The Distance Home

by Paula Saunders

  She got home after dark having seen neither hide nor hair.

  “As if I didn’t have anything better to do than drive around in circles all day,” she said, breaking open one of the bags of chips, then unpacking the sandwiches, putting a few of them out on dinner plates so that the “whole goddamn day” might not seem like such a complete waste.

  31

  Zipping Stones into Pockets

  Just after Mrs. G had left town, Miss Dea decided that though she would continue putting on The Nutcracker, she wanted to give someone else a chance to dance the Doll and the Candy Canes, so René was replaced in these, her usual roles. Miss Dea also asked Joey to recruit some of his friends from school to dance the boys’ parts, but they showed up in dirty jeans and T-shirts, refusing to put on tights, then huddled in a group at the back corner of the studio, giggling.

  “Lackluster!” Eve started saying to anyone who’d listen. “It’s just not the same as when Helen was doing it. Of course, Helen was such a professional. She had years of experience, and that makes a difference.”

  Eve still danced the part of Mother Ginger, but with Dea’s husband backstage, working the curtain, she was made to feel like “somebody’s idiot cousin,” she said. Every time she exited in her hoop skirt, Mr. D had to hold the curtain for her to pass, and he never failed to give her a look like he’d just whiffed a bucket of rotting fish.

  “No one seems to have any memory of how much Helen and I put into this production. People seem to think it just sprung up out of nowhere. But I can tell you that if it wasn’t for Helen Gilbert—” Eve would break off only to resume: “Without Helen here to keep it alive, it’s nothing but a rattletrap piece of junk. It’s heartbreaking to see it falling to pieces like it is.”

  Eve had no beef with Miss Dea, she said, but neither could she bear to see things done “half-assed.” What good was there in taking something so meticulously and carefully conceived, brought to life from nothing, tended and nurtured with so much effort and love, and “flushing it straight down the shitter”?

  “Taking something like that and letting it crash into a heap just because you can’t be bothered or don’t know how to pay attention to it is worse than never bringing it up in the first place. It’s a loss. It’s a tragedy. And I’ll be damned if I’m going to sit idly by and just keep my mouth shut. There’s no excuse for it. None.”

  The next fall, when Eve called to sign René up for classes, Miss Dea had a different idea.

  “There’s no room for René in this school,” she said plainly.

  “Now, wait just a damn minute, Deanne,” Eve started. “Your classes can’t be full already.”

  “No,” Deanne said. And she must have given it some serious thought, because her answer came without the slightest hesitation: “Classes aren’t full. René just isn’t welcome here anymore.”

  Eve hung up without shouting or arguing, without slamming the receiver, just pensive, still.

  “What’s going on?” René was in the kitchen with Eve, sitting at the table.

  “Sounds like you’re not going to be taking any ballet classes this year,” Eve told her. “Dea says you’re not welcome to come back.” Eve deepened the furrow between her brows. “Did something happen with you two?”

  René had taken Miss Dea’s summer workshop that year. They’d done mostly country-western line dancing. “What the heck,” Dea had drawled, putting the needle down on the latest Merle Haggard record. “Ain’t it summertime?” But nothing had happened.

  “How can she do that?” René said.

  “It’s her school. She can do what she likes.”

  René was dumbstruck.

  “No classes this year,” Eve kept repeating, mulling it over. Then she called Mrs. G.

  “She’s trying to get back at us, Eve,” Mrs. G said. “For giving her a run for her money.”

  “What we gave her was the world on a string,” Eve countered. “Still,” she admitted, “it’s probably my fault. I tell you, Helen, it’s just a fiasco without you. It’s a great big mess. But I should’ve kept my mouth shut. Maybe something I said got back to her.”

  “If she can’t do the job, she deserves to hear the criticism. That’s for damn sure.”

  They went round and round about what was going to happen next.

  “No more reason to hold back on opening your Royal Arts school there in Rapid,” Mrs. G said.

  “And a good reason to start one.” Eve laughed.

  “She’ll be sorry, Eve,” Mrs. G said. “It’s a terrible thing she’s done.”

  After Eve had hung up—as she was trying to tell René about the possibility of expanding Royal Arts Dance into Rapid City, about maybe putting out some advertising and organizing a class schedule—René started furiously running through her all-too-familiar protests about helping Eve teach.

  “It’s going to be your dance school one day,” Eve insisted.

  “Not me. Not ever.”

  “Never say never. I’m building this business for you, you know. You might be happy to have it one day when you need the income.”

  “If I ever have to make a living like that, I’d rather die. I’d rather kill myself.”

  “How can you say that?”

  Eve glowered at her, wondering how René could not have a single thought about how hard Eve had worked to get this school going, or how Eve had started from nothing, hadn’t had even one of the advantages René took for granted.

  “I’d rather hang myself from the railing or throw myself off a cliff,” René was saying, going through her usual gyrations. “I’d rather find a river and drown myself!”

  “Try to think positive, why don’t you,” Eve barked. “Just try. It’d be good for you.” Eve had been reading Norman Vincent Peale. She thought he had just the right approach. “It works, René. It does. It makes everything better for everybody.”

  “Like it works for you?” René mocked. “Like it makes everything better around here?”

  Eve stood up and left the room, pointedly whistling a happy tune. She headed straight downstairs to the pile of alterations that was crowding her sewing machine, proud of her decision to walk away from such negative-mindedness and her determination to make something worthwhile of her day regardless of everything going to hell in a handbasket around her.

  * * *

  —

  As far back as René could remember, it had seemed like she’d been riding a stormy, disordered team of horses—Eve and Al, Leon and Jayne, school and ballet—standing astride as many saddles as her legs could manage, clutching a fistful of tangled reins, balancing in jerks and starts like an untrained circus performer. Achievement and focus were the only answers she’d ever known to the question of how to keep upright, how to stay above the continual rumble. Just as exaggerated hygiene might be a way to endure living in squalor, pushing herself, succeeding, came to seem like the only solution to the problem of everything always falling to pieces.

  And considering the way things had been going at Miss Dea’s, René was all in favor of some time off from ballet. Though she figured she’d never get out of her indentured Saturdays with Eve, at least on weekdays she could do regular things. She could focus on school with a singular purpose, a unified vision. With The Nutcracker fallen away, with Leon graduated and gone, with Eve and Al settled into mostly muzzled hostilities, things would be simpler. Without everything pulling her from one direction to the next, threatening to topple her entirely, she might just be able to let go of the reins and, for once, keep her balance.

  So she settled on a year of normal life. And just like an actor sorting out a new role, on the first day of school, she tended to the details. She pulled back her hair, strapped her books and notebooks to the carrier on her bike, put her foot up on the pedal, and took off, sailing across town to General Custer Junior High.

  She
attended cheerleading tryouts, executing a front walkover to a full split, dazzling the panel of judges, and was unanimously elected head cheerleader. Though she’d been playing the flute since sixth grade, she now spent time practicing and captured first chair in the band. She continued her piano lessons with Mrs. White, who was finally not unhappy with her, since, for the first time ever, René didn’t have to lie about going over her pieces at home. She started taking guitar lessons and begged her band teacher to instruct her on the oboe. When it came time to choose the ninth-grade student government, René was voted secretary. And that fall, when the Custer Long Hair Marching Band was scheduled to perform at halftime for the high school homecoming football game, René won the coveted role of band majorette. On the night of the big game, she exploded from the ranks with a dazzling scissor kick and a loud scream of her whistle. Then she led the band onto the field, taking her place at the front, holding down the beat with her baton.

  It was a good start to the year.

  She read Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” in English class and thought it was sad and disturbing and totally unnecessary. Plus, it made no sense. No one deserved that.

  In home ec she sat next to Carly, called Carl, a heavy-set Indian girl who either hated her guts or was in love with her. It was impossible to tell. Carly was constantly bending over her, challenging René in smoky whispers either to fight her or to kiss her, and when René refused both, Carly would say—always loudly enough for everyone to hear—that René was a conceited cunt.

  And though she didn’t have friends, exactly, as the year went on, it seemed that everyone knew her. Kids she didn’t know would call her name. She understood that it didn’t mean they liked her. In fact, since she didn’t know their names, it was a problem.

  René was the one who’d danced in every Nutcracker, been elected head cheerleader, led the marching band. She was the one who’d be called on in history class to make a run to A&W, to get the teacher a root beer and onion rings, with one of the boys assigned to drive her. They’d get sodas and spend time cruising the neighborhoods before coming back to catch some final tidbits about the French Revolution or the Enlightenment, never anything that wasn’t in the textbook. So she was the one who cut class with impunity and still got good grades. She was the one who won the home ec sewing contest and got a ten-dollar gift certificate for the skill displayed in her patterned full-length, zipper-front jumpsuit. She was the one who danced the Sugar Plum Fairy in the talent show and performed the Mexican Hat Dance in the middle of the gym for International Day. She was the one who introduced all the songs the band played for its Christmas concert, and she was not only selected for All-County Orchestra but was the youngest-ever student to win a spot in All-State Band. She was the only one who could do a chest roll, a cartwheel, and splits on the balance beam during Gymnastics Showdown Week in P.E., and she had a floor routine that all the teachers and administrators left their desks to see because it was known to “knock your socks off.” Amazingly, she even won the school-wide Ping-Pong tournament that year. All in all, she was an uncontrolled explosion, like a firecracker going off in your hand.

  So, though some vague idea of having friends stayed with her, the situation remained pretty much the same as it had been since grade school. She knew the drill. She didn’t expect to have friends. She simply turned her mind away, taking that place inside herself that felt like loneliness and setting it aside, like zipping a little stone into a pocket.

  * * *

  —

  That winter, Leon left Hill City and moved, first to Lead, then to Spearfish, to live in a friend’s trailer. In general, he didn’t come home at all, except when he showed up to fall onto the couch and sleep for a few days. Still, there were phone calls for him—Leon owed someone money, or some “old friend” they’d never heard of was looking for him. Eve didn’t give out any information.

  But if Al was home, or even if he just caught wind of some trouble regarding Leon, the arguments would resume full blast from a not-forgotten midpoint—as though opposing warriors had suddenly been jolted from a deep, unconscious slumber and found themselves aching to get back to business.

  First, Al would rail at either Leon or the impression he’d left on the couch; then Eve would square off with Al about his never having been there for Leon in the first place; then Al would forbid Jayne to do something, and Jayne would cry; then Eve would scream at Al that he had no right to tell any of them what to do; then Al would slam the door and roll away in his car, and René would swear at Eve, and Eve would slap her; then René would scream and run up the stairs as Eve called after her, threatening to wash her mouth out with soap. And just as abruptly as everything had started, things would quiet down, and they’d all gather, smoldering, to sit in front of the television.

  So, even with Leon mostly miles away, sleeping on a cot in someone’s trailer in Spearfish, or lounging on an old mattress in the basement of a friend’s place in Lead, and even with Eve and Al generally keeping to their own corners, what René came to think of as the Black Bird of Anger continued to reside with them. It would alight on one of them after the other. And though, after stirring up blinding outbursts and deafening rages, the bird would finally lift, René began to realize that it wasn’t going anywhere. It was staying. It was simply perching somewhere out of the way, biding its time. And while for the rest of them the days were passing, slipping quietly through their fingers, that bird seemed to have eternity on its side.

  * * *

  —

  Then one day in spring, when the grass was finally coming up in Technicolor, the daffodils and tulips blooming, lilacs just beginning to bud, Eve went out to her garden shed to get a watering can and trowel, to put in her annuals. She opened the door, which she’d found strangely ajar, jumped back with a start, as though she’d seen a rattlesnake coiled atop the stacked chair cushions, then quickly reversed herself once again and lunged forward.

  “Leon!” she cried. “Leon!”

  He didn’t respond, and she thought for a second that he might have come home just to die there in that shed.

  “Leon!” She shook him, taking his face in her hands, turning his head back and forth until he finally opened his eyes. “My God,” she said.

  “What?” Leon said.

  “For Chrissakes, Leon,” Eve shouted. “What in God’s name are you doing in here?” She stamped her foot at him. “Get up! Get in the house!”

  And Leon got up, and she shuffled him inside, putting away all her plans for the morning. She sat him at the table and poured him some coffee. Then she sat down with him.

  “Leon!” she said when his eyes began to close, his head bending inevitably toward the table. “What’s happened to you? What were you doing out in the shed, for God sakes?”

  “The door was locked,” Leon mumbled, “so I laid down in there ’cause it was cold out. That’s all.”

  “The door was not locked,” Eve scolded.

  “I tried it,” Leon said half-heartedly.

  Eve shook her head. It was no use arguing with him in this condition—whatever condition this was, drunk or stoned, Eve didn’t know. Just thank God Al wasn’t home.

  “Go upstairs and take a shower,” Eve said, “then get into bed. We’ll talk about it when you get up.”

  So Leon did those things, and he slept all that day and all that night and all the next day, getting up once for a bowl of cereal and a big drink of water, then falling straight back into bed. Eve checked on him from time to time just to make sure he was still alive, but she figured that if he was that worn out, he might as well just keep sleeping. When he woke up, he’d feel better, and they’d have a chance to talk.

  But Leon must have felt better in the middle of the night, because when Eve got up the next morning, the guest room was empty and his car was gone. He’d taken the clean clothes she’d laid out for him, left the dirty ones behind, and d
isappeared.

  A few days later, there was a call from the county courthouse. Leon had been a no-show on a series of DUIs. They were looking for him. They had a warrant.

  Eve gave the officer the address where she thought Leon was living, but the officer said they’d already checked that location and there’d been no one around.

  “Then I don’t know,” Eve said. “I don’t have any idea.”

  “If you see him,” the officer said, “or if he happens to come by—”

  “I’ll have him come right down,” Eve said.

  “Just give us a call,” the officer said.

  But Leon didn’t come back to the house, and Al was still on the road, so Eve was left to worry it out on her own. She called a few of Leon’s high school friends, but none of them had heard from Leon in a long time.

  “He’ll turn up,” she said to herself, digging out in the garden, finally putting in her petunias and marigolds. “Seems like he’s got nine lives.” She put down her trowel, carefully shook a young flower from its casing, and placed it evenly, steadily in the ground, watering around the exposed roots. “He’ll show up one of these days when we’re least expecting it,” she muttered to herself, on her knees in the cool sunlight. “Then what’ll we do?”

  Eve finished her planting and went inside. She hung her gardening hat on a hook and sat at the breakfast table with a cup of coffee and a cigarette. She just sat there, smoking and looking out the bay window, watching the road. She sat for a long time before she finally said to herself, “Well, Eve, if you’re going to accomplish anything today, you’d better get going.” She ground out her cigarette and stood up, and just then Al’s car pulled into the driveway. He walked through the back door and came into the kitchen.