Beyond Deserving

by Sandra Scofield

  “He seems to be feeling happy, Ma.” Michael takes the extra plate she hands him and sets it on his side of the counter, then pulls a chair over from the little desk with the telephone. “Really, he looks good to me. He’s already getting some color in his face.”

  “There’s something about it I don’t like.” She doesn’t want Michael to misunderstand her. “Your dad always went by the Bible, mind you. He didn’t go to church for a long time, but he knew the Word. He knew the Commandments. But this stuff eggs him on past all reason. He’s got good advice all mixed up with nonsense, and there’s too much of it. Who does he think he is? A missionary? Does he think he is supposed to save these fellows?” She turns and moves her head toward the screen door. She can’t hear the men yet. “I bet you, right now, he’s got him out in that yard telling him how he used to drink. How he doesn’t anymore. Talking, while dinner’s getting hard around the edges.” It galls her that Gully uses the past like that. She thinks it ought to be a private thing. She thinks he makes himself out worse than he ever was, for the effect. After the treatments at the hospital he didn’t remember things right. He used to get morose, and go off by himself and drink some, that much is true. But he never stumbled around acting crazy, and he never drank so that it interfered with his work. The meetings he’s been going to for years now rile him. She thought they were a temporary measure, to tide him over after the hospital. Can’t he see how much they disturb him? Why else does he need to get away so much, in the woods? What is out there? Couldn’t he give up history for the sake of the present? It isn’t fair. She never butted him around with his faults and lapses, when they hurt the most, when they mattered. She doesn’t need to be reminded now. Sleeping dogs ought not to be yapping and growling. That’s why they have a saying about them.

  She rummages around in the refrigerator and comes up with a can of pears and half a carton of cottage cheese. She gives Michael the can with an opener. She spoons Miracle Whip into the cottage cheese and stirs it around, then plops it onto the fruit halves, two to a plate for the men and none for her.

  Michael pushes his plate back toward her. “Take one of these.”

  “Can’t stand the stuff,” she snorts. She can finally hear Gully and that man clomping up the steps into the tiny hall.

  “Bless the Lord and paint the rafters. Now we can eat!” she says.

  Gully seems cheerful. “I worked up an appetite.”

  Homer says, “I had coffee and crackers this morning.” He has a wily look. He takes his time deciding on one of the two available plates before he sits down beside Michael.

  People who don’t eat regular have to store it up when they can. She remembers that from a long hungry childhood. It has been fifty years since she had that terrible gnawing in her belly. Gully always kept them all fed. He always knew she could stretch a dollar and a bean, and he counted on that, but the dollars were always there. He left her money when he went off to be by himself. She’s been sad, and she’s been glad, but in half a century with Gulsvig Fisher, she hasn’t ever been hungry.

  “Help yourself,” she says pleasantly to Homer, and passes him the meat loaf.

  22

  “Homer here worked the Tok highway,” Gully says.

  She must look surprised. Gully says, “Sure a small world, ain’t it?”

  “That so?” she manages to say. The “ain’t” was for Homer’s benefit, she supposes. A man who has read the Bible, William Shakespeare, and Herman Melville knows better.

  “Yes, ma’am,” Homer says with his mouth half-full. “Lived in this old tin-can trailer all one winter, burning scrap wood and green logs, waiting for the work to start up again. From the Canada border up above Tok.”

  “The highway went past that.”

  Homer laughs. “Sure did, but I’d heard about work farther north that paid real good and—well, it sounded like an adventure. I wanted to see the real north. It didn’t work out so good.” He takes a huge mouthful of potatoes.

  “Think of the miles they built with my machinery,” says Gully, with awe in his voice. She hopes he won’t start naming places. He loves to look at a map and put his finger where he’s been, where they have been as a couple, as a family. Best of all he likes to point where a ship has sailed that he helped build, or a road. One time in Guatamela, they saw a railroad engine he said was from Sumter, Oregon. He clears his throat. “A man takes a journey one step at a time.” Homer swallows and says, “Sometimes it’s that first step kills you.”

  Gully knows. “That’s what friends are for,” he says. He sticks one finger up in front of his nose, his way of announcing a quotation. He says, “The comfort of a true friend is an affirmation of life.” He looks over at Michael. “Homer’s got a dilly of a drinking problem.” Geneva thinks Gully looks pleased.

  “I never heard of nobody getting talked out of drinking,” she says sourly.

  “Oh yes, ma’am, I’m sorry but they sure do.” Gully sucks at his teeth. “Somewhere, every night of every week of the year, and lots of noontimes too, that very thing is going on.” He holds up his finger again. “Though, ‘Let no one be deluded that a knowledge of the path can substitute for putting one foot in front of the other.’ M. C. Richards.”

  “If you say so.” Geneva clears their plates. Homer has sopped up the last streak of grease with his bread.

  The silver maple outside the kitchen window rustles in the evening breeze. The tree sprang up all on its own after the fire. Gully said it was from the roots of the tall tree twenty yards away, on the Lewis property. He said the trauma of the fire must have let it loose.

  “I could make coffee,” she says unenthusiastically. She can feel all three of them getting set to run.

  “I’ve gotta get home, Ma,” says Michael. She doesn’t comment. She has never asked a married son to give her time that belongs to his wife. She does wonder what they do on a Friday night, though, that he can’t sit with her a little while, especially now that he can see how his father is.

  “We’ll set a spell out in the yard.” Gully pushes Homer toward the door.

  “Appreciate the chow, ma’am,” Homer says. Geneva sets her mouth to keep from saying something she will regret. Homer seems to her the veteran of too many soup kitchens.

  Gully fed that other fellow on Tuesday night, hauling him home after that blessed meeting. She stayed in her room. Three pieces of pie was all that was left. Gully said he ate most of it, but he couldn’t eat that much in a sitting. He gave it away to hold that old drunk captive to his talk.

  She lies on her bed with the pillows all propped and the tv on with no sound. She tries to read from a Good Housekeeping, but there isn’t one article to catch her eye. Editors think women die at forty.

  Off her little night stand (a fruit crate covered with contact paper), she picks up one of the invitations she sent out a few weeks earlier:

  You are invited

  to celebrate

  with Gully and Geneva Fisher

  Fifty years! On the back she printed “An old-fashioned recipe for a successful marriage.” Gully thought most of it up, though it had been her idea, and she set down the words. They had a good time figuring it out.

  1. Get together one boy and one girl.

  2. Set the date.

  3. Get a blood test, buy a license.

  4. Find two friends or hangers-on.

  5. Do it.

  6. Stick to it.

  People will either understand or think it is funny. It is the truth, though, and more people could stand to know it. Young people expect too much of marriage. What do her own sons want? Michael has done okay, all things considered. He is a good family man. Ursula isn’t the friendliest woman, but she does her share, and they have the kids. But Fish and Katie are a downright wonder. She didn’t even know they were married for the longest time. She hardly saw them half a year at a time. She never saw Katie pregnant. Nobody brought it up. It was little Juliette who told her, and Juliette who said Katie went away with her baby a
nd came back alone. At least Katie had it. At least she didn’t kill it instead.

  Geneva never asks Fish anything. She can remember times he said he was going out for cigarettes, and she wouldn’t see him for a month. When he was in Vietnam he didn’t write for so long it drove her crazy. She wrote his commanding officer, who sent the chaplain to talk to Fish, who wrote her to say if she ever did that again he wouldn’t come home when it was over.

  She knows what it is with Fish and Katie. They are too self-centered for a baby. Neither one of them has grown up. Though she can’t speak for Katie’s mother, she knows she did her level best. You can look at Michael and see that. Fish could have turned out better. Twins, like two sides of a coin. She thinks Gully had a lot to do with it. There was something he recognized in Fish right away, something Michael didn’t have. Now he is sorry. He said just the other day, “Isn’t it something? Fish buys a house on the GI bill, and here neither one of them lives in it!”

  She will be surprised if she sees Fish or Katie either one tomorrow. She asked Katie to take her shopping for napkins, because she thought it would give them a little time together. She wanted to see how Katie was getting along. But Katie stood her up, no different than she might have figured.

  She goes to Gully’s room at the other end of the trailer and straightens up the bed. Every morning Gully pulls the blankets up over whatever mess he has made of sheets and pillows, and, every day, sometime before bed, she straightens it all up, tucks things back in, and pulls the blankets back up as if she has not touched it.

  The room has the faint acrid smell of Gully. Socks on the floor of the closet, like a little boy. His wool sweater on a hook, stretching out the neck. She sits on the edge of his bed. The mattress curves in like a hammock. She told Gully they both needed mattresses last year, but Gully insisted on her getting one, and not him. He said he liked his bed as it was.

  He has things stuck up all over his walls. Clippings from the newspaper (the dead doctor; a new find in Egypt; a couple of cartoons; a photo of Michael and some of his students with their birdhouses). There are drawings from each of the kids when they were little. The drawings are brittle and brown around the edges. It does tug your heart to see the charm of children’s art. Their children. People the same size as the trees beside them. A lion with a curly red mane. Flowers with yellow moons in the center. The drawings were in an atlas during the fire, that was what saved them. There is a photograph of Fish, too, at the radio on board his ship, smiling, looking straight at you. His face is cleanshaven; he looks like a teenager. All the other photographs he sent home from Vietnam for safekeeping were burned up. All the school pictures and report cards, the certificates, merit badges, and ribbons. Evelyn’s yellow afghan she made for 4H. It would be a comfort to have it now. There isn’t anything of Evelyn left, except a few birthday cards that Geneva saved in a metal box from the fire. Evelyn probably did one of those drawings, but Geneva doesn’t know which one. She could ask Gully, but it would make them both sad. He has his own way with memories.

  She leaves Gully’s room and shuts the door. It does no good to go in there. Her room is hers, and in there there is nothing of the past to cling to, except that one box. She lives in the present tense. She has Gully, that’s what there is. Michael has a family. Fish has his ways. Evelyn is dead. They haven’t even had a dog in ten years.

  She stands at the screen door that opens onto the big closed-in porch where Gully has a wood stove, a shop table, and his appliances waiting to be fixed and sold. She has her laundry room, and the freezer.

  Through the screens she can see the men’s shapes against the back of the truck. She can hear their voices. They might talk all night. Then Gully will be worn out before the party. Whatever Michael says, Gully seems frail to her. She worries.

  Every night of the week, Gully said. Every night, AA meetings, was what he meant. For a long while he was gone two, three, four nights a week some weeks, until she thought she would scream from being left. He needed to go; those people had something to give him that she could not. She didn’t say anything, any more than she had said anything when he got drunk and set the shed on fire, any more than when he called Evelyn a slut for coming in late when she was sixteen and looked like a full-grown woman. It doesn’t do any good to do battle with a man’s needs. You put him in God’s hands and go around cleaning up after. You are thankful for the good days.

  Now Gully goes on Tuesday. Once in a while he goes out to the VA Domiciliary and talks to the fellows there, besides. And he goes out scouting, not so much for wood as for men who might need him. “What do you spent your time with old sots for?” she asked one night. Gully said he had to. It was something he had to do. “You have to reach out, to keep yourself steady.” She hears him sometimes in his room, whisper-reading from the Bible. He keeps a little notebook too, scribbling in it while he sits out on the porch in the rainy months. Keeping track of his sin and misery, she bets.

  “Why don’t you talk to your own son then?” she said. What she meant was All your little quotes don’t do any good with Fish. Gully looked so stricken, she regretted saying it.

  “Don’t I wish, Ma,” was all he said.

  She turns off her light before Gully comes back in the house. She knows he won’t say anything if her light is out. He will respect that she is either asleep or wants him to think she is. But it is ten-thirty at night, and tomorrow they are celebrating their marriage, which has lasted more years than people used to live.

  She pulls her robe tight across the front of her and ties the belt, then steps to her door, just as Gully goes into the bathroom. She goes in the kitchen and gets a drink of water. Through the wall she hears him splashing. There will be water all over the place.

  “You want something?” she asks when he comes out. He takes a glass of water. She sits down at the counter and so does he, across from her.

  “How did he get back?” she asks. She wonders where the old man camped. What a way to live!

  Gully has taken off his shirt washing up, and has pulled his overalls back up over his bare chest. He looks like a bird with a scrawny neck. The upper parts of his arms are still knotty and strong, but his hands looks frail.

  “I put him down in the truck,” he says. He keeps a bed under a canopy for his forays in the woods and mountains. “He’ll be on his way at dawn.”

  “I see.” She doesn’t, not really.

  He reaches over and pats her hand. “That would be me out there, if there hadn’t been you.” Then he gets up and says good night.

  Geneva goes back to bed and lies in the dark listening to the tree leaves. She thinks about the first time Gully touched her. It was a long, long time ago, but she remembers it very clearly. The last time she has long ago forgotten, but the memory of the first is with her forever.

  23

  It seems to Katie that the very ease of getting a divorce keeps a person from thinking it all the way through. She feels victimized by the system, as if she is being sucked through a vacuum tube, her life out of her hands, ever since she signed a paper her lawyer thrust at her in return for four hundred dollars. You used to have to show cause—adultery, abuse, mental cruelty. She remembers her mother talking about a friend of the family, saying, “He certainly gave her cause.” If you still had to do it that way, she would never have gone past the idea. Of what could she accuse Fish? How could she build an ugly file of bitter reinterpretations of their past? She was there, too. She is entirely complicit. There have been minor infidelities, but they were only larks to wound her or soothe him, and they passed quickly. There were unscheduled jaunts taken without regard for Katie’s feelings, but that was something in his blood. Once when they were in Berkeley, he got mad and left her standing in a Chinese grocery store and drove to Reno with a week’s wages from the shipyards. She can’t remember why he did that, but she does not doubt that she provoked him.

  There was that time he hit her, before she went to Texas, but she already punished him for that, didn’
t she? She was gone for so long. She can think of more reasons for staying than for going. Fish is like a part of her she can’t quite dig out. There are all the things he knows how to do—building, repairing, inventing—that she cannot manage. Once, in B.C., he took a woodshed on a hillside slope—he’d been hired to help the Turkish owner clear the hill to make an RV campground—and turned it into a cozy lodge for them. He brought water down from a tiny creek, made a wood stove out of a metal drum, built them a bed from scrap lumber. He read The Sotweed Factor to her by kerosene lamp.

  There are all the places he had been before he met her, experiences he brings to her like an abandoned garden of perennials. He tells her stories, like a man plucking flowers.

  Maybe somebody could make a case against him because he has so little regard for people in general. They could say he is antisocial. But Fish’s attitude confirms Katie’s own assessment of most of the world, and it gives her the comfort of a cohort. She knows that Fish dislikes a lot of people, most of them mere flickers of experience across his life, but he loves Katie. She stands out from all the others, with him. He told her her little breasts were perfect. He told her that her skin could be experienced as the organ it is. He said she has a perfect cunt. She remembers where they were when he said those things. She can remember the pile of dirty clothes on the floor near the end of the mattress where they lay. She remembers everything about the times when he talked like that.

  Katie’s friend Maureen, who lives in the apartment across the hall from her in a cut-up old Victorian house near the theatre, and cooks in a vegetarian deli, says that relationships are like mirrors shining your history back at you. You are what your family has been, she says. You live out the family myths. She talks about her “family of origin.” She gives Katie books to read that are full of case histories to illustrate the impact of childhood on adult life. She also gives her smaller, less densely written books designed for small, quick readings at night, before bed, ones full of good advice about serenity, self-esteem, assertiveness, and intimacy. The second kind of book has a lot of white space, checklists, and bold headings. It makes it easy for you, repeating every point a lot of times, in a kind of literary mantra.