Rebellion

by Molly Patterson

  George was looking straight ahead, not willing to risk any more than we already had. “I want to be somewhere no one can see me.”

  “Not even me?”

  “You’re allowed. No one else.”

  “Well,” I said, “we’re almost there.” And it was true: we were pulling up to my house. I looked up and down the road and didn’t spot anyone coming. “All safe,” I said, and together we got out of the car, and together we went inside, and even though we weren’t really safe, we felt for a short while as if we were.

  Getting caught was a worry, but I just added it to the worry I already had. I worried so much I was hardly sleeping. I’d lie in bed watching the moonlight slide across the ceiling and the shadows stretch themselves like cats, even while I tried not to think of any of the things that rightfully made me anxious. I’d pray for sleep to come, though it never did, and I began to grow nervous about the nighttime rituals. Brushing my teeth, I’d feel my stomach twisting, and as soon as I lay down in bed, my heart began to thump. I felt so fretful it made me nauseous. I’d close my eyes, open them, close them again. I’d move from my side to my stomach, then flip onto my back. Nothing worked, but I’d give it a few hours before I threw off the blankets and went out into the living room to see how the night had colored the house, to examine it in the silver light and decide whether it still felt like my own. I didn’t smoke, yet those nights I wished I did, only so in the long scraped-out hours of two and three o’clock I would have something to do with my hands and all that useless concentration.

  When Karol was alive, he had sometimes wakened in the night. It had always been a strange curse. His work was hard, and when we went to bed it took him no time to fall asleep; I never understood how it was that he woke in the darkest hours and could not drift off again. But as a mother I was used to hooking my sleep onto that of the other resting bodies in the house—I was always ready to drop my feet to the cold floor and go comfort the child who had cried out in the dark—so when Karol woke in the night, I did, too. Sometimes he was sitting up on the edge of the bed, or standing at the window looking out over the yard. Other times, he was simply lying there awake, and even if his eyes were closed I knew by his breathing that he was up and it was my job to get him to fall back asleep. I’d put a hand on his chest and he’d turn to face me. For a few seconds we’d stare straight into each other’s eyes. At that distance, in the near dark, we were both laid bare to each other. The feeling was wonderful and terrible and the only way to resolve it was for Karol to climb on top of me and take me, quick. When we did it that way, in the middle of the night, he kept his eyes opened narrowly and locked on my face. Intensity seemed to seep into us from the midnight vapors; we were both present, and yet somehow absent, too—in separate places, far away. What we did then had nothing to do with our normal bodies, our daytime selves.

  Now, awake and alone in the night, I would think of Karol, of those times when we’d come close to reaching our moment at the same time, and how we never talked about it afterward, even when the daylight arrived. There’d been an aspect of shame about those nights, a feeling of guilt that always sprang up if I thought of them as I stood at the stove frying eggs the next morning. It was almost as if he and I were cheating on our real selves, the wife and husband we were by day.

  With Karol gone now and sleeplessness once again prowling our old bedroom, I remembered those long-ago nights and wondered if instead of being the exception to who we were, they actually represented the truest part of us. I remembered how there was a shade of violence to each instance, how Karol’s eyes shining in the dark beside me had kicked at some deep-down fear; they might have been an unblinking pair of eyes suddenly spotted in the woods. You should run, but instead you freeze, and there he is: a bear, a wolf. Not different from my husband, but part of him. Not separate from our marriage: at the very heart of it.

  I thought of Karol. I thought of George. I thought of Lydie, and of my children, and of George’s and hers. I thought that no one had ever explained to me about love—how many different notes it sounds at once, and how those notes make a chord that keeps ringing and ringing even late into the night, and how even if you want to damp it, that chord won’t be silenced and sleep still won’t come.

  I needed a job. It didn’t have to be much, enough to bring in some money while I waited for Nate to pay me at the end of the fall. Taxes came due in the spring, and I hoped by then I’d have got enough from the harvest to pay them over, and to purchase the seeds and pesticides for the next year’s planting. All of that was in the future. In the meantime I had to pay for groceries and electricity, school supplies and gas money, and I needed to have a little cushion for a visit to the doctor if one of us got sick or injured, or for a new tire on the car. I had a sum saved up but was loath to touch it: that was the money Karol and I had been putting aside for the past several years to put in an indoor toilet. It was one of the great embarrassments of my life, that in 1959 we were among the last in the area to still have an outhouse. We’d saved almost enough to reach our goal when Karol died, and during the winter that followed, each time I had to take Debbie outside after dark and stand listening to her go—she’d got more scared now that her dad was gone—I swore that I wouldn’t dip into that money for anything. I’d get that toilet put in, no matter what.

  Now it was autumn again, and I was staring down another winter without indoor plumbing. I made a promise to myself that it would be our last. Come hell or high water, when the ground softened again in the spring, I’d have the septic tank put in and the plumbing installed and our house would finally be like all of our neighbors’, no longer an embarrassment, no longer a source of shame. Now, more than ever, I felt the necessity of keeping up appearances. I couldn’t bear the thought of whispered condemnation: Hazel Wisniewski can’t keep her house in order. A house was the measure of a family’s well-being: swept floors, clean stovetops. You couldn’t allow cobwebs to grow in the dark corners. You couldn’t neglect beating the rugs, scrubbing the screens. I recalled from my childhood those small oblong houses we’d sometimes pass on our way into town, where the paint was peeling and the porch was always missing a step. There’d be children standing barefoot in the yard, snot dripping down from their noses, mean, solemn looks on their faces. (Where did those looks come from? Hunger, I suppose, and too many nights without a bath.) There was always a young girl dangling a baby loose at her waist. There was always a mule in the nearby field that looked half starved. Most of those families had eventually quit the farm business in the long hard years leading up to the war, but their ghosts still haunted those of us who’d stayed on. I was determined not to have anyone thinking my house was at all like one of theirs.

  I’d already had to borrow a small sum from Rena and John Charlie to make it through the end of summer. They were doing well enough, they had the money to lend, but I didn’t want to do it again. Money tends to come with advice, and having the old homeplace meant I already received plenty of that. Even before Karol died, my sisters had liked giving me their views on everything related to the property. I’d learned to resent their interference wholeheartedly and preferred to go see them rather than have them come to the house. I didn’t need their opinions on the way the grass had been mowed, or the fact that we’d switched to a different kind of feed for the hogs. So when I went to borrow money from Rena and John Charlie, I insisted on being charged interest so all of us were clear on what was being asked.

  The loan wasn’t enough to get me through to the harvest. After my meeting with Mr. Freese, I’d started looking for a job and quickly discovered that they weren’t easy to come by. First I talked to Edith about working at the flower shop, and she told me she didn’t have the money to pay another worker; there was only herself and a colored woman who came in on Saturdays and one or two days a week. Business was good, but not good enough. That was fine because I didn’t know that I’d want to work for my sister, anyway. While Edith and I were close in some ways, she had a certain quali
ty that kept her clearly defined and apart from our family, as if in a photograph hers was the only figure that had been outlined in pen.

  I moved on to other options. I ventured into several cafés and diners to see if they had need of a cook. They didn’t. I went into the library, and when I spoke to the woman at the desk about working for them, perhaps shelving books, she said she didn’t recall seeing me in there before. I said I came in sometimes, hadn’t for a while, and she said, Would I consider myself a reader? I said, I read. By the end of our conversation I’d decided that I wouldn’t work there even if they paid me five dollars an hour, which they weren’t by any means offering to do.

  Several days in a row, I went downtown and walked through the doors of a dozen businesses. Bells jangled over my head. Heavyset women grabbed pencils out of their hair and potbellied men patted their pockets for cigarettes to light up as they stared at me from the other side of glass counters, squinting one eye and then the other as if they couldn’t quite see me. Noooo, they said slowly, sucking in a lungful of smoke, afraid we don’t have anything for you right now.

  I grew discouraged. I was a woman in middle age looking for jobs that either didn’t exist or else weren’t intended for someone like me. The whole working population suddenly seemed like an alien race with a secret language I wasn’t able to speak. I stopped going into town and knocking on doors. Keep a lookout, I told Iris and Edith. If you hear of anything, let me know. They would, they said, but the end of it was that Iris kept suggesting that I take a typing class so I could get a secretarial position, though there didn’t seem to be all that many of those around, either, and Edith never seemed to come across anything at all.

  Things went on this way for a few months. I talked to George about it, with excitement at first, and then later with a feeling closer to shame. He always shook his head in sympathy and said something would turn up eventually.

  Then one day while we were lying in bed, he told me he might know of a job.

  I twisted around so I could see him. I’d been lying on my side, staring at the rain hitting the window. It was the end of November and rain had been falling all week, which had put me in a sour mood. Even George being there hadn’t snapped me out of it; I’d felt low all morning, and now it was afternoon and I felt even lower. I didn’t know how he had managed to come over, what he’d told Lydie he was doing, and with the humor I was in today, my mind was going through the lies he might have told and resenting all of them for not being the truth. I asked him what job he was talking about.

  “My nephew was complaining the other day, saying how hungry he gets in the afternoon. Says the ladies in the cafeteria give them a scoop of mashed potatoes each, and it ain’t enough.” George fell quiet, as if that were the end of it.

  “What’s the job exactly?” I asked.

  “Oh, well, working in the cafeteria.” He took his thumb and stroked it down my arm. “Thought you might check with them to see if they need somebody. I figure Pete might be able to get himself an extra scoop of potatoes if you were the one doing the scooping.” He narrowed one eye at me, not quite a wink.

  “Are they looking for someone?”

  “Could be. I don’t know.”

  “Then it’s just an idea. You don’t actually know anything about it.”

  He drew back his chin. For the first time, I saw a shade of annoyance pass over his face. So be it, I thought. I was annoyed, too.

  “I know what I just told you. Is that a problem?”

  “I thought maybe you had something more certain in mind, the way you were talking.”

  “If you’re asking whether I called up the school and asked them direct if they’d like to hire my neighbor to work in the cafeteria, no, I sure didn’t do that.”

  “Neighbor.” I laughed, one of those short, snorting laughs that has nothing to do with being happy. “That’s a word for us. Neigh-bors, I guess I should say. You’re a neighbor, I’m a neighbor. Together, we’re neighbors.” George had already taken his hand from my arm, and now I pulled away to make sure my leg wasn’t touching his any longer. I left a damp spot where my foot had been. The soles of my feet always started sweating when we were together in bed and then afterward grew as cold as stone. I’d been embarrassed about it at first—it was one of those things I’d forgotten would shame me, sleeping with a man who hadn’t seen me that way before—but it hadn’t taken long for me to grow as comfortable lying with George as I’d ever been with Karol, and it was only now that I once more felt ashamed. A moment later, the shame was replaced by resentment.

  I could feel myself taking short, strong breaths. George was breathing evenly beside me. He’d been silent for at least half a minute when at last he said, “What word would you like me to use, Hazel? ‘Mistress’? ‘Girlfriend’?” He lifted one hand and rubbed it slowly over his mouth in a gesture I knew so well from Karol—it meant, I don’t know, what do you want?; it meant, There’s not a thing I can do, so don’t look at me that way. It was a particularly masculine gesture that meant having to stay patient with a woman when she was being unreasonable.

  “Not ‘girlfriend,’ for certain,” I said, and in that moment decided to take it back down to even. This was George and me; we didn’t fight. Ours was an arrangement meant only for pleasure. I said, “Makes me sound like I’m sixteen, like you’re taking me to the pictures.”

  I waited for him to laugh, for the hand to come down from the mouth and reveal a smile. At last, it did, though the smile was sideways-leaning and thin. We were both quiet for a while. The rain outside had gotten heavier, and the sound swelled on the roof of the front porch, which was right next to the bedroom. The front porch was never used—we always went in the side door through the screened-in porch, as did all of our guests—but it had occurred to me that my bedroom was only a few feet from the front door, where a stranger who didn’t know any better might stand waiting. Every now and then, it happened: a traveling salesman, a census taker, another old bachelor arguing his case. The door opened right into the living room, and I had to push the rocking chair out of the way to answer it. One day a stranger might come up by the porch and if the windows were open, they’d hear George and me. If it were a stranger, I figured, they wouldn’t know that the man wasn’t my husband, that I wasn’t his wife—and if it was a bachelor, well, then, he’d have his answer.

  “I guess it don’t matter much what I call you,” George said thoughtfully after a minute. “I know what you are to me. You know it, too.”

  “Do I?” Leaning my head on my hand, elbow on the pillow, I was suddenly aware of how the blanket had fallen, how this short sentence sounded like some cheap flirtation. George’s eyes darted down to my naked breast, and I figured he had noticed, too. Maybe this was what I was to him, after all. This was what he knew, and what I knew. And it was good to be wanted; it was enough. I tilted my head down and batted my eyelashes for all I was worth. He moved toward me again, laughing softly, and it was another half hour before he was walking home.

  The next morning, I called up the high school to ask about talking to someone in the cafeteria. The operator told me to call back after lunch, about twelve thirty, so I could talk to Mrs. Brainerd, or better yet, go on down there any time after about one. I’d find her either out front or in the back, the operator said, and if I didn’t spot her, why, then I should just ask.

  When I pulled up to the high school, I found a spot near the back of the lot and walked up to the main entrance. The building’s many windows reflected the sky and trees and clouds, and I could picture the images inside, chins resting heavily on upturned hands, heads bobbing sleepily and then snapping up again, longing glances at the same windows I was seeing from the other side.

  I’d been to school myself, but long enough ago that it seemed almost like a television show I’d watched in pieces. I remembered certain characters and scenes—smudged, inky fingers curled around the edge of a book; a teacher with a hooked nose and a weary stance, leaning against the blackboard with a
rms folded over her thin bosom; the steamed windows of a winter classroom and all the world gone gray outside; a fat boy scowling—but these images didn’t connect to form any complete stories, and like a television show, the world they came from seemed small and self-contained and beamed into view from far away. I’d gone to a small country school down a lane that ended at the two-room building, and I hadn’t attended past the age of thirteen. It was all so long ago—nearly impossible to think that I’d ever memorized a poem or spent a single minute puzzling out the answer to a math problem.

  The school in front of me now was the one Joe and Debbie would attend. Not with a handful of fellow classmates they’d known forever, but with hundreds of teenagers, both familiar and strange. And they wouldn’t quit school, because there’d be no one telling them they needed to; there would be no farm to swallow up their work. They would continue to take the bus that went out 143, and they would walk the distance back to the house, passing fields that all looked the same to them.

  Once inside the school, I found myself standing in the middle of a long hallway, empty except for a lean man in a janitor’s uniform peeling posters off the wall. I asked him where I could find the cafeteria, and he pointed the way. “You a parent?” he asked. He had a poster in his hands advertising a basketball game that had taken place the weekend before.

  “Yes,” I said. It wasn’t untrue—I was a parent—though I knew that wasn’t what he meant. I said it without thinking, because I didn’t want to explain that I had come there looking for a job. Suddenly the idea of what I was doing frightened me. I hadn’t thought any of this through, really.

  “What’s your kid’s name?” I’d already started to walk away, but I stopped and turned back. The poster was dangling from the janitor’s hands, and he had on his face the friendly expression of someone who’s in no hurry to get back to work. “I know most of them,” he added, “or anyway, I try to.”