by Tricia Dower
“Does that mean die?”
“The way most people think of it, yah. But they’re not dead-dead, if you know what I mean, just someplace we can’t see.”
Lin’s eyes sting with sudden emotion. She turns away to fill glasses with lemonade for the boys. As much as Mother and Daddy annoy her at times, her throat tightens at the thought of them silent and gone. She doesn’t blame Angel for wanting to believe her parents were too special to die. She clears her throat. “What about your ex? Did he disengage, too?”
“No. He went to Vegas, won big and didn’t come home again. Rhonda said he simply ran out of lines so he left the stage. That’s all it was. People come, people go, she said. She helped me not take it so personally.” A muscle under her right eye twitches.
“I don’t know how you could not take it personally.” When the Transactional Analysis workshop changed Lin’s script, Ron took it personally for sure. “Does this ex have a name?”
Angel shudders theatrically. “Yes. Richard as in Dick or Dickhead. Rhonda said the conditions that led to our separation arose because we had divergent paths."
Such a cold, unaccountable way of putting it: the conditions arose. “Meaning new scripts to act out with others?” She fights the urge to turn the spoons right side up, having given Tavis the job of setting out the stainless earlier.
“I suppose so but I find his lack of curiosity criminal.” Angel’s expression is as indignant as her voice. “He’s never seen Matty, never given us a cent. Anthony was seriously messed up after he left. Charles’s attention means the world to him. To me, too.”
Lin glances over at Charles’s tree, standing awkwardly like an uninvited guest hoping for a place at the table. “Messed up how?”
“Angry, violent. On his fourth birthday he took a baseball bat and smashed all our lamps. He said, ‘You let Daddy get away!’ The poor guy expected his father to surprise us and show up for the occasion.” She rubs her eyelids. “He hated me for a while.”
Tavis gets angry but he hasn’t broken anything on purpose. When she and Ron first told him about the move to Hopkins, he put his hands on his ears and shouted, “No, no, no, no.” They hurried to tell him he and Mommy would live there only for a while and then go back to Daddy. If that turns out to be a lie, how will she justify it, she who vowed to not bring him up on lies? “What would Rhonda say if you felt guilty about letting those conditions exist?”
“She’d probably say why create the need for guilt?”
Stop having a conscience? How facile. “In a workshop,” she says, “I learned that when I was a kid, I most likely wrote an unconscious script for my life with roles for good guys and bad guys, winners and losers. One way to discover your script is to imagine your life as a fairy tale and decide how the story ends.” She sticks her head around the kitchen and calls, “Boys, dinner!” Hears a silent echo. How often has she summoned Ron and Tavis to the table that way?
Angel says, “So what’s your fairy tale?”
Lin hesitates, afraid the answer will reveal too much and make her look foolish. Yet Angel has opened herself up freely and Lin doesn’t find her foolish. Nerves firing, she plunges in. “Sleeping Beauty minus the beauty. Waiting for Prince Charming to write the story of my life. Never waking from my enchanted sleep for fear of having to deal with dangerous strangers, spiders and plugged-up toilets.”
Anthony comes around the corner. “Spiders are cool. They make silk and live forever if people don’t kill them.”
Angel ruffles his hair. “He saw a TV special about spiders.” He ducks from her hand.
“I didn’t know they could live forever,” Lin says. She could hug him for the change of subject.
Matty thumps in with bright yellow Romper Stompers on his feet. “I’m a spider,” he says. “I’m a very good jumper.” Tavis brings up the rear playing a red kazoo. Angel says, “Hey, quieten down,” and points to the floor. “You’re stomping on people’s heads.”
Matty says, “Holy Toledo.”
Angel says, “Shoot. Gotta watch what I say around him.”
Lin could hug them all.
She dishes out macaroni and cheese, sits the boys at the table and tucks a napkin under Tavis’s chin. Matty wants his done the same. She and Angel take the floor on either side of the coffee table. “You could use some pillows to sit on,” Angel says.
“Don’t mention that to Charles, okay?”
“Ha, I won’t. And, by the way, Sleeping Beauty’s got nothing on you. You do know you’re beautiful, don’t you?”
Lin shakes her head, flustered. This woman, this stranger still, seems entirely without artifice, as unvarnished as Helen, who at times made Lin painfully aware how guarded she is, how locked up inside.
Angel forks a bit of macaroni into her mouth and grunts with pleasure. “Hmm, wonderful. Real cheese, not that processed junk, I can tell.” She bites into her bread, holds up a wait-a-minute finger, swallows and says, “I don’t see myself in only one fairy tale. According to Rhonda we act in dozens or more scripts at the same time.”
Lin rolls a taste of spongy mac and cheese around in her mouth, trying to savor it like Angel. She misses her passion for food. “Does she mean reincarnation?”
“Not exactly. All lives go on at once because time is what humans make up to deal with chaos. At least that’s what Rhonda says.”
“So, there’s no progress? We don’t get better or worse?”
“No, we do, we can. Some people assume Egyptians weren’t advanced enough to build the pyramids. That they must have had help from space aliens.”
“I haven’t heard that.” Helen would call it bullshit. But Helen probably didn’t spend girlhood nights squinting up at the stars, wishing for benevolent aliens like Superman and Wonder Woman to swoop down and save the world or, at the very least, her.
“Rhonda says that, since all civilizations exist simultaneously, whatever knowledge we have we’ve always had. Every life we experience influences every other. Imagine our lives talking to one another like at a massive family picnic: Pass the potato salad. Watch out for wasps. Why didn’t you call Uncle Harry before you hired a plumber?”
Lin laughs. “I’m having enough trouble with this life. Any other versions of me out there have to fend for themselves.”
“I hear you.” Angel stretches her neck toward the card table. “How you cowboys doing?”
“Ready for dessert,” Tavis calls back as Ron would.
“Coming.” Lin pushes herself off the floor onto her knees. She hesitates before asking a question that has broken into her mind, asks it quietly so the kids won’t hear. “In Rhonda’s view, has a little boy who’s wounded or killed by a bomb done something to allow that situation to exist?” She’s recalling a day of freaky late-April snow, seventeen-month-old Tavis a teddy bear in his light blue velour snowsuit, she and Ron pushing him in a stroller, demonstrating against Honeywell’s cluster bombs that can tear children to pieces.
“That’s a tough one. Maybe. If his script was to show others how wrong war is.”
Lin slumps back on her heels. “The victim wanted it? Come on. I don’t buy that. It lets everyone who’s responsible off the hook.”
“Is it better to say the child’s death is God’s will?”
“There’s no acceptable way to explain a child’s death.”
Tavis yells, “Mom-mee!”
“On my way.”
“Don’t know if this will make you feel better but Rhonda says nobody actually dies. We just sort of change addresses.”
“It doesn’t make me feel better.”
Lin serves up Neapolitan ice cream. Anthony curls an arm around his dish as if expecting someone to steal it. He sticks the spoon upside down in his mouth and slowly draws it out. Lin thinks she can see the damage reflected in his sullen eyes. Someone needs to feel guilty for that, Rhonda be hanged. Is
n’t that so, she silently asks Charles’s tree.
11
Three days after the honeymoon, they reach Northfield where Grace lives. Thank goodness. Lin is sceneried out.
Etched into a red brick building’s lintel is 1886. Other buildings, painted in desert shades of rose and sand, speak across decades too. The whole effect is intended to attract tourists, Grace says. “You missed this year’s Jesse James Days. Every September the town goes wild over a thwarted bank robbery that happened, let’s see, eighty-nine years ago now. I got dolled up in a long dress with a bustle this year. Pranced around like Lillie Langtry back from the dead.”
Grace’s home is a two-storey brick with a glassed-in porch and a generous lawn set back from the road. She bought it after Howard’s death. “I had to vacate the parsonage we were in, of course. Ronnie took a year off from seminary to help me move, help me through it all.” She reaches over and squeezes his arm.
“We helped each other through it,” he says.
He walks her to her door and waits until the house swallows her up, welcoming her home.
Ten more minutes to downtown Prairie Fire, population six hundred; the post office, city hall, a filling station, a lumberyard, a body shop and a tavern all cozied up together on the main drag. Ron stops to show Lin a plaque explaining how the town got its name. A crisp breeze stirs her hair and goes right through her gray wool slacks and white cable knit sweater. He wraps his long arms around her and rests his chin on her head as she reads that as late as 1875 prairie covered millions of Minnesota acres with “a rainbow” of grasses that grew waist-high and sheltered butterflies, red foxes, bobolinks, ground squirrels, burrowing owls, crickets, grasshoppers, garter snakes and meadowlarks. Annual spring burnings or prairie fires, a practice started by the Dakota Indians before Minnesota expelled them, protected the grasses from encroaching woodland scrub. Only fragments of prairie remain.
Lin Brunson, Pioneer Bride, is not sorry she missed the snakes.
Three miles from town center, he turns onto a gravel road. A sign beside a mailbox points to Open Door Methodist Church. Tiny stones fly up from the wheels with a corn popping sound. It’s just past three. On both sides of the road, sunlight filters down through evergreens and deciduous trees shedding their leaves. “Thar she blows,” he says.
A black cross atop a white belfry arises from a clearing in the trees. The red splash of the front door grows wider and taller. A brick chimney and a dormer jut out of a sloped roof. Windows with black shutters gape in pairs from either side of the red door. The church and parsonage squat bravely on a wide meadow, leaves scattered across it like confetti. At a circular gravel drive, the road dead-ends. He stops the car. “Well, Mrs. Brunson?”
Lonely storybook cottages in haunted forests flit through her mind. The nearest neighbor is acres away. She tries not to betray her shock at the isolation. “It’s beautiful,” she says. And it is. No sod house like the one that greeted Grandma on a different prairie. No cows to keep out as at Grace’s first parsonage. “Does all this land belong to the church?”
“In a manner of speaking. A homesteader gave us twenty acres fifty years ago. But if we try to sell it or let anyone else build on it, we lose it to a conservation group.”
Her throat tightens at us and we. This place is her responsibility, now, as well as his. “I didn’t realize there were no other houses around.” No kids on bikes or hopscotching, nobody walking a dog, raking leaves. All the times she wished to be alone, she meant without Mother and Daddy. Only that.
“You won’t be lonely. Something’s on at church nearly every day.”
Outside the car, the air smells clean. She does a slow full circle, surveying the girdle of trees casting long black shadows. Flashes of red and gold cling to some by thread-like stalks. An agitated magpie cries yak, yak, yak. An image of Eldon Jukes steering into a woody patch is so vivid she shudders. “Don’t suppose a garbage truck comes all the way out here,” she says.
“It does,” he says, faking an astonished look. “We have telephone, running water and electricity, too.” He takes the front steps two at a time and opens the red door.
“It wasn’t locked?”
“Nobody locks doors here. Mom woke to a vagrant asleep on her porch one morning.”
“I don’t like the sound of that.”
He laughs. “This is the safest place you’ll ever live.” He bounces down the steps and scoops her up.
“I’m too heavy.”
“Oh, I’m sinking, I’m sinking,” he moans, pretending to buckle at the knees.
As ridiculous as she feels, she wishes someone were there to take a picture.
He sets her down in the living room to the left of a short entryway and kisses her so long and hard her lips prickle. “Our first smooch in our new home,” he says. “Now look around, Mrs. Brunson, at all that is yours.” She sees floor-to-ceiling shelves framing the fireplace. A tired-out brown paisley couch and olive-drab armchairs sag as though the last minister’s family arose from them minutes ago. She can see through to the dining room and kitchen. An old wood smell lives in the house from dark planked floors and trim and a long planked trestle table in the dining room that brings Beowulf to mind. The floorboards creak like a ship’s deck.
He tells her the south-facing kitchen fills with light on even the grayest day. It has more than enough white cupboards and a double sink (something Mother didn’t have until last year) plus a built-in table with benches like a diner booth. Crocheted curtains cover warped window glass through which trees appear to swim. It all feels right.
He throws open cupboard doors like a salesman. “Voila! Pots, pans, dishes, glasses, Mr. Peanut salt and pepper shakers.” He yanks open drawers. “Forks, knives, spoons, spatula, a pancake turner from the Thousand Islands.” She laughs at his enthusiasm and their good fortune.
A hand-printed note under home-baked bread on one counter sobers her up. WELCOME PASTOR & MRS. B!!! DINNER'S IN THE FRIDGE. HEAT 30 MINS AT 350. She bristles at the thought of others traipsing in and out. The refrigerator breathes cold air on her face, rebuking her uncharitable thoughts. It holds what looks like tuna casserole, a green salad and a bowl of red Jell-O. Breakfast, too: milk, eggs, butter and bacon.
Stairs from the kitchen lead to a basement with a wringer washer and ropes strung to hang laundry. Ron reports there’s a clothesline outside as well. Back in the dining room, he points out a narrow, twisted staircase to the dormer bedroom. The second step turns out to be the perfect height to stand on and kiss him. A door leads to an unheated breezeway connecting the parsonage and church. Off the dining room is even more: a pink-and-black-tiled bathroom between a spare bedroom and what Ron calls the office, the doors all with glass knobs.
She steps into the office. On a wide oak desk, her brass gooseneck lamp and portable red Underwood wait like old friends. She asks if this is where he’ll work. “No. My office is in the church. Check out what’s on the desk.” A course catalog from St. Olaf College, a name conjuring up a fat elf rolling down a snowy hill. “I inquired at Carleton, too, but they don’t accept married students.”
She’s puzzled. He has a bachelor’s in philosophy and a master of divinity. “Are you enrolling in St. Olaf’s?”
“Not me. You.” He rocks back and forth on his loafers, unable to hide how pleased he is with himself. “Their psychology department has a fine reputation. I spoke to Admissions. You should be able to transfer most of your Douglass credits.”
She looks down at the catalog, momentarily derailed. Does he want her out of the way? “How can I do that and help you? And where’s the tuition coming from?”
“You’ll go part-time. Get the paperwork together and you can start in February. We’ll pay for your first term with the wedding gift money.”
“Wouldn’t it be better to buy a dryer and a newer washer with that?”
“Shortsighted, sweetheart.
We’ll use a laundromat if need be. An education’s forever.”
She’ll be the one at the laundromat, not him. And she planned to share his vocation, not go off to classes and hole up in a room studying. But he looks so delighted. It would make Mother happy, too, and lord knows how hard that is to do. She steps to the windows framing a postcard view of the trees, the setting sun painting the sky behind them orange, gold and magenta. She might want an excuse to come in here and close the door, to have a sanctuary of sorts like her bedroom was at home. She tries out the swivel oak chair, flips through the catalog pictures of tree-lined paths and Gothic stone buildings that seem grave with knowledge.
“I suppose with a degree I could help support us one day.” Like Grace did.
“You betcha.”
After dinner, they stretch out on the green braided rug by the fireplace, their backs against the couch, his legs extending a good foot beyond hers. The light from the fire licks the low ceiling as they open presents rescued from the trunk. She jokes about pawning the sterling silver before it tarnishes—three Revere bowls, two candlesticks and four serving trays, using the cash for tuition once the wedding bonanza is gone. She’s warming to the idea of student life again, to cracking open the cool, heavy cover of an unspoiled text.
Ron has placed a black and white portrait of his parents from 1929 on the mantel, Grace in a wedding gown with a long, narrow skirt and a hat shaped like a halo, Howard wearing a tux. His head is rounder than Ron’s, his chin big and empty, but he’s just as lanky. He and Grace stand as tall and proud as sunflowers.
“I wish you could have met my father,” he says. “Remember Rosa Parks?”
“The woman who wouldn’t give up her bus seat to a white rider?”