The Novels of Lisa Alther

by Lisa Alther

  “She didn’t?” Her own personal opinion was that Jed was itching for trouble. The gossip about Coach Clancy, and about her and Hank, had died down. The statue of the Confederate soldier had been blown up and brought the strike to a halt. A reporter from the Newland News came by one night and informed Jed that Al Grimes claimed to have spotted him near the statue shortly before the explosion. Jed denied it.

  “Why would Mr. Grimes have told them that?” Sally mused afterward.

  “Don’t know,” said Jed, grinning.

  But that gossip had died down, too. Jed had been promoted to foreman. The union was voted out. Raymond moved to Kentucky. Things got quiet and peaceful. Sally figured this was why Jed had to go arguing about babysitters. When she refused to argue back, though, he dropped it and started looking around at new-model cars. He haunted the auto lots. Every week he came home with a new deal—bigger trade-in on the Chevy, accessories thrown in free, no freight charge. He had huge stacks of racing magazines and consumer guides and manufacturers’ literature by his Naugahyde La-Z-Boy Lounger in the living room. In the end he bought him a rose-colored T-Bird, just as he had wanted to ever since high school. He got a license plate that read “stud,” which embarrassed Sally to death whenever she rode with him, or had to think about him roaring through town to the mill. But he just laughed and said the reputation he had to maintain was partly her doing, what with the business with Hank under the Chevy. He began buying a new wardrobe to go with the car—colored and striped and checked shirts and bright ties to wear under his coveralls.

  She meantime was just beginning to identify the possibilities all around her. Looking back, she realized that in the stadium that afternoon she’d recognized who she was, and she’d accepted it: She was no longer a teenage beauty queen, she was a wife and mother, a homemaker. The real challenge was to take this reality and do something useful and interesting with it. The house and children defined her and confined her only insofar as she allowed them to. She could use them instead as a framework around which to build a satisfying new identity all her own.

  Her bottled-up creativity was now just pouring out. Instead of singing the boring old lullabies everybody knew to Joey and Laura, she began composing her own. As she sang, she’d imagine she was holding a microphone. One night she was belting out, “Hush, hush my little larvae, / Cause dreamland can’t be far be- / hind those tired little eyelids …”

  Laura rubbed her fists in her eyes and wailed, “Can’t sleep. Mommy sings too loud.”

  “Hush, darling, Mommy’s composing.” She was trying to decide what picture she wanted on the album cover of “Mother Sally Tatro’s Bedtime Ballads.”

  As she was carving the head of a geisha girl doll from a Red Delicious apple for her term project, she grasped the fact that the course was almost over. It would leave a big void. She could go on carving apples on her own, true. But she’d miss the contact with Bonnie and the other women. Jed just wouldn’t give her any support for her appleheads. When he found the heads for her Cherokee Indian tribe hanging to dry from pipe cleaners over the furnace in the cellar, he threw them out. She cried for a week. “Shit, woman,” he muttered. “Just a bunch of moldy old rotten apples.” He had no idea how much time had gone into carving and pinching them into shape. Three of the four weeks required for them to dry had been up. He wouldn’t even try to understand why his throwing them out made her so upset.

  Bonnie had talked about setting up an Advanced Applehead-Carving course, but the Adult Education people felt that one applehead course was enough. Sally could take the beginning course over again, but that would be just marking time when she should really be moving on to more complicated techniques. She didn’t know what to do. She popped the piece of apple she’d just cut to form the temple and cheek into her mouth.

  Jed walked in as she was coring the geisha girl’s head and packing the hole with salt. “Ah shit, Sally, I reckon supper’s gonna be late again tonight?”

  Sally looked up as she brushed the applehead with lemon juice and salt. “I’m sorry, honey. This is real important. It’s my term project.”

  He stomped into the bedroom and began throwing his clothes around the room. Then he turned on the TV and lay back in his La-Z-Boy Lounger.

  As Sally stood over the sink cutting up peaches and cantaloupe for a fruit salad, she thought some more about what to do once the course ended. The girls in the class had become very friendly with each other and with Bonnie. Seemed a shame never to see them again, never to exchange ideas on common problems, such as what kind of paring knife to use so as not to discolor your appleheads. As she pondered this, holding a half-peeled peach and a knife over the sink, her eyes fixed on the seeds and pits that lay in the Dispose-All hole. Seemed such a waste just to wash them into the sewer. All of a sudden, wind seemed to rush around her ears. A bright light blinded her. In a flash she realized those pits and seeds were as potentially valuable as Red Delicious apples. Why couldn’t she clean and shellac and string the peach pits to make bead curtains for windows and doorways? Why not turn the cantaloupe seeds into bracelets and necklaces and earrings? She glanced frantically around the kitchen. Possibilities were being revealed to her at such a pace that she only hoped she could remember them all when she returned to her normal everyday self. Aluminum foil. It could be crumpled and pinched into silver roses.

  “Jed honey,” she announced at supper, “I just realized you could cut up one of those plastic trays you buy meat in to look like a peacock. Make a tail with those cups from an egg carton. Glue it all to a piece of black velvet.”

  “Huh?”

  She sighed. “It’d be beautiful, honey. Don’t you think?”

  Jed kept chewing.

  She looked at him. “You just don’t care, do you, Jed?”

  “About what?”

  “As long as your meals are on the table.”

  “Care about what?”

  “As long as there are clean socks in your drawer.”

  Jed shrugged.

  “There. See?” She imitated his shrug. “I could be murdering babies, and you’d never know or care as long as there’s enough beer in the refrigerator when you get home.”

  “Damn it, Sally, what are you talking about?”

  “Oh, just never mind.” She knew what she had to do. Jed might regard her as nothing more than a convenience, a household appliance, but she knew she had other potential.

  At her next class she told the girls about her vision at the sink. “Every day we homemakers are just surrounded by raw materials, if only we could train ourselves to view familiar things creatively.” She proposed that the class meet in each other’s homes after the term ended, to share ideas on applehead carving, but also to branch out into other materials. Everyone agreed enthusiastically.

  Jed was disgusted. “I don’t want my wife setting around stringing no seeds.”

  “But if it’s fun for me, why should you mind?”

  “It’s dumb, is why.”

  “It’s not dumb, Jed. It’s creative.” She began crying. “Please, honey. It’s real important to me.”

  “Ah hell, stop crying, Sally. Shit, go ahead and string some goddam seeds then. But don’t come telling me about it.”

  “That’s why I need this group, honey.” Privately she thought that if Jed couldn’t meet her needs, she’d just have to look elsewhere.

  “Shit, you don’t need to string no seeds, Sally.”

  “Jed, I need something besides you and the children.”

  “Why? What’s wrong with us?” He jutted out his chin.

  “Nothing, darling. But I got to have something all my own.”

  “Shit, your underwear pants is all your own. You got plenty that’s all your own.”

  Each week was more exciting than the last, as one of the girls came in with some object they’d always tossed thoughtlessly into the garbage transformed into something else. Tin cans turned into doll house furniture. Eggshells turned into miniature bird feeders. Things S
ally had always taken for granted leaped out at her, shimmering with new meanings.

  She walked in the kitchen door one night following a meeting at Bonnie’s house where Loretta had shown them how to make brooches from diaper pins. She knew her face must be glowing with excitement. Jed sat in his La-Z-Boy Lounger, the rug around it stacked with empty Budweiser cans. He looked up. “What’re you so fucking happy about?”

  She slipped back her coat to show him the brooch. “Made from diaper pins,” she announced with a triumphant smile.

  “Looks like it”

  She looked at it. “You don’t like it?”

  “I don’t give a shit about it one way or the other. But I do give a shit about getting stuck babysitting all the time.”

  “One night a week?” Apparently he didn’t have enough arguments to keep him occupied at work.

  “Do I ever ask you to sit her all alone at night?”

  “Sometimes. Like during the strike.”

  “That’s different. That was important.”

  “But so is this.”

  “Making junk from diaper pins is as important as keeping the Free World safe from Communism?”

  “Listen, honey, maybe we should each have one night a week out. You could join a bowling league or something.”

  “Don’t wanna join no goddam bowling league. Wanna come home to my wife and kids after working all day to keep them fed and clothed.”

  As he grumbled, she was looking absently at the beer cans by his lounger. Suddenly they took on a new life. Jed was feeling left out by her projects. Well, she’d include him then, make him a gift from his empty six-pack for his upcoming birthday!

  Jed joined a bowling league that met every Thursday night. The next Thursday he rushed through supper, then ran out the door to his T-Bird, glaring at her. “Just remember: This is what you wanted, Sally.”

  She waited until the T-Bird turned the corner before bringing out his birthday present to work on—a hat made of flattened beer cans, crocheted together with yarn through a row of holes along their edges. She knew once he opened it, he’d feel all right about her meetings. He hadn’t yet been able to see how her projects could enrich his life, but he would.

  The phone kept ringing. The Scheduling Chairman for the Candy Stripers was on vacation, and Sally was filling in. She’d recently earned her silver 100-hour pin and was now working toward her first gold 500-hour star. She kept having to put down her crochet hook to write down the hours and jobs the girls were requesting. As she wrote, she looked at Joey and Laura sitting two feet from the TV eating potato chips and watching “Charlie’s Angels.” It was past their bedtime, and that wasn’t a good program for children, according to the PTA list. Some nights lately they hadn’t had baths or a story. As guilt threatened to engulf her, she told herself that it was better for children to have an active happy neglectful mother than a bored depressed attentive one. If she turned all her energy onto them, they’d be suffocated. She’d supervise each detail of both their lives so ferociously that they’d be swamped. She remembered watching Joey get on that big yellow bus to kindergarten. She’d been seized with panic. How would he find the boys’ room without her? He wouldn’t. He’d wet his pants. The other children would make fun of him and exclude him.

  In fact, he’d gotten along just fine that day and every day since. And Laura was getting along fine too at her nursery school two mornings a week. As Sally now saw it, the only good nest was an empty nest. Surely this was progress for her?

  When Jed marched back into the house that night, he stumbled over Joey’s howitzer. He looked around the living room. “Jesus, Sally, this place is turning into a junk heap.”

  She said nothing. He must have bowled poorly.

  “I mean, hell, I don’t mind you having no hobby. But I can’t see getting so busy at it that the whole house goes to pot.”

  “Ever since Rochelle went to New York, I’ve had a hard time keeping up.”

  “I just don’t understand why it’s so tough to keep a house this small clean.”

  “You were the one who insisted that Rochelle come in the first place.”

  “Yeah, but for the hard stuff, like washing windows.”

  Sally thought this over. It was true that things were getting a little sloppy. Often she failed to curl her hair or put on her face before Jed got home. Sometimes the kids wore unironed clothes to school. Toys were scattered all over the house. “I guess you’re right, honey. But I am trying to find me another girl to come clean.”

  “I don’t see why I have to pay out good money to some no-count nigger when my own wife is here all day long with nothing to do. Why, the kids are even in school now.” He paused. “Am I right?”

  She didn’t reply.

  “Am I right?”

  “I guess.”

  “Damn right I am.”

  As she opened her legs in bed so he could push himself into her, she realized she had to earn some money. If she had money, she could hire twenty cleaning ladies and half a dozen babysitters—so she could work on her projects as much as she wanted. Her father would probably give her the money he’d put away for her if she asked him. But that would humiliate Jed. Besides, if her projects earned money, Jed would have to regard them with more respect. There had to be some way to do this.

  As Jed jabbed harder, she moaned and breathed heavily, as he’d decided he liked her to do—and thought about egg cartons. The girls had already figured out how to cut them into lilies and dahlias, and Sally thought carnations should be possible too. So far they’d confined themselves to the white cartons, but you could get pink ones too, and turquoise and yellow. She considered different angles for cutting the egg cups. As Jed jerked and came, she visualized a way she was pretty sure would work. With impatience she waited for Jed to roll off her and fall asleep so she could sneak into the kitchen and try it out.

  “Was that OK for you?” he asked.

  “Just fantastic, honey. You’re such a wonderful lover.”

  He grunted and turned his back.

  As she stood at the kitchen table in her nightgown snipping egg cups into a perfect carnation, she decided all these skills should be written down in one place, like the recipe collections church guilds were always doing. That way more girls could share the skills, and the skills wouldn’t be forgotten. Each girl in the group could write up her own ideas. They could get the collection printed up and maybe sell a few copies to people around town, split up any profits toward babysitting expenses and supplies. This might impress Jed, both the money and also her name on a real book.

  The girls elected Sally Book Chairman. Each wrote up her ideas and did rough sketches. Sally typed them up and asked her father if she could have some of the money he’d put away to hire an artist to render the sketches, and to have the volume printed up in a spiral binding. After some hesitation he agreed, saying, “Well, if you’re sure this is how you want to spend your inheritance, Sally.” They spent several meetings discussing the title. From Trash to Triumph. Your Triumphant Trash. Your Glorious Garbage. From Garbage to Glory. They settled on Turn Your Trash into Treasures. And for the cover one of their husbands took a picture of them all sitting around a table carving appleheads. They placed copies in local bookstores and hobby shops. Sally had the inspiration of mailing review copies to radio and TV stations, to magazines and newspapers in the region. To their delight, a few reviews drifted in. The local radio station interviewed Bonnie about her applehead-carving course.

  And then one day came a letter from a magazine in Nashville that had a book-publishing branch. Would they consider licensing a mass market paperback edition to be distributed throughout the region? There would an advance of $3,000 and a royalty of 7 percent on a cover price of $1.95. After Sally read them the letter, they sat in stunned silence. “Ladies,” Bonnie announced, “I think we’re on to something big.”

  Jed was getting more and more difficult. For his birthday he asked for tight leather driving gloves. When he opened the be
er can hat, he stared at it. “Don’t look like no driving gloves to me.”

  “I made it, honey.”

  “I can see that.”

  Sally wondered whether to burst into tears. Then, for the first time ever, she thought, Well, just pooh on him. Other people loved the beer can hats. She was getting comments from people around town who’d read the collection, made the hats and were just thrilled to death. If Jed didn’t like it, that was just too bad, wasn’t it?

  Jed announced he was going to buy himself a boat for his birthday.

  “But honey, I don’t much like boats.”

  “Well, I don’t like dolls made out of no apples neither. Ain’t no reason we have to do everthing together all the time. Said so yourself. So on weekends sometimes I’ll go out in the boat, and you can just set at home and carve your goddam apples.”

  “But apples don’t cost a lot of money, darling.”

  “Hell, it’s my money, ain’t it?”

  Sally looked at him. Always in the past Jed’s earnings had been “their” money. They’d decided together how to spend it. “Then maybe I’ll just spend my book royalties on a trip to the Bahamas.”

  He laughed. “Your money from that book ain’t gonna get you to Knoxville and back.”

  She said nothing. She’d show him!

  A woman who ran a talk show on the local TV station phoned Sally and invited someone from the group to appear on the show. Sally thought about having the group elect someone. But after all, she was the chairman. And Bonnie had already been interviewed on the radio. So she accepted for herself. She spent the rest of the week deciding to wear her lime green polyester pants suit, and a choker of shellacked cantaloupe seeds. At the last minute she pinned an egg carton carnation in her hair.

  On the show the hostess said, “We’re just so pleased to have here with us this afternoon as our Guest Artist a local girl who’s making quite a name for herself in the craft field—Newland’s own Sally Tatro. And here to discuss her art with Sally is Associate Professor Dorothy Anderson, who teaches courses in art and women’s studies at Volunteer State University. Sally, to get things started, could you please say a few words about how you came to be involved in the craft field?”