The Distance Home

by Paula Saunders

  “Hi there, Eve,” Al said. And, seeing her carrying her cup to the sink, he asked, “What you got there?”

  “You hungry?” She was suddenly tense, newly irritated.

  “Famished. Just about starving.”

  “Well, sit down,” she said, “and I’ll get you something.”

  “Okay.” And picking up a section from the stack of old papers on the table, he said, “Anything new around here?”

  “Nothing new, Al,” Eve said, disgusted, and she cooked up some bacon and put it together with ripe tomato, crisp iceberg lettuce, and plenty of mayonnaise on toast while Al looked over the last week’s worth of newspapers.

  “Oh, that’s just dandy. Thank you,” Al said when she set the sandwich in front of him.

  “I’ve got things to do,” Eve told him. “Seems I’ve gotten behind in everything.”

  Al nodded, not even looking at her. He was happy with his sandwich and coffee and newspaper, happy to be home, happy to not be driving anymore and to not have to sleep in a motel for the next few days. So Eve turned and took herself down to the basement, to her sewing corner in the utility area, to be by herself, so she could think, and so she could finally get to all the fixing and mending she’d left undone for far too long.

  32

  Breaking into the

  All of Everything

  When the cheerleading squad wanted to switch from gold to green tennis shoes late in the school year, Eve was against the idea, saying that it was “simply outrageous” for those girls to be demanding yet another pair of tennis shoes when the ones they had were still perfectly good. She went on from there with things like “For God sakes, you’ve barely used the first pair you made us buy” and “You girls should know better” and “Isn’t it the end of the season? It doesn’t make any sense.” So René figured they might as well stick with the gold shoes they already had and avoid all the trouble.

  No one agreed.

  “You’re the captain,” Eve insisted. “You should have the say. Why not just tell them they shouldn’t be so happy to spend their folks’ hard-earned money?”

  At the next meeting, René made her arguments. Then they voted. Everyone still wanted new green tennis shoes.

  “Well, I’m captain,” she said, in spite of the five-to-one majority, “and we’re keeping the gold ones.”

  “You can’t do that.” The girls were indignant, nodding.

  “You guys shouldn’t be so demanding.”

  “We’re not demanding,” one of the girls said, mocking her. “We voted.”

  “Well,” René said. “Either way. We’re not getting new shoes.”

  At the next game, the squad showed up in new green tennis shoes.

  “Mrs. Deacon said that since we voted, it was all decided.”

  Mrs. Deacon was their cheerleading adviser.

  “It’s not a dictatorship,” one of the girls put in, obviously quoting Mrs. Deacon as she took out her pom-poms.

  “If that’s how you want it, then fine. I’ll just be wearing these,” René said, indicating her shiny, suddenly wrong-colored sneakers.

  When she worried at home about her off-color shoes, Eve just smiled and said, “That way everyone will know that you’re the captain and they’re the crew.”

  René cheered for two more games before she got called into Mrs. Deacon’s homeroom. “The girls said you took a vote,” Mrs. Deacon noted and proceeded to give her an elementary lecture on democracy.

  “I’m captain,” René said, trying to explain that a good performance had nothing to do with democracy. It had to do with leadership. If people couldn’t follow a leader, the whole performance would suffer, which was what was happening now, with their tennis shoes. “And it doesn’t seem fair to ask our parents to buy us new shoes at the end of the year,” she added.

  “The parents don’t seem to mind,” Mrs. Deacon pointed out.

  “They can do what they like,” René countered. “We just won’t match. That’s the price.”

  Mrs. Deacon sent a letter home explaining that René had been suspended indefinitely from cheerleading for her inability to work with others.

  “Fine with me,” René said.

  “You give those girls too much as it is,” Eve agreed. “I’ve seen you. They wouldn’t know their asses from their elbows if it weren’t for you. I bet you made up almost all those cheers yourself, right?”

  So the last games happened without her. Then cheerleading was finished for the year. But something about getting kicked off the squad changed the chemistry, made René vulnerable to things she hadn’t even known were brewing. Suddenly, with the visible breach in her defenses, kids who’d said hi to her all year were silently passing her in the hallways, then turning to whisper to a friend, and boys were sneaking up behind her and yanking her hair or snapping her bra.

  René lost her first-chair flute challenge, and Tami, who’d been fighting her for it all year long, took her seat. René recaptured it the next week but walked out of class to find, written across her locker in huge, red script, RENÉ SUCKS DICK, with a graphic of a long-haired girl on her knees, as described. She got a bucket of soapy water from the janitor and cleaned it off, but the halls had been filled with kids changing classes, all of them glancing sideways at her as her face went crimson, her knees and bladder weak, a mysterious, thin stream of pee surprising her, glistening down her leg as she squatted to cover herself, pressing her thighs together.

  The next morning, someone in the trumpet section tapped René on the shoulder and handed her a piece of paper folded into a square. It was a petition, a form they’d been reviewing in social studies. There’d been petitions about protecting the whales and eliminating the death penalty, and René had signed them all. This one already had three full columns of signatures, single-spaced, on each side.

  We, the students of General Custer Junior High, think that René shouldn’t get to do everything she wants all the time. She never lets anyone else have a chance. There’s lots of kids who want to do the things René gets to do, but there’s no way because René takes everything for herself. René isn’t better than anyone else, she’s just conceited and stuck up because she always gets to do everything she wants. Also, René does too many activities, so she isn’t doing a good job at any of them. There’s lots of kids who could do a better job than René if only we got a chance. Everyone who thinks it’s not fair that René gets to do so many things, sign below.

  She looked at the list of names, front and back. Everyone had signed it: the boy she liked had signed it; Tami, the second-chair flute, had signed it; the kids in the trumpet section had signed it; the glockenspiel player had signed it; even the one girl who sometimes sat with her at lunch had signed it.

  When René finally looked up, the band teacher was pointedly holding out his hand, intending to collect the note that had been passed in his class. She handed it up to him and watched as he read. He got a strange, tired expression on his face and looked at René, tilting his head in sympathy. He sighed as he folded the petition neatly on its creases and wedged it under the sheet of music they were just about to play. Then he wearily lifted his baton.

  After class, he called René into his office. And as the other kids shuffled out, peering back over their shoulders, he closed the door.

  “You’ll need to speak with your parents about this,” he said, handing her the petition. “They’ll want to talk to the principal.” His face settled into a gloomy, well-worn frown. “I’m sorry this happened.”

  She nodded, pale.

  “Sometimes there’s a lot of jealousy.” He stopped. “You okay?”

  René nodded in a so-so way.

  “All right.” He sighed. He was tired. He’d been a band teacher for twice as long as René had been alive. “If you want to go home, I can write you a note.”

  “I’m all rig
ht,” she said.

  “Good. Off you go to your next class. And be sure to show that to your parents.”

  She left his office, securing the petition in her notebook, and took off for algebra knowing there wasn’t a kid in the building who didn’t hold something against her. That was just the way it was. And no one could tell her that it was just some nagging paranoia about nobody liking her or some resurrected, unrestrained yearning for friendship poking its head out from underground. She had proof.

  * * *

  —

  When Al came home, Eve handed him the note. “I’m calling the principal,” she said. “I want you to come with me.”

  “You bet,” Al said.

  So Eve and Al went to the school and demanded to know how something like this could have happened, but there were no answers for a question like that.

  “You can imagine,” the principal sighed. “There are things we can control and things we can’t. Kids will be kids.”

  “That’s nonsense,” Al said, “and you know it. Believe me.” He lowered his voice and leaned forward. “If you’re entrusted with educating these kids, how they treat each other is one of the things parents are counting on you to manage. If you can’t do that, you’re not doing your job. It’s as simple as that. It’s inexcusable.”

  “I’m sorry this happened,” the principal said finally. “I truly am.”

  “That’s fine. I appreciate that. I do. Only problem is, what’s René supposed to do now? Go through high school with this same bunch of numbskulls?”

  The meeting ended in a stalemate, since there was nothing to be done about any of it.

  “Thank you for that, Al,” Eve said on the drive home.

  “Thanks for nothing, you mean. Nothing’s going to come from that meeting. Not one thing.”

  “But I couldn’t have done it on my own. They wouldn’t have taken me seriously. I’d have been just another upset mom.”

  “They get away with too much,” Al said. “That’s for sure.”

  Eve nodded. “I only wish you could have been there when it was Leon.”

  Al didn’t say anything.

  “I don’t mean to be starting something,” Eve said.

  “This is a totally different deal.”

  “It’s not different but that it’s René. They treated him worse. It was the teachers, themselves, coming after him. And no one even bothered to stand up for him.”

  “I don’t want to go over it,” Al said. “We’ve been through it.”

  “Don’t I know it.”

  Eve shut up. She cracked her window and lit a cigarette.

  “Just so you know,” she said, “I don’t think Leon’s doing so well.”

  “Leon hasn’t been doing so well for a long time now, Eve,” Al said, parroting her. “And I don’t know what to do about it. Do you?”

  “No.”

  “If I knew what to do, I’d have done it,” Al said. “He’s got himself in a fix—living down in his buddy’s trailer like a drunken freeloader. I have no idea. I’m fresh out of ideas. I am.”

  “I just wish it could have been easier for him, earlier, when he was younger.”

  “I know you blame me,” Al said. “But I’ve done what I can for him, and you’ve done more.”

  They drove in silence.

  “It’s already been a long day,” Al said.

  Eve nodded. But when Al pulled into the driveway and turned off the engine, she jumped out and slammed her door. Al sat for a minute. Then he got out and stood leaning against the car, and he took the time to have a cigarette before he went inside.

  * * *

  —

  René kept a stiff upper lip at school, artfully shunning anyone who dared come near, but at home, she was crying all the time, tears falling like water from a busted dam. She’d stand in Eve’s walk-in closet, raking through Eve’s jewelry tray, and cry. She’d watch TV and cry. Right in the middle of a game of King’s Corner with Jayne, she’d have to get up for Kleenexes. Sometimes she’d cry during dinner and have to leave the table, and every night she’d weep herself to sleep, then wake up in the dead of night to the sound of footsteps creaking up the stairs. She’d listen, counting, imagining some pockmarked cowboy with a rope to strangle her, a hook to tear her to bits, an ax to chop her to pieces. When she’d gathered enough courage, she’d slip out from under her blankets and dash across the hall, to Eve’s room.

  “Mom,” she’d whisper, waking her.

  Eve would open her eyes and lift her covers, and René would crawl into Eve’s bed, where she’d sleep, cuddled in, until morning. It was starting to happen every night. Though she was nearly fifteen, every night heavy footfalls echoed on the stairs, and every night she’d run to sleep with her mother, and every night Eve would open her covers and scoot over, and every morning René would be surprised to wake up still alive.

  Even after their biggest fight—one night when René and Eve had just got home from yet another tedious Saturday in Belle Fourche, drawn and tired from the long drive and the endless, disheartening day of teaching, and after René had leveled her best at Eve as they’d stood in the kitchen, continuing their enraged altercation until René finally brought the whole thing to a close with the rousing finale of calling Eve a Bitch!, and even after Eve had flown across the tile floor and slapped René hard across her mouth and René had thought, That’s it! That’s the very last time! and cocked her arm and hit Eve back across the face as hard as she could and, bent from the sting of it, Eve had said, “You should be ashamed of yourself,” and René had fired back, “You should be ashamed of yourself!,” not even crying—even then, even that night, René came on her knees, trembling and afraid, to where Eve slept, and Eve lifted her covers and moved over to make room.

  René was reduced by the darkness. She couldn’t navigate what she couldn’t see. She’d been blind, mistaken, ill-advised and caught off guard. No one had told her that instead of making her admirable and praiseworthy, her will to excel, her determination and unyielding forward advance, would place her directly in the crosshairs.

  “Striving for excellence,” as Mrs. G had called it, had brought her a whirlwind of resentment and the sharp point of vengeance from those who felt themselves undervalued and overlooked, unappreciated and forgotten. Contrary to the years of Sunday school lessons, along with Mrs. G’s lengthy orations on applying oneself with dedication and purpose, in an instant they’d made her understand that she’d better step back, that she’d better start hiding her light under a bushel basket. Or else.

  She must have done the same to Leon as she’d done to her classmates—just like Eve had always said: eclipsed and overstepped him without even bothering to look. But the world wasn’t tender-hearted or willing to hit the dirt, as her older brother had been. It wasn’t the least bit interested in protecting her feelings or giving way. As it turned out, the world was upright and eager to hit back.

  Now she was afraid of the slightest shadow on the wall, just like a baby. And Eve was there, ready—even after all they’d been through, and even though René held so much against her, had forged and hammered the heaviest armor in place around her heart just for her—ready to catch her and hold her close, keep her safe through the night like she’d done since the day René was born. Eve was there, always, every night, opening her arms when there was nowhere else to turn.

  * * *

  —

  In the last weeks of Eve’s life—many years after Al had passed away, and long after Leon had been found dead on the floor of the hospital, and after Eve had sold her big, empty house on Pine Boulevard and moved into her elder-community condo—René would come to visit, and the two of them would sit together in Eve’s living room, Eve confined to her chair, watching Bonanza reruns, her hands and feet twisted in a crippling neuropathy, as René tried to keep busy by rummaging through Eve’s pile
of old papers, reading funnies and outdated shopping flyers. In general, Eve would sleep a lot and not speak much, but sometimes she’d stare at René so devotedly that, feeling the pressure of her gaze, René would look up and turn to her.

  “Do you need something, Mom?” she’d say, finding her mother rapt, her eyes moist and lighted from within.

  “No. I just want to look at you,” Eve would say quietly, tentatively, conserving breath. And she’d continue, unashamed, letting a slight, mysterious smile overtake her as she gazed at René steadily, taking her in as though she were something brightly colored, sunlit, singular, and miraculous.

  René would be older—her own children grown and gone, each living in a different far-off city—and still the depth of feeling, the force of Eve’s love and longing, would come as a shock. How many times had those same eyes turned on her as sharply as blades, hard and accusing? How many times had they held a rain of judgment, or a curse meant just for her? But now, as Eve’s powers waned, all the long-held grudges and resentments were dissolving, scattering, leaving only the essential seed—the sweetness and purity and shining love—burning bright, suddenly wholly visible and gleaming.

  She must have looked at me that same way when I was a newborn in her arms, René would think. Imagine.

  Imagine that it would all come around to this—from uncertain beginning to uncertain end—all the love she’d been looking for all her life, hidden away right in front of her, just like sweet, golden kernels of corn beneath a husk.

  And her chest would constrict, as if heartbreak were just like it sounded—something physical and audible, something that left a mark.

  * * *