by Lynne Hugo
And all the signs were good, that was the thing. When we were in front of one estate, two big, short-haired dogs came charging out at us, barking ferociously, and I thought we’d done it, we’d failed another test. But Mother waved cheerily at the man who came out after the dogs. “Yoo hoo, how are you this beautiful day,” she called, just as though we belonged there, and kept right on going. The man waved back and whistled for the dogs who went to him reluctantly, whining their disappointment at being denied fresh kill.
We went on a little farther, and the three of us sat on the rocks of a small promontory, a melon sun spilling color over the edge of our world and sea. My goose-bumped skin smoothed out, and Mother said my hair was a glorious titian. A great peacefulness settled over us, each with our arms wrapped around our knees, and time slowed for our gratitude the way it does when you’re by the water, your dry soul soaking up its magnitude and kindness. Mother rubbed my back and I wriggled into the crook of her arm and put my head in the hollow between her shoulder and cushy chest. We were all mostly quiet, but every now and then, something would pop into her mind and she’d say it and laugh, full and real and utterly joyous. She had the most wonderful laugh. I know I’ve said that, but it’s still true. Even when we had no idea what she was talking about, her laugh would make us laugh with her.
It grew chilly as the sun continued to sink, and Mother said we needed to get back to camp. Roger and I hurried along, eager not to let anything interrupt the good feeling. When we reached the small campsite where we’d built the fireplace, a circle of stones in the middle of the flat rock by which we’d left our bedrolls and cooking equipment, Mother’s face changed. Neither Roger nor I caught it quickly enough, and neither of us, even when we did see the change, knew what had gone wrong. Mother pointed angrily at the area and shouted, “How could you have let this happen?”
Roger and I looked at each other anxiously after each of us had taken a quick inventory. Nothing appeared to be missing. Mother realized we didn’t see what she wanted us to and it infuriated her. “There! There!” she shouted, pointing at what had been the fire, now quite dead of neglect. We scurried to pacify her.
“I’ll work on another one, Mother,” I said, and started to gather up the couple of remaining kindling pieces, while Roger went over to the site and began stirring the ashes with a stick to see if any were live, but it was too late. We had to be reminded how dangerous happiness is.
Mother charged over and pushed Roger to the side. He had been squatting and her rough shove upset his balance; he landed on an elbow and hip. She yelled, then, “It’s a man’s job to keep the fire going.” This was news to both Roger and me, but he knew better than to argue and I knew better than to draw her in my direction. It wouldn’t have diminished Roger’s punishment, only convinced her that her efforts were wasted on both of us and her rage and sorrow would lengthen like our shadows. I slunk backward toward the shadow of an overhanging rock, my back to the ocean, watching, and not wanting to.
Mother grabbed the stick Roger had used to poke the ashes and told him to let his pants down. At thirteen, though he hadn’t a trace of beard of his high-colored fleshy cheeks, Roger was already man-size, of a hefty rectangular build. Still, he obeyed the humiliating order. His underwear gaped open and I could see a thin gathering of dark pubic hairs. I’d wondered if he had it yet. I was nearly twelve and had some, but the health teacher had said boys got theirs later. I could hear Roger apologizing, saying he understood and it wouldn’t happen again, but Mother layered her sorrowful look over her steely one and said he’d have to be taught so he’d never forget again that a man is to tend the fire and provide for women. She reached over and yanked his shorts down, pointed at the rock he was to lean against and raised her other arm, holding the stick.
I lost count of how many times it came down. Behind her the sun was melting into the horizon and it looked as though she was pulling a great red fire down from the sky. Her arm was silhouetted in a slow black curving upward, until, after a momentary pause at the top of the arc, it blurred as it fell, a sickening sound splitting the air before the green stick cracked on his pale flesh, leaving another streak of the bloody sunset there. When we’ve been dead ten thousand years, bright shining as the sun, was the last verse she’d sung, we’ve no less days…than when we first begun, and I thought this time he might die but her killing him still wouldn’t stop. When it was over and Roger was alive, I wanted to be happy that I was a girl, but I wasn’t. Maybe I was jealous in spite of what she’d done to him because, when it was over, she pulled Roger into her arms and held him while he cried, loving and comforting him, and telling him it was all because he had to be a man, a man, a man.
ROGER HEALED UP, WE always did, though normal walking was usually hard for a week or so, and we had to make up stories to our gym teachers so we wouldn’t have to put on shorts. He had to earn his way back into grace, and I had to agree with Mother about how badly Roger had let her—us—down. Perhaps it sounds cowardly, the business of not standing up for each other, but until we were well into our teens, both of us kept trying to tilt the map of the world we held until it fit the puzzle Mother presented. We convinced ourselves it did fit, even if we had to lop off a country here, an ocean there to cram it into place. Later, we really did know better, but by then, we knew something more important: she had to have one of us to hang on to. When Roger defended something I’d said, even though it was to shore her up, she couldn’t stand it. She simply couldn’t stand it.
2
LATER, ROGER AND I AGREED IT was after Newport that the abyss began to spread, or maybe it was just our awareness of it. Not that we talked about it. The night was interminable after the campfire died, and the ocean exhaled a choking fog to overtake the flat rock on which we did not sleep. At least I didn’t. I knew the flame on his buttocks and thighs, the nauseous sweat on his forehead in the clammy air, while movement and stillness were separate agonies. I went over and over what had happened trying to make it come out right, and finally told myself that it must be God Testing My Faith, as He often did Mother’s. But I couldn’t quite believe it in my core where it counted. The it’s not me, it’s not us refrain I’d heard and silenced earlier started up again, as though the long bow of a cello were parting the darkest waters.
But life proceeded largely unchanged for the next couple of years, except for Mother’s vagaries, to which we were long accustomed. We stayed in one place longer than usual, and I thought maybe God was getting forgetful and had neglected to give Mother her usual instructions that it was time to move. So much the better for us. I hoped He’d never get His memory back. Roger took Driver’s Education at school the semester before he turned sixteen and took his test three days after his birthday, irritated that he had to wait so long. Mother had repeatedly warned him he’d not be using her car, but we knew how soon there’d be a bad day when she’d want an errand run, how fast she’d command his foot to the gas pedal then. Mother was a flute teacher whose students came to our house right after school until seven at night. He knew she’d send him to get food, especially on the days when she’d stayed in bed until ten minutes before the first student arrived. Sometimes more than a week would go by with her barely rousable. We’d dig through her purse for change to get cafeteria lunches while she subsisted on canned food until it ran out and hunger flogged her to the grocery.
“RUTHIE, WANT TO GO OUT to eat with me?” Roger asked me late one afternoon. We were, as usual, exiled to the kitchen while Alana Seeley, face jolted with freckles and buck teeth, hailed Schubert’s poor Maria to her most miserable death yet. Mother’s students were frequently untroubled by much talent, but Roger’s imitation of Alana included sucking in his lower jaw when he got on his hands and knees to act like a dog howling at the moon. “Just us,” he said.
“Without Mother?” It was unthinkable.
“We’ll go at five. She’s got Jason McAlister at five-thirty.”
“Will we walk, or…?” We were a good two miles ou
tside of town then, in a little house we rented from a real estate company. Darrville itself was a town like a sprung trap, where most of the houses were old and close together, with porches that sagged in the middle.
“She’ll let me use it,” he answered confidently. He was right, too. He asked when Alana left, and Mother did let him use the car. She even told him it was a nice idea in her sugar voice, the one that melted right into my kettle of jealousy. And it made me nervous. I told myself to have faith.
But the nervousness persisted through the burger, French fries and Coke I ordered at the diner. The beaten-up vinyl seats in the booth were cushy, the grill was giving off wonderful smells over by the counter where a few men in blue work uniforms lingered over coffee and the place was tacky and homey at once, with awful pictures above the booths. A jukebox played five songs for fifty cents. Mother, a rigid purist, detested rock and roll, so I was usually late learning the hits. I tried to keep up without her knowing; Mother’s interpretations of God’s secret messages to her had affected me. I didn’t see why—if He spoke to her by putting Spam on sale—He couldn’t speak to me by the songs He let me hear most often. On the way to the diner, I’d shushed Roger so I could hear Rod Stewart rasp about looking for a reason to believe, the meaning of which had bothered me for some time. Mother said faith was all about not asking for a reason. Not from her, not from God.
I was free to say whatever I wanted after we ordered, but nothing surfaced through my edginess. Roger didn’t notice my fidgeting. He had something else entirely on his mind.
“Mrs. Klimm called me in today during study hall,” he said, unwrapping a straw. Mrs. Klimm was the guidance counselor for the junior class.
“What did you do?” It wasn’t like Roger to get in trouble in school.
“Nothing, it was nothing like that. She wanted to talk to me about my plans.”
“Like your schedule?”
“Ruthie, like college.”
“College?” I was sounding dumb, I knew, but dread coated my tongue with the stuff from the bottom of a murky lake. One of the men at the counter got up to leave and winked at me as he walked to the cash register. Bob was embroidered on a white patch above his shirt pocket. Maybe my father was a man named Bob. Maybe he winked because he was friendly and nice, and maybe the daughters of men named Bob heard them say, I’m here, honey, don’t be afraid.
I studied a French fry as I twirled it in salted ketchup. “Do you think our father, or, well, my father, might be named Bob? That would be a good name…. Maybe someday he’ll…”
He wasn’t going to take the bait. It was amazing how square he could make his jaw when he was determined to ignore something. “She thinks I could get into engineering.”
“Who?” Somebody had put a quarter into the jukebox and was picking out their songs.
“Mrs. Klimm. Me.” He rolled his eyes then and exaggerated his enunciation for the benefit of the mentally handicapped. “Mrs. Klimm thinks I could get into engineering. There’s a scholarship. More than one, actually.”
“What about…?”
“I don’t know. I’d have to go away…it’s inevitable, Ruthie.”
Inevitable? The O’Jays were wailing out “Back Stabbers,” which had just made it to number ten this month. I tried to shut it out, make it that God was sending a message to someone at the counter or at another booth. “No…” I began. “No…she…”
Roger knew exactly where I was going with it. “Don’t worry about it, yet,” he said then, backing out of the minefield he’d planted like he was certified Vietcong. “Give me that ketchup, will you?” He hardly skipped a beat, turned casual as daylight. “I hope you’re doing better in Spanish than I did. How’s old lady Mortina? Nothing put me to sleep faster than that whiny voice conjugating verbs.”
Don’t worry about it yet, he said. As though that were possible. His leaving would begin the unraveling of the world like a ball of blue yarn. I knew that much.
Roger wouldn’t say any more on that subject, and I didn’t want to talk about anything else, so neither of us said much on the ride home. I’d abruptly switched the radio off, not particularly wanting to hear what God had to say at the moment. It might be “Alone Again (Naturally),” and then what would I do? Dusk had been overtaken by night while we ate, and the road was little trafficked. People were home already, in their normal surroundings and normal families, laughing or complaining and telling each other what had happened during their day. Roger reached over and patted my hand once, almost like a father, and tears pushed behind my eyes. When he pulled Mother’s claptrap Rambler into our driveway, he cut the engine, pulled me over to him and held me while I cried.
“Don’t go.” My voice was froggy and my nose running like a little kid’s.
“Ruthie.”
“Rog, don’t go.”
“Well, maybe when Mother moves again, you and she could just move near the university, wherever I get in and get money, that is.”
“It’s not the same, I can’t…be enough, you know.”
“Yeah. I know.” It came out as a sigh. He paused a long time, tightening then relaxing his arm around my shoulder. “You know, you’re really getting pretty, Ruthie.”
“Oh, yeah, Rog. Of course. Lots of guys are really hankering for bone bags with orange hair. What’re you saying that for, anyway?”
“No, I mean it. Your hair isn’t orange, in the first place, and it’s real thick. You’ve got nice eyes, like green and gold at the same time, and good skin, and when you get older, and, you know, put on a little weight…Look, you’re going to be a lot prettier than Mother. Her face is more pointy.” This last was heresy, a complete break from gospel. After another pause, he went on. “And you’re really smart. You could do anything. You should be thinking about what you’re going to do.”
I got the drift, and was not about to make it easy for him. He knew as well as I what was possible and what wasn’t. “Well, I can tell you this much. I’m not pretty. And I’m not smart enough to take care of her without you.”
We sat in the car a long time. I could feel how Roger was squarely in the middle, with me pulling on him from one side and the beguiling idea of his own life pulling from the other. Roger just wanted to be normal. Part of me knew I wasn’t being fair; I had a few friends at school, I knew how different their lives were. More than once I’d longed for a meal of meat loaf and mashed potatoes and a platter of sliced tomatoes set out by a regular mother wearing an apron and nagging me about homework, but it was a part of me guilt still readily squelched.
We sat that way a while longer, my head resting on his chest, until a small movement at the window, a minuscule change in the light around the car, perhaps, attracted my attention. Mother was standing at the window, holding the curtain aside and staring at the car. Instinctively I straightened and pulled away from Roger.
“We’d better get in,” I said.
Roger sighed as he pulled the keys out of the ignition. “Wouldn’t you think one of them—either one, who cares?—could have stuck around?” When he shut the car door on his side, he didn’t try to muffle the sound it made as I did mine, and the noise made me flinch though I couldn’t have said why.
“I still think Bob might have been nice…” I whispered to his shadowy form next to me on the path where grass and dirt stuttered from the driveway to our back stoop.
“I think he’s a jerk. Or they’re both jerks,” he shot back before we were in the small range of light from the house.
“So, did you two have a good time?” Mother asked when we got in the kitchen door. She held herself at a distance, her tone like fried ice cream, melty and warm on the surface and frozen in the center. “I guess you didn’t even think of me.”
“No, Mother, we did. I mean, we really missed you. A lot. We were talking about how lucky we are, and…” Roger babbled less than I, but tried to help weave a coherent cloth that would cover us. Mother took the carry-out bag Roger handed her and tossed it on top of the garbage
. Some of the French fries spilled, their odor full and rich in the kitchen. She loved French fries.
“I’m not hungry,” she said and went into her room, not slamming the door but closing it definitively so the click would resound where she wanted it to, in the lightless caverns of our fear. Although it was only seven-thirty, Roger and I took turns in the bathroom getting ready for bed without speaking another word. By eight o’clock, the house was dark and each of us in our bed, doing our homework with the least possible motion and light.
I fidgeted through my Spanish and algebra but couldn’t even begin to concentrate enough to read the lit assignment. My eyes felt gritty with worry. Finally I just turned off the small amber circle of light from the lamp by the daybed and tried to sleep.
It seemed hours that I lay there. The tension of the house that had earlier linked us room to room now seemed to have drawn itself into one place and coiled around me like a snake. Mother hadn’t come out of her room, but it had been so long now it seemed she wouldn’t, that she must have gone to sleep. Occasionally I observed—without allowing myself to think it—that an episode had to have been planned. How else would it be that she’d already gone to the bathroom, or I’d notice dirty dishes on her nightstand the next morning?
I got up and crept to Roger’s room. His light was off, but he must have sensed movement near his open door because I heard his breathing change. I tiptoed barefoot to his bed and he lifted the covers back with one arm. I’d not done this for a long time. While we were in elementary school, we’d rented a tiny two-story house for a while. Mother said the stairs bothered her knees and often slept in the parlor to avoid going up to bed. She’d be there in the morning when we left, and still there in the same clothes waiting for her first student when we got home from school. That year, when things were particularly bad, I’d sneak into Roger’s bed and sleep next to him for the comfort of it.