No One You Know

by Michelle Richmond

  “How old are you?” I said.

  I heard footsteps behind me, and turned to see a man in jeans and a plaid flannel shirt walking toward me from the direction of the barn, carrying a small bucket. “Thirty-one,” he said. “She’s old but tough.” He came around on the other side of her and ran his hand along her back. “Just like me, huh, old girl?” he said, hugging her around the neck. He looked at me and said, “We’re getting all our old-age symptoms at the same time—arthritis, failing eyesight, stiff legs, the works. My wife tells me that pretty soon she’s going to have to put me out to pasture, too.” He reached into the bucket and pulled out a turnip, which he cut into small pieces with a pocketknife before offering it to her on the flat of his hand. She nibbled it slowly.

  “You must be here for Farm Trails weekend,” he said. “We’re a lot busier than usual this year. Must be a slow day in the city.”

  “This is your farm?” I asked.

  “Mine and my wife’s. As of 1983. Back when we bought it they only had a few cattle—it was an apple farm in those days—but we expanded over the years, and in 1998 we turned it into a fully organic operation. Now we have nine hundred cattle. Still small as dairy farms go, but more than big enough to keep us busy. I’m Frank Boudreaux,” he said, offering me his hand.

  “Ellie.”

  His handshake was firm but not too forceful, and I could feel the thick calluses where his fingers met his palm.

  “It’s a beautiful piece of land,” I said.

  “We think so.” He patted the horse, who nuzzled her head against his shoulder. He pulled out a couple of blackberries, and she took them from his hand. “When my wife and I bought the farm, we just thought of it as a way to go off the grid, make ends meet, and have a better quality of life. We never dreamed of all this.” He tended to the horse while he talked, checking her ears, dabbing her eyes with a damp cloth. Finally, he dumped the remaining turnips on the ground in front of her and said, “I’m about to milk Tabitha. That’s pretty much the day’s main attraction, if you want to join us.”

  I couldn’t figure out how to tell him why I was really there. Instead I just smiled and said, “Wouldn’t miss it.” I patted the horse’s flank and ventured a question, unsure if I was ready for the answer. “What’s her name?”

  “Dorothy. I’m surprised she didn’t run away from you. She doesn’t usually take too well to strangers.” Frank glanced over at me. “Hey, are you all right?”

  “We’re not strangers,” I managed to say.

  “Come again?”

  “Dorothy and I go way back. I knew her before she came out here, back when she was being stabled in Montara.”

  He did a double take then, studying my face. “What did you say your name is?”

  “Ellie.”

  “Enderlin?” he asked.

  I nodded.

  He looked at the ground. For a few seconds neither one of us spoke. Finally he looked up. “You’re not here to milk the cow, are you?”

  “No.”

  What he said next completely took me off guard. “I think I always knew you’d show up one of these days. In a way, I suppose I’ve been waiting for you.”

  “You have?”

  “Yeah. I’m glad you’re here. I want to talk to you.” He looked up the hill, flustered. “Unfortunately, I’ve got all these kids over there, waiting for me to put on a show. Why don’t you stick around? This afternoon, after everyone is gone, we can sit down and talk.”

  “Okay,” I said. I was beginning to feel a bit dizzy, like everything was happening too fast. I didn’t know what to make of this man, this place. Part of me wanted all the answers. Another part of me, I realized, wasn’t prepared for this.

  For the next few hours, time took on a hazy, unreal quality. I sat on a hay bale in the circle of children while Frank showed us how to milk Tabitha. The children had a go, one by one, followed by their reluctant parents, and then it was my turn to sit on the little metal stool. I’d never milked a cow before, and it was nothing like I thought it would be. The teat looked like a finger, or a flaccid penis. When I squeezed and pulled, squirting the milk into a plastic cup, Tabitha lifted her tail and released a large, wet dollop of shit. This delighted the children, one of whom promptly declared it “grosser than gross.” I declined to drink the milk, even though everyone else had drunk theirs.

  “Drink it!” someone yelled. It was the little boy who had been chasing the dog, Rowdy. Then the other kids joined in, until they were all chanting, “Drink it! Drink it!” So I did. It was warm and weirdly sweet, and it was an effort to get it down.

  “I’m not cut out for farm life,” I’d said to Lila once, when we sat just a stone’s throw from this very spot, on the porch of the big white farmhouse. We’d been sitting in rocking chairs, drinking lemonade. The lemonade was tart and pulpy, with little bits of sugar that hadn’t melted. “I like this part,” I’d said, as the ice cubes clinked in my plastic cup. “The lemonade, the porch, the rocking chairs. It’s like something out of The Waltons. But I wouldn’t care for the rest of it—digging for potatoes, slopping the pigs, mucking the horse’s stall, waking up at the crack of dawn.”

  “You’d get used to it,” Lila said.

  “I don’t think so.”

  She rocked back and forth, her face turned to the sun, and she talked to me with her eyes closed. “You have this idea of what your life is, what it should be, and you’re afraid to veer too far from it. But if you had to—I mean, say, for argument’s sake, the big one hit and the city went up in flames, and somehow you ended up living in the country, and the only way you could survive was to raise your own food—you could do it. You might even like it. You might decide it actually suited you better than the life you have now.”

  “Would I have MTV?” I asked, pouring myself a second helping of lemonade from the cold metal pitcher.

  “No.”

  “Would I get to drive into the city to shop and borrow books from the library?”

  “No, all the stores burned down. The library, too. There’s nothing. You have to make your own clothes out of drapes, just like Scarlett O’Hara. For entertainment, you have to tell stories in the evening by firelight.”

  “Couldn’t do it,” I said. “I’d starve and go naked and ultimately die of boredom.”

  “But you could,” she insisted. “You’d just have to adapt your mind to the idea of an altered reality, a new set of rules.”

  “What about you?” I asked. “What if you could no longer practice math?”

  “That doesn’t make sense,” she said. “There will always be math. It’s the most fundamental building block of the universe. Humankind can live without MTV and Banana Republic—even, in a pinch, without literature—but not without math.”

  “For argument’s sake,” I insisted, “let’s just say that’s part of the deal. No math for you. Ever.”

  “That’s different,” she said. “Everything in your life right now is just a hobby, it’s expendable. But math is my calling. You don’t give up your calling, no matter what.”

  I stood up and stepped away, tossing the last of my lemonade on the ground. It quickly sunk into the earth, leaving a dark spot on the dirt. “I’ll wait for you in the car.”

  “Don’t be so sensitive,” Lila said.

  “This calling of yours. What has it gotten you? No friends, that’s for sure. No boyfriends. Maybe I don’t know what I’m supposed to do with my life, but at least I won’t die a virgin.” It was the meanest thing I could think of to say. Later, I would regret it, but at the time I wanted to hurt her, the way she’d hurt me by pointing out what I feared was my greatest shortcoming. For a genius, finding one’s life’s purpose was easy. For the rest of us, it was a considerably more difficult task.

  After that, I sat in the car in the driveway, doors open, Billy Idol cranked up high on the tape deck. From behind my sunglasses, I watched Lila riding Dorothy through the pasture. She looked natural on the horse, like she was meant to be th
ere. It was almost two hours before she came out to the car. At some point I dozed off. When I woke up the tape had run out, and Lila was sitting in the driver’s seat, trying to get the car to start. “I think you killed the battery,” she said.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “No, I’m sorry. You’re going to be great at whatever you do.”

  “Thanks,” I mumbled. I wasn’t entirely ready to forgive her yet, but I appreciated the apology. The weird thing about Lila was that she could say a thing like that—about my having no calling—without any malice; to her, it was simply a matter of stating the truth. It wouldn’t have occurred to her that her honesty might be hurtful.

  “I mean it,” she said. “You will.” She gave my arm a little squeeze. “I’ll go find William and ask him to give us a jump-start.”

  A few minutes later, she came out of the house with a big guy in overalls and a Giants cap. I couldn’t tell if he was wearing the overalls ironically or not. “William, meet my sister, Ellie,” Lila said. “Ellie, William.”

  William tipped his hat and mumbled, “Nice to meet you,” then went off to get his truck and jumper cables. He hooked up the cables and Lila sat in the driver’s seat, turning the ignition on command. He had our car running again in a couple of minutes. When he was finished, he propped his forearms on Lila’s open window, leaned into the car, and said, “Should be all right as long as you keep the engine running.”

  “He smells like sweat and apple pie,” I said to Lila, as we pulled out onto the main road.

  “You say that like it’s a good thing,” Lila said.

  “Isn’t it?”

  She didn’t answer.

  “I think he likes you,” I said.

  “William?” she said, laughing. “We’ve got absolutely nothing in common. Actually, he’s more your type than mine.”

  “How’s that?”

  “He’s really into music. He was in some weird band.”

  It was a nothing comment, something I quickly forgot. I rarely went back to the farm, and the only other time I saw William was on the day, a year or two later, when I went out there with Lila to sell Dorothy. Now, as I sat on the stool in front of the cow, swishing the warm milk around in a plastic cup, I thought about that afternoon so long ago, the good-looking guy who seemed to have a little crush on Lila. At the time, it had seemed so insignificant. William, Billy—it was starting to make sense. What have I done my beautiful one/what have I done?

  AFTER MILKING THE COWS, FRANK TOOK THE KIDS on a hayride. “What about seat belts?” said the blonde woman who’d been struggling to get her kids out of their car seats when I arrived.

  “It’s a hay wagon, honey,” Frank said. “Doesn’t come with seat belts.”

  “I don’t know,” the mom said, but her kids screamed until she let them ride.

  Afterward, Frank showed everyone to the smokehouse, where a whole pig hung by its feet, head dangling. The throat had been slit, but the face still looked alarmingly piglike. The boy who had led the “Drink it!” cheer after I milked Tabitha ran out of the smokehouse, sobbing.

  After the smokehouse there was a pumpkin-carving contest. At precisely four-thirty, Frank thanked everyone for coming and sent them all home with a free slice of sugar pie. I stood with him in front of the house and watched the last car roll slowly down the driveway.

  Thirty-five

  THE FOYER OF THE FARMHOUSE WAS LARGE and square, with wide-plank floors and fading floral wallpaper. In the center of the room was a wrought-iron sewing machine table, on which stood a vase filled with sunflowers. Upon stepping inside, I was struck by a profound sense of déjà vu. I must have been in the house with Lila on one of my handful of visits to the farm, although I had no distinct memory of it. The place smelled of floor polish, potpourri, and the musty, burnt odor that lingers after a rug has been cleaned with an old vacuum cleaner. In the room to the right, which was filled with old settees and high-backed chairs, the pale green carpet bore the marks of a recent vacuuming.

  Across from the front door, a staircase led up to the second floor. There was a sudden movement upstairs, followed by the creaking of the floorboards, and I glanced up to see someone retreating into one of the upstairs rooms—a white flash of elbow, the dark shadow of a shoe. Swirls of dust circulated in bars of light at the top of the staircase.

  “This way,” Frank said, leading me through the carpeted room, past a large flat-screen television and a bookcase crowded with videos and DVDs, into the kitchen. The kitchen was spacious and light-filled. A gleaming, stainless-steel refrigerator towered next to an antique Wedgwood stove. A diner-style booth, complete with red vinyl seats, had been built into the bay window. The effect was charming and somewhat unsettling. I imagined the way a marriage and family would unfold inside this house, indecisively, haphazard as the décor. I suspected most houses shared more in common with this place than with my own childhood home, where each piece of furniture was chosen with an eye for its relationship to the others, and where every object had its proper place.

  “Have a seat,” Frank said. The vinyl squeaked as I slid into the booth. The seats smelled as though they’d been scoured with Lysol, and the gleaming windows reeked of Windex.

  “Regular or decaf?” Frank asked.

  “Regular, please.”

  He took a canister of chicory coffee down from the cupboard and measured the ground coffee into an old percolator. Just as he was setting it on the stove, a phone rang, and he excused himself. He was gone for several minutes. When the percolator began rattling, I turned off the burner and poured the coffee into cups, glad to have something to do. I wandered around the kitchen, hoping to find something that would give me clues about the elusive Billy Boudreaux. But the photos on the fridge were mainly of a little girl—elementary school shots, Girl Scout camp, high school graduation, what appeared to be a Hawaiian vacation. A collection of ceramic cookie jars shaped like various Disney characters lined a high shelf, and a set of copper pots and pans hung from a metal rack above the island.

  Frank returned. “Sorry about that. It was my daughter.”

  “The one in the pictures?”

  “Yep. She’s doing a semester down in the Florida Keys, studying the effect of global warming on sponge life and coral reefs. They have this underwater laboratory down there called Aquarius, sixty feet below the surface, and they broadcast in real time over the Internet. It’s addictive. First thing in the morning I’m sitting at my computer, hoping to catch a glimpse of Tally with the tanks strapped to her back.”

  He put a plate of brownies on the table between us. “I’d have never guessed she’d decide on a career in marine biology,” he continued. “Her mother and I are completely land-bound. I’m ashamed to confess I don’t even know how to swim. But that’s what kids do—they surprise you. You have any?” He glanced at my left hand.

  “Not yet.”

  For a few more minutes we made small talk, as if neither of us quite knew how to broach the obvious subject. We talked about Tally, and the farm, and his wife’s previous career as the curator of a small art gallery in the city. I asked him about the large collection of DVDs and videos I’d seen in the other room, to which he replied that he was something of a movie buff. “Actually, I inherited them from my brother, Will,” he said. “More than half of those are his. Over the years I’ve been expanding the collection.”

  “Inherited?”

  “He has no use for them now, of course.”

  I waited for him to say more by way of explanation. But he didn’t elaborate. For a few seconds neither of us spoke. Frank kept nibbling at the brownies, like a nervous habit. He must have eaten four of them before we finally got around to the subject we’d been dancing around all day.

  “You said you’ve been waiting for me,” I said finally. “Why?”

  “One thing I’ve learned in this life is that the past always resurfaces. It simply stood to reason that you’d come around one day. You’ve been here before. It’s all a big circle,
right?”

  “I’m not sure I understand.”

  He looked up at me. His eyes were dark brown, the pupils so large as to make his eyes appear almost black. My mother had once told me that, because the iris expands in the dark, and because juries tend to look to a person’s eyes as a sign of whether or not they’re telling the truth, a dimmer room works in your favor when one of your witnesses is on the stand. “It’s human nature to feel trust when someone has large pupils,” she said. “If you can keep it in the vault, I’ll tell you a little trick I use. Immediately before going in front of the jury for closing arguments, I intentionally blur my vision by looking down at my notes and crossing my eyes until I lose focus. This dilates the pupils, so that when I stand up in front of the jury I look wide-eyed and honest as Abe.”

  It had provided an interesting window into my mother’s nature, into the person she was capable of becoming when she was at work, but I wasn’t sure it was a side of her I wanted to see. After she told me that, I found myself wondering if I could really trust her emotions. When she looked into my eyes and said she was proud of me, was she telling the truth, or was she simply feeding me a line, calculated to convince me of my own worth and thereby turn me into a better person?

  “Do you like stories?” Frank asked, pushing the plate of brownies aside.

  “Everyone likes stories.”

  “I have one for you.”

  I took a deep breath. “Go on.”

  “Early one morning in December 1989, my younger brother Will showed up at our door. A month before that, we had kicked him out. He’d been living with us for quite a while, trying to get clean, and he’d been doing great, so great that I thought he might really do it this time, he might really turn his life around for good. But then he had a relapse. We’d given him so many chances, and we had a new baby at the time, and my wife, Nancy, understandably, didn’t want him around. When Will was sober, he was a huge help on the farm—a hard worker, kind to the animals, got along with everyone. While Nancy was pregnant, he treated her so well, you’d have thought she was carrying his baby. He’d come in the house several times during the day to check on her, and when he finished with his work he’d do chores around the house so she wouldn’t have to. He’d go out in the middle of the night to get milk from one of the cows—he’d gotten this idea in his head that she should have only the freshest milk, if it had sat in the refrigerator for more than an hour it wasn’t good enough. ‘Straight from the teat is the only way,’ he’d say. ‘It’ll make the baby stronger.’ And to this day I’m not convinced there wasn’t something to that; after Nancy drank fresh milk, the baby would invariably start kicking up a storm. Anyway, for months, that baby was all Will could talk about.