Home Town

by Tracy Kidder

  And some were repeat performances. Tommy stood, wearing his fierce, implacable stare, in a living room he’d visited two weeks ago. That time the girlfriend had accused the boyfriend of pushing her around, and Tommy had locked the boyfriend up. This time the boyfriend claimed the girlfriend had abused him. She’d scratched him, he said, and he had the marks on his arm to prove it. Tommy stood between them now again, his arms folded on his chest, like the Colossus. He thought he’d like to leave them here to finish each other off, but then he had a better idea.

  He said, “I’ll tell you what, if I were you guys, you’ve done about as much as you can with this relationship. I’d call it quits. Now you’re both goin’ to jail.”

  Northampton was a town of many happy families, whom Tommy had never met. “No one ever calls and says, ‘Hey, we’re getting along great today!’ ” he said, as he drove away from the apartment complex in his mobile fortress. “It’s just miserable stuff we deal with. And it’s fun. It’s not happening to me.”

  Tommy went to Laura Baumeister’s apartment with Micker, one of the senior patrolmen. By policy, the supervising sergeant went along when one of his male officers had to call on a lone woman. In this case, Tommy was just a witness. Micker knew the routine, and for a change Tommy didn’t do any of the talking. While Micker helped the young woman fill out a request for a restraining order, Tommy stood near the door of the apartment, looking around and listening.

  The apartment was situated in an old Smith-owned building at the foot of Bedford Terrace, at the edge of the campus, at the edge of downtown. The furniture in the living room had the worn look of hand-me-downs, but the place was very tidy. Tommy listened, with habitual suspicion, to Laura’s story about the telephone stalker. At length he thought he could tell that she wasn’t lying. Besides, he knew the man in question, the worst kind of creep because he didn’t look like one. He’d harassed other women. He was essentially a coward. Micker would serve the restraining order on him, and that would probably be enough to keep him from scaring this woman anymore.

  An evening’s patrol usually contained an assortment of brief events. Tommy dealt with local criminals again and again, but when he entered the life of a law-abiding citizen, he rarely stayed for more than a few minutes. Tommy left the apartment with Micker, and promptly forgot Laura’s name. As he figured, her problem with the man was over.

  Laura had come to Smith several years before. The stalker, as it happened, had been one of the least of her problems.

  The mustard jar was empty. Laura stood at the kitchen stove and called to her son, Benjamin. Would he please go to the grocery store across the street and get some more?

  The time of her son’s independence would be coming soon, Laura knew. She hoped his revolution wouldn’t be as long and hard as hers had been, and she hoped that when it came, she wouldn’t feel like an old shoe being discarded. Maybe being in a new place, among strangers and without friends, had delayed the moment. Anyway, Benjamin was still in the compliant stage. Sure, he’d get some mustard, if she gave him some money. Laura was in a hurry. She had to get supper out of the way. She had a paper to write tonight. She looked around, and grabbed the booklet of food stamps. Then Benjamin told her he didn’t want to go.

  Only a few weeks before, Laura had stood in a checkout line at a grocery here, about to use food stamps for the first time in her life, and the moment she’d taken them out of her pocketbook she’d felt mortified. Suddenly, the place was full of eyes. Hurriedly, she handed the booklet to the cashier. The cashier said, in a weary voice, as if talking to a child, “I can’t tear them out. You have to.” As Laura fumbled with the things, she could hear noises coming from the woman in line behind her, a sniffing, then an angry-sounding clearing of the throat. So Laura should have understood how Benjamin felt. But she wasn’t thinking clearly. She told him to knock it off, just go and get the mustard.

  He came back with the wrong kind. It wasn’t their favorite brand. It wasn’t even honey mustard. She would be calm. Maybe the store didn’t have the right one. Was that the problem? He wouldn’t answer. He wouldn’t look at her. He sat on the sofa with his arms folded across his chest and scowled at the wall. Then she raised her voice. Damn it! What was wrong now?

  He started crying, angrily. He’d done what he was told to do! He had brought the right brand, their brand, up to the cashier, but when he’d handed her the food stamps, she’d suggested that he buy a less expensive kind. “I hate it here! I hate being poor!”

  “We aren’t poor! You can’t be poor at Smith College! We’re just broke!” Angry scenes played out in Laura’s mind. She would go and confront the cashier. “How dare you!” she would say. She rattled pots and pans instead. Benjamin had enough troubles. He still insisted on dressing for school in his West Coast surfer shorts and Vans. Some of his new classmates called him the California kid, sarcastically. The other day she’d had to go to the school because he’d gotten in a fight, and he wasn’t a fighter. She had saved and bought him a pair of hiking boots and some flannel shirts, but he refused to wear them. She had brought him here completely unprepared. Herself, too. It hadn’t even occurred to her that in New England she’d need a winter coat.

  They didn’t talk much during dinner. Afterward she sat with him and watched TV, apologizing with her presence. That was more important than trying to write her paper. It might be different for a man, she thought, but a woman couldn’t throw herself into anything wholeheartedly until she felt her family was secure. Besides, she didn’t know how to write the paper.

  The women at the Ada Comstock office had told her that most first-year Adas carried light academic loads. So she’d enrolled in just two courses. One was elementary math, designed especially for Adas. The first lesson was how to understand your phone bill. They’d gone far beyond that now, and she was barely getting by. She’d enrolled eagerly in her other course, English and Irish drama, her kind of subject. The class met in Seelye Hall, a venerable building of brick and stone. The closer Laura got to it, the more ominous it looked. She looked at it as little as possible. The ground was ordinary. The ground was safe to look at.

  By now she knew all the cracks in the pavement between her apartment and Seelye Hall. If she caught a glimpse of a passing fellow student who gave her a quick smile, she would smile back. Then for a moment her face was lit by dimples. When the smile faded, you noticed that the little creases on her chin and along the left side of her mouth were actually small scars. Laura kept her hair cut fairly short and coiffed like the feathers of a dove. She wore wide glasses. They made her look innocent and fun-loving and amusingly confused. But she thought she looked out of place. She wanted to keep her face hidden because she thought that anyone who got a good look would see that she didn’t belong here.

  She sat in class and tried to listen. Very young women, students of traditional college age, said the most amazingly perceptive things. “In this play, I think we hear echoes of Joyce.” She wished she could say something like that. This wasn’t her, this person who sat so fearfully in class. She was a laugher and a talker. She couldn’t think clearly about anything without talking. But if she opened her mouth, everyone would know how stupid she was. Also that she hadn’t really done the reading.

  She tried to read, up in her apartment, but her mind wandered. While she asked herself, “Have I done the right thing for Benjamin?” words on the page passed by like highway scenery, glimpsed, not seen. The longest paper she’d ever written, back in community college, was just a thousand words. The professor here assigned much longer ones, and expected her to write three of them this term. She made up an excuse and the professor gave her an extension on the first. She watched the other students turn in their papers, all printed on computers. Laura didn’t own one. She didn’t know how to use one. Smith had computer centers, and people at them who were paid to help you. She got as far as the doorway of a computer center, then turned away and walked home. Smith also had people who were hired to help you write your pape
rs. All you had to do was ask. They had made it sound easy during orientation. But any fool knew that they probably kept track of the students who came in looking for help. And if they found out how much help she needed, they’d probably go to the Ada Comstock office and talk to the director, Mrs. Rothman. “There’s an Ada who came to us for help the other day. She doesn’t have a clue. Frankly, Mrs. Rothman, she doesn’t belong here.”

  Laura had found it easy enough to write the application essays for Smith. Smith hadn’t seemed real, it was so far away from Mendocino. She hadn’t even known what state it was in. When her father had called her and said he’d seen a show on national TV about this special program for older women at Smith College, Laura had wondered, “Where is that? Is it near Harvard?” She knew about Harvard, from the movie Love Story. She asked around. Most people shrugged. “Smith?” But her favorite professor at the College of the Redwoods told her, “Laura, that is a very old and very prestigious women’s college. And, Laura, this is something that you need to do.” She got right to work on the application. Describing her life in a formal way made her feel as though another person had lived it. She wrote about her troubles as if she had put them all behind her. As she wrote, she started to believe this. One question on the form asked, “Why do you wish to enter Smith College?” Laura had her answer ready:

  There is an image that epitomizes my feeling for Smith. It is a picture of two women, one about fifty years old, and another, half her age. They are walking; their faces turn toward each other in expressions of genuine interest; their books are cradled confidently in their arms. They look like energetic, joyful women, sensitive and intelligent. Their feeling for one another seems to be one of mutual respect and caring. The discrepancy in their ages adds a special note of humanity to the simple portrait. It is an appealing and encouraging characterization of what Smith College means to me.

  Actually, this was an accurate description of a photograph in the Smith brochure. “That’s so cool,” Laura had thought, when she’d seen it.

  When she got her acceptance letter, some months later, Laura jabbed the air, just like those football players whose sport she feared and despised. “Yes!” She skipped around the halls of the community college, telling everyone. Once the surprise wore off, a troubling thought crept up, like someone whispering in her ear: “They made a mistake.” But people at Smith had to be very smart. They had to know what they were doing. And then again, all her life people had somehow gotten wrong impressions of her.

  Laura remembered a school in a suburb of Portland, Oregon, and the day in fifth grade when she was sitting at her desk and saw her teacher walking toward her, carrying a brand-new length of rope. She could still feel it. It was the soft, not the scratchy, kind of rope. The teacher tied one end around Laura’s waist and knotted the other to the back of Laura’s chair. She remembered the heat and tightness in her cheeks and how hard she made her jaw, as she sat there tied to her desk all that endless day, repeating to herself, “I’m not going to cry.” It was many years before she could work up any sympathy for that teacher. But now it seemed clear that the woman must have been sorely tested to have done a thing like that. Laura thought she must have been an impossibly unruly child.

  Not everyone had misunderstood her. Her sixth-grade teacher let her spend most of a school year sitting on the floor in the library, reading. Laura read every book there. It was a very small library. What she remembered best, though, was years of school days during which she felt both antsy and afraid.

  It seemed as if, looking back, she’d awakened to the world around her crib with insistent questions in her mind. In adult paraphrase, they ran: “Why are we here? What are we doing? Where are we going?” Soon they took the form of worries, attaching themselves to her mother. Her mother was a drunk. Laura still felt disrespectful saying that. Alcoholism was an illness, she believed. She preferred to say her mother had been sick, though when she did, she’d think, “It’s true, but that’s not why you say it.”

  Laura wasn’t sure where she picked up the rudiments of religion. She hadn’t been taken to church. But she lay in bed cutting deals with God. She’d be a good, good girl if He would make her mother stop drinking forever. She spent most days at school worrying about home, fidgeting in her chair, jumping to her feet when the pictures in her mind became alarming. She imagined dire tragedies, her infant brother suffocating in his crib while her mother lay dying in the wreckage of her car. And she couldn’t sit still, unless the teacher roped her down. She made up excuses to go to the principal’s office and call home. She listened, hardly breathing, for her mother’s voice to answer. The way the voice whispered, “Hello,” told Laura at once if her mother had been drinking. If the word was slurred, Laura spent the rest of the day like a caged wildcat around her desk, desperate to go home. If her mother sounded sober, she acted much the same, giddy with the residue of worry and relief.

  Her mother would sober up. Laura would think her prayers were answered. Then she’d come home from school and see no lights on, hear no movement in the kitchen, and smell alcohol. It had become the smell of fear to her. She’d run to her brother’s bedroom, then look for her mother, and usually find her passed out on her bed. She would take over her brother’s care and feeding. She’d get her mother under the covers. As she grew older, she began to think, “I’m very good in a crisis.” A dangerous thought for her, since she had also grown adept at creating crises of her own.

  Laura got thrown out of three different high schools. She remembered the last of the exit interviews—the premature ending of her time at a boarding school, a place she didn’t want to leave.

  “Laura, we’re heartbroken. You have so much potential.”

  “What’s the big deal?” she thought. “I’m not a criminal.”

  Forever, it seemed, people in authority had said to her, “We don’t know what to do with you, Laura.”

  And she’d shown them her chin, while thinking, “I don’t know what to do with me either.”

  She understood her mother now. The woman had been terrified when she’d seen her own costliest traits reemerging in her daughter. Their fights had never really ended until her mother’s suicide. As a grown-up, Laura would tell friends and new acquaintances: “I was grounded from the time I was ten until I got pregnant.”

  She liked her last high school—a home for adolescent girls, in an Oregon farmhouse. But she turned up pregnant there, and a kindly woman told her she could have an abortion or leave the school and live as an adult. Laura became a mother at sixteen.

  On Super Bowl Sunday, 1980, she was sitting at a bar with her child’s father and some friends. She thought they were all having a good time, but evidently her drunk boyfriend imagined she was flirting with some other guy. She remembered seeing him stagger back from the men’s room. Then everything went out of kilter. She was being pulled off her stool by the hair. He dragged her out to the sidewalk and punched her. She ran to the car. He got in, too, and really beat her up. She threw open the door and ran out into the middle of the street, waving her arms at oncoming cars. She still wondered why no one stopped. But she must have looked frightful—barefoot, her dress ripped, her hair wild. She ran away from him the next day, to Los Angeles.

  When she thought back to her years of living alone with her young son, she felt she’d drawn more strength from him than he had found in her. From an early age, Benjamin had given her reassurances that he and she were different. He seemed to know things that she never had. The time, for example, when he was five and Laura’s mother had just killed herself and, in something like terror, Laura turned to him in the backseat and asked, “Benjamin, do you have anyone you can talk to about your feelings?” He said, with great self-assurance, “I know about feelings, Mom. If you don’t get them out, they stay inside and turn into monsters.”

  She thought she’d often been lucky. She got in a serious car wreck. The doctors at the L.A. County Hospital, to whom she was just a Jane Doe, could have done a much less carefu
l, much less artistic job of repairing her face. She’d been a stranger to the women in the support group whose name she found in the phone book and called, asking for help, from a fleabag hotel in Portland. A different woman took her home every night and fed her, until her hands stopped shaking and she felt strong enough to live on her own again. An old Polish woman kept Benjamin during that time, until Laura could manage motherhood again.

  For a while after she moved to Mendocino, Laura thought she’d found her place. From the classroom windows of the College of the Redwoods, she could watch the dark northern Pacific roll in. In Mendocino she was never far from the sound of the waves, and it was as if for once she’d found another soul to commune with, one as turbulent as her own. She got straight A’s, except for a C-plus in psychology from a latter-day hippie professor. His usual commentary on the material was, “Oh wow!” She sat in the back of the room, making sarcastic remarks a little too loudly.

  Mendocino had a white-steepled church, which Laura liked. She liked the town, but it was, as she began to see it, a place of newcomer artists and third-generation blue-collar workers, riven in two by competing philosophies—“Earth Firsters against millworkers,” she said. Benjamin was happy. He was in love with baseball and music, and Little League baseball was run wisely there, and the school had a great chorus, which won statewide competitions. But she worried about his prospects. “I knew I didn’t want him to work in the mills.” And she had done all she could at the community college. She’d have to go elsewhere if she wanted to continue her education. She thought perhaps she wouldn’t bother. She worked at a hospital as an admissions clerk, usually for the emergency room. She liked the drama of the ER. She liked the other clerks, especially an elderly woman who had worked there twenty-three years. That woman’s retirement party was a turning point, one of the real answers to that question on the Smith application. Listening to the testimonials, Laura wondered, “How did she do it?” Laura didn’t want to be a snob. She liked this woman. She respected her. But how could anyone settle happily for such a life? That sensation of not being present washed over her. The party went on but it had become her own retirement party, after thirty years as a clerk at an emergency room. A lot of her old friends had gone on to college. They were getting interesting jobs. She talked to some of them now and then, and she envied them.