Acts of God

by Mary Morris

  We talked for an hour or so about the kids, the weather in California. She listened as intently as Lily was able to before she began her list of complaints about her back, her sinuses, her cleaning woman, always prefacing her remarks with “Now, I don’t want to complain” or “I don’t want to pry, but…” and then she’d complain, bouncing from one subject to another.

  When it was almost dark, I’d borrowed her car and headed north. I’d left later than I should have, but I didn’t care. I wasn’t in a hurry even though the party had begun without me hours ago. I knew how to get there, but I took my time. Now I drove slowly through Winonah, like a policeman on his evening rounds.

  The streets lined with maples and elms shimmered in the heat and the air was hazy. Fireflies whose green lights flickered like fairies danced in the tended gardens and the song of cicadas filled the air. Casting a ghostly light upon the houses, mist rose from the trimmed blue-green lawns. I could almost see my father coming out of that mist, pushing the mower up and down in even rows.

  I steered past houses where friends once lived, looking into homes where I’d spent half my youth, though this gave me an eerie feeling, as if I could look inside the houses and still see their mothers stirring a pot on the stove; fathers, who had moved to Winonah to give their children a better life, reading in the den. But, of course, nobody I knew lived in those places anymore. They had not lived there for a long time.

  Somewhere in the night a train whistle blew. I rolled down my window to listen to the Milwaukee Road making its last run. When I was growing up, we lived about a quarter mile east of the tracks. At night from my bed I could hear the trains—their horns and even the ringing of the gates as they went down. I knew that the whistle we heard on our side of town was the same whistle they heard on the other side of town and this has always been a humbling fact to me.

  Winonah is a town that divides itself in every sense along its railroad tracks. The side closest to the lake is the right side and the side farthest away, heading out toward the farmland, the cornfields, and the highway, has always been the wrong side. A lot of people got rich on things you wouldn’t think you could get rich on—gift cards, car parts, coffee cake—and they lived closer to the water. Many were Jews such as ourselves or wealthy Protestants. The Catholics—the Irish and the Italian—they lived on the other side. There were no blacks then in Winonah, though there are now.

  We lived on the right side, but it was close enough by some standards to be considered the wrong side. We lived near the intersection of Dearborn and Lincoln. From my bedroom I could hear the sound of the cars driving across the wooden boards that lined the tracks, so different from the sound a car makes on pavement. That steady thump-thud. I must have heard it a million times when I was growing up. Even now in the night, though I live two thousand miles away, I wake up thinking I’ve heard that sound.

  We barely made it, though we did; that was what mattered most to my parents, especially to my mother, who saw great value in such things. My mother who liked the table set just so, everything in its place. We had been secure enough to “keep the wolves from the door.” This was an expression my father used, and when I was small I thought he meant real wolves. Many nights I drifted to sleep thinking I could hear them howling.

  Actually what he meant was disaster. My father who sold insurance for a living in the floodplain of the Middle West had a clear sense of what disaster was. He’d seen lifetimes obliterated with the flash of a flood, a twist of wind. I was raised with the first law of insurance pounded into my head: You can’t protect anything that really matters. You can’t insure love or health. You can’t guarantee peace of mind or your place in the world.

  I hadn’t thought much about my father’s advice to me in a long time, but as I drove through Winonah, heading toward the railroad tracks, I began to think once more of what he was trying to tell me. Pausing at the tracks, I crossed into Prairie Vista. Here it was less pristine. Beer bottles and trash lined the tracks. Flashing neon signs lay ahead.

  Prairie Vista was on the wrong side of the tracks, but that’s where I was going that August night. We called it the land of a thousand bars—the only place where our parents could sip a little wine or go for a good time, and when we got older, it was where we went as well. For some reason, after Prohibition was repealed the towns along Chicago’s north shore decided to remain dry. Winonah was famous for its music festival, for the invention of the hearing aid, and for the fact it was dry. But if we wanted a drink, we just drove across the tracks into Prairie Vista.

  It was a hot night and the humidity made my spaghetti-strap dress stick to me. I drove with the skirt hiked up my thighs, the radio on an oldies station. It made sense that the reunion was being held at Paradise. Where else would they have it but in Patrick’s bar?

  It was as sweltering a night as any I can remember in Illinois. Sometimes on a night like that you can get a whiff of the alewives that coated the shore in late summer, their bodies sucked dry by lamprey eels. When I rolled down the window, things smelled rotten and dead.

  5

  Paradise was located on the strip of bars that lined the railroad tracks on the Prairie Vista side. I recognized it right away by the Christmas lights strung up and the hokey sign of heaven with little angels above the door. Dozens of cars were parked out front and a lot of them were cop cars. The music blared from the patio, which was also decorated with lights. Each light had a tin halo over it.

  As I walked up, a Motown CD—Diana Ross and the Supremes—played, but a local band was warming up. They were very noisy and already the crowd was begging them to stop. The air smelled of ashes and beer. Polyester shirts clung to men’s chests, revealing hairs. These men were ragged; their bellies, once taut and the color of bronze, rolled across their belts. They had elastic in their waistbands.

  At first glance the women looked better. They smelled of almond soap and avocado cream. Hair concealed the lines of their face-lifts. Some had the fine-toned muscles of women who ride a treadmill all day, sipping mineral water through a straw. There was a well-preserved look to them; others did not look so well. But it didn’t matter because I hardly recognized a soul.

  In the entranceway someone took my ticket and stamped my hand with the letter “W” for Winonah High. Then she looked at me. “Tess,” she said, “Tess Winterstone?”

  Discreetly I glanced at her badge. “Penny, how are you?” She was Penny Wilcox, who’d been in my homeroom for four years, the one who married Gus Garcia. In high school she’d been a petite girl but now she’d puffed out (she’d puffed out in high school but there had been other reasons then). I reached for a name tag. It was clear I was going to need one. I looked around a room of strangers.

  “Would you like the commemorative blanket?” Penny asked.

  “The commemorative blanket?”

  “Yes, from Winonah’s centennial. It has all the historic sites on it. The proceeds go to the high school development fund. It will be mailed to you.”

  I was looking around to see if there was anyone I knew. “Sure, I’ll take the blanket,” I said, distracted, checking the box.

  “Hey, Tess.” A tall, middle-aged man hit me on the back. Who was he? The quarterback of the football team? The class president? Some people asked how my brother was. A woman I didn’t know asked how my sister was doing. I replied fine, even though I don’t have a sister.

  Someone grabbed me from behind. “My God, Tess.” It was Maureen Hetherford, whose hair had turned pure white since her divorce a decade ago. She looked like a very old woman with a very young face, like someone out of Shangri-la who would crumble once the spell was broken. “You’re here.”

  “I am,” I said.

  “Hey, Tess, you made it,” the Dworkin twins said in unison. I still couldn’t tell them apart.

  Most of the old gang was there. Though my father called us “the girls,” to ourselves we were “the gang.” There were ten of us and we moved like a herd of sheep in one smooth motion across
a hill. We wore pleated skirts and bobby socks rolled down, cardigan sweaters buttoned up the back, saddle shoes. We bought our clothes in matching sets at Crawford’s Clothing. After school we went to one another’s houses and put on lipstick and danced to American Bandstand.

  We knew all the dancers. We knew what it meant if Francis danced with Bobby, if Bobby danced with Charlene. Sometimes before we put on the lipstick, we practiced kissing, just to see what it felt like. We curled up in beds in each other’s arms, lips touching. Never with our tongues.

  Now Grace Cousins, who’d married a plastic surgeon and resembled Cher with her high cheekbones, was giving me air kisses. She wore a silver lamé strapless and told us to all come by for a swim in her checkerboard pool later. Samantha Crawford rushed over with her husband tagging along, the way he had since the day she married him, like a puppy dog. No one ever got to see her alone. Wendy Young gave me a hug. She looked the same as she had before she joined the itinerant religious sect.

  “I think I want some pictures,” I said. I had brought a new Olympus point-and-shoot with me and began snapping.

  “Better take them fast,” Lori Martin, who’d been head of the Winonah Wildcats cheering squad and president of the student council (no one had ever done both in the same year), said, mugging at the camera. “This is the last reunion we’ll look good at.”

  “Oh, I wouldn’t say that,” Grace Cousins said, sucking in her cheeks. Suddenly Vicky was there, sweeping me into her arms. “I knew you’d make it.”

  “I didn’t know myself until this morning,” I told her.

  “It’s so good to see you. You look great, Tess.” Vicky had been my best friend during high school. It was to her house I ran when I had to get out of mine and vice versa. We’d seen each other sporadically over the years, usually for lunch downtown.

  “So do you.” She clasped me with her long white fingers, those hands that opened aspirin bottles and tied ribbons on TV. Vicky had wanted to be an actress, but ended up as a fairly successful hand model. (“Well, at least part of me is acting,” she liked to say.) For years her hands had been insured with Lloyd’s, though she’d never disclose for how much.

  “Well, what do you think of this?” Vicky asked, her seagreen eyes gazing around the room. Her strawberry-blond hair fell loosely across her face and she kept brushing it away. Her arms were bare in her thin rayon dress. Her gymnast’s body was still firm and taut and she had freckles everywhere—like a farm girl, my mother, who also had her own share of freckles, used to say.

  “I think I don’t know anybody anymore.”

  “Oh, you know them. You just don’t recognize them.” She seemed to be making eye contact with someone. “But I see someone you’ll recognize.”

  “Who?” I asked.

  “Oh, you know who,” she said.

  I suppose Patrick had been staring at me for some time when I turned. Even before I saw him, I sensed that he’d seen me. Of course, it was his bar so naturally he’d be there. “I thought you’d come,” Patrick said when he walked up to me. “I was sure you’d make it.”

  “Why is everyone so sure about what I’d do?” He looked the same. He was a little gray around the temples and maybe he’d put on a few pounds, but none the worse for wear.

  “It made sense that you would. So how are you? How have you been?” I started to reply when the band struck up and it was impossible to talk.

  “Let’s go somewhere else,” Patrick said, taking me by the arm. He walked with me over to a corner of the bar, looking at me askew, but that had to do with his bad eye. Basketball was supposed to be his way out. He would have gone to college on a sports scholarship and maybe even become a coach. He could sink anything from half court and slip in and out of guys twice as tall. Then someone put an elbow in his eye and he never went to college. He never left Prairie Vista.

  “You look good, Tess, you really do,” he said. He stared at me at an angle so he could get a look at me. I rarely gave much thought to how I looked, but as Patrick gazed at me, I suppose I did look good. I stayed out of the sun. I ran four times a week. We lived in the artichoke capital of the world and the mist that keeps the artichokes firm had also kept the wrinkles from my skin. My body had stayed small and compact. My hair had stayed dark auburn, thanks to a bottle, and I had let the curl go natural. Tonight I’d pulled those thick curls back with a silver scrunchie.

  “Well, so do you,” I told him, “you’ve hardly changed.” It was true. He looked the same. Before Patrick and I ever dated, my parents went to a costume party at their club dressed as moving men. Patrick’s father had a moving company and my parents borrowed Hennessey Moving and Storage overalls and cardboard boxes. I have a picture of them in overalls with strained looks on their faces as they pretended to move the giant boxes.

  “Oh, but I have,” he protested. “I’m not what I once was. But you look like you take good care of yourself.”

  “I run a lot and probably the place where I live is good for my health. And you?”

  He was about to answer when I heard a laugh, sweet and smooth, except that it was too high pitched, almost shrill, like an opera singer’s laugh. Only Margaret Blair had a laugh like that. It would have been one of the beautiful things about her, like her hair and her skin, except for its high pitch and the fact that it came too often.

  Margaret stood just ahead of me, her black hair spilling down the back of a creamy satin dress. It was the color of pearls and hugged her breasts and her hips. It was as if thirty years had not happened to her. I dodged left, then to the right because she was the last person I wanted to run into now. “Come on,” I told Patrick, “let’s go over here.” But when I turned, she was in front of me—her head tilted back, surrounded by a clutch of admirers, men I didn’t recognize, though I’d probably once passed notes to them in study hall.

  Patrick touched my elbow as he tried to steer me toward the bar, but it was too late. “Tess,” she called. “Tess, is that you?”

  Margaret came over, tottering slightly, holding a glass of wine. As she hugged me, her breasts pressed against mine. The chill of her wineglass against my bare shoulder sent a shiver through me. Then she stood back and looked me up and down. “You look the same, Tessie, except for your lipstick.” Patrick turned toward the bar, a quiet gaze settling over his features. I kept thinking he’d drift away, but he didn’t.

  “My lipstick?”

  “You used to wear red. But this peach color suits you.”

  My hand instinctively went to my lips. I didn’t remember wearing red. “Well, you look the same too.” It wasn’t what I wanted to say. Many times I’d rehearsed this meeting in my head. How I’d tell her what I really thought. But now that I actually stood before her, I found her still beautiful, but rather pathetic, and myself almost speechless.

  “You never answer my letters. You never return my cards.”

  “Oh, but I think about you,” I told her, which was true in its own way. “I’m bad about answering my mail.” I thought about the seasonal letters Margaret sent each winter. Those cheery Xeroxed epistles that outlined her family’s accomplishments and failures—Nick’s rise in his father’s real estate business, Danielle’s knee surgery, from which she’d recovered brilliantly; Margaret’s small decorating business flourishing. It was inscribed for all to read, copied on red paper and stuffed into green envelopes, where she’d put stickers of reindeer and Santa Claus.

  At the bottom of each seasonal letter, Margaret drew a smiling face and wrote, “Why don’t I hear from you anymore?” The fact was I didn’t want to know anything about her. I didn’t want to hear from her ever again.

  “Well, I think of you all the time,” she said with emphasis, as if she were accusing me of something. “You were always nice to me.” A somber look crossed her face. “Not everyone was, but you were. That meant a lot, you know, when I was the new girl.”

  “Well, I’m glad if that’s how you remember it.”

  “It is. It’s how I remember it
.” She took a long sip of her white wine, then pressed the glass to her cheek. “So tell me. What have you been up to all these years? Are you still living on the Coast?”

  “Oh, you know, same place. Divorced, a couple of kids.” I laughed, but she gave me an odd look as if she was sorry for me, and that made me angry. I’d always felt sorry for her because of where she lived and because her father never came and took her back to Wisconsin, the way she said he would.

  The wineglass teetered in her hand and she took another sip from it. Her face was flushed and I thought that she’d already had too much to drink. “Well, you must come by. Nick and I would love to have you over.” She rested her hand on my shoulder. “Come by and see us.” Then someone pulled her away and I was happy to move on.

  Patrick was waiting for me and he told the bartender to give me a beer. “She used to be my girl,” he said, patting my arm. The bartender said the beer was on the house and Patrick found us two stools off to the side. “I’m sorry if she upset you,” he said after a while.

  “Just because she took you away from me…” I teased him.

  Patrick grimaced, staring down into his beer. “You know it wasn’t just that, Tessie. Things happen when you’re growing up, things you can’t quite understand.”

  “It’s all right,” I told him. “I forgave everyone long ago.”

  “We were young.”

  “I wonder what my life would have been if I’d stayed here and married you,” I said with a sigh.

  “You’d be divorced with two kids and I’d be running a bar.” Patrick and I spent much of high school driving around in his father’s car. I’d rest my head on his knee and stare up at the passing trees as he rubbed my head, my neck. The trees in Winonah arch so gracefully over the roads. The wind off the lake keeps their branches rustling, and I’d watch the branches from the vantage point of Patrick’s lap as we drove. Sometimes his hand slipped to the side of my breast and then I felt that sweet awakening, a kind of ache that is more memory than anything else now.