Rebellion

by Molly Patterson

Louisa is standing a few doors down, her back to him. With her is a woman wearing a red hat tilted at such a steep angle it’s a wonder it doesn’t slide off onto the ground. “—think your father and I don’t know where you’re going—,” Bert hears his wife say in a hissing voice. At the same moment, the woman glances at him over Louisa’s shoulder. She has an ironic expression, as if she’s used to dealing with strangers like this.

  “Come on now, Lou,” Bert says, coming forward. “Don’t you bother this lady with your nonsense.”

  At the sound of his voice, Louisa turns, her eyes burning and her forehead creased in rage. “You tell her,” she spits. “Your daughter here thinks she’s going driving with that boy she’s so stuck on, that Harvey Ascher, dressed like a rich lady, thinks she’s a real egg wearing that hat.” Turning back abruptly, Louisa reaches for the red hat, but the other woman is too quick for her; she knocks Louisa’s hand away with a swift, efficient flick of her wrist. “No, thank you,” the woman says, straightening her shoulders.

  Bert puts one hand on his wife’s back and with the other gently turns her away, back toward their room. “Lou,” Bert says, “you leave her alone now. I told her she could go.” He glances back over his shoulder and nods once at the woman. The polite thing would be to apologize, but Louisa is protesting, and he doesn’t have the energy to deal with niceties. It’s as much as he can do to get his wife calmed down, to remind her where she is, who she’s talking to, who’s not there.

  Funny thing, though: he hasn’t thought of that boy Harvey for twenty, thirty years, probably. Nice young man, lived over on the other side of Fox Road. Wanted to date one of his daughters, and darned if Bert can’t even remember which one.

  Three knocks. Edith pinches her cheeks for color, takes two deep breaths, and smooths her dress over her hips. Then she opens the door. “Good evening,” she says very formally, and stands aside to let the other woman in.

  Mabel walks past her into the room, then stops and turns her head from side to side. “It’s a spooky feeling,” she says, glancing back at Edith. “Usually, I’m in here, it’s with my cleaning cart.” She gives a nervous smile before reaching up to unpin her hat.

  “That’s a lovely color,” Edith says. “Do you like wearing red?”

  At this, Mabel looks amused and glances at the hat, now dangling from her long fingers. “Well as I like any color, I guess.” She drops it on the bed and then, perhaps rethinking the familiarity, picks it up again.

  “I’ll take that.” Edith places the hat on the desk and busies herself fiddling with the radio. What kind of music do Negroes enjoy? she wonders. Is it the same as what she likes?

  She pauses on the station she was listening to before, with her parents. There’s a pang of regret that she left them early, but a moment later it’s gone. Tony Alamo is crooning out “Harbor Lights,” the sway of whatever instrument—guitar?—cradling his voice like a rocking hammock. She turns back to find Mabel holding out two glasses. “I brought these,” she says.

  Edith fills both glasses halfway with bourbon. Enough to do the trick. Mabel is already raising the glass to her lips when Edith touches a hand to stop her. “Wait, we should make a toast.” She pauses a moment, thinking. “To new beginnings,” she says, raising the glass.

  “Oh, no,” Mabel says, laughing. “That’s not how you do it. I’ve got this way of toasting. It’s something I learned way back when. Here.” She raises her own glass to Edith’s mouth, letting it hover there. “Now you.” And she guides the glass in Edith’s hand toward her own mouth. Edith can smell the bourbon sending its happy message up into the air between them. “To life and love and having a damn good time.”

  They both take a sip, carefully. Then another, and another, slowly draining the glasses with arms threaded into a strange kind of knot. On the last sip, Mabel sloshes a little of the bourbon down Edith’s chin, and then carefully, slowly, unlinks their arms. “That was on purpose,” she says softly, taking a step to close the gap between them. Edith feels the bourbon on her skin and thinks she should lick it away. But Mabel leans close and does it first.

  Louisa is dreaming of boats on the water. She’s swimming among them, all the boats of various sizes floating around her. Too close. She’s bobbing softly at first, but then, quickly, she’s getting tossed in the waves. No, she’s in a bed and the bed is shaking. It’s Bert, sitting on the edge of the mattress, beating his own feet. “Go on and get dressed, Lou,” he says. “We’re heading out in a minute.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “To see the ocean.”

  She doesn’t argue, doesn’t ask. Somehow, she knows it’s just him and her going. Last night, they had dinner with Edith. They ate noodles with red sauce, and Louisa had a sip of wine, and Bert nearly cried. Then they listened to the most beautiful songs on the radio. She remembers all of this, and though she doesn’t remember making any plans for today, Bert is rising shakily to his feet, his cane having appeared as if by magic to help him. She watches him cross to the desk and lean one hand heavily on the edge. He takes something up in his hands. Then he turns and gives her a grin. “Let’s go, Lou,” he says, and tosses the keys around to make them jangle.

  Though he’s looking out for the first sight of the gulf, somehow he misses it. After they’ve been in the car a few minutes, Louisa points a shaky finger at the windshield and asks if that’s the ocean, there. “You can’t see it yet,” Bert replies. “We’re still a few blocks away.” But then he realizes she’s right; the water lies against the sky like a bank of gray snow. He’s been looking at it for a while and didn’t realize what it was, piled up high in the distance. He figured it was clouds. “There it is now,” he says, and Louisa peers through the glass as if for the first time. “Golly, it’s a big old thing,” she says.

  They park on the shoulder of the road that runs parallel to the beach. There’s not much of a shoulder, just a strip of tall, unruly grass, and then on the other side of it the sand begins. A little path made of wooden planks cuts through the scrub, and Bert starts over to it, leaning on his cane. He makes it along the path just fine. Once he gets to the sand, it’s a different story. “Give me your arm, Lou,” he says, and she’s there before he finishes the sentence, firming the muscles of her arm and letting him lean his weight on her. That’s his girl—looking out for him the same way he looks out for her. He pauses, and sensing it, she turns her face up to him and grins. Got a smile like a sun shower. He meets her eyes and she’s there, all there; she knows just who she’s looking at. “Let’s go,” Bert says.

  The sand is uneven, but Louisa leads him without too much trouble. They take it slow. Twice, Bert stumbles and rests his weight harder on her arm, but she’s ready for it. He’d walk on his own if he could, she knows, but his feet worry him so. That’s all right: she can be feet enough for both of them. The way they’re walking now, it’s like they’re in a three-legged race. Years ago, she watched such a spectacle: two pairs of boys, each pair tied together with thin rope. There was a field with purple wildflowers and quilts laid out with people eating sandwiches on them. Fifty yards off, a girl in a bonnet stood with her arms raised straight in the air, a dog at her side. Her sister? Anyway, when she lowered them, the boys started toward her and everyone cheered.

  Strange, but Louisa could swear that’s the girl right there. Off in the distance, raising her arms. It doesn’t make sense, though, because they’re at the ocean. That scent on the air is of fish and brine. Someone’s pressing her arm, leaning heavily on her, and when Louisa turns her head she sees that it’s Bert right beside her. Bert, her husband. They’re walking on sand toward the ocean, and this is the first time she’s been here. Glancing back where she was looking before, she sees a fisherman standing a little ways down the shore. At his feet is a bucket.

  When they get to the strip of wet sand that borders the water, Bert shakes off her arm. “I’ll be all right now,” he says, and glances down. “The sand’s firmer here. I’ll be all right. Let’s go get
our feet wet.”

  “We’re wearing shoes,” Louisa says sensibly.

  Most times her mind is a balloon drifting ten feet above everyone else, and he’s constantly tugging it back down to earth. But then she opens her mouth and comes out with something like this that proves she’s clued in to the present moment and knows exactly what’s going on. Because it’s true: they’re still wearing their shoes. He stands there a minute, unsure how to proceed. There’s no bench or anything else nearby to sit on. He should’ve thought about this. Should’ve planned better. They’re standing less than a yard from where the waves are lapping up, but they can’t go any closer without sinking into the wet sand. He glances down the shore at the fisherman and watches him cast out the line. When he turns back, Louisa is already standing ankle-deep in the water.

  “What do you think you’re doing?”

  Louisa glances over her shoulder and laughs. “Oh, it’s warm.” A wave comes up and breaks over her shins. She half-turns back to Bert, squats down quicker than he’d have thought possible, and scoops up the surf in her palms. For a moment, he thinks she’s going to throw it at him. Instead, she dips her face to the water and splashes it over her head. Then she rises. “Look, I’m baptized.”

  He shuffles forward, planting his cane in the wet sand with each small step. The water washes up over his feet, and he shouts. He’ll have to take off his shoes when they get back to the car so they don’t slip off the pedals.

  Louisa is looking out at the water now. In the near distance, a fish jumps out of a wave and disappears beneath the gray surface. “This is the first time I’ve felt the ocean,” she says.

  When Bert reaches her, he puts his hand on her arm. She accepts his weight easily, without even looking at him. “You’ve seen it before,” she says simply.

  “No.”

  “Oh, yes, you have. You’re the one that told me what it’s like. Ocean Beach, that’s where you saw it. San Francisco. I might have it on me . . .” She starts patting her sides. When she looks up, her glance slides over him as if there’s no firm place for it to land. “I guess I must’ve forgot my purse. I always put it right there in the inside pocket.”

  “What is it you put in your purse, Lou?”

  “Your letters.”

  Bert fixes his gaze on her profile. “What did I write you about? I can’t remember.”

  “About China, mostly. All those places you saw over there.”

  “I saw a lot, did I?”

  “You bet you did. More than me, by about a million miles.” She looks over at him, and her eyes are clear now. She gives him a smile full of love. “You can’t remember it?”

  He breathes in and then breathes out again. “I’m starting to forget things, Lou.”

  She nods sympathetically. “You’re getting on in years, aren’t you?”

  “I am. But not you.”

  “No.” She glances down and pulls at the sides of her dress with disinterest. The fabric is damp from the baptism she gave herself a few minutes ago.

  Bert presses her arm. “Tell me what I wrote.” And when she doesn’t respond: “About the ocean, I mean.”

  She still doesn’t answer him. She’s staring out at the water. It’s so still, not at all like she’d thought it would be. She’d expected waves ten or twenty feet high, crashing surf, white foam. What she sees is so calm and flat it could be the farmland that spreads out from the house in every direction. North, south, east, west. Everything in between: an infinity of cardinal directions, each last tick around a full circle.

  What did the letter say? She remembers reading it to Bert; he was standing by the stove in the old house, the little house that was their very own. Oh, she loved him in that tiny house. Just try to find it if you can. Such an immensity of nothing around them: they are tiny dots on a nearly empty map. Over there is their narrow bed. Across from it two chairs at a table. There is the window and beneath it the cupboard not half filled with their things. A rug on the floor. There is the shelf of treasures she dug out of the dirt when she first arrived. There is the stove, and the chimney that sends smoke out into the open air. Here are the letters in her hand as she shoves them into the stove. Here is the smoke pouring out the chimney and testing the open air.

  Acknowledgments

  I bear a debt of gratitude to a number of people and organizations, too many to name, but here is a partial list:

  Thanks to Ellen Levine and Alexa Stark at Trident Media Group for being the first two people outside my family to believe in this book, and for their indefatigable advocacy on my behalf.

  Deep gratitude to Laura Brown at HarperCollins for her passion and commitment, for her vision, and for her very keen eye. May every writer be lucky enough to work with an editor like her.

  Great thanks to Jonathan Burnham, whose enthusiasm changed the life of this book, and to everyone at HarperCollins who helped bring it out into the world.

  I am truly grateful for the various organizations that have provided support and guidance throughout my writing career:

  The Writers Studio in San Francisco, for teaching me how to stretch and grow.

  My friends and fellow writers at Ohio State, and the faculty I was lucky enough to work with there: Lee K. Abbott; Lee Martin; Michelle Herman; Andrew Hudgins; Brenda Brueggemann; and especially my mentor and dear friend, Erin McGraw.

  All the great people at St. Albans School, in particular Donna Denizé and Vance Wilson.

  And my students, colleagues, and friends at UWEC.

  Thanks to the Alumni Graduate Grant for Research and Scholarship at Ohio State, and to the University Research and Creative Activity Grant at UWEC, for financial assistance on this project.

  Thanks to the many, many books, letters, journals, newspapers, and other research materials I consulted along the way, especially Nat Brandt’s Massacre in Shansi and Eva Jane Price’s China Journal: 1889–1900. Thanks to the Oberlin scholar whose name I’ve unfortunately forgotten, but to whom I owe the detail of an organ being installed in a Chinese mission house. Thanks to Josh Bauer, Winnie Khaw, and Alex Long for their research assistance.

  For the love and support of everyone I am lucky enough to call a friend, from every place I have lived, I am beyond grateful: from St. Louis, Carleton, San Francisco, Columbus, DC, Wisconsin, and, of course, Ya’an. Special thanks to Dai Ou, Bao Shuang, She Hongxia, and all the Shimian crew, and with love and gratitude for my “Ya’an family”: Luo Xinping, Jiang Hong, and Jiang Yiling.

  Thank you to all the women writers who have meant so much to me, as both a reader and writer, at various stages of my life, most especially: Maya Angelou, Jane Austen, Maxine Hong Kingston, George Eliot, Muriel Spark, Zadie Smith, Alice Munro, and Louise Erdrich.

  Thank you to all the smart women, the difficult women, the women who fight and take up space in the world. Now more than ever.

  Inexpressible thanks to my family—Pattersons, Butterfields, Borhams, and Gershmans—for their faith through the years, for their belief, encouragement, and love. The support we give one another is beyond measure.

  Finally, with every bit of my heart, all gratitude to Brett Beach, for whom there are no other words but you, you, you.

  About the Author

  MOLLY PATTERSON was born in St. Louis and lived in China for several years. The winner of a 2014 Pushcart Prize, she was also the 2012–2013 writer-in-residence at St. Albans School in Washington, DC. Her work has appeared in several magazines, including the Atlantic and the Iowa Review. Rebellion is her first novel.

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  Credits

  Cover design by Milan Bozic

  Cover photograph by Bruce Boyd

  Copyright

  REBELLION. Copyright © 2017 by Molly Patterson. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No p
art of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

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  Print ISBN 978-0-06-257404-6

  Epub Edition August 2017 ISBN 978-0-06-257407-7

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