lit another cigarette and drew deeply of the smoke and slowly exhaled. He brought his hand up as if to rub his nose but it wasn’t to rub his nose. It was to smell the tobacco on his fingers. That night with Aldine he’d brought her hand to his face and smelled the tobacco on her fingertips and then, in a kind of ecstasy he’d never imagined let alone experienced, he’d sucked the taste of it from her fingers, one after another.

  58

  Disparaging Ansel was something Glynis never grew tired of. Did he forget he was married? Did you forget he was married? What kind of man, and on and on.

  “Glynis,” Aldine said, “we must agree to speak no further of this. I do not speak to him. I do not write to him. What more is there to do?”

  Glynis didn’t answer, but made it clear that she wouldn’t desist until Aldine’s degree of disapproval matched her own. To accomplish that, her tight-lipped expression said, more talking was certainly required.

  More than once Aldine had thought about Mrs. Odekirk. She had encountered her on Neosho Street one summer afternoon when the temperature was 104. Mrs. Odekirk, her skeletal frame perched on slender legs like a white heron, had hugged and kissed Aldine so affectionately that Aldine might have been her own daughter. “Let me look at you,” she kept saying, the heat pulsing through everything, turning Aldine’s black pocketbook into a patent leather stove.

  “The Josephsons said you were here!” Mrs. Odekirk said, the lines in her face symmetrical and handsome, like the comb marks in her tightly bound gray hair. “Loam County is all but deserted now. I can’t drive anymore, so I sold my car, and I’ve come to live in my mother’s old house here in Emporia.” One hardened hand curled into itself with arthritis. With the other hand, she touched a handkerchief now and then to her narrow, bony nose.

  Aldine smiled and moved farther into the shade of the bank building.

  “A doctor rents the front house so I live in the back cottage. Convenient really for someone of my age. Oh, please come and visit me, Aldine. Better yet, take one of my rooms. Keep me company.”

  But she didn’t go visit Mrs. Odekirk, or stay with her, because when her circumstances could no longer be hidden, she couldn’t bear the look that would come into Mrs. Odekirk’s eyes. So she said to Glynis, “It was wrong of course, and who could deny it? But it’s a wrong that’s made only if two make it, so enough about him.”

  And it was enough about him, but only for the night.

  The days passed and within her stockings her legs swelled and then one day a letter came from poor sweet Clarence and it ended with, I guess you always had your heart set on my dad, and as she stood in the post office reading these words, she felt suddenly as if all her clothes and disguises had been stripped away, and there was nothing left of her, nothing at all, not even her secrets.

  Clarence knew? How could Clarence know? And if Clarence knew, who in all the world didn’t?

  But then as she was serving luncheon she thought—and this, she would tell herself later, was how dauntless hope could be—well, probably Clarence had indistinctly sensed his father’s distant attention to her, as a spurned admirer will sense such things. Sensed and then, in his letter, guessed. And walking home that evening while Glynis chattered about lousy tippers and Clark Gable and Jean Harlow, she thought, Yes, it surely had to be that, a guess, and nothing more.

  59

  In good weather some of the Harvey Girls enjoyed going to the park by the Cottonwood River, or seeking the cool of the Carnegie library’s basement reading room on Sixth Street, or playing ball on Mrs. Gore’s teams, but as far as Aldine was concerned, there were just two things to look forward to, and going to the movies at the Granada was one of them. She loved the darkness and hush and smoky haze of the movie house, and she loved settling into the lives of the people on the screen. She liked love stories (she’d seen Today We Live twice) and some crime pictures, but she didn’t like cowboy movies. She’d gone to The Rustler’s Roundup just to see why Clarence worshipped Tom Mix, but had come home befuddled. The cowboy star was old and squeaky-voiced and stiff as plaster; that was her judgment, anyway. The pictures changed in the middle of the week, but Aldine learned to wait until Friday, when the blond-haired boy named Harry was in the booth. He and one of his friends would come once a week to the Harvey House for coconut cake and he would always sit at one of her tables. One day, when his friend was in the bathroom, he’d introduced himself and asked her if she liked the movies and she laughed and said that was a funny question wasn’t it, because who didn’t? He said he worked at the Granada every night but Wednesday and Thursday, and he gave a discount to adorable waitresses, and Aldine, who couldn’t deny his spunk, said, well, when she next saw an adorable waitress, she’d pass on the news, and he said he thought the only adorable waitress he’d seen had already gotten the news, meaning her. That Friday she ventured to the Granada and found him sitting illuminated in the glass booth. He grinned at her, gave her a ticket without taking her money, and that was the way it was whenever she went to the Granada ever after. It was no sin, not by her accounts. She was saving her money, so why wouldn’t she wait a day or two until a friendly face was in the booth? And when Harry and one of his friends sat at one of her tables, she always gave them a lovely piece of cake, and a pretty smile besides, but she had to charge them full price all the same. If she didn’t, Mrs. Gore would sack her in a second, and she needed the job.

  One night she took Glynis along to the pictures on a Friday, and Harry smiled at Aldine, ignored their coins on the counter, and spooled out two tickets to pass to Aldine. Then, pushing their coins back toward them, he said, “Don’t forget your change,” and Glynis was such a little fool she went inside saying right out loud, “Wait a darned second, we didn’t even pay!” Aldine shushed her, and the Shirley Temple short wasn’t even over before Glynis got up and left. “I paid the boy and now I can watch in peace,” she hissed into Aldine’s ear when she got back, so that was it, she didn’t go to the pictures with Glynis again.

  Aldine was saving her money but for what, she didn’t know exactly. She didn’t want to go back to living with Leenie, not like this, and she surely didn’t want to go all the way back to Bellevue Crescent. What would she say to Aunt Sedge? You were right. I shouldn’t have gone away. She didn’t feel ill, at least, not in any boaky kind of way, and she hadn’t begun to fatten and waddle, thank the good sweet Lord, but the day was coming, and then she’d be out of a job and would need all of her savings and more besides to tide her over.

  The second thing Aldine looked forward to were her visits to the post office, and the guilty thrill she felt when the postman returned from the General Delivery bin with an envelope in his hand. She stopped by the post office every day and she always went alone. She told Glynis it was to see if anything had come from her sister, but that was only a sliver of the truth. Ansel had sent three letters and each one not only made fresh her feelings for him, but drove her further into her dreams of a world in which there was no Ellie, no guilt, just a far-off place she thought of as their Japan. When one of his letters came, she touched it there in her pocket as she worked, and back at the house she took it to the bog where she could read it again and again behind a locked door.

  If I had not kissed you or declared how I felt.

  It is terrible and wonderful the vividness of your face in my mind.

  Please write back and tell me . . .

  But she could not write back. She could have written m
ad, hothouse letters to the man who lived in her imagination, but she could not write back to Ellie’s husband. That did not, however, mean that she could be kept from reading and rereading his letters, touching her finger to the paper he had held, letting her finger follow the beautiful loops of the cursive he had written.

  The darkness of the movies, the romantic figures on the screen, the pleasant haze of cigarette smoke. And the thrill when the postman returned from the General Delivery bin with an envelope in his hand. That was all there was to get her through the days.

  The days passed. Scarface, As You Desire Me, Tarzan the Ape Man. She learned that sucking on ginger candy helped a little bit with the morning sickness, and she didn’t know what to do at all about the bulging veins in her legs and feet, and thanked her lucky stars for dark stockings. Grand Hotel, Horse Feathers, Shanghai Express. There were no letters for her in General Delivery until one day the postmaster handed her an envelope addressed in a childish cursive that could belong to no one in the world except Neva.

  Dear Miss McKenna, it began.

  It is ever so much warmer here and there is no dust blowing only fruits of all kinds which Clare and Dad pick from the trees every day. Mama works in the packinghouse with Aunt Ida and Uncle Hurd. Charlotte is going to be a teacher now, she will teach sewing and cooking which Clare says is a laugh and a half because Charlotte hates to cook. I miss you so much. I’m going to go to a big school but I just know there won’t be paper planes to go to the next knot if you get 100. I wish we could come back but I have stopped coughing and Mama says I will start again if I go back. Dad has another story. He says he has borrowed my cough and likes it so much he’s not going to give it back. Mom likes it here best of all. Dad does not like it one bit. Everyone can tell how bad he misses Kansas. That’s the one bad part, that and the fact you and Krazy Kat aren’t here. Okay. I love you, Miss McKenna, and I hope God is watching you and Krazy Kat.

  Your friend, Neva

  Every repetition of the word Mama was like a sharp cut in her stomach, and she read it over and over again to inflict the pain on herself so she would stop longing for what would hurt Neva so much.

  60

  One night after the dishes were done, and Ansel was off somewhere smoking and brooding about the girl—or so she supposed—Ellie walked out to find Hurd in his shop. He wore leather work gloves and was setting long pieces of rusty metal out on the ground, then staring down at them, rearranging, staring again. His orange hair was flat with sweat.

  When he saw Ellie, he nodded toward the metal and said, “What do you think?”

  She studied the splayed metal on the ground. She had no idea what she thought.

  “What does it look like to you?” he asked and when she didn’t answer, he said, “Doesn’t it look just like a stork?”

  “It does a little,” she offered, “now that you mention it.” She smiled. “It reminds me of Mrs. Odekirk back in Kansas, and she looked like a stork.”

  Hurd laughed, prized a slender piece of metal from beneath a nearby pile, regarded it for a moment, then used it to replace what she now saw was meant to be the bird’s bill. “What do you think?” he asked and Ellie said she had to admit, that made it look more like a stork.

  Hurd went over to his glass of iced tea and held it toward Ellie. “Want a snort?”

  She declined, and he took a big gulp, wiped his mouth on his blue sleeve, and waited. He knew Ellie wasn’t the type to idly watch him assemble his trifles.

  “I was wondering, Hurd,” she said carefully. “I’m grateful as anything just to have work, you know that, but if there were any extra hours, it would mean a lot to me.”

  “More hours?” Hurd said.

  “I’m saving up. Well, we are. Toward our own place.”

  “Well, I don’t know, Ellie. That’d just mean you’d leave us faster,” he said, but she knew that was just so much talk.

  “You and Ida have been beyond kind, Hurd, but we can’t stay forever. And the sooner we have our own place, the sooner Ansel will stop thinking about Kansas.”

  Hurd’s expression and emotions usually rode genially along on the surface of things, but his round freckled face softened and when he spoke his voice was low. “I don’t think you’ll ever take Kansas out of that man, Ellie. It’d be like removing his veins.”

  She said nothing, and in the next moment Hurd was himself again. “I’ll do a little checking,” he said, “but no promises.”

  “Thanks, Hurd,” she said, and that was just one more reason she wanted a place of her own, so she could finally stop saying thank you all the time. She walked through piles of scavenged metal toward the other end of a former olive-pickling barn, where Hurd, with encouragement—and, she suspected, financial backing—from Mr. McNamara had turned a storage bin into a darkroom for Charlotte, and on her way out, Ellie poked her head into it. It was dark as a coal hole until she found the cord to an amber light and plugged it in. A series of photographs hung clothespinned to an overhead line, images of the ocean and a fishing pier and some houses, all looking golden in the room’s amber light. There was a price tag showing on one of the jars of chemicals and Ellie went over to look at it. Thirty-five cents. Mr. McNamara bought her the paper and supplies but Ellie had no idea they were that expensive. Thirty-five cents a bottle times how many bottles? She began pulling them out to count them, and when she pulled the seventh one out, a piece of wood behind it fell forward, and revealed a small cubbyhole. Ellie peered into the darkness and tried to tell herself that it wasn’t a cubbyhole at all, but the only way to disprove the notion was to reach in, which she did with unease. Almost at once she touched something papery. What she pulled forward was a large brown envelope. She unclasped it and tilted it forward, and a sheaf of heavy papers slid out facedown. Ellie turned them over. They were photographs of a woman. That was her first thought—photographs of a woman—and she would remember it because until this moment Ellie had never before thought of her daughter as a woman. But she looked like a woman in the photographs, a woman sitting on a rock by a stream with her back to the photographer and wearing almost nothing whatsoever.

  Her first thought was to leave these photographs where they lay, so Charlotte would find them and wonder who had seen them, but what if Hurd found them first—what would Hurd and Ida and who knew who else think of their family then? So she squared the photographs and slid them back into the hiding place, secured by the piece of wood and the weight of the chemical jars in front of it.

  A full day passed before Ellie found a chance to speak privately with Charlotte, and by then her thoughts were more measured. It was dusk and they were walking a dirt lane that split the lemon grove. Artemis ambled along just behind. Mr. McNamara had taken Charlotte for a drive that afternoon, south on Highway 395 to a little town called Escondido that Charlotte said was full of orange trees and fruit stands. Her tone was flat and matter-of-fact.

  “Did you have a good time?”

  “Mmm.”

  A few seconds passed before Ellie said, “Do you have feelings for Mr. McNamara?”

  Charlotte hitched her chin just a little. “What kind of feelings?”

  “Romantic, I guess.” This was difficult. More than difficult really.

  “I don’t know about romantic,” Charlotte said. “Romantic might be taking it too far.”

  “Are you friendly to him?”

  Charlotte looked at her as if trying to parse her meaning. “I’m not overly anything—friendly or unfriendly,” she said. “I like going places, he likes taking me places, but, Mom, he’s a grown man.”

  “Exactly,” she said. “Are his intentions honorable?”

  Charlotte gave a hearty laugh. “Oh, God, Mom. He asks me to marry him practically every Sunday.”

  This was more than a surprise. “And what do you tell him?”

  “I don’t tell him anything. I don’t say yes and I don’t say no.”

  “And what does he say to that?”

  Just below the surfa
ce of Charlotte’s face brimmed something looking very much like pride. “He says he’ll just go on asking every Sunday until I say yes.”

  They walked on a bit before Charlotte, sensing something, drew up and looked behind. Perhaps thirty yards back, Artemis sat staring at them, looking abashed, but not taking another step.

  “Tired,” Charlotte said.

  “We’ll have to put her down soon,” Ellie said. She watched as Charlotte returned to the dog and led her to a shady spot under a lemon tree. She and Ansel. He was always putting off shooting a dog, too.

  “We’ll come back this way, girly-girl,” Charlotte was saying to the dog. “You can go home with us then.”

  Artemis looked at her and, without otherwise moving, let her tail thump the earth.

  Ellie said nothing as they walked on. She already had more to chew on than she could readily process. But after a time it was Charlotte who said softly, “What would you do? About Mr. McNamara, I mean.” And in that tender voice Ellie heard the Charlotte that she had once been, the girl who still wanted guidance from her mother.

  Ellie wasn’t sure how to say what she wanted to say, which was that a certain amount of pragmatism in such matters was no sin, so finally in a small, tired voice she said, “Well, Lottie, I would marry the man who can provide what will make you happy.”

  Charlotte waited and then asked, not in a challenging voice, but with a slight tremor, “Is that what you did?”

  Ellie reached down and picked up a stone that she pretended to study. She had thought so, and she had been wrong, but she couldn’t say that. What good would it do? Mr. McNamara was nothing like Ansel; Charlotte was not Ellie. “I trust you,” Ellie said decisively, pretending that was an answer to the question and trusting that Charlotte didn’t really want to know. “You know what will make you happy, and you’ll find it for yourself, with or without Mr. McNamara.”