“He still hasn’t talked to Coach.” Even in these low tones, Warren’s voice rang with accusation.
“How do you know?”
“Cuz I asked Gary. I ran into him in Jack & Jill.”
“Maybe we should let up on the football.”
“This whole town revolves around football. It’s like snubbing his nose, if he doesn’t go out.”
Teresa chewed her lip. “The Polanski boy doesn’t go out.”
Warren rolled his eyes.
“He could get hurt.”
“Hell. He won’t play that much.”
Then Warren reached around Teresa to switch off the bedside lamp, brushing her nipples and letting his lips rest against her neck. She had to admit; their sex life had improved. Nothing bonds like a common enemy.
Two weeks went by before Teresa found an opportunity to get back to Flora’s. There was no rush since Flora’s auction date was set for mid-September. Teresa had her hands full with the Tremain auction. And Otto. She had to ride herd on him to make sure he kept to the rules they’d imposed on him. To their surprise, Otto took a job. He hired on at Hardee’s. He made a friend, some new kid named Quentin Strickland. What kind of person is named Quentin, Warren had said, but Teresa assured Warren that Quentin seemed normal. He wore baggy jeans and T-shirts. He slouched, unkempt and surly. Around her, he was largely inarticulate. A regular guy. They should be grateful.
Now, she and Flora were seated once again at the dining room table. Flora wouldn’t budge on keeping her art activities secret. Too bad, but Teresa had to admit people weren’t likely to care about an artist they’d never heard of, even if she did have a painting hanging in the governor’s mansion in Lincoln, which Teresa found out by Googling Flora’s name. She’d learned that Flora had showings in Chicago, Minneapolis, and New York. She’d disappeared from the art scene abruptly, and no one knew why.
“So,” Teresa said, once the tea had been poured. “How did you get started painting?”
Flora scooted forward in her chair. Teresa leaned in to hear her. Their foreheads nearly met across the lace tablecloth. This time, Flora seemed eager to resume her story.
By the time her grandmother told her about the rape, Flora’s mother was already institutionalized. Her mother had depression. Her mother heard voices. Her mother had tried to strangle her grandmother, and Flora had to hit her mother with a croquet mallet to get her to stop. After that, Grandma had her mother committed. Grandma said that was the best way; her mother could get the care she needed.
Flora took a series of three buses across town to visit her mother. She sat with her in a stale room, no curtains on the windows, tile floor. The walls bilious green. Her mother rocked on the edge of the bed. Her hair hung in dirty strings, the ends frayed where she chewed on it. She hadn’t had a recent bath. Flora sat on a hard-backed chair, not too close.
“Grandma made spaghetti last night.”
No response.
“I got my report card.”
Flora knew that report cards were a big deal in some kids’ households. She knew that a report card like hers (3 C’s, 2 D’s, 1 F, the F in math) would be a very big deal to kids whose parents were part of the PTA, the same ones who showed up for parent teacher conferences. She missed a lot of school. Often, she didn’t feel well. Plus, she was needed to go to the store for milk and eggs, to pick up her grandmother’s medicinal whiskey in the brown paper bag from Skip Jaffrey, take the rent to Herm Griffith, their landlord.
Flora liked riding her bike to Herm’s because it was down a lane on the outskirts of Lincoln, and she passed a field with three horses. If she pedaled fast enough, so her grandmother wouldn’t think she’d gone astray or gotten herself into what Grandma called a compromising situation, in which case she might be sent to her room or made to kneel on rice on the kitchen floor until her knees bled, she could take a few minutes to study the horses. A black one with a white blaze of lightning on its forehead, a reddish-brown one with four white stockings and a swayed back, and the third, her favorite, gray and dappled with stars.
She held the way they looked in her head all the way home—and then, after the supper dishes were washed, while Grandma dozed over an open book in her chair, Flora sat at a tiny desk in her room under the eaves and drew horses. She loved the way their manes flowed under her pencil. She practiced until she could make the three of them gallop across the page, graze under a tree, stand together like old friends gossiping. She observed their distinct personalities—the bold black, the timid red, and the affectionate gray—and found ways to bind those attitudes to the paper.
At school, though she didn’t do well in math (having missed out on fractions), she could draw. “When you get to junior high, you can take an art class,” Mrs. Jordan said.
Sitting with her mother in the institutional place for sick people, Flora said, “Mrs. Jordan said I could take art in junior high.”
No response.
“She says I’ll love it. ‘When you get to junior high, Flora, you can take art.’ That’s what she says.”
Flora got quiet and real still after telling this. Teresa waited in the silence. She could hear Flora’s labored breathing. Shadows from the afternoon sun danced against the wall. Teresa was afraid Flora would pass out or have some kind of attack. After a while, Teresa said, “You’ve had a hard life.”
“Some of it,” Flora said. “Some of it, I got real lucky.”
“I’d like to hear about that lucky part.” They both chuckled over that.
Otto took to going out on Friday nights with Quentin. Teresa and Warren stayed up late, worried and waiting. They pictured their son lying at the bottom of a ditch or passed out in the backseat of Quentin’s car. They’d never met Quentin’s parents. The Stricklands attended the Presbyterian Church. Quentin’s dad was a manager at the ethanol plant. His mother had been a yoga instructor, but there wasn’t much call for yoga in Reach. She was skinny and fit, just what you’d expect.
Otto had an 11:00 p.m. curfew, but he invariably walked in ten or fifteen minutes late. This became the territory of their arguments. They knew Otto did it on purpose, just to rankle them, and it did rankle them because it was calculated. They couldn’t let it go, but it didn’t seem serious enough to ground him.
He stopped banging around the house. He grew secretive and quiet. He slinked in and out of rooms, as if they weren’t present. Even when they spoke to him, he reacted as if he hadn’t heard or as if they were calling to him from some distant place he’d forgotten. He spoke in grunts. He wore slouchy clothes, ill-fitting jeans that impaired his natural grace. His walk became a stutter, his voice guttural. He slept a lot, when he wasn’t working. The slack skin under his eyes looked bruised. His face took on an unnatural pallor.
One morning in late July, Teresa and Warren were sipping coffee over a Saturday morning breakfast. They kept their voices low, not wanting to wake Otto. He’d been late, again. There had been shouting, some shoving. If asked, they would have said Otto needed his rest, but the truth was that neither of them had the energy to confront their son. Teresa had planned to make waffles, but instead they were eating toast with peanut butter. Warren’s jaw hung slack. He was growing older before her eyes. Teresa knew her hair looked ratted and wild.
“Don’t worry about it,” Warren said. “I was exactly the same way at his age.”
“You were?” Teresa found this hard to believe. At fourteen, Warren was sitting beside his daddy in the pickup, learning how to do the auctioneer’s prattle by selling off telephone poles on the side of the road.
“Sure. It’s normal for a boy to sow some wild oats.”
Teresa stood. She moved over to pour more coffee.
“Normal,” she said. Then, with more force, “Remember how we worried when he kept bringing home those dead birds, conducting funerals in the backyard?”
“Yeah. We damn near drove ourselves crazy over that one.”
“He got over it.”
“Right.” Warren k
new his lines. “Then, when he told his teachers he was a descendant of Black Elk. Remember that?”
She laughed. Actually laughed. “Oh, yeah. We thought we had a compulsive liar on our hands.”
“How about that imaginary friend?”
“Sir Edwin. That was during his knights and dragons stage.”
Warren took her hand. “He’s fine.”
“The important thing is . . .”
“. . . He knows we love him.”
By now, she was seated on Warren’s lap. She gazed tenderly at his dear face. He ran his hands down her shoulders and arms, but she was too tired to respond. Instead, she rose and tightened the belt on her robe.
“You’re right,” she said. “We just have to get through this stage.”
The next few weeks Teresa had a hard time keeping Flora’s story from infiltrating her mind at inopportune moments. For instance, she thought about Flora learning of her mother’s rape after she and Warren made love. Snatches of Flora teased her brain when she thought about Otto. She missed a whole sermon one Sunday thinking about her last teatime with Flora. Flora had the tea and cookies on the table when she arrived. They scarcely talked about the auction at all before Flora launched into the lucky part of her story.
The first day of junior high, Flora could hardly sit still, so great was her anticipation for art class. First period after lunch, she flew into the art room. Her stomach churned, and she could barely breathe. Her hands were clammy. The teacher—Mr. Faraday—had blond hair and long, elegant fingers. He wore horn-rimmed glasses that he pushed up on his nose with his forefinger. This was his first school.
Mr. Faraday handed out scissors, paste, and construction paper. Then he drew a pattern on the blackboard of a tulip bouquet in a squat vase. “This is what we’re going to make today.” He said some more things about color and design, but Flora didn’t hear him. Cut and paste? Like kindergartners? She burst into tears.
Mr. Faraday got the class going before he stood over her desk. “What’s the matter with you?” He sounded like a toy wound too tight.
“I came here to do art. This isn’t art.”
She saw him fist his right hand. He looked around at the class, busy cutting their floral patterns. He stooped low and growled in her ear. “Just what do you think you want to do?”
She sniveled. Wiped her nose on her sleeve. “I want to draw.”
Mr. Faraday walked away, his steps fast and drumming. Hard-soled shoes on a hardwood floor. He rummaged around in a cabinet. He marched back, slapped a piece of paper on her desk, leaned over, and hissed, “Okay. You want to draw? Draw.”
He left her alone the rest of the period. She took a pencil out of her backpack and drew a horse. She made the horse sassy and spry, mane flying. She paid attention to the muscles flexing under the horse’s skin. She worked hard on the light in the eyes so you could tell the personality, defiant and bold. At the end of the hour, Mr. Faraday came and picked up her paper. He looked at her drawing a long time. Then he looked at her. The bell rang, and still he never said a word. She went to her next class and that night cried herself to sleep.
The next day, when the students were seated in Mr. Faraday’s class, he held up the remnants of the cut–and-paste project from the day before. “This,” he said, “is not art.”
Flora felt her breath catch in a sharp uptake. She glanced around to see if any of the other kids were looking at her, but they only stared at Mr. Faraday. He picked up a trash can. The leaves and petals pinged against the metal as they floated down. Then he waved a large bound notebook. “This is the proposed art curriculum for seventh grade.” That hit the trash can with a loud thump. “In this class, we will do art. Today, we’ll start with drawing.”
At this point in Flora’s story, Teresa had a sudden and overwhelming urge to cry. Thinking of it in church on Sunday, she had to take out a tissue and blow her nose. Warren put his hand over hers. Otto had not come home until 2:00 a.m. the night before, and when he had come home, he’d been drunk. Even now, he was home sleeping it off. Warren thought she was crying about Otto, and Teresa let him think it. Maybe she was and maybe she wasn’t; she could hardly tell anymore.
The first week in August, Otto was caught breaking and entering. He was a minor, so technically the arrest had some other name, but he and Quentin had been nabbed red-handed breaking into Ed Lambert’s house. They broke a window when Ed was home, loading shells in his basement. They were damn lucky Ed didn’t shoot them. Everybody knew Ed was crazy, and he was fed up with kids breaking in. This was the third time in a month, though Otto hadn’t been involved before. After money, rumored to be hidden under Ed’s mattress. Or maybe drugs.
“Drugs?” Teresa said, dumbfounded. She stood in the sheriff’s office, one hand clamped around Otto’s arm. Warren was in Hay Springs, working an auction.
She took Otto home. She had no idea what would happen to him. Something about juvenile court and being sentenced. The sheriff said Ed was considering whether to press charges.
She walked into the house ahead of Otto and sat in the kitchen chair and stared at the table.
Otto slumped in the doorway. He looked scared. She wanted to put her arms around him. Instead, she stood. “Are you hungry?”
He shook his head.
“Could you . . . Go to your room, Otto.”
She reached under the sink and dragged out a bag of potatoes. She peeled six in long thin strips, forgetting there were only two of them. She sliced them with onions into a frying pan. Salt and pepper, turned them often. She dumped a mound onto a plate and took it to Otto’s bedroom door, but she couldn’t bring herself to open the door. She couldn’t say his name. She couldn’t knock. Finally, she set the steaming plate on the floor and went back to the kitchen. She picked up the frying pan, went outside, and dumped the contents onto the compost pile beside the garden. Looking at the browned crisp potatoes, the golden onions slithering atop a mass of decaying vegetables, she started to cry and knew she wouldn’t stop anytime soon.
The day of Flora’s sale dawned bright and sunny. Warren had a flatbed truck hauled onto the adjacent empty lot, and the best of what Flora had to offer was loaded onto the truck. An old violin. A set of Delft china. Waterford crystal candleholders. A couple of young men Warren had hired carried the furniture out to the front lawn. Otto used to help them, but he spent his Saturdays now working for Ed Lambert, doing whatever Ed told him to, mucking out stalls, digging holes that he filled in by nightfall. In exchange, Ed had agreed not to press charges. When he was not working for Ed, he was at football practice, the grunts and team yells reverberating across the field. Quentin was gone. His parents, too. No one knew where. Miraculously, Teresa’s family had held together. They were intact. They were polite and careful. No one had time for movies. She and Warren hadn’t made love since Otto’s arrest. Really, everything had turned out fine. Just, sometimes Teresa thought the air in the house was tinged blue. When she looked at her son, she longed for a glimpse of the old Otto, her buoyant boy, and then she’d have to put her hand over her chest to keep from doubling over.
The rest of Flora’s household goods were lined up on cardboard flats, stretching from one end of the yard to the next. Minutes before the sale, Warren would show up and group several of these flats together. People would have to bid on the lot, haul everything away. That was the secret of an auction—make the buyers feel they were getting a bargain and get rid of stuff for the seller. The crowd for the auction was small, but respectable. The usuals were there: old man McFlinty with his gray straggly beard hanging to the waist of his bib overalls; Tripper Washburn, whose nasal voice carried above everybody’s including Warren’s, even when Warren used the PA system; a few children playing tag around the decaying elms. One guy had driven an hour and a half to look at the old violin. He repaired instruments and wanted the curved wood from the sides.
The iron lung and all of Flora’s personal belongings had already been trucked to Denver. Teresa had helped Flora cr
ate and ship her paintings. They’d driven to Scottsbluff rather than to excite the curiosity of the Reach postal workers. Nobody knew a thing about Flora’s fame or her troubled past or how art had saved her.
Flora was gone, too, choosing to move to Denver before the auction took place. Teresa walked through the empty house hoping to catch a glimpse of Flora, a whiff of perfume, a glance in the closet mirror. When the dining room table sold, Teresa longed to put her face to the wood, inhale deeply one last time, imprint her lips on the oak boards.
Finally the only thing left in the house was the old upright piano. Warren had the guys move it onto the front porch, but it was too heavy to carry down the steps. Once a player piano, the roller mechanism was broken. Warren tried to auction it from the stoop. Teresa stood in the crowd to help Warren spot any anxious bidder. Warren started at $20, but no one bid. At $10, Teresa noticed a boy, eleven or twelve, tugging on his mother’s sleeve. From a few yards away, she could see that he was begging his mother to buy that piano. Teresa moved in closer.
Teresa didn’t recognize the pair of them. The mother looked tired, haggard. She was middle-aged, middle-sized. Nothing remarkable about her. The boy was scrawny. He had a hungry look. Each time the boy stamped his foot and said, “Please,” the mother shook her head. Teresa’s heart pounded in her chest.
“Can I help?” She looked at the boy.
The boy ignored her. “Please, Mom.”
“We already have a piano.” His mother sounded weary.
“It’s in the room with the TV. I can’t practice when I want to.”
“Where would we put it?”
“In my room.”
“Do you play?” Teresa asked.
The boy nodded.
“If it helps,” Teresa smiled at the mother, “I’m pretty sure he could have the piano.”
“Stay out of this.” The mother’s voice landed hard and flat.
“See, Mom. It wouldn’t cost anything.”
In Reach Page 17