Farley’s is a huge hardware store, open seven days a week ’til ten. They sell lumber, barbecues, unpainted furniture, shower curtains and telephones. Farley’s is my secret ace in the hole; I call it “Hillary’s Refuge.” When I become too shaky about being alone, I come down to Farley’s where “Everything to Make an Oklahoma House a Home” is on sale. Besides that, all the products come with instructions. And failing those, they offer a courteous staff of men who will explain everything.
But this afternoon is not one of those shaky times. I have a couple of hours before Jenny gets home from school, and I’m going to check on a picnic table with benches attached—a clearance item. I seem to be the only customer interested in this bargain—$69.95, redwood. A bony-faced clerk with slicked-back black hair is standing beside the floor sample. His name, Morgan, is stitched on his white Farley’s shirt. I hope he will move on, but he just folds his broad arms across his chest. The picnic set is a satisfying, dark rose color, sanded smooth. “What I’m looking for,” I say, “is a kind of booth effect. For my kitchen?”
The manager frowns.
“A cozy corner to eat in, sort of enclosed, you know, with a lamp overhead, in front of a window, a good place for homework too.”
Morgan’s frown deepens.
“I don’t have any kitchen furniture,” I say. “This would be a start, wouldn’t it? For the time being.”
He is shaking his head. “I wouldn’t,” he says.
“You wouldn’t, huh? Well, what would you do?” I sound strident. Morgan glances down the aisle to see if anyone has heard the unhappy customer.
“You’d have to build in something like that,” he says softly. He keeps his arms folded, and tightens his grip on the muscles beneath his rolled up sleeves. Damn him. If I were handy, I wouldn’t be considering such a stopgap solution.
“Your husband could—”
“My husband was a salesman. Salesmen don’t build things. Robert never fixed a thing in his life. Salesmen play golf!” I am trembling. I turn and make myself walk briskly towards the exit.
I sit in my car in the parking lot and wait for the hot spinning behind my breast bone to slow. I am weakened against these outbursts partly because I seem to have lost the knack of sleeping at night. At first after Robert left, I thought the problem was in our bed. I took Jenny and stayed a few nights with my folks.
“Did you sleep?” my father would ask each morning.
“No.”
“But you rested, right?” As though my time in bed were idle. We went back to our house, where I could not sleep in private. I tried all the tricks—exercised myself to exhaustion, drank warm milk, thought happy thoughts as I set aside my book and switched off the lamp. Then, suddenly the dark would harness me to a wheel— If I’d known the rules had changed, Robert, I would have played a different game!—a better game—If I’d known you’d changed the rules on me, Robert. You changed, Robert— round and round I tread the same circle. If I’d known that was how we were going to conduct ourselves. Robert!
It is hot in the car. I turn on the engine, set the air-conditioning on high, and try to get a grip. I am Hillary O’Brian, a long time resident of Cadillac. I am now a journalist with a new job, hot on my first important story. I am a homeowner. I vote, pay my bills, and most of all, I am a mother, and I must not let myself fall apart in public.
The school bus lets Jenny off just before the road dips between us and the section line. Although she’s still half a mile away, I can watch her coming home from her first day of school. She’s only ten, a new fifth grader, but there are already signs that she’s going to be built just like me—not a sprinter, a bit of a trudger, but she’s picking up a little speed. I dry my hands and head for the back door.
“Guess what,” she says as she plunks her papers on the card table next to my typewriter and reaches for the fridge. “Mr. Richter, my teacher, he isn’t married.”
“Yes, I know.” I actually was at O.U. at the same time Todd Richter was regarded as the cutest football player in A House.
“Mom!” She turns from the fridge with a can of coke in hand. Her eyes are wide with excitement. “He’s extremely handsome, and he’s just your age!”
We stand there facing each other. She thinks I’m slow to get her point. I suddenly feel very heavy—“good farming stock,” I once heard my father say referring to that side of the family I have to thank for most of my physical characteristics. Jenny’s eyes are bright with her news. She is ready to conspire. She thinks we will sit down now to decide what outfit I will wear on my date with Mr. Richter. Jenny is too young, I think, to be introduced to the concept of a woman’s market value.
“Sit down, hon. Catch your breath. Do you have any homework?” I sit on my mother’s old dresser bench that I use while typing at the card table.
Jenny sits on the piano stool across from me. “Don’t you want to talk about Mr. Richter?”
“Surely there’re lots of other things to talk about. What’d they give you for lunch?”
She is suddenly glum. “Meat loaf,” she says hardly moving her lips. I’ve handled this wrong. All summer she’s been on the lookout for a good man, and today she found the perfect answer for revenge. Her daddy married a new wife and moved three hundred miles away. She hates him. She misses him desperately. This would have shown him. We found somebody better—a handsome teacher, a man who can play the guitar, a man who wears jeans and boots to school. But stupid Mom has smashed it. Jenny twists off the piano stool, anxious to go upstairs and get on the phone to a friend. I’ve been so eager for her to come home, and she hasn’t been in the kitchen five minutes.
“I’m going to make tacos for supper,” I call after her. I pull my laptop in front of me. I need to finish the piece on the City Commission’s input on the town green proposition before I start supper. Mr. Tarman has me on probation to see if I can handle a story with a death and a Las Vegas widow. But this is my story, and I can barely wait to pounce on the toxic waste issue.
In the morning I rise from the labors of the night and prepare for my day job. I drop Jenny at school, then head for my desk at work. This job is getting exciting, poking underneath Cadillac’s self-satisfied, booster surface.
I stop in at Farley’s on the way home for light bulbs. I must not start avoiding this place. I dash down the center aisle and make a left. There seems to be nothing here but paint, stacked to the ceiling—canyon-like, running for miles in either direction. Dammit, where are the light bulbs. I whip around a corner and bump into Morgan.
“Gosh, I’m sorry,” he says.
“I’m sorry. Really.” We have jumped back from each other.
“Pews may be the answer,” he says.
“What?”
“You asked what I would do for the kitchen?”
“Thank you, Morgan.” I am still catching my breath. Maybe this is one of those very literal-minded people who thinks you really want to know when you ask, How are you? Light bulbs. Light bulbs. Just don’t get into another scene. I make myself smile. “Thanks, really.”
“No,” he says holding up his hands.
“Pews?” I ask.
“My old church is auctioning off the pews to raise money for the building fund. You could just look at them, maybe get some ideas.”
“Where?”
“Up near Bartlesville. Saturday morning.”
“That’s a long way.”
“I could show you. I’m going anyway.” He hands me his card. Morgan Thornton, General Manager.
Friday afternoon Jenny comes in, but doesn’t speak. She has taken forever to get up the hill, and I know there is bad news. She gets a soda from the refrigerator, but doesn’t sit down. Her face is pinched shut.
“So how was school?”
With great concentration, she opens the pull tab. “Mr. Richter is taking Patty Morrison’s mom to Oklahoma City to a Miranda Lambert concert.”
Well of course he is, I want to say. She’s just his type, poor thing. Jenny
looks up. She’s crying. The good man has gotten away. “Ah, sweetie, don’t cry.” I rush toward her. She pulls away and runs upstairs. I lean on the card table and let myself down in front of the laptop. I rest my fingers on the keyboard.
Todd Richter was a second string football player, but he was handsome enough to glide along in that social strata where warm, sweet breaths encouraged him to believe that his luck would somehow carry him right into the pros. But when O.U. gets done with its jocks, they often discover that they are not young gods, but grade school teachers—elementary education being an easy major.
By 11:00 p.m. I am drowsy. I must let sleep slip over me like a net over a dumb animal. I stretch and close my eyes. “You must have had a good laugh, Robert— me humming along, no clue. What a laugh, Robert!”
Cars are parked on both sides of the country road for half a mile. How did all these people find out about an auction at a country church? As we pull up, a man says hello to Morgan and takes aside a rope that has kept people from parking in the churchyard. It’s a pretty church, bigger than I’d expected. The auctioneer has set up a platform with a podium. There are folding chairs, but many people are sitting on the pews, drinking from Styrofoam cups and eating donuts.
Morgan parks behind the church. I can tell already, this isn’t going to work. These pews are too big for my kitchen—dark, clumsy things, gummy with age. They look out of place, like beached whales out of their dim, cool element; slung out in the bright sun where people gawk at their scars. “Come on,” Morgan says. These are his first words in an hour.
It had been dark when his new pickup pulled in front of my house. We dropped Jenny at Patty’s and drove over three hours. He has what my dad calls a hatchet face—narrow with high cheek bones and a hook nose, probably some Indian blood. He told me this was his boyhood church, but he moved to Cadillac after he finished business school at O.U. Not much information for a over two hundred miles. I didn’t ask him if he knew Robert in the business school or if he’d heard of Todd Richter.
“Do you want to look inside first?” he asks. We climb the three steps of the old clapboard church and stand in the doorway. There is the smell of old hymnals and recent carpentry. The morning sunlight streams through the dusty air into the bare, empty space. On the floor dark holes mark where each pew was unbolted. The chancel, without its pulpit or choir, looks to be nothing but a stage, its holiness stripped away. Only the walls are left—a carcass without its bones. There is a story here. “Can’t you use the pews in the new church?”
“The majority voted for theater seats.” He says this evenly, looking straight ahead. “Theater seats and air conditioning is what this is all about.” His jaw pulses leaving me sure how he would have voted if he’d still lived here. “When I was first divorced,” he says, “I felt just like this church—a big old drafty hollow thing that had lost its purpose.”
He escorts me out to a pew in the shade of a big elm tree then heads in the direction of the auctioneer. I hadn’t thought about whether he’d ever been married.
I had known Todd Richter at O.U. and actually spoke to him once. It was one of those brief interludes that occurs at the end of the semester between the good-looking guy who’s hardly attended class and the female grind he approaches for her botany notes.
I feel myself smiling now and straighten in the pew to lift my elbow to see that on the armrest there is a band of carving—a twisting pattern. Fish—gracefully swimming down the armrest. They have long curved bodies like salmon, their backs smoothed by generations of churchgoers whose fingers have traced their silky progress through thousands of sermons. I want this pew. It is comforting. Its gentle curves are better than any fine furniture. It will bring dignity and stability to my home. I look up. Morgan is coming back. He’s got to tell me how to get this.
“You may not like these particular pews,” Morgan says and hands me a cup of coffee and a donut. “There are some from the choir—shorter.”
I want to look for them, but the bidding has already started. “Forty, Gemme fifty. Forty, Gemme fifty. Got fifty. Who’ll Gemme sixty,” the auctioneer chants.
“It’s buy the piece and take the pair,” Morgan says softly.
“What does that mean?”
“They are selling them in twos. The price reached in the bidding is for one.”
“So whatever I bid, I will pay twice that, right?”
“Right.”
I will wait for the choir pews.
I had been in one of my reckless frames of mind when I picked up the phone and called him. It was one of those what-the-hell-nothing-else-is-happening-in-my-social-life moments. The association with Farley’s probably gave him a warranty of safety: This is not a strangler. He told me to bring cash just in case I wanted to bid. I have three hundred dollars in my purse. Numbers seventy-nine and eighty have just sold for a hundred and ten dollars apiece. Morgan is leaning forward, his elbows on his knees. His thin lips are pressed shut, his hatchet profile is harsh. “We’ve got to do better than this,” he says. Of course, this was his church. He wants the bids to go higher. It is only 9:30.
By noon all the long pews have been sold. I feel grateful that after a steady rise, the price has come down, but Morgan is leaning forward, his big hands gripped. He rises when an old couple comes up to thank him for his help. I stand aside and listen. Morgan was in charge of removing the pews. He stoops slightly to listen to the couple. Jenny had spurned his gentle greeting this morning, making it clear that the only exciting possibilities for the day awaited at Patty’s.
After lunch one of the smaller choir pews is lifted onto the platform beside the auctioneer. Number three. It looks rosy in the sunlight, not like the long ones. I turn to look at Morgan. “I rubbed it down with Murphy’s soap and steel wool,” he says. The crowd is scurrying to their seats. “Buy the piece and take the pair,” shouts the auctioneer to start things off. “Who’ll gemme a hunnert, Gemme a hunnert, Gemme a hunnert,” begins his nasal chant. “Gotta hunnert. Who’ll Gemme hunnert twenty. Got twenty. Got thirty. Got forty. Got fifty.”
Oh, no. I’m out of it, and I didn’t even get to bid.
Morgan is sitting up very tall turning his head from bidder to bidder. He is smiling. The final bid is seven hundred.
On the long drive home I keep wanting to say, Listen, Mr. Handyman, why didn’t you suggest I buy two of the long ones and cut them down? Why did you let me wait for those choir pews?
It’s only five when we get back to Cadillac. “I want to show you something,” he says as we pull onto Ellis Street. “Can we stop a minute at my place?”
I’m hot and tired and eager to get Jenny and try to forget about redoing my kitchen. “Gee, can it wait?” I say. “I really have to pick up Jenny and get home.”
Two nights later Morgan calls. He is taking a break at work, and I can tell from his tone that he wants to shoot the breeze awhile. Jenny and I are in the middle of dinner, and she stares at me as I try to make casual conversation standing at the wall phone beside the sink. I feel like I am trying to talk to a boy with my mother listening, but Morgan’s deep voice contains no push or program, and it comforts me.
“Not that hardware guy?” Jenny asks when I hang up. The expression on her face makes me want to slap her, but I don’t. Mothers are supposed to be constant, placid, sexless beings. Tomorrow I will choose another Voice for my column and hand it to Mr. Tarman.
Farley’s seven-days-a-week, fifteen-hour-days leave Morgan almost no free time, but we talk on the phone every day. He’s good at asking questions and then waiting while I meander and double back into my answers. I like his sense of humor. He’s a farm boy—doesn’t shy away from alluding to cow pies and prairie oysters. Yet he can be subtle. Tonight I asked him if he liked fishing.
“Fishing, huh?” he draws out the words. “Yeah, I can fish.”
“Oh,” I say, “and what kind of a fisherman are you?”
“I’m a fly fisher.”
“Oh?”
; “Fly fishermen are very particular. I’m not a trawler.” His voice is deep and slow, and I cannot get enough of it. He says, “Never had any taste for just dragging the net along behind the boat. I won’t sample something just because it jumps into my net, looking flashy.”
I close my eyes and press my forehead against the kitchen wall to savor a moist pang rising in me that I had forgotten I could feel. “We fly fishermen know what we want,” he says. “And we tie a fly, something subtle, irresistible, tailor-made to get the job done. And we have to go to just the right pool where the particular fish we want swims. And we stand there in the cold water, patiently sending out our line as long as it takes to entice the one we have set our hearts on.” There is silence now on the line, and I know he can hear me breathing.
It’s Sunday morning. The phone is ringing. Jenny is spending the night at Patty’s house. She and I packed a dress and the patent leather flats for Sunday school. This is all coming back as I struggle to rise from a deep pool of sleep. I feel almost too heavy to swim or to raise my head to look at the clock. 7:20. I pick up the phone. Jenny says I must come get her immediately. What has gone wrong? I throw on my jeans and rush into town without even brushing my teeth.
In the car she sits as far from me as she can get. I know she will run to her room as soon as we get inside, so I step in the back door ahead of her and block her path to the stairs. She sits on the piano stool and wraps her arms around her waist. Finally she looks at me. “Mom, I made a bad mistake.”
“What happened, sweetheart?” My heart is thumping.
She turns slightly and looks at the floor. “Mr. Richter—you know how I wanted you to go out with him?”
“Yes, sweetheart, I know.”
She glances sidelong at me and her chin quivers. I kneel beside her. “I thought he was so wonderful, and—” She gulps and lets me take her in my arms. “I thought he was a nice person, but he did something that hurt Patty’s mom’s feelings, and now she’s crying all night. He’s so nice in school—” She drags in a shaky breath and then in a hot sob, “I hate him.”
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