by Nancy Jensen
Grace hadn’t asked about her father in years—Rainey couldn’t even remember the last time—but it was Grace’s way to go quiet when she was angry or troubled. Now that Rainey had some real information, something more than just a name and a few memories, would Grace want to know? Would it help her find her path? Perhaps she could just mail Grace the clipping with a little note saying, “See—this is what you come from.” Would that knock some sense into her, make her realize there was something more for her than the half a life she was living in that place with the absurd name—a place nobody had ever heard of? Nothing but fields and trees and cattle as far as you could see.
“Who can say when it’s too late for anything?” Sally said. “I think you should just go. I know you want to. You don’t have to make up your mind absolutely before you get there. Maybe you’ll introduce yourself and maybe you won’t. Just go and see what feels right.”
It was well past midnight when Rainey hung up the phone. She had thought it would help when she admitted that Sally was right—yes, she did want to go, she did want to see Marshall—but it hadn’t helped, because no matter how much they talked, Rainey couldn’t say exactly why she wanted to see him. Again, Sally had urged her to go to the presentation, and, once there, to follow her instincts. But that was just the problem: She didn’t know what her instincts were. How was she supposed to separate her instincts from fantasy and nostalgia, from selfishness and fear? At times, she even felt jealous—but of whom? Of his wife? Or of Marshall? And for what? She did feel an intense longing to see Marshall again, but she also felt just as intensely that going would be wrong in every way.
Rainey turned out the lights and pressed the pillow into a perfect cradle for her head, but she couldn’t sleep. She imagined walking into the auditorium, taking a seat near the front, but off to one side. She would sit at attention in her chair, and then, when Marshall came in, laid his papers on the podium, and began to talk, he would glance her way and she would smile, nod reassuringly. She could see him sorting through his memory as he continued his lecture, finally looking at her again with warm recognition. The ice broken, she would wait patiently until the crowd of students wanting to ask questions had dispersed, and Marshall would come toward her, clasp both her hands, hold her at arm’s length to say how little she had changed, and then embrace her, whispering an invitation to dinner, where he would ask about Lynn, and nod in shared pride as Rainey said, “She’s a judge now. Married to another lawyer. Last year they adopted a child—a little girl. Taylor.” When he asked Rainey about herself, she would smile and shake her head—no, I never remarried—and he would assume there were no more children, so how could she tell him of Grace? If she did manage to find the words—saying how she hadn’t realized she was pregnant until months after he’d left, explaining how she’d decided not to contact him, not wanting even to risk that he would give up graduate school to provide for them—would it shame him, a university professor, to know his daughter had squandered her chance to go to college to run off with a crazy ex-soldier who didn’t deserve her? Or would it be better not to speak of Grace at all? Perhaps there would be no need—this was only catching up between friends, after all. But if she didn’t tell, what would she do if he wanted to keep in touch, if he asked to see her again?
Rainey twisted furiously in the bed. Dinner. Another meeting. The scenario was ridiculous. If he recognized her, his reaction might be far from warm. There wouldn’t be any reason for him to be hostile. But indifferent? That was very likely. And why shouldn’t he be? Thirty-five years ago, they’d known each other for three months. How many men since had she dated—some of them for nearly a year—men she’d slept with that she would be neither happy nor unhappy to see if she unexpectedly ran into them? If she stayed behind then, to reintroduce herself, Marshall’s indifference might quickly turn to alarm. How would she explain why she had come? Just because his picture was in the paper? Why him, after all these years? What would he think? That she was stalking him? And then if he became upset and tried to get away from her, would she lose control, get upset too, demand he listen, and shout after him as he tried to push out the door with his host, And what about our daughter?
Perhaps she could sit in the back of the auditorium, pretend to take notes, drape her hand over part of her face whenever she looked up, and when he was finished, she could get lost in the crowd and slip out, make it all the way to her car before he was even able to get to the door.
Insanity. Rainey sat up in bed and flung her pillow across the room. If she wasn’t going to speak to him, why go at all? What was she hoping to gain, anyway? Her memories of Marshall were lovely. In his company, she had felt beautiful and desirable, capable and smart. Seeing him now might damage those memories somehow, replace them with new and less satisfying images.
But that had happened already. Now that she’d seen the photograph, now that she knew he’d married and had sons and an important career—none of it having anything to do with her—she wasn’t sure she would she be able to remember the darling, nervous young man who had made her feel for a time that almost anything was possible. Once, when they’d been together for about a month, they’d sat in the courtyard of her apartment building on a warm afternoon, watching Lynn practice her somersaults. She kept rolling to the left, getting more and more frustrated, until Marshall got up to help her, laying one hand on her left knee, guiding her over until she began to feel the balance in her own little body. In a few moments, the somersaults were perfect, and Lynn couldn’t stop, in her success forgetting all about the adults and the attention she usually demanded from them.
“You’ll be a wonderful father,” Rainey had said. “So patient.”
Marshall shrugged but looked out at Lynn. “Did you always just want to get married?” he asked after a long while. “Have a family?”
She looked at him, astonished. “No,” she said, as though he ought to know better, but then she realized he knew almost nothing about her. She told him then about Carl, about that first job she’d loved, her classes at the junior college, and her hopes of someday being an independent woman with the freedom to marry—or not. “I never wanted to feel like I had to get married just to have a man to take care of me,” she said. “My sister did that.” She looked at Lynn, her dress and panties stained with grass, her face red with the joy of effort. “I messed things up pretty bad. A child. No husband. No education. Barely getting by.”
Marshall’s silence terrified her. She ought not to have been so frank. Did he think she was trying to trap him? What could she say to make him understand that she knew he wasn’t going to marry her, that she didn’t expect it, or even want it? That she just wanted to enjoy what time with him she could?
At last he took her hand, lightly squeezing her fingers. “You can still have your independence, Rainey.” He laughed when Lynn leapt up in triumph from a particularly fine somersault. “You have it now.” He looked at her. “You really don’t know how strong you are, do you?”
Rainey hadn’t thought of that in years. Hadn’t thought of it, she was sure now, since the moment Marshall had said it. She had raised her girls—perhaps imperfectly, but she had raised them. She had taken care of everything Mother either couldn’t understand or had been too upset to deal with when Daddy was dying. And then for years after that, she had taken care of Mother, seeing to it that all the bills got paid, supplementing the Social Security check with her own small income, always finding some other way to cut the budget when she was sure they were at bare bones.
That long-ago afternoon, while Lynn, newly confident in her somersaults, entertained herself by chaining them in combinations with hopscotch and jumping jacks, Rainey had asked Marshall, “Why archaeology?”
“Two things,” he said. Reaching into his pocket, he brought out a small drawstring pouch, and from that, a flat stone the color of a desert sunset. He laid it in her palm. “This is the first fossil I ever found—I must have been seven or eight.” He placed a fingertip on the stone an
d said, “See here? It’s a beetle. For weeks after I found it, I couldn’t think about anything else except that beetle. How it must have died. How it must have gotten trapped, maybe suffered. But then how, if it hadn’t died this way, locked in the mud, it wouldn’t be here in my hand, making me think about my life. About all life.”
Rainey looked harder at the stone, as if she could look deep enough to see beyond the beetle to find Marshall as a scrawny boy of eight. “You said two things.”
“I found the fossil while I was collecting potsherds. I didn’t really know what they were then—no idea how old they were, or even that they were bits of old pottery,” he said. “I had noticed one on the ground one day, saw that it had a design on it, and decided to find all I could—a shoe box full—you know how kids do? Collect things without any reason to collect them?”
Rainey nodded. One summer of her girlhood, she hunted the ground for bottle caps which she dropped into a mason jar. At night, she rattled their music in her ear before she slept.
“After I found the fossil, I wanted more. I put the shoe box in a garage and forgot about it.” Marshall took the sunset stone from Rainey and slid it back into its pouch before speaking again. “A long time later—two, maybe three years—I came home from school, and there was my mother, sitting at her worktable, that old shoe box open beside her. Did I tell you she’s an artist?”
Rainey shook her head. “What then?”
Marshall laughed. “Stupid kid I was, I said, ‘Hey! Those are mine!’ My mother just kept on working, setting the sherds one by one into plaster. ‘They’re not yours,’ she said. ‘They belong to the people who made the pots, painted them and used them. And to the people who respect them.’ I just sat and watched her for the longest time, not saying a word—I’d never done that before—and after a while I started to see what she was doing. She was making something beautiful, something new and whole, out of what had been lost and broken.”
A few weeks later, when Marshall, off to graduate school, said good-bye to her, he gave her a small box, asking her not to open it until he was gone. Inside, wrapped in a soft cloth, was one of the potsherds he had shown her the night they met—a jagged triangle, not quite two inches long from its apex, half that wide at the base. Most of the other sherds in Marshall’s collection were in shades of brown and red, the colors of mud and clay, but this was a lovely aged white, like old ivory. Dropping diagonally across its broken shape was a pattern of faded black lines, each like two sides of incomplete triangles, or like two paths diverging from the same point, keeping each other in sight—three repetitions of the pattern and part of a fourth, traveling across the sherd like time.
Somewhere, deep in a drawer or maybe a forgotten box in the attic, the sherd waited for her to find it again.
Rainey made up her mind. She would go to hear Marshall’s talk. And afterwards, perhaps, she would speak to him only long enough to thank him. She wouldn’t be able to tell him she had always been confident of her own strength, but at least she could thank him for telling her he had seen that strength in her. No one else, not even Daddy, ever had.
* * *
The campus was much larger than Rainey had imagined, sprawling across an area she remembered as a collection of small farms. So much had changed that, on the way in, she’d missed the main entrance and had to drive a little further on to a subdivision where she could turn around and come back. The parking area was a confusion of signs, most of them saying either RESERVED or PERMIT ONLY. Finally, on her second go-round, she saw a sign that said VISITOR PARKING, and she was able to get a spot someone else was just pulling out of.
She was no less confused when she got out of the car. Five or six buildings arced around the parking areas. Still others stood beyond those. There were people everywhere—not all of them young—with arms full of books or bags slung over their shoulders, walking from one building to another, sitting hunched in their winter coats on benches, huddling in entryways to smoke. She tucked the newspaper under her arm and headed for the nearest building, where she stopped a woman about Grace’s age, showed her the article about Marshall’s talk, and asked for directions. The woman pointed her to the center building, a flat-roofed structure that seemed to be made of nothing but windows.
Once inside, Rainey took a moment to catch her breath. She looked around and unbuttoned her coat. There was a handmade poster advertising Marshall’s visit, with a sign-up sheet at the bottom. A stout woman with frowzy blond hair was writing on it. Rainey put a hand up to her own hair before stepping up beside the woman. “Is this for the archaeology lecture?” She noticed there was a line not just for name but for address, phone number, and e-mail, as well. “I didn’t realize it was reservation only.”
The woman shook down the ink in her pen and finished writing her address. “It’s not,” she said. “This is for anyone who wants to go on a dig.” She turned to Rainey, offering her the pen. “Interested?”
“A dig?”
“In Arizona, in March. Spring break, I guess.”
“And you’re going?” The woman was over sixty, with splotchy pink skin that would blister in the desert.
“Something I’ve always wanted to do,” the woman said. “My husband’s not too keen on the idea, but I just said to him, ‘Nobody’s asking you to come.’” She smiled at Rainey conspiratorially. “Kids are all grown. What’s to stop us, eh?”
“I never really liked the sun,” Rainey said. “My daughter does—but her work keeps her too busy to do anything like that.” The woman was looking at her so intently, Rainey felt she had to explain her presence. “I just saw the article in the paper and it sounded like it might be interesting—the talk. Maybe some pretty slides. I had the day off work, so…”
The woman looked at her watch and then bent down to pick up a large tote. “We’d better get going, then.” The tote was open at the top and Rainey could see a couple of thick books and a fat green binder.
“Do you take classes here?” Rainey asked.
“Oh, sure,” the woman said. “Three or four a year. I always think I’ve taken about all there are, but then I get the schedule and I see something else that looks interesting. How about you?”
“Me? No,” Rainey said. “I started here years ago, just after high school, when it was still the junior college. But I had to quit.” She felt a surge of tears behind her eyes and struggled to think of something else to say without revealing too much.
The blond woman nodded at her words. “I know what you mean. Life happens.”
The room wasn’t an auditorium, as Rainey had expected, but more of a meeting room, with long tables pushed together to form an open rectangle. A wooden lectern sat on the end of one table. A white screen had been pulled down behind it. There was no crowd to get lost in. Only one other person was seated—a boy of perhaps twenty who looked like he hiked for a living. Rainey looked for the least conspicuous seat. If she sat at the furthest end of the room, she would still be no more than twelve feet from Marshall.
“How about these two?” The blond woman was already scooting sideways behind the chairs to the seats with a center view of the podium.
Rainey followed. The woman set her tote on the table, pulled out a chair and started wrestling out of her coat.
“You know,” Rainey said. “I think I’d better find a restroom before this starts.”
“Oh, yes.” The woman winked at her and whispered, “I miss those good old days of bladder control, too.” She lifted her tote into the chair next to hers and nodded toward the door. “Go left. It’s five or six doors down. I’ll save your seat.”
In the restroom, several very young women—Rainey supposed they were only eighteen or nineteen—giggled and talked as they leaned in toward the mirror, checking their hair and makeup. Rainey pushed into a stall and locked the door. She dug in her purse for her cigarettes and lighter and then dropped them with irritation back into her bag. She’d seen at least four NO SMOKING signs since she’d come into the building. It
would be humiliating to be caught sneaking a smoke in the bathroom like a teenager. She tried to remember a calming exercise she’d seen once on television. She had never tried it, but now she hooked her purse on the stall door, stood as straight as she could, relaxed her shoulders, and tried to breathe very slowly from below her belly button, counting to twenty. She took one breath, then another. On the third, she realized it was working: she’d stopped trembling and her mind was no longer spinning around like a carnival ride.
She waited until she heard the girls leave, then came out of the stall and set her purse on the counter over the sink. She washed her hands, reached into her purse for her comb, dampened it with water, and flicked it lightly through her hair. Putting the comb back, she worked her fingers along the bottom of the purse to find the potsherd, still wrapped in its soft cloth. After hours of looking, she’d found it in a box of old photographs taken during the two years she’d lived happily in Indianapolis—first with Sally and Lynn, and then, briefly, on her own, with Lynn and baby Grace. She slipped the sherd in her pocket, in easy reach if Marshall needed a reminder. With another deep breath, she picked up her purse and stepped back out into the hallway.
Two men wearing jackets and ties passed her. They were talking, focused on their conversation about how a design on a pottery fragment could identify its place of origin, even if it had somehow been carried hundreds of miles away. Marshall’s hair was streaked with gray, but his body still danced with boyish energy. He and his companion turned into the room where Rainey’s pink-cheeked friend with the flyaway hair waited in happy anticipation.
Every doubt, fear, question, and silly dream Rainey had had about coming instantly dropped away and burned like a launch engine from a rocket. Just like that.