by Joan Shott
“But I didn’t ask for a raise, Matthew.” I was afraid he was going to expect me to work full-time, and I was strung as tight between schoolwork and the job as I could be. “I like this job, and I’m doing all right with my bills. My car hasn’t broken down in weeks, and I actually have money in the bank. I wouldn’t have expected anything for at least a few more months.”
“Are you arguing with me, Diane Elizabeth Hayes?”
“How’d you know my middle name?” I asked, the strangeness of his invocation throwing me off balance.
He hesitated and shuffled some papers on his desk. He smiled and showed me those perfectly straight, white teeth of his. I imagined him as a kid wearing braces and wire things around his head at night to create the smile that would someday melt women’s hearts.
“It’s on your application…for the job. Maybe it was on a tax form,” he said.
I nodded while I searched my memory and didn’t recall putting down my middle name on anything I’d given him. He never had me fill out tax forms. The subject left me dizzy with confusion. I tried to quash the odd feelings he had ignited as I stared at the blur of words on the typewritten paper in front of me. But I couldn’t ignore the memories the mention of my full name spelled out like that brought to mind. His using my middle name not only came through with a sense of familiarity I didn’t think we had, but it also made me feel like a little girl being called on the carpet by my mother when I’d done something wrong.
I was in trouble when she called me Diane Elizabeth Miller, but she never could stay angry with me. The words were always said with love. Whenever I recalled our relationship, I felt her hand slip around my much smaller one, and I knew I had been loved by her more than anything. I was eight years old when she died. My father never talked much about her. I was too young at the time to argue when he gave away her clothes, her books, the things I could have had to remember her by. He told me he had to get on with his life, and it was too painful for him to have the memories around. I was the best thing she had left behind, he claimed, and he didn’t need material things as a shrine.
That was how my father and I were different. I wanted the things that had been hers, so I could hold them close and breathe in her smell and imagine her hands running across their surface. Like my memories of Bobby. Our house on the island was untouched since he had left. I never changed or moved anything. Whenever I went back to our house, I picked up his things and tried to reconnect to him with the little sparks still left in my heart, but each time I returned the flickers grew dimmer. The memory of my mother brought back the feeling of loss, and my bruised heart erupted in my chest as if the pain was born again. I couldn’t blame Matthew for a little slip up like that. I had too many things on my mind, and how could I remember whether or not I’d written my middle name on a job application?
“I hope the raise will help. I wanted you to know how much I appreciate your hard work,” Matthew said.
“Sure, thanks,” I replied.
“I’ve got a special project for you to do tomorrow.”
“Sorry, Matthew. I have to go back to Whidbey Island for the weekend. I can’t work this Saturday.”
“Is everything okay? With your father, I mean?” he asked.
“Nothing’s wrong. I just realized I’ve been away too long and I have to get back there.”
“If you need a ride or…”
I had to put my hands beneath the desk to hide their shaking. “No, thank you. I’ll be fine.”
But I wasn’t fine. I had let myself get too far from where I was supposed to be. I hadn’t been back to Whidbey in weeks, and my birdfeeders were surely empty. My hummingbirds would never forgive me. I had begun to neglect my life, the life I had never wanted to leave behind. I couldn’t bring to mind the exact way Bobby’s leather jacket hung from the peg by the doorway. Was there a worn seam along the shoulder or had I imagined that? Matthew’s suede jacket, the one he wore when the weather was cool and clear, was just slightly worn at the shoulder seams, and I might have been confusing the two. I felt torn between my past, which had ended before it started, and a future I couldn’t predict.
After Matthew left for the printers to check the proofs for his latest set of pamphlets, I walked over to his desk, opened the top drawer, and picked up his gold pen. I turned it sideways and read a line of engraving that ran the length of it: Duty, Honor, Country. And there was the engraved spread-winged eagle on its tip. I wasn’t sure what I had expected to see, but the inscription only added to the confusion of my morning. I ran my finger along the smoothness of the metal and felt a glimmer of warmth in my chest. What I didn’t understand, I would have to trust. As I carefully placed the pen exactly where it had been, I let the thought float across my mind that I might be on the verge of becoming involved with him. I formed the word love with my mouth. I shook my head against the idea. I still loved Bobby, and I couldn’t be unfaithful to his memory.
I closed the desk drawer and looked around the room as the shadows of the coming day stretched like a lazy cat across the old pine floors. If I felt as if I’d found a new home, I still wasn’t sure I understood anything beyond what was printed on all those fliers, the sayings I spouted with increasing ease. I knew there was much more beneath the proverbs of the SDS, the mantras now seared into my mind: Hell no, we won’t go — Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today? —Make love, not war. I couldn’t tell if the cause, quickly becoming my cause, was succeeding or not and what the people with the loudest voices really wanted. Was it an end to the war, a political platform, a way to escape the guilt of their safe, middle-class lives? What did Matthew want? And what did I want?
Across the ocean in Vietnam, the bombings and the body counts continued week after week. There seemed to be no end in sight. I could only hope that each letter I mailed, each trip I arranged, each student I encouraged to work for peaceful protest was another step closer towards ending the war which had taken Bobby from me. And I was doing it for Bobby’s memory and for others who might be sent in harm’s way, wasn’t I? But I was frustrated and angry by the snail’s pace of what Matthew called success. I wanted it to be over so I would be free to begin my life. If I could help to end the war in my small way, I could extricate myself from the feelings of culpability I couldn’t shake. My husband had died in a war I now called immoral. He was dead, I was alive. He lost me, and I found someone else. Maybe.
Chapter Five
I trudged back to the apartment, feeling wrung out from a long week of too much of everything. And my mind was still clouded by the mystery of the arcane inscription I had read when I looked at that gold pen, the one I knew I shouldn’t have touched. Opening the drawer of Matthew’s desk had set me one step further on the road of no return. I was slipping into a place it would be hard to find my way back from, maybe a place I wouldn’t want to leave.
I hoped a weekend on the island would help clear my mind. I had a paper due next week for my English class and a report to complete on a nature walk I hadn’t yet taken. Both tasks dangled by a thin thread over my weary head ready to crash down upon my delicately balanced world. And to add one more weight to my precarious mountain of misery, I was unhappy about missing my usual Saturday at the office. But I owed my other home a visit. I needed some distance from Matthew to sort out how I ought to feel about him. I couldn’t let my attraction for him grow unchecked.
Once I was back at the island house, I’d reconnect with the way I knew I should feel. I’d be reminded everywhere I looked that I was a widow. If I let myself forget Bobby I would be admitting how careless I’d been in the first place to take those marriage vows, no matter what they said about until death do us part. The desire to get closer to Matthew would be buried under my good sense. Mind over matter.
It shouldn’t be that hard to concentrate on other things. God, there was no end to the garden work back on the island. I’d forgotten to plant sweet peas in February, but if I threw in some seeds over the weekend there was a chance they would
come up by late summer. And the roses hadn’t been pruned as they should have been months ago. And the birds, my birds — the nesting season was in full swing, and I hadn’t checked the rafters in the shed for signs of swallows. They seemed to have gotten in last year through a broken window, and the same pair might have returned to set up housekeeping among the tools and stacks of clay pots. There was also a chance the Anna’s hummingbirds had nested in the big pine behind the house, but it was too late to catch them in the act by now even if they had settled their brood among the thick, safe branches. Now that we were at the end of May their chicks would be on the wing and, if I were lucky, they’d show up at my feeder — if I could keep it filled from one week to the next. I hoped they wouldn’t forget me. I hadn’t forgotten them, but it was difficult to live two lives in two places.
I slammed the apartment door behind me and dragged my heavy backpack down the hall to the bedroom I shared with Amy. I heard Nancy call out to me.
“Hey, Diane, wait.”
I threw my things on the bed and pulled off my jacket. “What’s up?” I asked as Nancy came through the doorway.
She looked from my side of the room to Amy’s, strewn with cast off clothes, papers, and books still open from last night’s or last week’s studying. “I took a message for you. Here.” She pushed a scribbled note at me. “You got a call this afternoon.”
At first I thought something had happened to Lilly, since I hadn’t been able to stop by to see her for over a week. But then I read Nancy’s slanted script and translated the name Hayes from the scrawl. “Who is this? I don’t understand.”
“Well, it was a man, I think an older man, and he said to tell you that he and Mrs. Hayes would be in town this weekend. I said, Oh, in Seattle? and he said, No, Whidbey Island.”
My heart dropped into the pit of my stomach, and sweat began to prickle at my collar as if ice was crystallizing on the fine hairs along the back of my neck. I knew my face must have shown my uneasiness, because it was reflected in Nancy’s surprised expression.
“Is there something wrong? Are they relatives? You know, they have the same last name as you, and I didn’t think to ask. I figured it was none of my business, so I’d stay out of it.”
I wanted to ask her since when she stayed out of anyone’s business, but I couldn’t be so forward. I was the kind of person they would have named The Most Likely Not to Confront Anyone if they’d had such a title in the high school yearbook. Besides, I was growing to like her snoopy, well-meaning nature. I credited her intrusive ways to a type of concern, and I was glad she cared about me in her own way.
“Did they say how they got my number?” I asked.
“I think he said your father gave him your number at school. Honest, that’s all I know.”
“This weekend, huh?”
“If you’re sticking around tonight, we’re having some people over. Maybe you could let your hair down and have a little fun.” She picked up one of the books I had brought home and pretended to look through it.
“I have to call my father and see if he knows anything else,” I waved the piece of paper, “about all this. I’ll let you know and thanks for the message and the invitation.”
Nancy nodded, dropped the book on my bed, and walked towards her own room as I headed for the kitchen phone.
My father answered on the first ring. “You still working? It’s getting late,” I told him.
“I thought it might be you, Diane. Don’t have no plans other than to go home and be by myself, so I’m finishing a tune-up. You get the message from your in-laws?” he asked.
“Yes,” I swallowed. I knew my fear was evident in my voice even through the poor connection. Hearing these strangers referred to as my in-laws was unnerving. “What do they want, Dad?”
“I suppose they want to meet you. Never did meet them, did you?”
“We never found the time before Bobby left, and we always thought we’d be able to do it when he…” I twisted the phone cord around my fingers and watched them turn red.
“I know. But now they want to meet you. Don’t worry. There’s nothing to be afraid of, now is there?”
“I suppose not.” I released the breath I’d been holding and let go of the twisted telephone cord as the blood rushed back through my fingertips to the tingling numbness I’d caused.
“I told them it might not be noon ‘til you made it there,” he said. “They said they’d be at your place around two or so.”
I nodded as if he could see me through the phone lines. “You’ll be there, won’t you Dad?” I asked the question like a little girl. I fell backwards to the first day of school, my dark room in a storm, the night my mother died. I needed him for this meeting as much as any of the other times he’d been there for me. Besides Lilly, he was all I had.
“I’ll be there,” he said.
As I hung up the phone in the kitchen, Nancy came through the doorway, her expertly plucked eyebrows raised in expectation. “Will you stay tonight? I’d really like you to come to the party.”
“I’ll hang around for a while,” I said. I thought spending time with other people would take my mind off the impending visit of the in-laws. I’d never been good dealing with people I didn’t know, and Mr. and Mrs. Hayes might question the decisions I’d made, including why I’d married their son on such short notice without so much as even speaking to them.
“I think you owe yourself a good time, Diane. You work too hard. Why don’t you ask a date to join us?” She casually flipped her long, blonde hair back over her shoulder and grinned. She was smug in her knowledge of what my answer would be.
“I’m not seeing anyone.” I shook my head and thought, here we go again. How many times had Nancy asked me if I had a date for the weekend? No matter what I said to her, she insisted on grilling me about the men in my life, or lack of.
“You don’t? How about the guy you work for? That time I stopped by to drop off your English book…when you forgot it at home…I saw the way he looked at you. That guy really digs you.”
I never did forget my book, but Nancy had dropped it off the day after I told her where I was working. “Matthew’s my boss, Nancy.”
“Yeah, and so what?”
“It wouldn’t be right to date my boss. I don’t even know anything about him. I think he’s a little too, I don’t know, I guess unusual is the only word I can think of.”
“You mean just because he’s running the SDS office?” Nancy pulled herself up on the counter, settling in for a longer talk than I cared to have.
I shifted my weight from one foot to the other. “Yes, well, maybe. He’s so different from what I would have expected someone in that job to be like.”
Nancy shook her head to caution me, “Don’t judge a book by its cover. But then again, if the book is the Guide to the Students for a Democratic Society, I suppose he is a little too perfect for the cover.”
“I know. It all seems too good to be true, doesn’t it? I mean, are we really doing anything to stop the war? We write letters and he goes to organize protests and I sit there and record it all. I feel good about some of it, and then I get the creeps when I read the anti-government stuff around the office.” I decided I would stop trying to run away from her company and sat down on one of the kitchen chairs. The chance to talk to another person, to share my thoughts, was nice, even if I had to be careful what I said. I did not want to give away the doubts I carried around on my shoulders about Matthew. Especially to Nancy.
“Yeah, sure. I guess I understand, but you believe in the movement, don’t you? We have to stop this war,” she said.
“But I feel weird about all this protest stuff. I mean, my father was in World War II, and we did the right thing then.” I listened to my words slipping away, as if they were going down a drain somewhere in the distance. My father had told me he had risked his life for future generations so we could live in freedom, and here I was repaying him by working for the anti-war movement. And then there was Bobby, ha
ving given his life for a cause he believed in. What kind of daughter was I? What kind of wife?
“How else do you get change? This war’s not right.” She raised her eyebrows, waiting for my response.
I knew there was some truth in what she was saying, but she hadn’t seen the anger in the letters I waded through each week. Nancy, with her ironed jeans and blue eye shadow, didn’t know what kind of powder keg sat just under the surface of the whole anti-war movement waiting to explode.
“Some groups are calling for nothing short of armed revolution. I’m not for that,” I said.
“How do you know he is?” She’d pulled an emery board out of thin air and got busy shaping her nails.
“He must have something at stake and might do anything to further his career. Why else would he be doing what he’s doing? There’s no reward besides ending the war other than political positioning that I can see. I wonder if he’ll resort to violence if he becomes tired of not getting the results he wants.”
Nancy shook her head. “Not in those Brooks Brothers pants, he won’t.”
It was the first time I’d laughed since I could remember, bending over and hiding my face in my hands as my shoulders convulsed. And then the feeling of falling, the fear of letting happiness into my life, broke my moment of release. I sat up and put on my serious look.
“Maybe you’re right. I might be letting my imagination run away with me, but I think he’s planning on becoming some kind of politician. That’s the impression I get when I watch him.”
Nancy smiled and tilted her head like an excited puppy. “You’ve been watching him, huh? I thought he was just your boss, Diane.”
I was pretty sure she knew she’d hit a sensitive spot as she pushed her finger in deeper and deeper. Each time I thought about Matthew, I felt a pang of guilt run through me, the unfaithful widow that I was. Nancy couldn’t know about that but she sensed she’d hit the target every time she mentioned his name. “No, Nancy, it’s not like that.”