Rebellion

by Molly Patterson

  “That Frenchwoman was sitting there, having a glass of wine. Sitting all alone somewhere across the world, and I don’t know why, but I swear I felt like I was looking at me. It gave me the shivers.”

  “You mean she looked like you?” I squinted at Lydie. She wasn’t a bad-looking woman, but she was no model, either; she was thick and sturdy and had the same folds in her neck as I had. We were women who’d spent long periods of time under the sun, crawling down rows of lettuce or strawberries, or shaking out wet laundry and throwing it over the line. We were neither of us the kind of woman who’d catch a photographer’s eye. I tried again: “In the face, you mean?”

  She gave me a wry smile and shook her head. “No, it wasn’t her looks. She looked French. You know—” She narrowed her eyes and pursed her lips. It was such a girlish move that I laughed out loud. “What, can’t I pass for a Frenchwoman?”

  “Could be. Just probably not the type who spends her afternoons at some café, looking off into the distance and drinking wine.”

  Lydie leaned forward over the table with both hands flat on the Formica. “That’s what I’m saying to you, Hazel. It’s like this woman—she was me, but she was living a different life. Like if I’d been born somewhere else, grown up some other place. I kept looking at that light, and thinking it looked better than it does here, and I’m telling you it made me feel . . . angry, I guess, because I won’t ever see it shining down that way, hitting at just that particular angle.”

  She’s found out, I thought: this story about Paris was simply a distraction, so when she hit me with the accusation, I’d have all my defenses down. It was one of those moments when you know something terrible is coming, when you hear its tiptoes down the hall and you feel only that you don’t want to know what it is. “What time of year was it,” I asked, “when that picture was taken?”

  A breeze had started up outside, and it was stirring the curtains over the window above the sink. Lydie had lapsed into a brooding kind of thoughtfulness, and my question yanked her out of it, back into the kitchen with the clock ticking on the wall. “I don’t know. What does it matter?”

  “If you ever get there, you’ll want to go when the light is exactly like it was in that photograph. You’d be disappointed if you didn’t.”

  “If I ever get there,” she repeated. And suddenly she smiled, shaking away the gloom that had settled over her. “We’re not likely to be running off to Europe anytime soon. You or me, either one.” She took a sip of her coffee. “Doesn’t it seem strange to you sometimes, how they saw all those places? France and Belgium and way over there in the Pacific, and they hardly talk about it.”

  “Who?”

  “George,” she said, “and—well, I guess Karol didn’t go, did he?”

  “No,” I said. “Never even got called for home duty or anything.”

  Lydie nodded sympathetically. “He was doing his part, though. People had to eat, after all.”

  I thought about how, in the years after the war, Karol would always laugh about what a bad soldier he’d have been. There was a desperate glint in his eye when he said it, despite the laughter. No one but me ever seemed to notice. “He was ashamed,” I said. “He thought he should’ve gone with all the others.”

  “Really?” Lydie said. “Karol always seemed so casual about it. I’d never have thought he minded.”

  “I remember when the war news used to come on the radio,” I said, moving my coffee cup in a little circle on the tabletop, “he’d get this look on his face. Sometimes he’d point to his eye, the blind one, and ask me what I was doing with a man who couldn’t go and fight for his country.”

  “How’d you answer him?” she asked, leaning forward.

  But suddenly I didn’t want to tell her. It felt too personal. I thought of the time not long after she and George had started renting my land when I’d ask him things about her. The barrier was gone, somehow: talking about her suddenly seemed like fair game, and I had a fascination with their marriage, wanting to know things about her that no one else knew: Did she make the bed first thing in the morning or wait until after the kids were gone? Did she fold the towels lengthwise or widthwise? Did she kick her legs when she slept? I wanted to know if she had chin hairs to pluck, and I wanted to know the worst thing she’d ever done, whether she’d told George about it, whether it seemed that bad to him.

  He answered some of my questions. Not all of them. There was a line somewhere that I hadn’t bothered to look for then. But I saw it now, and it lay right in front of the soft spots. You didn’t reveal vulnerabilities, not when they were real.

  I told Lydie I couldn’t remember what I’d said to Karol. “It’s all so long ago,” I said.

  She nodded and sat back in her chair. Then she blinked and looked at me and said, “Hazel, I’ve got a favor to ask.”

  There was a hitch in the air. “What’s that?”

  “I went to see Dr. Anderson about a pain I’ve been having.” She fluttered her fingers about her chest. “Tuesday—I saw him on Tuesday. He said he thinks I might have a cancer and should get a test. I’ve got an appointment next week, over in St. Louis, and I was hoping you’d be able to drive me.”

  Outside, I heard Debbie shouting. She was far away, probably calling to her friends still on the bus. That meant Lydie and I had about three minutes left in private. “What about George?” I asked. “Don’t you think he might want to take you? I can watch the boys, for however long you want. You need to stay overnight in the city, it’s no problem.”

  “I don’t want George to take me. That’s why I’m asking you.”

  “But why?”

  “Because I’m not planning on telling him. I don’t want him or the boys to know anything about it. And Hazel,” she added, leveling me with a gaze, “I just need you to agree.”

  What else could I do? I picked up her coffee cup and went to refill it, and as I was pouring the coffee, I heard her say thank you, so softly I almost missed it. Because I’d agreed—of course I had. And when I came back to the table, she looked at the coffee like it was something she’d never seen before, and then she said she’d see me on Monday morning. She got up and went to the door, and I drank the cup of coffee I’d poured her, sip after sip, staring out the window at her car as it rolled down the drive, and Debbie waving eagerly after.

  George hadn’t been up on my property that day. The next afternoon, driving home from work, I saw him out in one of his and Lydie’s fields south of the house, and I pulled off the road and got out and waved him over. It was that time before seeding began, and George had been busy all week, draining the sloughs and picking rocks. The week before, he’d been waking up all the machinery from its winter slumber, taking it all out from the barn to check the hoses and pipes and shanks and clamps, and soon it would be time for tillage. I never saw much of him during the month of March, and it wasn’t a time for neighborly talk. But when he saw me waving, he came right over. He had on a cap that was partly covering his face, and he tipped the bill as he got close, then settled it firmly again on his head.

  I hadn’t planned what to say. My head was full of the news Lydie had given me the day before. She was sick, and she wasn’t planning on telling George. She was sick, and she’d only told me because she needed me to drive her over the river to the hospital. I couldn’t say anything about it, and I’d needed to see her husband up close so I could determine whether he had a sense of things going wrong. “How’re the fields looking?”

  He nodded at the bare earth behind him. “Full of rocks the size of my head. I’ll probably end up breaking that new blade I put on the tiller.” Of course, I couldn’t see a single rock like that, but this was how he always answered questions about the farm; he wouldn’t ever say that things were easy or looking good. Karol had used to come in every day complaining about how dry the soil was getting. Or how wet. Or he’d warn me that one of our cows was showing signs of fog fever, but by the next day when the cow wasn’t coughing anymore, he wouldn’t da
re admit that he was wrong. “I don’t need to see God’s bicep to know He can throw a punch,” he’d liked to say.

  George was the same way. Superstitious. But just now it was clear he was waiting to see why I’d called him over. He scratched his arm and squinted at me.

  I couldn’t talk to him about Lydie, which meant that I needed some compelling reason for this chat. I told him I wanted to see him. “This evening,” I added. “After supper.”

  He made a sound with his tongue on his teeth. “Not the most convenient time, is it?”

  “Maybe not. But”—I thought quickly—“I’m taking the kids into town to stay with Iris overnight. So I figure: there’s an opportunity, we better take it.”

  “What am I supposed to tell Lydie?” His tone was light; he wasn’t taking me seriously.

  “Tell her—I don’t know, tell her I’ve been having trouble with my television and you offered to give it a look.”

  “That’s what you came up with? Joe’s down at our house every day, talking about this and that he saw on the TV.” He shook his head. “I wouldn’t be so bold, Hazel. We’ve been too smart to get stupid now.”

  “Okay, then,” I said, “not my television. Something else. My fridge, maybe, or—” I stopped because he was laughing. He twisted his head to glance again at the field, waiting to get back to it. I felt relieved, suddenly, that he hadn’t taken me up on my offer. I hadn’t made any plans for Iris to take Joe and Debbie, and it would have been a lot of trouble to work out now. And I wasn’t sure how it would feel being with George when I had information about Lydie that he didn’t have.

  “I’ve got to get back to work,” he said. “Me and J.B., we’ll probably be up your way tomorrow, working on the back acres. You need anything then, just holler.” He stopped, scratched his neck. “Anything within limits.” If he were a man like Karol, he would have winked. But charm didn’t come naturally to him, and he just walked away.

  I was supposed to take Lydie to St. Louis on Monday, and in the three days that passed before then, we didn’t see each other or talk at all. I didn’t see George, either, except from afar. Usually we all met at church, but every few months Iris and Walt would invite Joe and Debbie and me into town, and we’d attend service with them instead of at our own country church, where Lydie and George went. That’s what we did that Sunday. My sister and her husband were Methodists rather than Presbyterians. Despite this fact and the size of the church and congregation, the services weren’t all that different. We sang hymns, and the liturgist read passages, and the preacher made his sermon. This week the reading was from Ephesians 4. I perked up when I heard the line: “Therefore, putting away lying, ‘Let each one of you speak truth with his neighbor,’ for we are members of one another.” Considering what was at the front of my mind, I might well have considered this a message, but the matter wasn’t a simple one. Because I had to wonder: Which neighbor? Which truth? And what if one of those truths isn’t yours to speak?

  At the end of the service, the preacher read out the prayer list, those who were sick and those who were struggling, those who had lost someone to disease or accident or plain old age. We had a prayer list at our church, too, and my thoughts turned again to Lydie. It seemed unlikely that she’d allow herself to be added to that list. And her own husband and boys wouldn’t be praying for her if they didn’t know that there was a reason to pray.

  After the service, we all went over to my niece’s home. She and her husband had four children under the age of eight, and they lived in a big old house on Randle Street with a front parlor no one ever sat in and a big range in the kitchen that took up most of one wall. With all of us at the house, and Edith besides, it was crowded and noisy and therefore something of a wonder that we managed to sit down for a hot dinner at one o’clock in the afternoon and fit around the table in the formal dining room. My niece’s husband was an accountant, like Walt had been before he retired, and the two men were as similar as could be, which is to say, quiet and forbearing. They sat across from each other at the table and chewed thoughtfully and put butter on their rolls and took second helpings of everything. In such gatherings, the men in the family tended to fade into the drapes and upholstery—John Charlie and Karol had always been the talkative ones—and it was Iris and my niece who led the conversation now, kept food moving down the table, laughed and teased the children.

  Edith and Iris hadn’t ever gotten along all that well, but living in town they were accustomed to seeing each other several times a week, and they had their running topics of conversation, as Rena and I had ours. I suppose we were like most families that way, the closest bonds depending mostly on geography. Not that I felt pitted against either of my sisters in town. I didn’t have the same concerns as they did, and they didn’t have mine. I was the only one in the family who still had children at home; Iris’s three were all grown, and Edith had never married. And I was the only widow.

  Most of the conversation was taken up by my niece, who talked continually to and about her own children. She was almost fifteen years younger than me and had relied on Dr. Spock—in particular, the second edition of his famous book—for all of her parenting ideas. When her youngest, not yet a year old, started crying from the other room, she sent the eight-year-old to change his diaper. “Davey thinks it’s time to eat,” she said with a shake of her head, “but it is not.”

  That was our Sunday, and then we drove back home and Debbie fell asleep in the car, even though it was only a fifteen-minute ride, and Joe tried to convince me he didn’t need to go to Rena’s after school the next day. I was sending him and Debbie to my sister’s place because I wasn’t sure what time I’d get back from St. Louis. They’d need dinner, and I didn’t want to have to worry or rush. “You’ll have a good time,” I told him.

  “Why can’t I go with you?”

  “You have school.”

  “You do, too. And you’re not going.”

  I’d told Mrs. Brainerd on Friday that I needed to take off Monday for a personal matter, and she’d said that would be fine—the cafeteria could function without me for one day. “Work isn’t school,” I said to Joe, “and I’m not taking off for fun. I’ve got business to take care of.” I let it go at that.

  It started raining while we were on the road home from my niece’s, and by the time we arrived at the house, it was pouring. After the big dinner we’d had earlier, we weren’t very hungry for supper, so I fixed us some BLT sandwiches and we watched Ed Sullivan and then Bonanza. Then I sent the children to bed because it was a school night. I meant to follow them, but I fell asleep on the sofa with the television still on and woke an hour or two later to a single clap of thunder, loud and close enough that the windowpanes rattled in their casements. I was in terror, the kind that doesn’t allow you a name or history, just a heart pounding so hard in your chest that you feel it as a separate animal, a desperate thing that has gotten hold of your body. I stared around the room, blinking at the television, the piano, the record player—I took it all in without knowing what I saw. I had no idea who or where or what I was, only that I had been grabbed from sleep by a loud noise that could only mean danger.

  Another second or two, and then reality floated together and held: I was Hazel Wisniewski, widow and mother of two, sleeping with my mouth open on a sofa in the house my parents had built. And it was time for bed.

  The thunder was loud, and I figured Joe and Debbie must have been awakened, too, but though I sat listening, I didn’t hear any noise from above. Joe was eleven and a boy, the man of the house now, but Debbie was afraid of storms, always cowering in the corner whenever the wind picked up. I went upstairs as quietly as I could, and at the top, I considered the closed door on the left. For the first several months after her father’s death, I’d awoken some mornings to find Debbie curled in the bed next to me. Only then would I remember that in the middle of the night I had been startled out of sleep, not by any sound, but by a presence. Eyes flying open to see this girl with her hair ta
ngled around her face and her nightgown hanging loose on her shoulders. Sometimes I got the feeling that she’d been standing there for a very long time. Minutes. Hours. It was all the more alarming because at the time, sleep was difficult to come, yet her presence proved that once I did fall asleep, it was as if I’d fallen off a cliff. I swam up from the depths only once she was right there, breathing on me. In the morning, I’d tell Debbie that she should shake me awake when she was afraid, but she told me she hated touching my sleeping body. I didn’t seem like her mother, she said. I didn’t seem like a person she knew.

  I stood outside the bedroom and listened for a moment to see whether she was awake now. It was quiet, but when I nudged open the door I nearly screamed because she was sitting up in bed, arms folded around her knees, her back against the wall.

  She watched me with wide eyes until I sat down on the edge of the mattress and held out my arms. Then she lunged forward and started sobbing into my neck. She was crying so hard she couldn’t speak, but I understood that for several minutes she had been sitting there in terror, too afraid to move. She seemed young, terribly young, not nine years old but four or five. The room was covered in its night wash, a silvery-gray landscape where every object looked like a photograph of itself.

  She sniffled and slowed her crying, and after another minute sat back, looking embarrassed. I asked if she was all right now, and she said yes. Then she rubbed her eyes and looked away.