Clara at the Edge

by Maryl Jo Fox

  Copyright © 2017 Maryl Jo Fox

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, digital scanning, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, please address She Writes Press.

  Published 2017

  Printed in the United States of America

  ISBN: 978-1-63152-250-5 pbk

  ISBN: 978-1-63152-251-2 ebk

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2017944691

  For information, address:

  She Writes Press

  1563 Solano Ave #546

  Berkeley, CA 94707

  She Writes Press is a division of SparkPoint Studio, LLC.

  To my family

  PART ONE

  chapter 1

  Clara heard his breathing, smelled his smell of rotten mushrooms and oily sweat. Her father had followed her into the darkest corner of the barn, where she hid. He was going to hurt her, she just knew it. She was twelve. She’d been watching him the last few months. He would give her the look that said she knew the same secret he did—that she was no good and he had to beat it out of her. But she didn’t know any secret like that. She was just afraid of him. She’d seen him beat her mother and her twin sister, Lillian, and she knew her turn was coming. Her mother was mild as a moth, always washing doilies and holding them up to the sun to admire their designs. She would keep sweeping the porch until he came and beat on her. And then she just cringed, never fought back. Clara never wanted to be like that.

  When his lantern lit up her face in the barn, wasps came from nowhere and surrounded his head. Wasps! Her heart thudded in her chest. They were furious, in a tight ball, making a sound like a thousand voices. He covered his face with his arms and let out a shuddering scream. She’d never heard him scream before, had never seen wasps like this—an angry swarm with lavender wings and lavender bodies. Her head hurt with how they shimmered and hummed darkly, circling her father’s head. Not bothering her, just him.

  Suddenly she knew the wasps would always protect her. In the worst moment of her life so far, when she was old enough to know her father could do something far worse than just beat on her, the wasps came to drive him out of there. He dropped the light and ran, crashing into milk pails, never to bother her again. She never knew he was so deathly afraid of wasps. His cries echoed over the flat North Dakota plain.

  The next day, she and her twin sister Lillian made a fierce pact. They faced each other in the barn, put their thumbs on each other’s foreheads, and vowed to save up money to take the Greyhound to Oregon together after they finished high school in 1946 because Oregon was far from North Dakota and had lots of rain and trees and they had a cousin Loretta there who would never rat on them. The trip took three days—sweltering, cranky, carsick days, but also giggly days. It was worth it. Clara and Lillian went to college in Eugene and never saw their parents again. Never once did their parents try to contact Loretta to see if their children had landed there. Clara and Lillian could have flown to Mars for all their parents knew.

  Clara assumed Lillian would always live nearby. But in her junior year, Lillian—such a wonderful artist!—ran off to Europe with her no-good boyfriend and never came back. Clara, heartsick and furious, knew this guy would break her heart, but Lillian wouldn’t listen. Clara would make her own home in Eugene and stay there forever. She would find people she could love and who would love her back. She would be safe there. What she wanted most in life was to be safe.

  Now in the summer of 2000, Clara screeches the tattered U-Haul to a halt by the side of the two-lane highway. She watches her grown son, Frank, make a wide turn into the big Desert Dan’s Casino and Restaurant parking lot in Jackpot, Nevada. Hunching forward, she white-knuckles the steering wheel as she watches. He’s shooting for a grand ballet-like turn—if you can describe a fifty-year-old, one-thousand-square-foot house anchored to a twelve-axle flatbed trailer as being at all ballet-like in the way it moves. He’s over-shooting the curb, she’s sure of it. He’s going to hit it! That’s how he gets—impatient. This is the end of their journey from Eugene, Oregon, to Jackpot, Nevada. It’s June 4, 2000. They’ve been on the road four days now. They’re bushed.

  Her heart is pounding. She jumps out of the U-Haul to watch and stands panicked near the wide driveway entrance, clenching her damp hands together. As he rounds his load into the oncoming lane, a car speeds toward him. Frank lays on the horn. The other driver slams to a halt and jumps out of his car, shouting, “What the fuck, man! A house? For Christ’s sake, what’s going on here?”

  “Give me a minute here, dude.” Frank cranks the trailer cab back out of the oncoming lane with a hard right. The house groans and shifts as it gains the parking lot.

  Clara hears something like a muffled crack. She covers her ears, refusing to let it register. But her heart sinks. The house hit the curb? Cracked? No, it’s just the sighing of old timbers hammered together almost fifty years ago. Has to be, she thinks desperately.

  The offended motorist careens into the night, blasting his horn for good measure.

  Late night gamblers gawk at the highway showdown and the uncommon cargo as it lumbers to the far side of the big casino parking lot, shadowed by the small gray-haired woman running along beside it. Such a drastic step, some might say—uprooting her house to be with her son?

  Frank kills the motor and unrolls the window when he sees his mother running alongside the tractor trailer.

  “What now?” he barks.

  Four months ago, the unthinkable had happened. Bulldozers would soon tear down Clara’s house to make way for a new mall. All her efforts had failed—the incessant city council meetings, her outraged speeches, the petition drive she led against the mall with her friend Abigail Morton in front of Safeway—nothing stopped the city. Once she got the eviction notice, she called Frank in a panic. His phone rang and rang. On a layover in Chicago, he finally picked up the phone, sounding sleepy.

  She sputtered in a rush, “They’re going to tear down the house, Frank. I can’t believe it. I thought we could stop them.”

  Silence. “So what will you do?” he said slowly, mulling on the fact that his mother is seventy-three years old.

  “No way will I leave my house to the wrecking ball.” Her voice was steely. The line went silent for a minute. “Frank? Frank, are you there?”

  “Let me call you back tomorrow,” he said morosely.

  The next day his voice was barely audible. “Well, there’s Jackpot.”

  “There’s Jackpot,” she echoed, her voice quavering. She knew he would say this, and she jumped at the chance. Frank is going to Jackpot to see his old friend Scotty who is having back and stomach pain and won’t see a doctor. Scotty hates doctors. Frank is going to stay in Jackpot until he gets Scotty to see a doctor.

  A small crowd lingers in the parking lot, watching. Clara’s voice is tight with panic. “Frank, that sound back there—it sounded like a crack.” She’s shaking all over. But he’s a good driver, she thinks in confusion, ashamed of her lack of confidence in him.

  “Oh, for God’s sake, Mother, that was no crack. The house shifts and settles like that every time I turn or change lanes. A sound like that is old news.” Frank looks at her in exasperation, sighs, and jumps out of the trailer cab. His hair is tousled; he could use a shower. “Look, let’s walk around the house together. You’ll see there’s no crack.”

  “Let me do it. You stay here,” she says stoutly, straining to come up to his collarbone.

  It’s da
rk, almost ten, on a hot June night. She gestures vaguely for him to stay put by the open door of the trailer cab, a rich sweaty smell coming from inside. He’s just glad to be standing up. Glad not to hear her belly-ache at him for two minutes as she disappears behind the house.

  She can’t see any cracks by the light of the neon Desert Dan’s sign, but she runs her hands eagerly along the entire perimeter of her beloved house anyway. She can’t feel any cracks. But a crack might be in a hidden place! She’ll look later, when he’s not around. Her hands, when she’s done, are filthy. She wipes them on her weathered jeans. At least she’s had time to gather her wits.

  “Remember why you came, stupid woman,” she whispers. “To heal things with your son. All those years when you couldn’t even talk together.” She makes a little gasping sound as her daughter’s face flashes before her eyes. “And to save your soul from damnation.” She whispers, “And maybe have one last moment of life again?”

  She scratches her forehead. Two wasp stings, one above each eyebrow, still itch. Her head aches.

  The night before she and Frank left Eugene, Clara was marching around on the driveway, agitated and mumbling about the move. The current purple wasp was flying around Clara’s head, trying to see what was going on.

  Finally she muttered that she wasn’t going to leave Eugene with Frank after all. “Four days creeping along the highway with an old house ready to fall apart? I’m too old. Can’t do it. Too much to ask. Too big an undertaking. House will fall apart. Collapse. Might have an accident. Going crazy worrying.” Whine, whine.

  BAM! Buzzing in a tizzy, the purple wasp stung her forehead twice, one sting above each eyebrow. She shrieked. “Why did you sting me? You’ve never done that!”

  The wasp hummed in the way only Clara could understand. “Think again, Clara. You’ve dilly-dallied for years about your kids. Thousands of us swore to protect you forever ever since that night in your father’s barn. But you won’t listen to anything we say about your daughter’s death. Talk, we say, just talk. Or you’ll die miserable and alone. But you stay buttoned up. At least on this trip you have a chance to connect with your son, explain how it was all those years.” The exasperated purple wasp whirled in dizzy circles. “For heaven’s sake, you’re an ordinary woman bedeviled by a lion’s share of grief and loneliness. Why wouldn’t you want a chance at peace and reconciliation and truth-telling before you die? Are you crazy? I need to get into your moldy Dream Jars and Brain Rooms to dig out all the muck. But with all your dodging about, I’ve only got thirty-five days left to do it. Or have you forgotten that wasps only live a hundred and twenty days and you are very late to sign on to this enterprise, missy?”

  She wasn’t listening. She was a sting virgin, never been stung before. Didn’t want any lecturing just now, thank you very much. She gripped the sides of her head to blot out the pain. She ran inside, put an ice pack on the stings, took a Benadryl, and looked at herself in the mirror. The stings had swollen up and looked like two extra eyes on her forehead. She looked like a religious statue with mystical powers.

  Clara looked out the window at her winged attacker, still angrily circling the driveway. This wasp means business.

  But she knew that already. That’s why she wanted to back out.

  Frank stands by the door of the trailer cab, his muscular arms folded, looking sour and ready to drop. Clara is done looking for cracks.

  “Maybe you’re right, Frank. Maybe I just heard something shifting around.” She wants to make peace with him. He’s been on edge the entire trip.

  But then so has she. Over four exhausting days, they would pull into rest stops and right away she would jump out of the U-Haul and head for the tethered house. It was empty except for their sleeping bags and a few wardrobe changes. Everything else was in the U-Haul. But she always had to check on the wasps, buzzing furiously in their big beef jerky jars. She kept them in her closet where the two big jars wouldn’t roll around.

  After she sat down cross-legged on the floor and peered at each of the sixteen wasps, eight in each jar, Frank always knew what was coming next: She would sing to them: “Some Enchanted Evening,” “Blue Suede Shoes,” “I’ll Be With You in Apple Blossom Time”—God knows what other ancient Top 40 songs. Even thinking about this makes him feel like such a fool. What had he gotten himself into? He’d go sit in the trailer cab to escape her singing and have a smoke, his arm dangling out the window, tapping ashes to the ground.

  He started smoking again on this trip. Here he is, forty-six and can’t say no to his mother. He understood about the house, how important it was to her, that she had to save it. He even understood about the wasps in some dim way he didn’t want to admit. But he had just hatched his own run to freedom, which he’d have to put on hold now. He had planned to leave the country with his friend Fernando, go to San Miguel de Allende and build houses for gringos. He had enough money now to go anywhere he wanted.

  A few months ago, his Aunt Lillian dropped dead from a heart attack outside a London theater as her new lover, Patrick Chalmers, stood shocked beside her. Lillian’s will left everything to Frank. She had no children, had never married. So Frank promptly quit his boring job with Union Pacific, for which he had endlessly crisscrossed the country for years. He had quit just as Clara got her eviction notice.

  So here they are, mother and son yoked together after all these years of hardly seeing each other. At rest stops, they sat wordless at old picnic tables and avoided each other’s eyes. Sometimes they discussed the weather. All along the route, mother and son would ask themselves why they agreed to this hare-brained scheme anyway, tying themselves together like this after years of hardly seeing each other. Tongue-tied, they couldn’t talk about it.

  Before it’s too late, she wants to talk with him, laugh with him, be a mother finally after all these years of halting silence and endless grief. He’s her only living family. Her daughter and husband have been dead for years. These deaths, particularly her daughter’s, have scalded her soul. She feels responsible for her daughter’s death and can’t discuss this with anyone. She knows Frank wants to leave the country, but before he does, she wants to reconcile with him, have some loving times with him, heal the painful past they share. She’s tired of living as if she were already dead.

  Something in her snapped when she heard the house would be demolished. She and her husband Darrell built that house together almost fifty years ago. She will not lose her house, and she will follow her son to Mars if she has to.

  Frank sighs and walks into Desert Dan’s, where Scotty was supposed to meet them, but he’s not there. Scotty owns Desert Dan’s. So instead of Scotty’s quiet house with three bedrooms, three bathrooms, and beds with sheets, not to mention running water, Frank and his mother have to sleep again in the uprooted house right there in the big parking lot. One bathroom, serviced by a camp toilet and bottled water.

  Just as she’s falling asleep, someone scratches at her bedroom screen. Frank doesn’t hear it. He’s already fast asleep on the living room floor in his battered sleeping bag. But she hears it. The scratching stops, and someone snickers and walks away, rattling something, keys or a set of tools. She had slept fitfully, until just now, in the silvery desert morning, when a loud boom boom boom! wracks the walls. She listens carefully, not moving. Someone’s walking around the perimeter, banging on the house real smarty-pants like. Loud, with a beat: ta TUM tum, ta TUM tum. Her house. The house Frank grew up in, the house she’s lived in like a nun for almost thirty years, ever since Frank left after high school.

  “What’s that noise?” Musty with sleep, Frank bolts up from his sleeping bag.

  “Nothing. Some kid.” She tries to sound brave, but her voice shakes.

  “Baloney. Stay here.” He does a quick check outside, comes back in. “Nothing. I’ll talk to Scotty. We’ve got to get off this parking lot.” He yawns, irritated, and climbs back into his sleeping bag.

  She’s frightened, wonders if she’s dreaming. First the
scratching, now the banging. Why would someone do that? On the road those four days, people waved and smiled at their old house rumbling along the highway. Not like this—rude. Some punk, she tells herself. Standing up straighter, she marches into the cramped bathroom and stumbles over the camp toilet next to the disconnected toilet. She splashes her face with bottled water at the sink, massages her neck near her strawberry birthmark, and anchors her springy salt-and-pepper bob with barrettes. Back in her bedroom, she straps her Timex with the big numbers to her wrist and dresses in her black sports bra, red knit sweatpants, and blue T-shirt. It’s 7:40 in the morning. She’s exhausted.

  Thin flesh flaps quiver on her upper arms as she stubbornly does hamstring stretches, downward dog, brave warrior. The wasps are buzzing like mad, butting their heads against the two big beef jerky jars in the closet, trying to get out. She pats the well-aerated lids. The wasps clump furiously in each jar, trying to get to where her hand is.

  We want our sugar water.

  “Settle down. You know I walk first.”

  What was she thinking, luring them into these jars for the long trip? She’s got to let them out, for heaven’s sake. She can’t asphyxiate them. But what if they escape? She can’t be without her wasps. It’s as simple as that. She’s in a fix, one of many. She’ll deal with this one later.

  She passes by Frank in his sleeping bag. He stirs, grimacing, his dimples long creases in the brash light, his rumpled sandy hair twisted in crazy curlicues. He waves at her without conviction and mumbles, “I’ll be gone when you get back.”

  “I know.” She smiles distractedly and heads for the door.

  Wiry, headstrong, Clara will do as she’s always done. She will know this place by walking on its dirt.

  She hops off the makeshift steps Frank built for the high-riding flatbed and slowly crosses the big parking lot. It’s pretty quiet this morning. Even so, stray laughter and slammed car doors are too loud for her sleep-deprived state. But her lungs feel pumped up, as if millions of tiny air sacs have sprung to life. She breathes better in this dry air; that’s for sure. In Eugene, her allergies—to ragweed, Douglas fir, molds from the damp climate—were getting to be murder. Her first bout of pneumonia this winter scared her, made her nun-like retreat from life seem suddenly foolish. The sound of bulldozers was the last straw. Everything is conspiring to wake her up, change her life somehow before it’s too late. Something is pushing her, some unknown force. Her forehead aches. She itches the stings. She’s scared.