Olive and Arthur had already arrived, so they got to watch my mother make a total fool of herself, out there in the yard.
“What gorgeous shoes, Bette,” Olive shrieked, reaching out to take my mother’s arm as she came through the door.
Things went downhill after that. I got busy frying up the hamburgers and onions while Ray was supposed to keep all the guests happy in the living room. All the guests included Gayl’s two best friends from town, her oldest friend from out here in Thunder Hill, Olive’s family and Bear James of course. Alana and Danny hadn’t yet arrived and I was just thinking I should call them to see where the hell they were because everybody was getting hungry. After I made myself a rum and coke, I went into the living room to look for the phone and just in time saw my mother reach behind the curtain for a glass.
As soon as she saw me, she tried to put the glass back on the windowsill, only it hit the edge of the sill and broke, so now I had sticky rum and coke all over my curtains and broken glass scattered all the way from the window to the middle of the living room, and of course Gayl and her friends were in stocking feet so I yelled, “Don’t anybody move!” Then I shouted at Ray to get the vacuum cleaner and the broom and a cloth to clean up my mother’s mess, but really what I meant was Ray’s mess, because obviously he’d given her the drink. When he knew, knew, knew how I felt about my mother being drunk, especially in public, especially on our daughter’s birthday. But that was Ray for you, everybody’s friend, especially when he’s been drinking himself. Meanwhile, Bear had run upstairs to get the vacuum cleaner and Olive fetched the broom and there she was cleaning off the windowsill, which she could likely tell hadn’t been wiped in probably a year. And then there was Ray, helping my mother up from the chair and moving her over to the couch next to Gayl, who wore a look of pure disgust, and who could blame her since her friends and cousins had to witness all of this, but why she kept looking at me like it was all my fault was beyond me. To top it all off, there was my mother crying, and Gayl hushing her, telling her not to worry, that it was just a little accident and not worth getting all worked up about. And what was I doing in all this? Marching to the kitchen to mix myself another rum and coke thinking my own bloody family drives me to drink.
I cornered Ray in the pantry where he was way ahead of me by happily mixing up more drinks. “How could you give my mother a drink when you saw the kind of shape she was in?” I asked, arms folded, foot tapping.
“I didn’t think she was all that bad,” Ray said.
“How would you know?,” I said. “You’re already drunk!”
“So? So are you.”
“Bullshit. I’ve only had one.”
“Two. I saw you drinking two.”
“One. You’ve had at least three.”
“Oh, but who’s counting?”
I wheeled around to see Olive standing in the pantry doorway. “Patricia, I have to apologize. I made Bette’s drink.”
I looked at her and I looked at Ray, who hadn’t even bothered to deny his part in this. “You watched Olive get my mother a drink? When you knew I’d have to scrape her off the floor later?”
“Trish,” Ray said, in that way he has of making me feel like I’m ten years old, “you’re making too big a deal out of this.”
“I swore Ray to secrecy,” said Olive, as if that would change everything.
“Oh you did, did you?” I glared at Ray, who sighed loudly. I grabbed the kettle off the stove and filled it under the faucet. “Amazing. Even though he knows what one too many drinks can do to my mother, he can be sworn to secrecy.” I wheeled around to drive this point home, just in time to catch Ray actually wink at Olive. I probably started foaming at the mouth right about then.
“What?” said Ray, hands outstretched, a guilty grin on his face.
Olive cleared her throat. “I think it’s time for me to go and join the party.”
Ray cleared his throat. “Me too.”
Fat chance of that, I thought as I grabbed his arm and hissed, “Thanks a lot.”
He pulled his arm away, and the change in his face was sudden and dangerous. “Lighten up Trish, I was just joking around. And can you try to remember it’s our daughter’s birthday?”
“Oh. I don’t see how I could forget that seeing as how I’m the one who spent the morning vacuuming and putting away a week’s worth of laundry. Plus making the cake for our daughter’s birthday.”
“It was a cake mix,” he said with what looked a lot like a smirk.
“So what? I’m the one who made it.”
“And I’m the one trying to keep things cheerful around here, which is pretty hard the way you’re acting.”
“That’s fine,” I said, tossing a tea towel. “But it seems to me that when you lost the school bus job, heaven help anyone who went around acting too cheerful then, right?”
“It’s hardly the same thing.”
“You’re right mister, because when you’re freaked out about something, I don’t turn into your fucking enemy! No, when Ray’s fucked up, everybody better be careful or he’ll run off to town and get so stupid drunk he ends up in jail, or somehow finds his cock in Rena Dickson’s mouth.”
I knew I’d just trodden into dangerous territory by digging up something that happened almost two decades ago, but the picture I have in my brain of walking into a bathroom one night at a party and seeing Rena Dickson on her knees in front of my boyfriend has never quite left me.
Maybe it’s not fair of me to dredge up something he claims he’s been paying for our whole lives together, but still I wasn’t prepared for him to grab me hard by the shoulders now and spin me around to face the mirror. “You know who your real enemy is? Look! You see how bitter she is?”
There was a freshly opened can of tomato juice on the table. That can was in my hands for only a second before it flew through the air and hit him squarely in the chest. The juice splashed upwards to his face before the can clattered to the floor, sending rivers of thick tomato pulp across the linoleum.
Isn’t it amazing how life can change in an instant? Looking back, I could have apologized right there on the spot. For a second neither of us spoke, but, as I stooped to pick up the can from the floor, he threw up his hands and said, “That’s it, I’m done.”
I stood there with the can in my hand while he walked right out the porch door.
I could tell from the sudden silence in the living room that everyone had heard. I knew they’d be drifting in at any moment. I looked down at the pool of red liquid, which had already started to seep under the wainscoting. I pulled on my rubber boots and ran after him.
“Hey!” I shouted as I struggled up the lane through the mud. It felt like running in a dream when you use all this energy but don’t get anywhere. “I’m sorry, okay?”
Ray wheeled around and held his hand straight in front of him. “You stay back, Trish! Just keep away from me.”
I did what he said, halting right in my boot tracks. I called out, surprised at the plea in my own voice. “Don’t do this today, okay, Ray? It’s Gayl’s birthday?”
Ray paused at Gayl’s name but then kept walking. I shouted, “This is just stupid!” I watched him, hoping he’d turn around. When he disappeared behind the spruces at the top of the lane, I started back to the house and must have been in such a stunned state I didn’t hear Alana’s car until it was right behind me.
“Hey, we just saw Ray hitchhiking,” Alana said, rolling down the window. “He was getting into Whitey Forbes’ truck. Is everything okay?”
“Why, sure,” I said. “Everything’s a birthday party, right?”
Danny leaned towards me from the passenger side. “Hey, is that blood?”
I looked down at the tomato juice all over my shirt and it could have been blood the way I stared at it.
“Oo-kay,” Alana s
aid, raising her eyebrows at me. She put the car in park and opened the door. Without a word, Danny slid over to the driver’s seat.
“Oh God,” I said, when Alana and I were alone there in the lane. “I don’t think I can go back in there right now.”
“Tell me what happened.”
I let her take my arm because my knees felt too weak to stand. I may not be psychic like Alana, but I knew a real bad thing had just happened to Ray and me.
5. Alana Who Knows Everything
ALANA HAS ALWAYS BEEN one step ahead of me. When I first met Ray she was already pregnant with Kim. By the time I got pregnant with Gayl, she was the mother of a four and five year old. She knew everything about babies and I knew nothing. So when Gayl had a high fever and then a convulsion, Alana happened to phone right then and she talked me through it. “She’ll be okay,” she said calmly. “Lay her down and rub her arms. Say soft things to her. Do it now, while we’re on the phone.” I did what she said, and Gayl came out of the convulsion looking rested and none the worse for wear. Alana’s Kevin had had one when he was two so she knew exactly what I was going through.
“Maybe this explains why you were crying over your icing,” she’d said there on the lane, after I told her about my fight with Ray. “Your own psyche knew something bad was going to happen.”
When she called earlier to see if there was something she should bring to the party I’d told her about the silly tears over the boiled icing. Adolescence was also her specialty, so she had a theory about that. “Of course you were crying. You probably don’t remember the hell I went through back when Kim turned nineteen.”
Alana was wrong. How could I forget the day a few years ago that marked the end of what Alana still calls her “prime time?” And when hers ended, so did all of ours. We were driving along Thunder Hill road towards town in the back of Bear’s Rover one day in early September and I was noticing how everything we passed seemed to sparkle and not just the water out in the strait. I mean everything, like the leaves on the quaking aspens, the cornstalks or oats in the fields, even the spruces high up on Thunder Hill shone bright in the late afternoon sun. Up front in the Rover, the boys were yakking about music or boats, and suddenly I noticed that beside me, Alana was crying. I don’t mean she was bawling her eyes out, but her eyes were glassy with tears and she was sniffling. When I pressed her about it she blurted out, “You know, it’s not like I’m jealous because I’ve got this beautiful daughter whose function it is to replace me as a baby maker. Hell, I went through all that when she turned fifteen and men were staring at her and not at me.” She’d paused here and shuddered. “No, I think what’s getting to me is that as of today she’s old enough to get into bars.”
“That’s why you’re crying?”
“I don’t know. Maybe it’s just a premonition, but I just have this feeling that nothing is ever going to be the same after today.”
Alana was right. I can even pinpoint the exact moment our lives changed because when it happened later at the Roll-a-Way Tavern, I was dancing with Danger Dave, who everyone knows is anything but, and we were goofing around to the music, slipping into old dance steps like the “Funky Chicken” and the “Frug.”
The dance floor of the Roll-a-Way Tavern was bouncing so hard you could see it move. The Roll-a-Way used to be a bowling alley. The dance floor was laid right over the lanes, which made our footsteps all that much louder and springier too. Danger Dave and I were laughing and I suppose my eyes were closed, my elbows and knees flapping to the music. I was working up a buzz from the rum, as well as the vibrating floor, when I suddenly realized the floor had stopped moving under my feet. I opened my eyes and talk about embarrassed. I was the only one still dancing. Danger Dave was shouting in my ear. “Isn’t that Alana and Danny’s daughter?”
There stood Kim in the doorway, her black hair shimmering around a turquoise dress. I watched Alana rush to her daughter and link arms with her. She steered Kim to the bar to buy her first legal beer. When Kim touched the bottle to her lips, this big cheer came from the crowd and everyone toasted her on her birthday. Then things turned quite comical, when, instead of Danny dancing with the prettiest girls in the place, as he usually did, he spent the whole time with his arm fixed around his daughter’s shoulders. We even spotted him trying to cover her up with his jacket.
But the real clincher came when it was time to slip outside for a toke with the gang. I gave Alana the signal to follow us, and she nodded. But after waiting and shivering in the alders surrounding Emily’s Pond, Danger Dave went ahead and lit the joint without Alana. I kept an eye on the Roll-a-Way entrance but Alana never came. Maybe this was what Alana had meant about nothing ever being the same again. But when we went back in, there was Alana wheeling about the dance floor with her head tossed back and her arms out to her sides like always. I joined her up there on the dance floor and everything seemed normal enough until I noticed Kim and her friends smiling at us like we were the cutest little kids. I knew right then our days at the Roll-a-Way were coming to an end. We kids were being replaced by our kids.
Now, for the third time today, I’m watching someone drive up my lane and out of my sight. My own almost grown-up kid. Gayl has had her license for almost a year but I have never let her drive in real weather.
I watch the Toyota bounce up the lane. Gayl reaches her arm out the window to snap the ice off the windshield wipers. That snow has now turned to freezing rain. Earlier, I’d told her it was too messy for her to drive, but she’d held her ground and said, “You’ve driven in way worse weather than this.”
“But I’ve had almost twenty-five years of experience driving in this kind of weather,” I said, knowing full well I was about to lose this one.
“And how am I supposed to get my experience? You want to tell me that?”
“Just be careful. Gayl, I mean it,” I said finally. “And call me when you get to Gran’s.”
“Okay, Ma. I got it,” she said, slamming the door on her way out.
Now that the fog has moved in, I can barely see the Toyota’s taillights. I listen for the horn to toot before she turns onto Thunder Hill Road. It was Alana who started doing this tooting of the horn business but it has since become a custom and now just about everyone toots their horn as they leave my lane. Maybe everyone has a different reason for doing this but Alana told me it was to let me know that just because I was out of sight, I wasn’t out of her mind.
When I finally hear Gayl’s beep, I can’t help but think she’s sounding it more as a good riddance.
6. Flue Fire
THE BATHROOM IS SO cold, steam rises from the tub as I take off my clothes. The sight of me shivering in the mirror behind the door makes me think I’d like to get rid of it. The mirror I mean, not the body. That I still need. But does a barely forty-year-old woman always need to be reminded of how she looks? I pull my shoulders back and when I tilt my pelvis forward like I learned in that aerobics class I started in town last fall, I don’t look quite so bad. Alana’s right that I’ve lost lots of weight since Ray first left for Newville. I run my fingers up through my hair, holding it behind my head. I wonder how it might look cut really short. Maybe I’d look like those snooty university types Olive and Arthur have as guests over at Kyle House.
Normally, it is Gayl who stands in front of this mirror looking this way and that. It’s my daughter’s turn to be young and pretty, I remind myself when I see her posing. Just like it’s my turn to be, what? A middle-aged woman? What’s so good about that?
Then there’s Olive who goes on about a woman’s forties being the most productive time of her life. “Time to kick ass,” she says.
No wonder Olive says that. The year she turned forty was when she took possession of my father’s house and moved her own ass down here.
And I’m here looking at my ass in the mirror and wondering how far it will have dropped by the time
I’m fifty. Fifty! Fuck.
I wince when I step into the bath water, water that feels slightly less than boiling. I wait until my feet get used to the temperature before I lower the rest of me into the tub. I’d rather feel like an ice-cube slowly melting than a lobster in a pot.
If it was summer, a bath would be a whole other story. On really hot days I often climb the path behind my house up Thunder Hill through raspberry brambles scratching at my legs and cobwebs draping my arms like silk. By the time I make it to Bear’s cabin I’ve worked up quite a sweat, and then I have to scramble even higher to the enamel tub perched on a rocky ledge.
Bear has figured out a way to divert a spring so that it flows into the tub. As soon as the water fills the tub, he re-diverts the spring and the sun warms it up. Warms it up to just above heart stopping cold, that is. I’m the only person I know who’d work up a sweat just to cool off in that tub when everyone else is making for the beach. But that’s because the tub is one of Bear’s coolest creations and if I didn’t use it he’d neglect it and it might fade into the landscape.
If Bear isn’t home, I go straight to where I hang my towel and clothes on a branch and grab the bio-degradable shampoo Bear makes me use. The tub is long enough to float in so I do, staring through the trees to the clouds, feeling like there’s nowhere else on earth I’d rather be. The spring water on my skin feels way softer than well water.
Sometimes, if Bear happens to be home, I’ll first share a toke with him before confiscating his binoculars. I do this partly because he’s a guy but mostly for the view to be had from the tub. Farms and fields stretch toward summer cottages strung along the red shoreline. I can’t see my own house from here, but the Four Reasons is in plain sight and sometimes I can tell who has stopped there for gas. Further up the coast, where Thunder Hill Road turns sharply toward town, Kyle House stands nestled under two giant elms. I can practically scope out the county and if I look down to Bear’s cabin and he happens to be working on his deck or yard, then I take a peek at him too. No beer belly yet on that boy.
Road to Thunder Hill Page 6