Julia Watts - Finding H.F.

by Julia Watts

  But Wendy seems interested. “Does your grandmother talk much about your mom?” You can tell Wendy ain’t from around here, because she can’t quite wrap her mouth around words like “Memaw.” If she says something about her grandmother, she calls her “Gramma,” just like she was saying “grammar” but without the “r” on the end.

  “Sometimes she’ll tell a story about when Mom was little, but she don’t like to talk about the time around when she left.”

  “I guess not. You said your mom was 16 when she had you?”

  “She turned 16 right after I was born.”

  “God, H.F., can you imagine getting pregnant at the age we are now?”

  I say I can’t, but the truth is, I can’t imagine myself getting pregnant at any age.

  Wendy hugs her knees to her chest. “I mean, when you’re 16, it’s like the whole world’s out there waiting for you, but then if you get pregnant, the world shrinks to the size of the baby in your belly. All of a sudden you have to worry about taking care of someone else’s needs before you’ve even learned what your own are. I don’t know...I think if I found myself in that situation, I’d have an abortion.”

  “But Momma would’ve had to figure out how to get all the way to Lexington or Knoxville to get one, and Memaw would’ve killed her dead if she found out. Plus,” I say, “then there wouldn’t have been a me.”

  Wendy smiles. “Well, I’m glad there is a you. You and Bo have been the only people at Morgan High who haven’t treated me like, what was it you said? A redheaded godchild?”

  “Stepchild,” I laugh. “A redheaded stepchild.”

  When Wendy’s dad comes home, he gets to work grilling hamburgers in the backyard. The Cooks eat supper at 7 o’clock, which is two whole hours later than me and Memaw usually eat.

  As it turns out, Wendy’s red hair comes from her dad. The top of his head is slick, bald, and pink like a baby’s butt with a diaper rash, but the fringe of hair that grows around the sides of his head is bright orange. If he wasn’t so serious, he’d put you in mind of a clown.

  All that memorizing from Emily Post turned out to be a waste of time because all we have for supper is hamburgers and french fries. Ain’t a fork in sight. The food is good. Memaw’s great at making beans and corn bread and macaroni and cheese, but when she makes hamburgers and french fries, which she don’t do often, she just fries the patties in a skillet and fixes frozen french fries that come in a bag. Mrs. Cook’s fries are homemade from real potatoes.

  Wendy and me get Coke to drink, but Mr. and Mrs. Cook are drinking beer right out of the bottle. Memaw would die.

  “So, H.F.,” Mr. Cook says, “have you always lived in Morgan?”

  Wendy has already told me her dad asks lots of questions. She says he don’t mean nothing by it but that sometimes a conversation with him feels like you’re facing that Spanish Inquisition we read about in world history class.

  “Yessir,” I say. “My whole family’s from Morgan or thereabouts. Memaw was raised in the Argon coal camp. It was a few miles south of Morgan, close to the Tennessee state line. Some of the houses from the camp’s still standing if you was ever to want to see ‘em.”

  Before I know what I’m doing, I’m rattling off Memaw’s life story—how she grew up in the coal camp and met my papaw when she was 17 years old, how Papaw didn’t want to be a coal miner and so he and Memaw moved to town after they got married and he took a job in the hardware store, where he worked till he went off to fight in World War II and got part of his leg blowed off. I talk and talk and talk, and you’d think Mr. Cook would be bored out of his mind, but instead he looks so interested that I wouldn’t be surprised if he whipped out a writing pad and started taking notes.

  “Fascinating,” he says, and even though I know he means it in a good way, I still feel like a bug under a microscope.

  “I think it’s great that you have your family so close at hand,” Mrs. Cook says, and I wonder if Wendy has told her about my mother taking off. “Sometimes I wonder,” she says, “if people are making a mistake when they move all the way across the country to take jobs and so forth. Of course, I guess it’s more of an economic necessity than a choice.”

  Mrs. Cook drinks some more beer, and I wonder if she, like Wendy, is less than happy about their move to Kentucky. Maybe I should change the subject. “So, Mrs...I mean, Carolyn, what do you do over at the college?”

  She rolls her eyes. “Less than I’d like, to be honest. When they gave Stan the job in the English department, they said I could be the curator of the Randall College art gallery. I was really excited at the time.”

  “Mom was the assistant curator of a gallery in Scranton,” Wendy says.

  “Right,” Carolyn continues, “and so I was excited to be moving up from assistant curator to curator. Little did I know that the Randall College art gallery was one dusty room with the same paintings hanging in it since 1977. The same lousy paintings, I might add. So it’s a made-up, part-time job basically, but I’m trying to make the best of it. I’m thinking about putting together some shows by local artists. Wendy says the art teacher at the high school does some interesting work. You wouldn’t happen to know any good local artists, would you?”

  I think of Memaw’s bread-dough refrigerator magnets and egg dioramas. “No,” I say.

  After we eat, we sit in the den. Carolyn asks Wendy to play something on the piano. Wendy rolls her eyes but sits down at the bench anyway. I’ve heard the plink-plink-plinky piano playing when Memaw makes me go to church, but the way Wendy plays is different. Her hands move all over the keyboard, hitting so many notes at the same time that it’s hard to believe all that music is coming from one little piano.

  And then there’s the way she looks. I try not to stare at her too hard while she plays, because I’m afraid her parents will see how I’m looking at her. To try to keep from staring at Wendy, I look at the picture that’s hanging above the piano. It’s a fuzzy-looking painting of a redheaded girl in old-fashioned clothes playing the piano. Except for the old-fashioned clothes, she looks just like Wendy.

  When Wendy finishes, her mom and dad clap, so I do too. “Thanks for playing the Bach, honey. You know it’s my favorite,” Carolyn says.

  Then Mr. Cook sets down his beer bottle and takes a guitar out of its case. “So, H.F.,” he starts, and I’m terrified he’s gonna try to make me sing or something, “how about a little C, S, N, and Y?”

  “Sure,” I say, even though I have no idea what he’s talking about, and he might as well be saying, “So, H.F., how about we cook you up and eat you?”

  But instead he starts strumming the guitar and singing some song about teaching your children well. Carolyn joins in, and they sound real good together.

  When they finish, I clap, and Wendy says, “So, H.F., now you know the truth. My parents are a pair of overeducated hippies.”

  “Well,” I say, “I reckon that’s all right.” I’ve heard Memaw talk about hippies, about the long-haired do-gooders that came to Kentucky around the time my mother was little. Memaw says they all talked about wanting to save the Appalachian mountains and the Appalachian people, but she could never figure out what they were trying to save the Appalachian people from. And besides, she always says, she don’t need no stringy-headed college boy from up North trying to save her; she’s done been saved by Jesus.

  Mr. Cook goes into the kitchen and comes back with two more bottles of beer. “Well, Carolyn,” he says, “do you think the old folks should clear out of the way and leave these girls to their own devices?”

  Carolyn takes one of the beers and opens it. “I suppose they’ve had all they want of us old fogeys. See you in the morning, girls. And I know you’ll be up till all hours, but do try to get some sleep tonight.”

  I gulp as I picture Wendy’s big bed and wonder where—and if—I’m gonna sleep tonight.

  Chapter Six

  Wendy’s stretched out on the bed, propped up on her purple pillow. She changed into her nightg
own in the bathroom, which I was halfway glad of. Sometimes, like in the locker room at P.E., when girls take their clothes off like it’s nothing just because they’re in front of other girls, I get so embarrassed I have to stick my head in a locker so I can’t see them and they can’t see me.

  Don’t get me wrong. I would’ve liked to see Wendy with no clothes on. I just feel like looking at her would’ve turned me to stone, like the men who looked at that Medusa we read about one time in junior high.

  “Mom and Dad really like you. I can tell,” Wendy says. She’s stretched out and relaxed in her white nightgown, like a long white cat. And me, I’ve finally brought myself to sit down on the bed, but I’m sitting at the foot—so close to the edge that half my butt is hanging off.

  “That’s good. I kept worryin’ I’d say somethin’ that’d give away how ignorant I am.”

  Wendy picks up a pillow and hits me with it. “H.F., you’re not ignorant. You shouldn’t put yourself down like that. You’ve got—what was it Dad said when I went in to say good night to him?—’a keen native intelligence.’ ”

  I wonder what “native intelligence” means. The “native” part makes me think of cannibals with bones in their noses. “Well, that’s good, I guess.”

  “You shouldn’t worry about what my parents think. They’re pretty laid back. You know, what I said about them being hippies is really true.” Grinning, she leans down and picks up a photo album from the bottom shelf of her nightstand. “I’ve got to show you this picture of them in the ‘70s.”

  She flips open the book, and there’s a snapshot of Mr. and Mrs. Cook, probably before they were married and way before there was a Wendy. Carolyn’s mouse-brown hair is long and stringy past her shoulders, and she’s wearing a flowered top and all these beads around her neck. But Mr. Cook’s the real funny-looking one. Even though in the picture he’s probably not much older than I am now, he’s mostly bald on top. But the bright red hair on the sides of his head is long enough to touch his shoulders. He’s got a mustache too, a long one that goes down to both sides of his chin, and he’s wearing this fringy dress that looks like something an Indian might wear. Both Mr. and Mrs. Cook are wearing these teeny little round glasses that don’t look hardly as big as their eyeballs.

  “Pretty wild, huh?” Wendy says. “I like to keep this picture in case Mom and Dad drag out my baby pictures to show people. That way, I’m armed against embarrassment.”

  Below the photo of Mr. and Mrs. Cook is a picture of Wendy in pearls and a long black dress. She looks beautiful. She must see me looking at it, because she says, “That’s from a couple of years ago—my piano recital in Scranton. Most of the other pictures are of my friends back in Pennsylvania.”

  I flip through the pictures of high school kids who all look like they can afford to go to the mall and buy new clothes anytime they feel like it. I flip through pretty fast until I come to a picture of Wendy, standing cheek-to-cheek next to this blond boy, who I think is a girl at first because he has smooth skin and hair down to his shoulders. He’s touching Wendy, so unless he’s related to her, I hate him. “Who’s this?” I try to sound casual.

  “That’s Josh, my boyfriend back in Scranton.”

  I feel stupid for feeling hurt. Of course Wendy would have a boyfriend. In any town but Morgan, boys would be beating her door down to date her. And of course she likes boys. Most girls do. “Uh...is he still your boyfriend?”

  Wendy shrugs. “Yes and no. We E-mail each other just about every day, so we’re still close. But when I moved I told him it was unrealistic for us not to agree to see other people. So I’m sure he’s dating around. And of course, I’m here in Morgan, where nobody has the slightest interest in me.”

  How can you not know? For a second, I’m scared I really said it instead of just thinking it, but Wendy keeps flipping through the album like nothing’s wrong, so I guess I didn’t say anything.

  On the last page is another picture of Wendy’s parents—this time looking the way they do now. They’re at some kind of party where they’re dressed up. Mr. Cook has a tie on, and Carolyn’s wearing the same pearls Wendy had on in that other picture. They’re holding glasses of wine and smiling.

  I have to change the subject away from Wendy and boys, so without even thinking, I say, “Has your mother and daddy always drunk?”

  “Huh?” Wendy says. “Oh. You mean, like, drinking alcohol, don’t you?” She closes the album. “Hmm...I’ve never really thought about it, to tell you the truth, but yeah, I guess they’re what you’d call moderate drinkers. They usually have a drink in the evening, maybe a few beers on Friday night. Why do you ask?”

  “I don’t know. Memaw’s a pretty hard-shell Baptist, so I guess them drinkin’ out in the open like that just seems...I don’t know, like they might have a problem or something.”

  Wendy laughs, and I feel myself starting to shut her out. “Trust me, H.F., more often than not, the people who drink out in the open aren’t the ones with problems. It’s the people who try to keep their drinking hidden that you have to watch out for.” Wendy sits up and hugs her knees to her chest. Her toenails are painted the same color as the inside of the big seashell Uncle Bobby brought Memaw back from Florida.

  “When we first moved here,” Wendy says, “Mom and Dad couldn’t believe how provincial people were about alcohol. When somebody told Mom that Morgan was in a dry county, she thought that meant it didn’t get much rain. She couldn’t believe you actually had to drive across the state line to buy a six-pack.”

  “Huh. I guess Memaw always told me all drinkin’ was bad, and I believed her without thinkin’ much about it. Of course, I have thought about Bo’s daddy. He gets drunk on payday and comes home and breaks dishes and calls Bo a faggot—”

  “Well, Bo’s dad is obviously an asshole, and drinking makes him even more of one.”

  What Wendy’s saying makes sense. Memaw’s always told me that drinking so much as one beer is like walking up to a booth and saying, “One ticket straight to hell, please.” But from what I’ve seen of Wendy’s parents, they’re nice folks. If there is a God, it’d be awful small-minded of him to make them burn in hell on account of splitting a six-pack.

  I’ve always known Memaw wouldn’t understand about me liking girls, but the more I think about it, the more I realize that’s not the only thing she doesn’t understand. Memaw is the best-hearted person in the world, but sometimes I think she’s too busy thinking about the next life to notice much of what’s going on in this one.

  “I bet you’ve never had a taste of alcohol in your life, have you, H.F.?”

  “No. Have you?”

  Wendy turns over on her side and stretches, fanning out her little toes. “Sure. I’ve had a glass of wine at Christmas dinner ever since I was 12. That’s how they do it in Europe. The idea is that if kids get exposed to small amounts of alcohol when they’re young, it won’t be a big deal to them when they’re older. Dad says that America’s Puritan heritage really shows in the popular attitude toward alcohol.”

  “Is that so?” I say, even though she’s lost me on that part. Suddenly Wendy hops up off the bed. “I’ll be right back, OK?”

  “OK.” When she’s safely out of the room, I pick up the pillow she’s been laying on and smell it. It’s like laying down in a flower garden. No matter how nice that boyfriend of hers up North is, I hate him with a purple passion.

  I figured Wendy had just gone off to the bathroom, but when she comes back she’s carrying two long-stemmed glasses filled a little over halfway with something deep purple. She closes the door behind her with her foot. “I’m about to corrupt you, H.F.,” she says.

  I feel tingly all over, but I try to act reasonable. “Wouldn’t your mother and daddy be mad if they knew you was sneakin’ liquor into your room?”

  Wendy laughs. “It’s not liquor—it’s wine. And I’m not sneaking. Mom was in the kitchen, and I asked her very politely if we could each have half a glass of wine. She said yes, as long a
s a half a glass was all we had, and as long as your grandmother wouldn’t mind. I kind of bent the truth a little and said she wouldn’t.” Wendy crinkles her nose.

  Memaw would say she’s leading me to temptation, and she may be, but damn, it feels good. I’d rather be led into temptation by Wendy Cook on earth than have a brick ranch-style house in heaven any day.

  Wendy hands me the elegant, long-stemmed glass and sits next to me on the bed. She sips from her own glass, then nods toward mine. “Try it,” she says. And just like Adam in the Garden of Eden, I do what the pretty lady tells me.

  The first sip is kind of sour, like grape juice that’s been sitting out too long, which when you think about it, is what wine really is.

  “You’re supposed to hold it in your mouth a few seconds,” Wendy says, “so you can taste the different flavors.”

  I swish the second sip around like mouthwash, and I’m surprised that there really are all kinds of different flavors in this little mouthful of wine. There’s the sour part, which is all I tasted at first. But then there’s also this peppery taste, and underneath that it’s smooth, like vanilla.

  “Like it?” Wendy asks.

  “It’s nice.” I take another mouthful. “Now I understand that Bible story.”

  “What Bible story?”

  “The one about the big wedding where they run out of wine, so Jesus turns the water into wine. That was a helluva party trick, wasn’t it?”

  Wendy laughs. “I guess so.”

  “Of course, Memaw always says that in Jesus’ day they called grape juice wine, but that don’t make no sense, does it? A bunch of grown-ups gettin’ all excited about drinkin’ plain ol’ grape juice.”

  Wendy laughs again. Her laughter and the wine make me warm. “So, H.F., do you really believe in all that Bible stuff?”

  “I don’t guess so. Not any more than I believe in any other story. It’s just that Memaw has filled my brain full of Bible stories from the time I was a little bitty girl, so they’re always rattlin’ around in there.”