Acts of God

by Mary Morris

  My father went into great detail with each story as Clarice Blair listened intently, her eyes round as saucers. Then he paused and now he seemed to be watching her carefully, as if he expected her to topple over at any minute. From time to time she crossed and uncrossed her legs. Even from the other side of the room I could hear the sound of her silk stockings scraping together, a slick, whooshing sound like hockey skates turning on ice.

  Later that night I sat on a chair in front of the mirror in my room. In the other room I heard my parents arguing through the walls. More and more common an occurrence, it seemed. My mother shouted something about how he had talked to that woman all night, telling her his lies.

  I wasn’t exactly listening as I tried crossing my legs the way she had, knees and shins tight together. First to the left, then to the right. Like a pendulum I moved my legs back and forth. Then I parted my legs and saw how dark it was. How you could hardly see what was inside.

  17

  Christmas is about the worst time to be in Illinois if you don’t like winter. I actually do like winter, but I have a fear of being snowbound, trapped. A fear that I can’t get out. But shortly after Thanksgiving my mother had declared that she didn’t have long to live and asked me to come home. “This will be my last Christmas,” she said. Of course, it wasn’t, but since she hadn’t asked me to come from California in a while and she often came to see me and the kids, I agreed to fly home.

  Besides, Nick had been calling me almost every night and I thought this might be a good excuse to see him. I’d found myself waiting up for his late-night calls. I imagined him slipping out of bed, tiptoeing down to the kitchen in bare feet to the phone. He whispered into it when I picked up. I loved the way he said my name, with that silibant “s,” the way people once said his father’s. “Tessie,” I’d hear. Some nights if I couldn’t sleep, I’d wrap myself up in an armchair in my Winonah centennial blanket, hoping the phone would ring. Some nights it did; some nights it didn’t. When it didn’t, I was surprised at how disappointed I felt.

  Often our conversations revolved around him, around his marriage to Margaret. How she drank too much and seemed indifferent to everyone except Danielle. How it was hardly a real marriage anymore, though once it had been. But slowly the conversations began to turn to me. He wanted to know more and more about me so I spoke of my marriage, never quite able to pinpoint what had gone wrong. I told him that there seemed to be something that stood between me and the world.

  I pondered these conversations as the plane flew. Though it was the holidays, perhaps I’d get a chance to see Nick while I was in town. From the window of the plane I looked down upon those long flat stretches; the green farmland; the wheat from what were probably now cooperative farms blowing in the wind, but that from above still looked like the wheat of the prairie I had always known. Even as I flew above the floodplain in winter, the Mississippi was swollen, its banks flooded, pockets of the river looking more like small lakes. Land laid to waste.

  I have seen what water and wind and disaster can do. When I was a girl, I had to get away. I could not bear the open expanses. Everything was flat. I had a feeling even then that anything could happen. There was nothing to stop the water, the wind. It could all be swept away.

  * * *

  For a few days I slept on my mother’s hideaway sofa and helped her with things around the apartment. I wanted to call Nick but resisted the urge. He knew where to find me. He knew I was at my mother’s and where she lived. But still I found myself thinking about him, wondering if he was shopping for holiday gifts, if he would get something for me.

  The first morning my mother and I ate cottage cheese and crackers and she talked about her will and who was getting what. In the last five years or so she always talked about her will and who was getting what, and it hadn’t changed all that much. But it made her feel better to go over everything with me again.

  As she was discussing her will, I kept waiting for the phone to ring. It did from time to time. Always a friend of hers. That evening I picked up the phone and called Nick. A child answered. It was the first time I’d heard Danielle’s voice and she sounded older than her years. I hung up quickly.

  My second day there my mother handed me a book of Santa Claus stickers, the kind you put on gifts, and she told me to put one on whatever possessions I wanted when she was gone. My mother sat watching CNN as I wandered through her apartment with my box of stickers. I paused at her silver, a pewter plate I’d always admired, a painting done by someone who was briefly famous in Chicago. I glanced at these objects, but I did not put a sticker on them.

  My mother was slowly unencumbering herself of her belongings, she told me, shouting above CNN. “Art’s gonna come and take whatever you don’t want,” she called. Silver trays, porcelain pitchers, antique tables. I could see them all in Art’s collectibles shop on Walton. I moved from room to room.

  I paused before a photograph on the wall of me and my brothers and my father and Lily. We are standing in front of a tepee and an Indian chief in full feather is doing a little dance. Jeb has a tomahawk in his hand, Art wears a silly grin, always the clown. I’m a bit crumpled, my long stringy hair falling in my face. But we are all smiling, mugging for the camera.

  We are dressed like pioneers. Art and Jeb and I have on coonskin caps, my father is in a buckskin jacket, and my mother in a long skirt. I don’t remember the trip we took to the Dells, where this picture was taken, except for one night.

  We were sitting in a circle of bleachers around a campfire and the Indians were dancing. I did not know that this was for tourists; I thought it was for me. They were dancing and as they danced they dropped colored sand onto the ground. Blue and red and green, and they made designs on the ground—a lake, an eagle, a cornstalk, the sun.

  The music of the drums grew loud and the Indians moved in their moccasins, heads thrown back, and the colored sand was being tossed to the ground. An intricate pattern was emerging and I saw it illuminated by the light of the fire. Perhaps I was tired. I was cold and a chill ran through me. During the dancing, my mother reached for my father’s hand. She touched him gently, but he pulled away. In the glistening light of the fire, tears formed in her eyes.

  I took out a Santa Claus sticker and put it on this picture. It was the only object in her apartment that I put a sticker on.

  18

  Every Monday as soon as our father’s car disappeared under the railroad trestle, Lily took over the house. She spread out into all the rooms. She slept wherever she wanted. Some nights we’d find her on the couch or on the chaise in front of the TV. Other nights she’d appear in one of our rooms, the cover pulled up to her chin, snoring slightly.

  It frightened me to find my mother in my room as if she were a ghost, as if she were already dead, all white with the sheet up to her chin, but then I heard her breathing, and I knew that it was one of those nights when my mother roamed. In her own way it seemed as if she ached for him. Yet she seemed to do better when he wasn’t around.

  It was as if in his absence she had to fill a void. What was it about water—how it seeks its own level? How it displaces whatever has filled the space within. That’s what she would do. Lily would expand, fill up the house. Some wives, when their husbands go away, fold up like a flower when the sun leaves the sky. I was this way with Charlie. But not Lily. She opened. She beamed and expanded. Projects suddenly presented themselves. Came out of the closets, where she’d tucked them. There were quilts to be sewn, family albums to fill. Bulbs she’d been saving suddenly got planted. Letters were written. Books she wanted to read piled up at her bedside.

  And then on Thursday she started to pull it all in, put it away, as if the photo album or the quilt or the letters on her desk were some big dark secret, something she had to hide. Back in the closet they’d go. And then she cleaned up the house and did all the chores she’d been avoiding doing before Victor got home.

  Then just as suddenly as he’d left, he’d be home—Victor Wintersto
ne, the deli man, cutter of chubs, fine slicer of cheeses, full of stories from the road. No one could layer a corned beef sandwich like he could. He made us his favorite drinks—black cows, 7-Up floats. Then he would pour himself a Cincinnati.

  We sat around the table and he’d say, “I want to hear everything. Everything you did all week.” He listened to every word. Grades, friends, points we scored, what we lost. He wanted to hear it all. Then we begged him to tell us the things he saw. A house turned around in a tornado so that its front door was now its back. A cat, clawing the water, being carried downstream. Disasters, lives in disarray, those were the stories my father brought with him from his weekly trips on the road.

  When our father came home, he was gentle at first. Subdued. He had the weary look of the traveler about him and on that first night he’d sleep a dozen hours. Never mind the chores, the home repairs that had to be done. He looked at Lily as if they’d just been introduced and it was beginning all over again.

  Indeed, their children got to witness their parents’ courtship begin all over again every Thursday. They locked their door on Thursday night and we could only imagine what might be taking place behind that closed door.

  And then by Friday night they would forget they had just met. The shouting started from upstairs and downstairs. He called for his boys, his girl, his best girl, his Button, his Squirrel, his little men, and Lily, oh, Lily, never bothering to walk the flight or two to find us, but shouting for us just the same. His big, amplified voice carried through the house, past closed doors, and headed out toward the lake, out to the prairie, the plains, rattling through the Midwest, his voice like a sonic boom, bursting the limits. “Okay, guys, I’m home,” he’d shout, and we’d make a pretend grab for the crystal.

  Lily heard, but acted as if she hadn’t. Hands over her ears, she walked around complaining of the noise, the disarray our father brought with him when he returned from the road. Soon our father grew subdued. It only took a day or two before Victor Winterstone became an intruder in his own home.

  * * *

  Every Monday like clockwork our father left and every Thursday, though sometimes it stretched itself into Friday, he returned. Those trips with him to the floodplain stopped, but we still begged our father to let us go. Art especially wouldn’t let up because Art had never gone. To Art the cow floating on its back, the cars resting in trees were just stories we’d made up, something we lorded over him.

  We asked in the summer on our vacations, “Can’t we go, Dad?” and he’d say, “Come on, aren’t you kids getting a little big for that sort of thing?” We’d kick and punch him in the arm, but the truth was we loved to go to those truck stops and eat pancakes stacked with butter and maple syrup. We loved the motel rooms with the TVs. I longed for “acancy” again.

  But the trips dropped away and after a while we grew accustomed in the summer to the melancholy feel on the Monday mornings of our father’s departures, the quiet that came over the house when he was gone, and the excitement that grew as the day approached when he came home.

  We grew so accustomed to the way he eased himself in and out of our lives that after a while we didn’t notice. After a while it seemed as if he hadn’t really gone anywhere at all.

  But obviously he had. The roof sprang leaks, paint peeled on the walls. He spent what little time he had at home fixing things, but still he seemed to leave earlier each week and come home later. Sometimes he didn’t make it home on Thursdays at all. The Thursday night rituals, the platters of deli food, Victor and Lily acting as if they’d just met, none of this seemed to be happening anymore.

  Though I can’t say that I noticed. I was a busy girl. I was gone all the time to baton twirling and basketball, to student council and school paper. I had so many activities I couldn’t think straight. On my wall there was a chart: “Where I Have to Be and When,” it was called, and just about every box was filled in.

  And Jeb. He was running wild, hanging out at the Idiot’s Circle by the train station with the other bums. I’d see him smoking cigarettes, and he’d give me curt little waves. “You’re going to get in trouble,” I’d yell at him, but what did he care.

  Jeb got straight A’s. He never cracked a book. “How do you do it?” I’d shout at him in the evenings.

  “I just listen and learn,” he’d say, mocking me.

  Lily walked around, cursing. Shouting at me to go get Jeb and bring him home. She’d say her children were running wild, all except Art, who still cried on Monday morning when our father left. Even though he was older we still had to pry his fingers off the car.

  One Friday afternoon when my father returned, Lily gave him the silent treatment. Walking around in a huff, slamming doors. Then she stomped upstairs and he followed her. I heard them fighting in their bedroom. This was becoming a more common occurrence, but still I stopped to listen. Just like Jeb said. Listen and learn. I heard the voices rising.

  “Why do you even bother?” Lily shouted. “Why do you even bother coming back here at all?”

  “Because this is where I live,” he shouted back.

  “No, you don’t. You’re hardly ever here,” she yelled at him. “We never see you. You don’t really live here at all.”

  One night I woke to find my mother standing at the foot of my bed. She wore a white gown and at first I thought she was a ghost. She was weeping. It was a silent weeping, but I saw the tears that streaked her face. I closed my eyes and pretended to sleep.

  19

  Paradise was decorated for Christmas. Dozens of little angels were suspended everywhere. Colored lights were strung from one end of the room to the other. Stockings hung off the draft beer levers. Vicky was sitting at the bar, nursing a bottle of amber. I’d called her the day after Christmas and said I wanted to drive up. Jimmy and the kids were skiing in Wisconsin. She was glad for the company.

  She looked a little older, as if she needed a vacation. Even she would admit how strange it was that she worked in a travel agency but never went anywhere. Vicky gave me a big hug as I looked around the place. “Forget it,” she said, “he’s not here.”

  Chills ran up and down my arm. I hadn’t told her I’d been in touch with Nick. I wondered if somehow she knew. “Who’s not here?”

  “Oh, you know, Patrick. Seriously, did anything happen the night of the reunion? I’m dying to know.”

  “Things that slow around here?” I didn’t want to talk about Patrick. I had other things I wanted to talk to her about. But I sensed that it was perhaps best not to talk about Nick. That it wasn’t the right time to tell anyone, especially not in Winonah. It wasn’t that I didn’t trust Vicky. I didn’t trust the town. It had a way of finding out what you didn’t want it to know.

  I ordered a rum and Coke and Vicky kept giving me the eye. “Okay,” I said, “nothing happened.”

  “Nothing? You didn’t make plans to see one another again?”

  “Not at all. He walked me to my car. That was it.”

  “Oh, brother.” She was still laughing when Patrick walked in. He didn’t see us at first as he said hello to his bartender, to the cashier. The music was Del Shannon’s “Runaway,” and he turned it up as he walked by the stereo. He was going over the receipts, humming to himself, when he looked our way. Then he sauntered over in his jeans and flannel shirt. “You must be moving back.”

  “My mother’s been sick,” I said. “She asked me to come home for the holidays.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that.” He looked genuinely concerned. He also looked tired and his bad eye started to wander.

  “How’ve you been?”

  “Oh, hanging in there.” He laughed, slipping into the booth beside me. We chatted for a little while with his arm dangling across the back of my seat. Then he said he’d love to get caught up. “I don’t want to intrude on your girls’ time. I’ve got some things to take care of. Come back tomorrow and I’ll take you someplace nice.” He spoke to me, not to Vicky.

  “I’ve gotta be back at my m
om’s tomorrow night.”

  “Well,” he patted my arm, “next time then.”

  “Next time,” I said.

  When Patrick left, I was suddenly hungry so we ordered a pizza. I wanted a vegetarian but she wanted pepperoni and anchovies so we split the difference and got an anchovy and broccoli, which wasn’t very good. “You know, I like that guy,” Vicky said after Patrick disappeared somewhere back in the kitchen. “I don’t know why, I just do.”

  “Well, I like him too.”

  “So how is life really treating you?” Vicky asked over another beer.

  “Actually, it’s not the easiest time for me. The kids can’t seem to leave home and I want to get on with my life. I’m having trouble making ends meet and keep thinking about getting a real estate broker’s license. What I really want to do is turn my place into a B-and-B.”

  “Good tax write-off.”

  “That’s what everyone says, but I can’t seem to get the insurance I need. I actually like the idea of people coming to stay. I love where I live. I don’t want to have to move. We aren’t getting any younger, you know—”

  “You’re telling me.”

  Vicky paused, staring at her hands. She turned them to the right and left in front of her. They were beautiful, with long, white, slim fingers, and she could hold them gracefully in front of her like a dancer. She had wanted to model her whole body, but only her hands had had any success. “You know, I used to be able to make real money with these hands. But it’s not the same now. Ten years ago I did Pampers. Now I expect I’ll be getting calls for Depends. I used to do Flintstone’s aspirin. Last week I did Geritol. The producers are getting younger. They call me a ‘tweenie,’ somewhere between old and young. They look at me and say, ‘Can we float her over a table? Can she stay awake for a two A.M. shoot?’ In a few years, I’ll just be doing the travel agency stuff. I don’t mind it, but it’s not what I think I was put on the planet to do. You know, we could get into something together. Start our own travel business or something. Specialize in spiritual journeys, some New Age thing that will make us rich. I’ve been looking to start my own business. You’ve always got the ideas, Tessie.”