Dedication
For my grandmothers,
VIOLA STILLE AND COLLEEN PATTERSON
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Driving, 1999
Louisa Chapter 1
Addie Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Juanlan Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Hazel Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Juanlan Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Addie Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Hazel Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Louisa Chapter 16
Addie Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Juanlan Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Hazel Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Juanlan Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Addie Chapter 27
Hazel Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Correspondence Chapter 30
Driving, 1951
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher
Driving, 1999
Hazel is driving and damn her children and damn her eyesight and who cares where she’s going. Up to Hamel for a half gallon of milk. Out to the cemetery west of I-55. Into Edwardsville, just to drive past the old high school where she used to cook lunch, serving her own children when they came through the line. Never saying more than hello, you want potatoes? Then turning to the next one: And how about you? There’s the brick building, there’s where the tiger used to crouch above the doorways. Gone—the place has a different use now; the high school has been moved out to 157.
Back home without a hitch. This time, most times. The stoplights in town are enough to guide her, and she knows these streets. Occasionally, yes, a shape dives into view from the left side or right and she’s not quite sure what it is—could be a bird or a tree branch or, Lord, a child on a skateboard—but she keeps her hands steady on the wheel while a fist grabs her stomach and squeezes hard.
Has she got into an accident? Even a little one, even once, in all these years?
No, she has not.
Down Sumner Road, following its jigs and jags. These roads, her roads, are the width of two cars, but they slope just a little to either side, and so gliding down the center she feels, looking ahead, like she’s balancing on the blade of a giant knife.
Here it is March; here it is April. Here she is—Hazel—driving, driving.
The house is white clapboard, has damp cellars, has olive green carpets circa 1963. Sits on one hundred fifty acres, including barn and fruit trees, septic tank, dug well, and a garden verdant and terrifying with eight weeks of weeds. All the rest of the land is planted in corn and soy. This still groomed, carefully attended.
In the kitchen, a Christmas cactus points out the closed window. The rooster clock on the wall cock-a-doodle-doos to an empty house.
Flocked wallpaper in the dining room. A wooden hutch. Painting of Jesus and the disciples seated in a row like the head table at a wedding. Jesus is looking down past the bottom of the painting, past the expandable table with all of its leaves stowed away, past the chairs, even past the green carpet to the wood planks below. Hidden there is the impress of an iron stove that once squatted fatly in the center of the room.
The second story wasn’t added until 1927. Outside, one can see it and other changes: different siding, seams at the edge of the porch, a garage that hides the cellar door. Before all this, the house was a simple square located just down the road, until the sturdy German forebears put the cabin on logs and rolled it up the hill. No one can explain why this was done.
But here it is.
And there, there in the garage: a maroon Lincoln believed by most everyone to have last been driven at a date no more recent than Thanksgiving. Sometime between pie and dishes and Rummikub, the keys were palmed by a devious daughter. Only late the next day was the mother informed—by phone, the daughter safely back in Chicago—that the theft of these keys was “for her own safety.”
The spare key had been accounted for: the mother had given it to her son for safekeeping. This fact should have been verified, of course, and was. Only the brother hadn’t cared to admit to his sister, when the idea of the key repossession was first proposed, that he wasn’t exactly sure where the spare one had gone. When asked, in fact, lied: Yeah, I have it right here. What did it matter, as long as the mother didn’t have it?
Could the mother have had it?
No.
Well, yes, in fact, but of course she mentioned this fact to no one. Berated her daughter and sulked to her son in the days following Thanksgiving. Still hadn’t forgiven them by Christmas. (Grumbling in the kitchen while rolling out dough for the crescent rolls, while boiling and mashing many pounds of potatoes.) But through the winter and early spring she accepted rides to the grocery store and to church, Oh, yes, thank you so much, oh, I sure do appreciate it, from various members of the son’s family—daughter-in-law and eldest grandson, and once the younger grandson, whose long hair and scowling expression frightens everyone but his grandmother. No need to drive herself anywhere other than to prove a point. Or for the freedom of the road, grown skittering at times, unsteady, but still hers to claim.
In early May a stepladder was dragged out of the garage and set up under the cherry tree. From the kitchen’s south-facing window, the Christmas cactus pointed. First step, second step, third step, fourth. The fourth just missed.
The daughter-in-law was luckily coming for lunch that day. Then the ambulance, crunching gravel, pulling up the lane to the house. Out jumped two men, one fat and one skinny. Steady hands and a stretcher, Easy now, don’t you worry. The querulous reply: Just a little fall, I don’t need all this fuss. Backdoors slamming shut on Wendy, you be sure to lock up the house—
A phone call made from the kitchen—To the hospital, yes—then the daughter-in-law, dutiful, closing doors, turning locks. Since then, the house has stayed quiet. Days and weeks, one month, two. From outside come all the normal sounds of crickets, birdsong, and the distant rush of semis out on I-55.
Up the lane now comes a Corolla. A four-hour drive, and she’s still here before her brother.
Figures.
Debbie has a long drive from the northwestern suburbs of Chicago and a full-time job, which in her world means sixty hours on a good week (and this was not a good week; this week she had five thousand pages of discovery to review), so Saturdays and Sundays are not exactly free time, especially not with a ten-year-old house that seems to have all the problems of a century-old one: perpetually running upstairs toilet, gutters that won’t drain, signs of a carpenter ant infestation in the home office. Also a daughter who is home for only an abridged version of summer, newly graduated from college and joining the Peace Corps. She’s leaving in two weeks for Burkina Faso, and is right now experiencing some very intense anxiety, some very long sessions of crying and unexpected malaise, wandering around the house trying to anticipate (aloud) what exactly she’ll miss most about home once she’s so far away. For once, she’s eager to spend some good quality time with her mother, which hasn’t happened in a long time, not since before the teenage years, and because Debbie is not just a hardworking lawyer, but a hardworking single mom, she has been trying her best to indulge her daughter’s requests. Including that she, Mal, join Debbie at the farm on Sunday rather than driving down together today. One of her college friends is in town, and she’s not going to see him again for two years, Mom, two whole years at the very least.
With so much to balance, one might think Debbie would have trouble getting down almost to Edwardsville by ten on a Saturday morning with only this to look forward to: going room by room through the house where she grew up, where her mother has lived all eighty-four years of her life, deciding the fate of the furniture, the pots and pot holders, the cross-stitched pillows, the dusty artificial flowers in stem vases—all the things that won’t fit into the three-hundred-square-foot “apartment” in the assisted living center where Hazel has recently been moved.
But here she is. Ten o’clock, and the sun is already barreling down on her head as she stands beside the car, listening to chapter 7 of the latest book-on-tape checked out from the Orland Park Public Library. For two months she’s been coming down almost every weekend to see her mother, first in the hospital and then at Golden Valley Retirement Home and Assisted Living Center. That’s eight hours of additional car time a week, and most of it in areas without anything better to listen to than country music or Christian talk radio. Ask most people which is the flattest state in the country, and they’ll tell you it’s Kansas, but those people haven’t driven through Illinois. Set a quarter rolling, and it will keep on going all the way to the horizon.
Ten o’clock, and she’s been here fifteen minutes. Whereas her brother, who lives less than ten miles away and whose job almost never requires forty hours of work in a week—much less sixty (or eighty! Try eighty!)—and whose spouse actually puts real bacon in a pan and fries it for him every weekday morning (try sitting in Chicago traffic with a plastic spoon stabbed through the foil lid of a yogurt container), who, to the best of Debbie’s knowledge, does not have a child preparing to move across the world for what will no doubt be an absolutely life-transforming experience in an exciting and vibrant place, but one that brings with it exposure to malaria and encephalitis, as well as a pretty real risk, it seems clear, of being kidnapped, raped—he can’t be bothered to leave the house on time.
She sees his truck coming while he’s still a ways off. Reaching in through the open window of the car, she takes the keys from the ignition and drops them into her purse, so when he pulls up he’ll see her standing in the hot sun, foot tapping, and know that he’s been wasting her time.
The truck rolls to a stop behind her car. “How was the drive?” he asks.
“Long.”
“No traffic, though. Saturday morning, can’t be anyone crowding the roads between here and Chicago.” He shrugs stiffness out of his shoulders, as if he’s the one who’s been behind the wheel for hours. “Where’s Mal?”
“I told you, she’s driving down tomorrow. One of her friends was coming to town, and she promised him a bed at our house.”
He whistles through his teeth. “That’s cozy.”
“Oh, get off it, Joe. She’s twenty-two.”
“I’m just saying, her trip might get a lot harder if she gets over there and finds out she’s been—” Sweeping a dome over his stomach, he laughs heartily. Debbie rolls her eyes.
Quiet then, and they both glance at the house. Windows closed, it’s been sealed since the day their mother fell, breaking her hip and shattering an elbow. Well, not quite sealed: Joe and Wendy came out here once a few weeks ago to take a few things for the new place in the retirement home. Lucky Debbie, she managed to get out of that one. Joe’d driven his wife out here that Sunday morning, pouring rain, mud everywhere, leaving his youngest son—who was grounded after getting caught drinking alone in the parking lot of a 7-Eleven—in the care of the older one, when they all knew goddamn well Travis couldn’t do a thing to keep Jesse from going out. And when Joe walked through the door of his mom’s house he just thought, Get me out of here. Reminded him of a funeral. In fact, took him right back to—strange—not his dad’s death when he was eight, but a visitation for their neighbor, Mrs. Hughes, several years later. The air had that same closed-up, cottony quality, that cemetery quiet. In the house, Wendy had given him a this-isn’t-so-bad-now-where-do-we-start? look. It should have made him feel better, but after twenty-odd years her can-do has started to get to him. It’s useful sometimes, though; talking to the doctors, for example. He isn’t good with hospitals or doctors or any of that. After the second day his mother was there, he spent no more than a half hour in her room at a time, dropping by in the early afternoon and leaving with the excuse that he had to get back to the shop. Wendy, meanwhile, spent most of each day there and didn’t seem to even notice the smell that she brought home, something like canned meat, sick-making.
Wendy is good with hospitals, good with nursing homes, good at everything the last two months has thrown at them. She made caring for his mother her full-time job, and he got the reports. Anyway, she’s the one who knows how to handle these things. That day in the house, she’d brought along a floor plan of the apartment and a measuring tape, to see whether the sofa and rocking chair would both fit.
Debbie sweeps her eyes now over the lawn. “Hasn’t anyone been out to cut the grass?”
“Travis was here two weeks ago.”
“It doesn’t look that way to me.”
“You want to take a ruler to it? Measure it?” Joe shakes his head. “The rain we’ve been getting, you cut the grass in the morning and by nighttime it’s halfway to your knees again.” He gives her a look: What does she know, living four hours away? The look she returns: This, at least, you could do.
They go into the house, where the kitchen smells of linseed linoleum baking in sunlight. Debbie opens the fridge, notes that the perishables have been removed (surely her sister-in-law’s doing), but all the rest remains: ketchup, mustard, barbecue sauce, mayonnaise. A jar of blackberry jam with “1996” penciled on the masking tape. Tub of margarine. Two sticks of butter. An old Tupperware container that, opened, reveals a half cup of chopped pecans. Her mother’s got a microwave and double burner in her little apartment, though she’s taking most of her meals in the dining room, where she can sit and be social, ha. When Debbie asked if she was making friends, she turned her head and said tightly, “I don’t know these people.”
Debbie shuts the fridge and says, “Let’s start upstairs with the hard stuff.”
“Downstairs is harder. Most of the useful stuff is down here.”
She looks at him. “Upstairs is all old junk and papers. You don’t think Mom’s thrown out any of her Reader’s Digests, do you?”
The second floor is an oven, so they retrieve the box fan from the downstairs bedroom, which is the only one their mother has used for the last few years. The husks of dead flies now line the windowsills upstairs, and when Joe fits the fan into a window frame, sleepy herds of dust wander out over the floor. “Ninety-six degrees,” he says, stepping back from the fan. “That’s what the weather said for today.”
They’re already sweating when the first of two closets is thrown open and they begin taking things down from the shelf. There are shoe boxes whose yellowed glue is giving out at the seams, stacks of old calendars, old catalogs, boxes of books with titles both familiar and unfamiliar, Murder on the Orient Express and Prayers from the Middle Kingdom, Vol. IV. Hazel has never been much of a reader, so who knows where these came from. But it’s all the same: the extension cords with fabric-covered wires, the ball of panty hose, the hand mixer missing one of its beaters. Stiff hats worn by their mother no more recently than Watergate and purses with cracked handles and rusting clasps. When lids are removed from the boxes, they find unopened credit card offers, envelopes fat with tissue-paper dress patterns, replacement lids for mason jars . . .
“Jesus Christ,” Joe says, unearthing a stack of S&H Green Stamp collectors’ books. He flips through the pages and finds one partially filled. “When’s the last time you saw one of these?”
Debbie pauses in the act of unfolding a torn plastic tablecloth. The memory is of a permed and gum-smacking grocery store cashier dialing up their stamps, tearing along the perforated lines, handing a pile of them to her mother along with the receipt. Hazel tucking them into
her purse. “They stopped giving those out—what?—twenty years ago?” she says, taking one from her brother.
“Something like.” He twitches his nose. “Wonder if they’re worth anything now.”
The house has eight rooms, two cellars, a garage, and a barn. They have today and tomorrow, and then Debbie has to drive back to Chicago: no time for reminiscing. “Probably as much as those bank calendars,” she replies. Then she takes the other books from her brother and places them in the trash pile.
It’s slow going in the morning; they make it through only the first of the upstairs bedrooms. For lunch, they drive into town to eat fast-food burritos in an air-conditioned space. The beans are soupy, the soda flat, but good Lord, the air. On their way back out to the farm Joe says, Why don’t we stop and get some beer, make this thing a little easier, and Debbie says, Yes, please.
The plan was, the first day it would just be them two, and on the second day they’d bring in the reinforcements. “Why did we want to do this to ourselves?” Debbie asks as they pull back into the drive.
“I don’t know what you were thinking. Me, I figured I’d only get the boys out here for one day. Might as well be when we’re hauling things out.”
In one corner of the second bedroom are the Christmas decorations. Old grapefruit boxes filled with ornaments they’ll divide. The Advent calendar will go to Joe for safekeeping until December, and the same for the one-foot-high porcelain tree with lights. These can be put up in the apartment at Golden Valley.
Into the trash pile go the artificial tree in parts, a broken suitcase, a musty cooler, all the old folding chairs with rust flaking off.
Rebellion Page 1