by Newall, Liz;
“Until?” Sarah says. She’s on the edge of the sofa, breathing in my smoke.
I shift the ashtray, “Until the summer Samuel Harrison and his family came to live at the farm. I was sixteen at the time, Viv was seventeen. Samuel Harrison had a son, named David, the same age as Vivienne. And a daughter, Opal, about four, I think.” I wipe the sweat from the can and take a pull. “He told Papa that his first wife died in childbirth. You can just bet that got to Papa. And Samuel said his second wife went back home to her parents after Opal was born. Papa said a man like that would work hard to keep his mind off his sadness. Papa was right. He just didn’t realize what Samuel Harrison would work hard at.” I light another cigarette and blow the smoke away from Sarah, toward Papa’s corner. Sarah doesn’t seem to notice. She’s staring into my eyes.
I take another long drag then continue, “Viv and I hung around the Harrison household at first to play with Opal. We pretended she was our little sister, made a big fuss over her. She had sky-blue eyes and the reddest hair I’ve ever seen. Vivienne made Opal a dress, buttercup yellow, and embroidered little daisies all over the collar. We’d put Opal on Tar Baby, that was our pony’s name, and lead her around the barn like a princess. Had her looking like Shirley Temple. I used to think about little Opal everytime Viv got Donna all dolled up for those recitals. Remember how Donna looked? Remember that poodle costume?”
Sarah nods. “Go on about Opal,” she says.
“Opal wasn’t the problem. What happened is your mother started spending more time with David than she did Opal. David looked like his father, only younger of course, handsome and just busting out of his jeans, like he was outgrowing everything he put on. Only his hands didn’t go with the rest of him. They were artist hands, long fingers, smooth nails, knuckles not yet knotted with work. A little young for my taste, but not Vivienne’s.” Sarah’s eyes widen. She takes a long drink.
“David told her about places he’d worked. Pennsylvania with its big red barns, Georgia with black dirt and tobacco farms, Kentucky’s blue grass that wasn’t really blue. Viv hung on his every word. Every night she’d repeat them to me. David said he hoped his family would go out West, get their own place and raise whatever they raise out there. Just so it was theirs and nobody else’s.
“Vivienne and David fell for each other faster than star-crossed lovers. She was so pretty and hungry for the world. He was handsome and had seen a good part of it, even if it was from tenant shacks. I’m sure Papa and even Samuel Harrison would have put an end to it, early on, if they had known then. But Papa was busy with the store and Samuel was busy with me.”
Sarah reached for a cigarette, touched her belly with her other hand, then slipped the cigarette back in the pack.
“I can still see Samuel Harrison. God, Sarah, he was handsome, so masculine. Eyes greener than summer grass. Moustache thickest at the corners of his mouth. Dark hair curling around his ears. Arms shiny brown from the sun.” I still get a rush just thinking about him.
Sarah touches me on the knee. “Go on,” she says.
“I always wondered why he went for me instead of your mother. She was prettier. Maybe pretty didn’t matter and I just looked more willing. Hell! I was for him.” I stop to pull on my beer. It’s empty. Sarah goes for another one. I can still feel Samuel Harrison, tall and dark, pulling me up the ladder into the hayloft. Straw pricking my neck as he kissed me up one side and down the other. Whispering love words the whole time.
Sarah hands me the beer. It’s already popped. “Go on,” she says again.
“It was good, too Goddamn good for a sixteen-year-old farm girl.” I take a drink. It’s cold all the way down. “Because, Sarah, it never was that way again. Memories of him haunted me, came between me and every other lover I had, like a fog rolling in so thick I couldn’t even see the face in front of me.”
“Tell me about Mama,” Sarah says. Her voice sounds tight, urgent.
“While I was in the hayloft making love with Samuel Harrison, Vivienne and David were in the back room of the tenant house doing the same.” Sarah reaches for a cigarette again. This time she doesn’t put it back. “Samuel caught them. They left the next day.” Sarah’s trying to light up but her hand is shaking too hard. I think about stopping here, letting her calm down, but I want to get this done. I light the cigarette for her. She inhales. “I don’t think they would have left,” I say, watching her closely, “if they’d known about Vivienne.” Sarah exhales, then gulps for air like she’s drowning. “You okay?” I ask her.
She nods. “Go on,” Sarah whispers. That same look she used to get as a teenager. When she got upset at home, she’d come over to the farm and crawl up in the barn loft. I’d leave her alone to cry or scream or cuss or whatever made her feel better. Then she’d come looking for me and I’d hand her a cigarette. Sometimes she wouldn’t even tell me what was wrong. We’d just sit together smoking and talking about a beautiful sunset or horseback-riding or a good book until she was ready to go home.
“But,” I say, “at any rate the Harrisons did leave. And there was Joe Crawford who’d been hanging around Vivienne since grade school. They got married fast with Joe still amazed at his good fortune.” Sarah stares into space. Her cigarette rolls off her fingertips. I retrieve it, grind it in the ash tray, then take both my hands and turn her face toward me. “When you came along, Joe made a big to-do over being a father. At the time I thought he must have a room-temperature IQ. Now I realize he knew. But he never let on.” I let go. Sarah’s face collapses into her own hands. I put my arms around her shoulders, hold her close and just let her cry.
The phone rings. I leave Sarah to answer. “It’s Jack,” I say. Sarah shakes her head. “She can’t come to the phone. No, Jack, she’s fine. She’s in the bathroom.” I roll my eyes at Sarah. “After-while. Just ice tea. Okay, Jack, I promise.” I hang up. Poor Jack, I think to myself, he lives in a world of balance and absolutes. I don’t think he knows there’s a whole other world. Shadows, longings, passions he doesn’t feel, at least I don’t think so. But Sarah does. I can see it in those Harrison eyes.
She’s quit crying. “Jack wanted to know if you’re feeling all right. I said you were. Are you?”
She nods.
“Want to stay here? You know you don’t have to go back to Jack.”
Sarah smiles and pats me on the arm. “I’ll go home, at least for the night. I need to lie down.”
I walk her to the car. The moon is full or almost, I can’t tell the difference when it’s this bright. We both cast long shadows.
Sarah turns to me. The moon illuminates her face. “Did you ever hear from them, Aunt Kate, either one?”
I lift my arm out from my body, watch its shadow streak across the driveway. “No,” I say, “and I never told Vivienne about me and Samuel. I figured their leaving had as much to do with me as it did her. She might not have forgiven me.” I look for forgiveness in Sarah’s eyes but they are somewhere else.
“I didn’t come out unscathed. I used up my womanhood loving and hating Samuel for what he’d done to me in that musty hayloft. Now, I realize he was just a big horny farmer, scraping for a living, and desperately missing his wives. But for me, he became a Romantic hero, not the Harlequin kind, but the noble savage of Byron and Shelley and Coleridge’s poetry. I’ll bet that’s what your veterinarian is to you, some kind of hero.”
“Maybe so,” she says. She opens the car door. Her shadow folds, collapses.
“Still,” I say, more to myself than to Sarah, “if I could trade hindsight for illusion, I don’t think I would. What a tedious life it would have been, married to some mechanic or teacher or mortician, going to choir practice on Wednesday, playing bingo on Friday.”
“Maybe so,” Sarah says again, but her mind is somewhere else. She cranks the engine. I watch her drive away.
“Rest in peace, Vivienne!” I shout to the moon. I won’t and Sarah has a long way to go.
PART IV
BIRTH
&n
bsp; ANDREW
Donna looks upset.
“I got here as soon as I could,” I tell her. She glares at me, then back across the waiting room at Jack.
“Is Sarah all right?” I ask.
“SHE is,” Donna says in a loud whisper, “but that sorry husband of hers.” She flips her hand in his direction like she’s trying to shake off something nasty. “He called me ‘Prima Donna Dingbat.’”
“What on earth for?” I say, thinking of several possibilites.
“Because I didn’t call him.”
“You didn’t?”
Donna looks me in the face, her eyes full of sincerity. “I was at Sarah’s when she went into labor, so I drove over here just as fast as I could and got her admitted. He SHOULD be grateful.” She catches her breath. “And I would have called him, but after I called you and Aunt Kate and Daddy and Holly’s Hair and Then Some—I had to cancel my appointment—I ran out of quarters.”
I look at Jack. He seems oblivious to everything around him. You’d think Sarah were dying instead of giving birth. In the opposite corner is Joe. Buddha-like, belly and all, staring at the television. It isn’t turned on. Kate’s got the other corner. Smoking a cigarette and nursing a cup of coffee as if she’s spiked it. She probably has.
After sixteen years of living with these people, I thought nothing they could say or do would surprise me. When I married Donna, my family and friends kidded me about getting used to mushy food, i-n-g without the g, “S-u-u-u-r” and “May-yam.” But it’s not the way they eat or even talk, although they do have a knack for backyard metaphors, that’s so peculiar about them. It’s the way they think and, as a result, act that makes you wonder about oxygen deprivation south of the Mason-Dixon.
Take Mr. Crawford’s white pickle. It’s suspended in a bottle of vinegar, sitting on the living room mantel. “A conversation piece,” he calls it. It looks like a giant’s thumb or huge growth or a man’s vital organ floating around in vinegar. Guests invariably ask what it is. Old Joe says “a cucumber.” Just that and no more until someone asks how he got it through the small mouth of the bottle without cutting it or why it’s not green. That’s what he waits for, lives for, someone asking about the mystery of his huge albino cucumber.
He won’t tell me. Each time I ask, he just sits there, sphinx-like, letting me guess and guess, while he clicks his teeth or laughs at my hypotheses or says, “Do ya give up?” I refuse. I’ll figure out that damn pickle as soon as I don’t have so many other matters on my mind. My tenure project, for one.
It’s that sort of behavior you have to get used to. And I thought I had until Sarah came home. I could understand her returning to see about her mother and, of course, staying for the funeral. But afterward, she just moved back in with Jack as though she hadn’t been away for the past year. And Jack let her. Amazing. They were back at Sunday dinner like they’d never missed a pot roast. A regular couple just sitting there in domestic bliss, passing the rice and green beans.
Of course, I relieved the tension by keeping the dinner conversation going. I’d told interesting tidbits I’d read in Time or the latest Journal of the American Medical Association; we in the business call it JAMA. But if Sarah were my wife, absconding with another man, I’d never let her back in my house. Not that Donna would even consider leaving me for another man or for any reason that I can think of.
I told Donna I would offer them counseling but she said it might start something. She’s probably right. If I counseled every troubled marriage I’ve seen, I’d never get my project done. The whole family treats Sarah as though she’s never been away, except Joe, who’s been extremely withdrawn from all of us since Vivienne’s death.
Then Sarah turns up pregnant. We didn’t even know it until two months ago. My Donna popped out the second month, but she was carrying twins. When Donna told me Sarah’s due date, I figured backwards. Nine months, to the day, when Vivienne was buried.
“Sarah’s cutting it close,” I told Donna. But Donna said that was Jack’s calculations, not Sarah’s.
I stare across the waiting room. It hits me. I think out loud, “Sarah’s not due for two more months, is she?”
Jack jumps to attention, “one month and twenty-eight days,” he says, panic evident in his voice. “She made it to six months one time—that was the longest.” He wrings his hands. “But seven months and two days. That’s better. Much better for both of them.” He’s talking more to himself than to us.
I look at Donna. She rolls her eyes and whispers, “Sarah saw her doctor this morning. He said she was ready.”
“Tell Jack,” I whisper back. “Maybe that will help calm his nerves.”
“Mama died seven months ago, Andrew, just seven,” she says. “Better he worry about premature than other things.” She lifts her eyebrows to punctuate “other things.”
I don’t know why we’re debating due dates. For God’s sake, the man’s had a vasectomy! I’m not supposed to know, but Sarah told Donna and, of course, Donna told me.
“Think I’ll turn on the TV,” Donna says, reaching for the dial, “Oprah’s supposed to be about UFOs today.” She begins flipping through stations.
“Wait,” Joe says, leaning forward, breaking his Buddha pose. “Turn back.”
“What, Daddy?”
“Turn back.”
“To what?” Donna says, turning the dial slowly.
“The black and white one. I don’t know the number,” he says. “Stop! That’s it.” He shifts in his chair, “Mayberry RFD, you know, Andy Griffin.”
I say, “It’s Andy Griff-ith.”
“That’s what I said, Andy Griffin. Leave it there, Donna.”
“I want to see ‘Oprah,’” Donna says, disappointment obvious in her voice. “It’s about UFOs, Daddy. Some people who’ve been kidnapped by aliens.”
Jack looks up. “Kidnapped?” he says, his voice almost high.
“Just television,” I say. “Good God, he’s on edge,” I whisper to Donna. She doesn’t hear me.
“They’ve all been examined by aliens,” Donna is saying, “touched inside and out.”
“That’s a bunch of bull,” Joe says, not taking his eyes off Andy Griffith. “They just say that to get on TV.”
“Anybody need coffee?” Kate says, disappearing through the door before I can answer.
“How long has it been?” I ask.
“What?” Donna says.
“How long has Sarah been in labor?”
“Two hours,” Donna says.
Jack looks at his watch. “Two hours, fourteen minutes,” he says.
“You’ve got a long time yet,” Donna says. “I was in labor twelve hours, ten of those hard labor and I do mean hard. Wasn’t I, Andrew?”
“Yes,” I say, not really wanting to remember.
“And Andrew was with me the whole time, holding my hand, rubbing my forehead. Weren’t you, honey?” She smiles at me sweetly.
“Yes,” I say, “the whole time.” The delivery room comes floating back to me like a bad dream. Donna yelling, voices saying “push, Mrs. Webster, push.” The stirrups and those umbilical cords, all wet and coiled. I swallow hard and stare at Don Knotts.
“This is the one,” Joe says, “where a counterfeiter comes to Mayberry and pretends to be a barber.” He starts laughing. “Course he can’t cut hair worth a hoot and Andy gets suspicious.”
I’m starting to feel claustrophobic. “Think I’ll go out for a stretch,” I tell Donna.
“Maybe you’d better pick us up a bucket of chicken while you’re out,” Donna says. “It’s right across the highway.” She looks at Joe and Jack. “Does that suit y’all?” Neither answers. “Make it extra crispy,” she calls after me.
I detour the labor room, take the stairs, push through the glass double doors and into the wide-open day. A pretty day. Slight chill to the air but almost spring-like. The buds on the red maples are ready to burst open. At home it would be the sugar maples, but not for another month at least.
Donna thinks it’s bitter cold, but she doesn’t know what cold is. At home there’s probably snow on the ground, maybe even into April. I’ll bet the kids are skating as I did as a child. Every winter when the city would send in snow plows to clear the streets, they’d push up berms of snow in the school yard. Then they’d release water from the fire hydrant to make layers of ice within the berm. Mother wouldn’t let me skate on ponds, but I could skate all winter in the school yard. Dad would come for me every evening after work. It would be almost dark by then. I would carry my skates over my shoulder and we’d walk home, like a Currier and Ives Christmas card.
When summer came, sometimes we’d drive up to Berkshire Hills. Dad and I would hike while Mother and Grandmother and Aunt Ruth would go to concerts at Tanglewood Music Shed. Other summers we’d head east to Cape Cod. Those beaches are different from these down here. Shorter stretches of sand framed between rock, more private than the miles and miles of Southern beaches. You could buy French rolls stuffed with lobster right on the shore.
That was when Dad was alive. All that stopped the year he died. I was ten, but never a child again. Grandmother moved in with us. Then Aunt Ruth. They called me “the little man of the house.” All three took it upon themselves to make Andrew Junior into the perfect Andrew Senior. Grandmother was as proper as a finger bowl. She appointed herself etiquette warden. “You can,” she would say, “but you may not.” Aunt Ruth became the education warden. She was a teacher and wanted me to benefit from her vast knowledge. Actually, I did learn a wealth of her trivia, but better, I learned to collect my own, a trait that has become useful in adulthood.
For Mother I became her only reason for living, “all I have left.” She was a walking record of what “your father did” and didn’t do, “your father would like” and wouldn’t like.