by Tom McNeal
Judith was unmoved. When Marjorie Williams had told her the tale in the C Wing bathroom, two girls she didn’t know had stopped their own conversation and turned to listen, which just about doubled the humiliation factor. “Behind your back?” she said now to Mack Stanton. “Could you get a hard-on thinking of my mother with your hands behind your back? How about folded on top of your head? How about with a thumb in each ear, wagging your fingers like a jackass?”
Laughter worked the table, with Mack Stanton, red-faced, trying to join in.
“Because if you can get a hard-on thinking of my mom with a thumb in each ear, that would be a prime example of something definitely worth demonstrating.”
When Mack Stanton didn’t speak, she was satisfied. As she left, the laughter at the table turned raucous. She heard someone whoop, “Where would your hands be at the time?” and she understood that without question this would not be the last time these words would be flung her way. They would float with her through the school corridors and probably beyond.
As she walked, her skin felt like pudding. It was the sweat, she guessed. When she glanced down at her white top, she saw that the wetness under her arms had radiated halfway down her rib cage and was tinted a brackish yellow. Oh, she thought. Oh, how she hated Marjorie Williams and Mack Stanton and his sniggering friends and what they’d turned her into.
It took over an hour to walk home. Her mother sat on the front stoop wearing cut-off Levi’s and a man’s white sleeveless undershirt, painting minute blue flowers on her toenails. She sat in dappled sunlight that sifted through the just-leafing elm tree. She seemed happy. She looked pretty. She didn’t remark on Judith’s early homecoming. “Hi, princess,” she said, and Judith, with just a flick of her eyes, said, “Couldn’t you at least wear a bra when you’re outside where anybody can see you?”
To prepare for the jibes and simpering grins she knew she’d be receiving at school, Judith stood before her bureau mirror and practiced a drop-dead look while saying things like “Are you a half-wit or just easily amused?” and “If I was the weatherman I’d call you a pocket of fog,” phrases she imagined Don Rickles might use, but her heart wasn’t really in it. She sensed something she would later be able to put into words: that her adolescence wasn’t meant to play out in the spotlight; it was meant to be quiescent, transitional, pupal. She didn’t want unpaid electric bills and she didn’t want boys ogling her mother and she didn’t want friends telling her that her mother had given them cigarettes and free fries at the Satellite and she didn’t want boys using her presence as an excuse to ask someone nearby where their hands would have to be at the time. She didn’t want attention of any kind. She wanted to lose herself in the book she was reading, or in the movie she was watching, or in the plans she was laying for the life she would one day lead.
What Judith decided was that her mother needed to start acting like her mother again, and this would occur only if her father came back and started acting like her father again. To this end, Judith arranged to spend the summer with her father in order to bring him back to Vermont—not that she said so.
“Is there some point to this visit?” asked her mother, who knew that with Judith, there was a point to everything.
“I just want to see him, that’s all.”
Her mother studied her a moment, but she was late for her shift at the Satellite. She began looking for her keys, which Judith found under a catalogue for summer recreation classes. At the door, her mother looked back. “You can visit if you want, but Judy, sweetie, don’t do any plotting on my account.”
“I’m not,” Judith said in a peevish tone. She felt her skin flushing. “I just want to see him. Is that so terrible?”
Her mother smiled and said that nobody said it was.
The father Judith found in Nebraska was not quite the father she’d had in Vermont. He’d gotten slightly bulkier, for one thing, and he’d become a surprisingly good cook. He loved baking bread, especially challah, the braiding of which Judith herself quickly learned to enjoy. He’d taken up photography—black-and-whites of abandoned farmhouses and outbuildings were attached with clothespins to a line hung in the basement, where he’d built his makeshift darkroom—and he’d planted a tidy garden in the backyard. “You garden?” Judith said when he led her out to it, and he smiled and said, “Yes, well. It surprises me, too.”
She regarded the house itself. It was her first good look at it—she’d arrived after dark the night before. “I thought it was bright yellow with green trim.” The yellow now was pale and the trim was white. The shutters were painted a mossy green she found pretty. The work looked fresh.
“I only finished yesterday,” he said, and brought the back of his hand close to his nose. “I still smell like turpentine.” Then, looking again at the house: “Do you like it?”
Judith did, and said so. She also made a mental note to send a picture of it to her mother in Vermont. Her mother would like the house better now that it wasn’t those garish colors. Maybe she would want to move here, if Judith’s father couldn’t move back home. One element was common to both houses. Here, as in Vermont, her father liked to read in an overstuffed armchair covered with red floral fabric. Judith thought he might have bought it because it reminded him of his chair back home, but no, he said this chair had belonged to his grandparents and in fact he’d bought the one in Vermont because it had reminded him of this one.
Judith and her father fell easily into a routine. In the morning, her father sliced fresh bread for cinnamon or French toast, and when she saw him pouring cream from a little tin pitcher into his mug of percolated coffee, she wanted that, too, though she preferred such a large proportion of cream that it turned the coffee cool and caramel-colored. Her father also consumed a small dish of prunes every morning for regularity, which he prized. (Judith said she’d take constipation over prunes any day of the week.) Before the morning turned hot, they went out to the garden to pull weeds and hand-pick snails and harvest tomatoes and butter lettuce as well as beets, which her father had learned to pickle. They cleaned house together and marketed together and for lunch ate bacon, lettuce, and tomato sandwiches on toasted bread. Afterward they napped and read for an hour or so. Midafternoon, they walked to the pool in War Memorial Park, where Judith swam laps and sunned and covertly watched older boys while her father sat in the shade and read, sipping iced coffee, hunching close to his text, bracketing phrases and making marginal comments in a tight, tiny hand. College girls would come to his table, often in wet swimsuits, and Judith would wonder what her father might be saying that could make girls who at the other end of the pool seemed to jingle with laughter turn so still.
Before Judith had arrived, her father had sought out information about various activities she might be interested in—youth programs in dance and gymnastics; a drama camp at Fort Robinson; a three-day teen archeology dig at Toadstool Park—but Judith wasn’t interested in mingling, and in fact soon came to rely on her father’s regimen. Monday nights they went to Brun’s Coin Laundry (though she didn’t like the commingling of their clothes and having to fold her underthings in public), and because Judith loved movies, they went to the Eagle Theater every Wednesday and Sunday night, when the movies changed, unless it was something Judith guessed would make her queasy watching with her father (she ruled out Carnal Knowledge, for example). Tuesday nights her father taught a summer course on Jane Austen, during which time Judith read or walked or, most often, watched reruns of I Dream of Jeannie, Bewitched, or Truth or Consequences on Channel 11 from Denver. Normally she didn’t answer the telephone, but once or twice, when she did, a girl’s voice would register surprise and say, “Oh, I was trying to get Professor Toomey.” Occasionally her father would answer the ringing phone and listen a few moments before saying courteously, “Let me give you my office hours. We can discuss it then.” Other evenings he made a single large gin and tonic (usually with complaint about the hard-skinned limes available locally), brought it to the living room, and sa
t in his look-alike chair, where he read Pride and Prejudice to her in his low rich baritone. One night, after he finished a chapter and marked his place, Judith said, “Will I ever be like Elizabeth Bennet?” and her father released a puff of air through his lips, his version of a laugh. “Once, when you were ten or eleven, you asked your mother if you would ever be a bathing beauty.” He let his eyes settle calmly on Judith. “This is a much better question.”
She was stretched out barefooted on a sofa upholstered with worn green velvet. Dusk had come on during the reading, and the room was dim and cool. She said, “Did you used to read to Mom?”
He had, he said, before they were married, and afterward, for a while. “But then… things intervened.” He smiled. “Parenting, for example.”
“I like it when you read,” she said, because she did, but then, with the same innate calculation she would later notice in her own daughter, she said, “You know, if we bought a washing machine, we could read Monday nights, too.”
Her father smiled and sipped his gin and said maybe he would start watching the classifieds.
Judith slept in the large concrete basement of the house, where several rooms, including her father’s darkroom, had been improvised through construction of partitioning walls. When Judith arrived, the room allotted her was bare except for a worn Persian carpet on the floor and a cot and some old wooden crates, recently cleaned. A promotional calendar from Eitemiller Oil Company featuring a hunter and his dog before a local butte hung on one wall above a two-tiered glassed bookcase, its upper shelf half filled with a dozen or so old copies of books acquired secondhand for her by her father—Pride and Prejudice, for example, Anna Karenina, Tess of the D’Urbervilles. After breakfast on Judith’s third or fourth day in the house, her father led her to a lean-to shed built onto the rear of the garage. He cleared cobwebs with a broom handle and shined a light inside so that Judith could get her first glimpse of the bird’s-eye maple bedroom furniture. Plastic sheeting meant to protect the chest of drawers had yellowed and somehow become an encrusted part of the veneer. Elsewhere the layering dust on the furniture’s flat surfaces had darkened to grime and was dotted with rodent droppings.
Her father said, “Needs some help, doesn’t it?”
Judith said, “What it needs is some blind men to haul it away.” She leaned in and was met by the thick fusty smell of dead rodents. “Blind men who are also hard of smelling.”
It took them most of two weeks to restore the furniture—filling the scars and tiny holes, sanding, finishing, sanding, finishing, sanding again. They drank lemonade. Sometimes they would talk, but often they were quiet. Judith broke one of these silences by saying, “You lived in this house when you were in high school?”
“Yes.” Her father looked up at the house. “It hasn’t changed that much. The color now is close to what it was then.” His gaze shifted toward his garden. “The garden’s right where my grandmother’s used to be.”
“Did you like it here?” she said, because she knew he had not.
Her father took a sip of lemonade. “As much as I could’ve liked anywhere I’d been at the time.”
“I thought you hated it.”
He seemed amused by this assertion. “Did I tell you that?” he said, and Judith knew he knew he had not. It had come from her mother, as almost all the authoritative assertions did.
“A student of mine said it was a sincere house, and that seemed the right word.” He pointed out the foundation and back porch made of red sandstone blocks cut by stonemasons in Hot Springs, South Dakota. “You don’t get work like that anymore,” he said. “The rock’s still there, but the stonemasons are gone.”
Judith, on the verge of sulking, said nothing. What bothered her was the almost certain fact that the student who’d commented on the house was a girl. No boy would call a house sincere.
Judith and her father worked on quietly for a quarter-hour, and he said, “Did you know that this furniture has a history?”
Judith’s sourness hadn’t lifted; she gave a bored shrug.
The story, which Judith initially pretended to ignore, was this.
In 1879, the furniture before them had been crated by A. A. Copeland & Sons of Philadelphia and shipped to Rufus Sage by rail. Harry Toomey, Judith’s great-great-grandfather and the town surveyor, had hauled the packing crates from the station to a farm owned by a friend, where the furniture was stowed in a barn. The furniture was identical to the set his young wife had seen while visiting a family friend in Des Moines. She’d gone so far as to write to the company, whose response she had handed with trepidation to her husband. He had looked at it long enough to memorize what it said, then folded it and dropped it into the fire. He was sorry, he said, but buying furnishings they couldn’t afford wouldn’t give their marriage a good beginning. Harry Toomey was an absentminded man. He forgot birth dates, he forgot names, and he was not above playing this forgetfulness to his own advantage. When the day came that marked the first anniversary of his marriage to Christianna Gardner, he let most of the day pass without notice. Early evening, Christianna carried the Rufus Sage Record and a covered dish to her great-uncle, a widower who lived three doors down the street, something she did every night of the week. While there, she visited perfunctorily, straightened the house, and washed the day’s dishes. This generally took thirty to forty minutes. During this time Harry Toomey and two friends set to work. They took away the Toomeys’ crude bedroom furniture and replaced it with the fine bird’s-eye maple. By the time Christianna returned from her great-uncle’s, the bed was made, all of their clothes were neatly folded into the drawers of the chiffonier, and Harry Toomey sat by the fire reading, just as he had been when she’d left forty minutes before. Christianna went into the bedroom to put down her purse, as he knew she would. He didn’t speak or follow her into the bedroom. She was in the bedroom perhaps five minutes. When she came back out, her face was pink and discomposed, as if she’d been crying. She said one sentence: “I knew you wouldn’t forget.”
When he was done, Judith’s father waited a second or two and said, “Do you like that story?”
“I guess,” Judith said.
Her father made the smallest nod. “I do, too.”
“That man Harry Toomey who bought the furniture for his wife,” Judith said. “Did they stay happy and married?”
Her father shrugged. “I hope so. They stayed married, I know that.”
A breeze stirred. A truck could be heard downshifting on Highway 20, a few blocks north. Judith said, “You haven’t once asked how things are at home.”
Her father smiled but didn’t look up from his work. “How are things at home?”
Judith didn’t like being made sport of, and it gave her response a sullen edge. “It’s like she wants to be my age.”
In a mild voice her father said, “Whereas Judith wants to be hers.”
Judith didn’t think this was fair at all. “She borrows my clothes,” she said. “She asks my friends to call her Katie. She offers them cigarettes. She buys Grand Funk Railroad albums.”
Something just short of a chuckle escaped from her father, which incensed Judith. “She doesn’t wear bras. A boy at school told someone he gets a hard-on just looking at her.”
“Ah,” her father said, and if he was shocked, as Judith had intended, he didn’t reveal it. He was quiet for a while, and then he said, “People separated from their spouses… they’re almost like stroke victims. They have to learn everything over again.” He refolded his sandpaper and stared at the wood he was working on. “I can tell you from personal experience that the way we get around at the beginning isn’t always pretty.”
What was he talking about? What was he saying? “But this is just temporary, isn’t it? You being here and us being there? Either you’re going to come back home or Mom and I’ll come out here, isn’t that right?”
She was glad he had the sandpaper in one hand so he couldn’t put his fingertips together and make the cage he kept hi
s thoughts in, or at least she thought she was glad, but then she wasn’t, because when he couldn’t look into his thoughts, he looked instead at Judith, and she saw in his eyes more uncertainty than she had ever seen there before.
“Maybe,” he said. “I don’t know.”
“You don’t know? If you don’t know, who does?”
His eyes slid away from hers and he began again to sand. Judith stalked into the house. A half-hour later she peeked out. Her father was still seated in the same place, in the same attitude, evenly sanding the bird’s-eye maple.
Once they’d refinished the bedroom set, carried it to the basement room, and purchased a mattress from Midwest Furniture, Judith and her father began scouring farm auctions for the kind of quilt Judith wanted as a bedspread, and one Saturday morning, on a farm southwest of town, they found it, a like-new quilt intricately composed of blues, yellows, and greens in thirties prints. Judith had read enough about quilts to know their patterns had names, and when she asked the auction’s cashier about the quilt’s history, she was directed to the widow who was selling the house and farm in preparation for a move to the retirement home in Rufus Sage. She was sitting by herself at the fringe of the crowd, eating pie from a paper plate.
“It’s called Young Man’s Fancy,” the woman told Judith. “I made it for my husband the winter before we were married.” She lifted a corner of the quilt and brought it within an inch of her eye for a last inspection. “It’s a nice tight stitch,” she said in a whispery voice, “better than six to an inch.” Judith felt a sudden sense of intrusion, and her father seemed to feel it, too, because he said, “We’d like for you to keep it,” but the woman quickly dropped the quilt from her hands and raised her eyes. She squinted, as if from an unexpected introduction of light. “It turned out my husband didn’t care for the quilt—he thought it was too prissy. My husband…” She smiled, shook her head, and stared off, as if trying to compose the sentence that might set before them the exact nature of her fifty-three-year marriage. “He was a good provider,” she said, then paused again and finally gave up. She said, “I’m glad you’ll have it, missy.”