“Hell, Gully, I ain’t a married man. My son don’t have nothing to do with me. I don’t drive when I drink. There’s just me and my acre and my dogs and my recollections. Now, don’t a man have a right to seek a little bliss? To have a little fun? Drinking is a pretty short route to a good time.”
“I never saw it that way. I always thought of it as getting away.”
“But now you’re older, and the bogeyman’s gone to bed.” Melroy stands up and winces apologetically. He hitches his pants and cranes his neck toward the back of the trailer. “Don’t run off,” he says, and goes to the toilet.
Gully stares at the closed door for a minute, then shakes his head to clear his thoughts. He reaches down and scratches Bounder’s backside. The dog wiggles and moans, his eyes still shut. Then, still for the moment, he looks at Gully raptly.
“I can be no man’s salvation,” Gully says to the dog. “I can’t teach a man tricks with a bean can.” And he heads home.
37
Gully goes to bed soon after supper, but he isn’t sleepy, so he reads a few pages from a book Fish left at the place a few years back, Joshua Slocum’s account of sailing alone, feisty old bugger. He knows this is Fish’s fantasy, to lose himself somewhere on the ocean, and though Gully does not share it—he does not think he would like the openness, or the lack of steady balance—he would do anything to help his son sail away.
Geneva goes out to the RV with her sister, but Gully is still awake when she comes back in about nine. She takes a long time getting ready for bed. She fusses around in the kitchen, and then the bathroom. He hears her switching tv stations back and forth in her bedroom, and then turning on the radio. Down the length of the trailer, he thinks he hears her make a noise, a sigh, or cry of some kind, and it worries him. If she were ill, he wouldn’t know until morning.
He goes to see. Her door is closed. He taps lightly and opens it. She is sitting on her bed with her keepsake box spilled out beside her on the covers. Little homemade Valentines with cut-out hearts and white doily trim; he remembers Evelyn making them; and other cards, store-bought, now faded and a little tattered, with shiny foil fronts, Be Mine, Love Me, I Do; and Christmas and birthday cards; he recognizes them, anyone would, but he didn’t realize that was what she saved in her blackened metal box. Except for the ones their daughter made, they are all cards Geneva gave the children. He remembers sitting down to breakfast on Valentine’s Day, a card at each child’s plate. Evelyn would read hers and smile shyly, and say, “It’s sweet, Mama,” but the boys would set the cards aside and eat cereal and toast without ever opening them. He has never wondered where the cards went when those breakfasts were over.
Geneva starts gathering up the cards, without haste, her long and slender, blotched hands moving with grace and a kind of sadness. He wants her to look at him, but he has no idea what he ought to say. It is pathetic to save mementoes you gave away that nobody took, or kept, or wanted, and he feels bad for her, and worse that he didn’t know. Of course she could not have told him, she could not have shown him when she gathered up her silly verses and tucked them away for some undefinable reason; he would have mocked her, he realizes with a pang. There are probably some school photographs in the box, maybe a letter or two from Fish in the navy; those things you can understand keeping. If he asked her, would she show him what she had? Would she say, You never gave me a Valentine’s card, your sons never did, no one ever said Be Mine?
He sits down on the bed, with the box and a few cards between them. Her mouth is tight; he thinks she will tell him he came in without her permission, that it is none of his business (he knows it isn’t, and wishes he had not seen her like this), but she stops figeting and just sits, her hands on her lap over a faded red paper card.
“Genny,” he says in an old man’s voice. He could curse, to hear it croak and quaver on him now.
She puts the last few cards in the box, fastens it, and sets it on the floor away from him. “I’m going to bed now,” she says.
He puts his hand lightly on her wrist, and when she doesn’t pull away, he feels relieved, and braver. “I’m glad Ruby came.”
“She wants me to go with her.”
“To Spokane?”
“No. South, next winter.”
“Well.” He shouldn’t be surprised, he thinks, but he is. He never thinks of one of them without the other anymore. He wouldn’t go off without her, not now.
“It’s been a long time since I’ve seen anything of the country.”
“I’d think it might be a disappointment,” he says. “The way things are built-up and paved-over.”
Now she frees her hand, and pats her hair, bouncing her fingers on its wiry fluff. “Still, a person ought to know what’s going on past the edge of her yard.”
“Why, you ought to go.” He tries to sound hearty, but his voice betrays him, or perhaps it is only the hour, late for him. Slocum sailed, to leave a wife behind.
“I’ll decide,” she says. She stands up suddenly and makes him feel foolish, perched on the edge of her bed like an old buzzard on a tree limb.
On his feet now, he takes a long leap of faith and says, “I wouldn’t mind another fifty, Geneva, in the next life if not in this.” He means to comfort her, to give her what she wants.
She shakes her head. “Go on,” she says.
Now she’ll tell what her sister says about me, he thinks.
“I set your coffee on the stove,” is what she says. She crawls into bed while he watches her. She wears an old soft pair of flannel pajamas. When it gets hot she changes to cotton “shorties,” she calls them. “All you have to do is turn it on and let it perk, if I sleep in.” She shuts her eyes.
He nods, and leaves her, feeling foolish and bewildered. He thinks of a time Geneva went out after supper, to go to a meeting. She was working on a raffle sale for the church. The girl was supposed to do the dishes, but she whined about it, and then when he yelled at her, she ran the water and began, leaning hard on one foot, her other hip higher, her posture slouched and slutty. Right away she broke a dish. And he hit her. He remembers watching her, disliking her; he remembers seeing the plate slide out of her hand and drop to the floor. He remembers his hand hard against her ear. At the time he forgot it, drinking.
When Geneva came home and Evelyn ran to her, wailing, and Geneva stood across the room from him, glaring, hating him, he had already forgotten. The girl was always unhappy, was always complaining, always trying to get out of things she was supposed to do, or into things she wasn’t, and this was just another time, something between mother and daughter, that he did not need to understand. When he stumbled to bed that night, Geneva made a wall between them, out of rolled blankets and extra pillows, but he didn’t care, he hardly noticed before he was asleep. Only, the wall was there a long time after, and when, weeks later, she made the bed in the old way, so that when you pulled the covers back there was the bare smooth expanse of sheet, and no reason he could see not to reach for her, or roll to her side in the night, he had forgotten that too. He had forgotten so much. There was only a blur between the time Evelyn broke the plate, and the day she lay in her coffin, looking pale and pure. He remembers Geneva whispering to him—there were people around, and when he looked at her, astonished, she had already turned away—“Now she can’t do anything more that you don’t like.” And after that things blurred again. There was the fire, and the hospital, moments when he knew it was his own voice he heard shrieking, and then this new, better life they have, the pieces put back together, except for the girl. And over everything, a haze of pain. It isn’t that he ever wants to drink, and it isn’t that he needs to forget, because he still cannot remember; it is that he knows Geneva remembers everything, and the wall is all around her, as though she is her own estate.
In the kitchen he goes to the stove and picks up the coffeepot, sets it back down, and commences to weep, as quietly as he is able.
38
Katie calls her mother. June answers the firs
t ring. She sounds neither surprised nor pleased to hear Katie’s voice. She sounds like a doctor’s receptionist.
“Did I get you at a bad time?” Katie asks.
“I’ve got a pot of soup on the stove, and I’m sitting at the table reading. I’ve got a quarter hour till I go get Rhea at practice.”
“What’s she practicing?”
“Gymnastics.”
“Oh,” Katie says. She should have remembered. “Ursula said you called. I’ve got my own phone now.” She gives her number to her mother, blushing deeply, whether ashamed, or frustrated to do so at all, she isn’t sure.
“I’ve wondered how you’re faring.”
“I work, I eat, I sleep.”
“You wrote that you were seeing a lawyer.”
“Oh that.”
“Katie, really. ‘That’?”
It must please her mother, Katie thinks. She feels a wave of defensiveness for beleaguered Fish. “It’s all in motion, Mother. The end of Katie and Fish.” She is repeating herself, she realizes, or was it Jeff who said that?
“Is there a chance you’d want to come down here, dear? Rhea asks about you.”
“I’m working. I can’t get away right now.” When her mother calls her “dear,” it affects her exactly as does the scrape of nails on a chalkboard.
“Then I don’t suppose I can do anything.”
“Do anything?”
“To help.”
Katie feels her throat tightening. “You already do a lot, don’t you? Like take care of my daughter?” June does not throw that up to Katie; it is Katie who keeps it in the air between them.
“She’s a sunny little girl, Katie. I don’t know where she gets her disposition. She puts us in a good humor most of the time.”
“I’m glad.”
“She’s been asking about you lately. And her father.”
“What do you tell her?”
“I try to answer questions in a straightforward way. I say, your father is a carpenter, he lives in Oregon, where there are lots of trees. Your mother works for a theatre. I tell her it’s an office, is that right, Katie? Selling tickets?”
“You don’t tell her that I worked as a waitress for twenty years? Or that her father was in prison?”
There is a long silence. June says, “It’s not a rare thing anymore, for a child not to live with her parents, especially not with both of them.”
“Lucky for all of us, to be in style.”
“Nobody’s being criticized, Katie.”
“I hope not. Since it’s my call.”
“I’ll write. That won’t cost you anything.”
“Sorry Mother. Sorry, sorry.”
“I think she wants more of you, that’s all. She’s not unhappy, Katie, but she’s growing, and she has questions.”
“Maybe it was a mistake for me to come and go, to see her at all.” There always is a bad moment, every visit, but not with the child.
“It’s too late to think that. And it’s not like you were dead. I didn’t want to trade you for her, you know. I didn’t see it as an exchange.”
Katie thinks, but that’s exactly what you wanted, Mother. You got Rhea, Fish got me, I got off the hook. “I don’t know when I can come again. I just don’t know.” She wonders which step would have to do with her mother. She wouldn’t know how to make amends. She didn’t make her life by herself; her mother has always had the upper hand.
39
Katie went to Texas at Christmas.
Her trips to Texas are nothing like going home. Though it is the same house, it looks different, it feels different. Of course it holds a different family, only June being constant, and, all these years later, she seems in many ways younger and happier, a relaxed mother to Rhea.
There is the real difference: the attitude of house and family toward child, the place of the child. Sunny Rhea.
The house has been improved by paint and wallpaper, tasteful furniture, a new large sun porch in recent years. There is an easy feel to the rooms, a brightness. June cleared away old pictures and left the walls bare. She replaced the heavy furniture of the fifties with spare chairs with slung seats, a chintz-covered couch with fat pillows, an old chaise lounge upholstered in polished cotton.
Rhea has a bedroom with twin beds. Christine has the third bedroom, so Katie shares Rhea’s when she visits. It was once her room, and for a couple of years, Uncle Dayton’s.
She lay on the bed in the middle of the night and tried to recall the room as it had been in her childhood. There were twin beds then, too, a blond wood set. (Rhea’s are white iron, with firm mattresses and feather-stuffed pillows.) There was a dark dresser with drawers on two sides and a large oval mirror in the middle. Katie can remember sitting on the cushioned stool in front of that mirror, an adolescent anguished at the sight of her own image. Rhea has a long sleek wall of laminated cabinets, and a little desk built in at the window. Above the cabinets are wide open shelves, filled with the paraphernalia of a contemporary girlhood: a boxed set of Little House on the Prairie; a dozen paperbacks all called Babysitter’s Club; some old volumes of Katie’s, with fairy tales and Bible stories, myths and legends, a book of narrative poems; modeling clay, and small fanciful animals made from it; drawings; airplane models; a working paper clock; origami birds; a dangling God’s eye.
Katie lay in bed and remembered the few books with red and brown spines, and the spill of her schoolbooks on the unoccupied bed, clothes on the floor, her hairbrush and mirror on the dresser, but nothing more, and all of that seemed so impersonal to her, devoid of character. What kind of child had she been? There was nothing left of her in the house to tell. In her mother’s room there was a portrait of her done at five or six, with color retouching to give her apple cheeks and lemony hair. That was all. It seemed strange to Katie, that portrait, because the child in it was not recognizable as herself. She thought she would have recognized photographs of her, past age twelve, say, but not before. There had to be a high school yearbook somewhere; she would get it out and look at it, she thought, though the next day she forgot the intention.
Katie remembers that when she came into the house after school, she entered quietly, speaking if her mother was in the room, or if her mother called out to her from the kitchen, and otherwise going to her room silently to read or brood. She spent a lot of hours staring at the ceiling. When she was about Juliette’s age she went through a long period when she slept too much, or badly; she would go straight to bed after school, until her mother called her for dinner. Then she was awake through long hours of the night, and after that, sleepy and reluctant in the morning.
Rhea wakes up cheerful. When Katie opened her eyes in the morning, her daughter was watching her, and as soon as she saw that Katie was awake, she broke into chatter about anything—the day’s plans, the upcoming breakfast, a dream she’d had.
June is a mild presence these days. Katie remembers her sterner (as she can be, still, with her). On the whole, June treated Katie delicately, as she might treat someone recovering from what used to be called a nervous breakdown. She didn’t pry. They all did best when they kept busy. Rhea had a game she loved that was played like Monopoly, but was about farming. It was endless and boring and silly, but it took up hours, especially if Rhea could talk Aunt Chris into playing too. On another card table, on the sun porch, there was a “Schmuzzle Puzzle,” a jigsaw of what looked like baby lizards, difficult for Rhea and not very easy for Katie, either. Besides that, Rhea loved to play card games like Go Fish, Hearts, and Old Maid. Sometimes she helped her Aunt Chris make elaborately decorated cookies while Katie sat at the table and watched. “We sold these at our school carnival last year,” she told Katie, “for fifty cents apiece!” Christine smiled fondly. Katie said that didn’t surprise her.
It was strange to lie near Rhea at night in the dark room, surrounded by fuzzy animals and Japanese boxes, under a spread decorated with printed pandas. Katie tried to guess what Rhea might dream, but she could only suppose there
were fantasies provoked by movies, and, whatever the dreams, that they were not nightmares, because Rhea never seemed to stir.
One day Rhea said she had something to show Katie. Katie followed her to her room and sat down on one bed while Rhea looked in a few drawers until she came up with an old flat gift box like a scarf might have come in.
“I’ve saved them all,” she said. “See?” She seemed pleased with herself, or pleased that she was able to show Katie. She had dumped some greeting cards onto her bed. She stirred them around, then handed one to Katie. “See?” That’s yours from Christmas when I was six.”
Katie looked at the card quizzically, not remembering it, and then Rhea gave her another card and said, “And this one was from my father.” The child kissed the card and passed it to her mother. “I’ve saved them all.”
Katie managed to utter, “That’s nice.” She felt guilty and embarrassed, and desperate to be somewhere else. The cards became instantly familiar, and as she looked at them dutifully, one by one, she remembered choosing and buying each one, and taking some of them to Fish to sign. Hadn’t Rhea ever realized that all the cards were addressed in her handwriting? Hadn’t she guessed? The cards that were supposed to be from Fish said, “Merry Xmas, from Fish,” or just “Fish.” One was scrawled completely illegibly, and Katie could instantly recall the scene where she screamed at Fish that all she was asking him to DO was to put his goddamned NAME on a goddamned CARD for his KID.
Ursula, apprised of the birthday/Christmas, deception, advised Katie that somewhere truth would catch up with Katie’s good intentions, and Rhea might be hurt more than she would have been otherwise. But even Ursula admitted that a ruse once begun was difficult to end, so Katie kept on with the cards, even that same Christmas, signing Fish’s name herself, sending another lie into the pile of lies. And Rhea saved them all.
Later, lying in the dark, Rhea asked about Fish. She asked “Is he a hippie?” and Katie said, “I don’t think so. I don’t think you would call him that,” wondering furiously where Rhea had heard such a thing. She wanted to know, “Does he build nice houses?” and Katie patiently explained that he worked on old ones, to make them nice. Then Rhea asked, “Where do you live?” When Katie named the town, she said no, she wanted to hear about the house, and so Katie painfully described their house, a little shabby, in need of paint, but surrounded by lots of trees and vines and bushes, with a nice bright kitchen (well, it did get lots of light) and a fireplace in the living room—speaking slowly, until Rhea was asleep and did not move when Katie said, “It’s a house in a hollow, perfectly chosen for the couple we make, with an old chicken house in the back full of empty bottles put there, day by day, by your father, Fish the fish.”
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