The Sisters of Summit Avenue

by Lynn Cullen

  Now, outside in the field, Ruth listened to the tweedle of waking robins and kicked the parched ground, setting off tiny tempests of dirt. Nick was pouring a sack of seed corn into the hopper of the planter. He wanted to do the planting himself, but she wouldn’t let him. He’d thought with her sister coming that afternoon that Ruth would be busy with preparations. Ruth had argued that no, she was not doing anything special to get ready for her sister. No red carpet needed rolling out. June was not some sort of star, no matter what others might think.

  Chickens rushed over the toes of Ruth’s heavy shoes to snatch the few kernels that bounced from the metal hopper as Nick poured and Ruth watched Nick’s broad shoulders. When he squatted down to recheck the fittings connecting the planter to the tractor hitch, she let her gaze fall to his hands. She imagined them cradling her to him, his slim hips touching hers—

  “Ready.” He stood up.

  JoJo nickered from behind the fence separating the pasture from the field. John used to joke that JoJo followed Ruth around like Mary’s Little Lamb. He used to say that animals knew a kind heart when they saw it. “Animals do not lie,” he’d say when she protested.

  She still didn’t know how to take a compliment.

  “Root, look,” Nick said. “JoJo thinks that she should work.”

  Ruth shook off her thoughts. “She used to plow, you know, when we first took over the farm, old as she was. She insisted.” She didn’t say that was because JoJo would do anything to please her. The horse had adored Ruth since she was a little girl. “We were the ones who had to call a stop to it, although she did trample the rows less than a tractor. Wherever Mother got her, she sure got her money’s worth.”

  “Are you sure you do not want me to do the planting?”

  “Nope.”

  They were gambling that the building heat meant that rain was on the way. The bloody sky might just bear this out; a sky as red as this pointed to a severe gully-washer. Regardless, it was getting late in the season to put planting off any longer. Heat like this had to break, and when it did, it would pour.

  Well, let it. She clapped on John’s beat-up hat.

  Nick stood back. “I do not feel good about letting you do the planting.”

  Letting her?

  He added, “With your sister coming earlier than you thought.”

  Oh. He was being nice. She had to quit being so crabby. Oversexed and crabby was a nasty combination. She’d been off since Ed Squibb had driven over last night to tell them that June had telephoned. She was going to be arriving a day early because they were taking an airplane. Show-offs.

  “Doesn’t matter. June can come whenever she wants.” It truly didn’t matter to Ruth. Not in the least.

  “They are flying in an aeroplane!”

  Ruth shrugged.

  He whistled. “They must be important.”

  “I bet they think so.”

  She walked around to the back of the tractor. He lifted her by the waist up onto the metal seat. “Am I going to like this sister?”

  “Probably. Everyone else does. She’s relentlessly likable.” Her waist was still glowing from where his hands had been.

  “Just like Betty Crocker.”

  “Don’t get me started.” Ruth grabbed the lever of the shift. “Anyhow, June was like that long before she was a barker for flour. I was always in her shadow, growing up.”

  “I cannot see you in anyone’s shadow, Root.”

  “Well, it’s true.” She squirmed in the slotted metal cradle of the seat, which felt something like sitting on a warm street grate. “My parents were so busy worshipping at the feet of June, they sort of forgot about me.”

  “I don’t believe it.” He stepped aside. “Well, I love you best.”

  She hit the gas to hide her pleasure, then jerked back as the tractor started off, the hoppers tottering down the rows behind it. “You don’t even know her!”

  “Does not matter!” he called after her.

  Poor JoJo, trailing from behind the fence, raised her dusty neck as if to oversee the operation.

  Ruth jostled along on the tractor. It was true, she thought, looking behind her to make sure the seed was coming out properly. When she was young, her parents actually did seem to pretty much forget about her at times. She blamed her mother especially. At least Dad was working at the store and was busy. But what was Mother’s excuse when she’d sent Ruth to her first day of half-day kindergarten with June, without any provision for Ruth to get home?

  Ruth could remember that afternoon like it just happened. The morning had been a revelation, filled with finger paints and painting smocks, sleeping mats and recess. Still vibrating with the excitement of it all, Ruth stood in front of the school by a brick planter bristling with scratchy shrubs. She watched her classmates march off two by two with their mothers, having been released hours before the older grades. Where was her own mother?

  They hadn’t discussed what she should do after school. She thought Mother would just appear—the other mothers had. She knew that she shouldn’t go home alone. The walk there with June that morning had been an arduous journey through unknown territory occupied by interesting new kids and untold marvels. Ruth had to resist pausing for even the most fascinating discoveries—grapevines and pear trees dripping with fruit, an apparently haunted house, the filling station rich with the dizzying smell of gasoline. She had only dropped June’s hand once, just long enough to run over to pet a peach-colored spaniel that was chained to its doghouse.

  The last of the kindergarteners had gone and Ruth, still waiting for Mother, was picking the little round leaves from the pricker bushes when a man with a broom came out and took a pack of cigarettes from his shirt.

  He struck a match on the planter.

  “What are you doing here?”

  She rolled her gaze up to him. June had warned her about strangers.

  He stepped toward her. “Here, I’ll take you to—”

  She gasped and ran in the direction she thought she’d come. She didn’t stop running until she came to a busy street.

  A Model T rattled by, then a horse-drawn wagon loaded with crates of apples. She recognized this corner. It was at the street where the nice dog lived. But which way to turn? She made a choice.

  She walked along, scared, thirsty. Her new shoes rubbed sore spots on her feet. Where was the peach-colored dog? When was she getting to him and his doghouse?

  A car ah-ooh-gahed at her, jolting her from her skin. She ran now, blurry with tears, until she came to a rusty bridge.

  Terror descended. She had not gone over a bridge that morning.

  She stood on tiptoes to peer over the flaking rails and into the river. Sticks rode the brown muddy water. Something plunked.

  The river was dangerous, Mother said. People drowned in it. Ruth was never, ever, to go near it. Now as she gazed woozily into the thick brown water, it seemed like it might leap up and snatch her from the bridge.

  She pulled back with a yelp. She was lost. Maybe forever.

  She was walking blind with tears when it occurred to her: the river passed near to her home. They crossed over it whenever they went downtown. It was just a short walk away from where she lived. She could follow it until she saw her street.

  Cicadas were wailing, late in the afternoon, when she dragged up her porch steps. “I’m home!” she yelled.

  No one answered.

  The house was empty. The world seemed inside-out, a bleak nightmare in which she was the last one alive.

  She was in front of the mirror, looking at her belly, scratched and muddy from where she had clawed her desperate way up a steep place on the riverbank—now she knew why she’d been forbidden to go there alone—when June came in.

  “Ruthie! Where have you been?”

  “Mother didn’t get me.”

  “Someone said they saw you by the river. We thought you were dead!”

  They clung to each other and bawled. She drank in the comfort of June’s skinny arms
and her dirty, sweet, musky scent. Ruth’s favorite smell in the world. It smelled like home.

  * * *

  Toasted from the sun above and pummeled from the tractor below, Ruth steered the big iron wheels around the end of the row. She’d been on the tractor for most of the morning and she was ready to be done. She was getting depressed up here.

  A car mounted the nearby rise in their road. Ruth’s gut seized.

  June.

  She ducked her head.

  No, couldn’t be June already. Anyway, Ruth had nothing to hide. What she’d done, she’d done. June wasn’t any worse for the wear from it; in fact, she’d come out way ahead. Ruth held her head up, battered hat and all, and turned her chin belligerently toward the road.

  A fancy car roared by, a big touring automobile with a chrome grill that stuck out like a cowcatcher on a train. She watched it as it slunk down the road, on past the ruins of the log cabin built by John’s ancestors, and out of sight.

  What was that showboat doing out here in no-man’s-land? She entertained herself with the possibilities as she bobbled along on the John Deere: some bankers took a wrong turn in Chicago. It was the Squibbs—their rich uncle croaked and left them a bundle and they were joyriding in their new limousine. A bank robber was making an escape in a getaway vehicle—actually, that was not a joke. Dillinger was striking all over the area. Just a couple months ago, he hit as close as Auburn. He was said to have hidden out in a farmhouse just up the road.

  When she came to the end of the row, she stopped, tractor motor running, and looked out over the naked furrows of neighboring fields spreading out in all directions. In the distance, the sun glinted on the dome of the Squibbs’ silo and on the tin of their house’s rooftop, and further off, on the horizon, from the outbuildings on the Martin place. Acres of fields and pastureland lay between her house and the Squibbs’. If she screamed, there was no one to hear her.

  Her skin prickled even as the sun beat down.

  She frowned at JoJo, quivering her haunches to shoo off flies. Calm down, Ruth. More likely it was some city folks with a summer place on one of the nearby lakes, James, Snow, and the like, taking a tour of the “scenic” countryside.

  She gave the tractor gas.

  On she swayed, the hot sun cooking her back. A lake sounded pretty nice right now. The image of a speedboat cutting across cool gray water flashed through her memory. In her mind, she was back in her brother-in-law’s gleaming mahogany speedboat during her first visit to Minnesota, back when Margaret was a baby and she was pregnant with Jeanne. Back when John was whole.

  * * *

  The sleek mahogany boat idled in the middle of the lake. Marinating in the smell of gasoline and mildew, Ruth rocked on the cushioned second-row seat with John, as roly-poly in oversized white cloth life jackets as Tweedledee and Tweedledum. Richard, perched on the wooden divider between seating compartments, was looking down on them with a grin.

  “What do you think of the boat, John?”

  “Nice,” John said.

  “ ‘Nice’?” Richard’s navy blazer sleeve trembled in the wind as he knocked back a drink. He handed the glass to June, sitting down in the passenger seat. “ ‘Nice’? They only make ten of these crafts a year.”

  June cradled the glass, a small smile fixed upon her face. She often looked upset around Richard, Ruth noticed, though Ruth doubted anyone else could tell. Usually when a person smiled, it meant they were happy, but with June, not necessarily. A smile could mean she was panicking. Or furious. Anything that a smile didn’t usually mean. Ruth wondered if anyone else knew that about her.

  “Want to drive it?” Richard asked.

  John tightened his arm around Ruth. “No, thanks.”

  “You should. You can do it, my man. It’s just like driving a tractor.” Richard winked at Ruth. “Only a tad more suave.”

  John patted Ruth’s shoulder. “No, thanks.”

  Ruth found herself speaking up over the rumble of the idling engine. “I’ll drive.”

  “You will?” Richard’s tone was amused as he beamed down on her. “June doesn’t even drive my baby.”

  Ruth didn’t care about driving that tub. It was just that John was acting like a hick. “I can drive your ‘baby.’ I drive the truck all the time.”

  John palmed the top of her head. “You might as well say yes, Richard. She won’t stop until you do.”

  Ruth leaned out of his grip, more to get away from John, who was suddenly infuriating her with his inferiority to Richard, than to make her way out of their compartment. Richard, thinking that she was insisting on driving, reached down to pull her up to him.

  “See what I mean?” said John.

  June hugged the empty glass. “I admire Ruth. She doesn’t give up until she gets what she wants, let the chips fall where they may.”

  Ruth paused, midway across the divider. The hair rose on her scalp. Was June actually going to make trouble? Here? Out in the middle of the lake? For the first time in her life? Ruth felt her mouth crook. What bee had gotten in June’s bonnet?

  Richard made a show of helping Ruth into the front though her pregnant belly wasn’t all that big yet. “She can drive my boat any day.”

  “Problem is,” said June, “Ruth wants to drive everyone’s boat.”

  Ruth slid between her and Richard. “Three’s a crowd,” she said cheerfully.

  June smiled at her, then, abruptly, pushed up out of her seat. She swung her legs elegantly over the divider and dropped down next to John. Ruth saw them glance at each other, and then, very pointedly, away.

  Ruth should have thought out this stupid move. She should have watched her smart mouth. Putting them together was the last thing she had wanted to do.

  She made herself listen as Richard showed her the controls. She frowned at the switches and gauges, her inner self scrutinizing John and June from the back of her head. Even without seeing them, she could sense them studiously looking out either side of the boat.

  Ruth knew that she would never completely have John. Oh, she might have won the legal right to sleep with him, might have borne a child for him, might have had the honor of enduring the nausea and sprung varicose veins of carrying another. She might have been the chosen one who got to get up before dawn to milk the cows with him and to salve infected udders, the lucky winner who got to wash his clothes, cook his meals, and raise his kids. But even having all this, she didn’t really have him. She could never control his heart. She could never make him not love June.

  Ruth had not dimmed his love for her sister in the slightest by marrying him—she might well have increased it. She could feel them now, perched behind her in the boat, nobly resisting their beautiful love. Their yearning was so palpable she could reach back and wave her hand through it.

  The realization poured through her like molten lead: John didn’t have to have a physical affair to betray her. Even if he never acted on his love for June, Ruth would hurt just as much as if he had. For while a stolen act of the flesh was over in a flash, the craving for what-might-have-been knew no end.

  Ruth goosed the boat, sending it shooting across the water.

  * * *

  The mahogany boat scudded from her memory, leaving Ruth atop the tractor, glaring at nothing and everything. She was still there, Ruth the human rubber strap, binding together farm and family, though stretched to the point of snapping. Her dismal mood had settled in like a heavy cold when the big car returned.

  JoJo swiveled pricked ears toward the dust-covered showboat taking up the entire width of the dirt road as it barreled their way. Now the gray clouds billowing up from its whitewall tires seemed to lessen. The car was slowing down, slowing down, until it crept up . . . and stopped.

  A solitary fellow stared through his rolled-up window. Huh—big-city man must think her quaint, a lowly farm woman working the land.

  “Take a picture,” she yelled. “It’ll last longer!”

  He sat there, engine running.

  H
er pulse picked up. Maybe she shouldn’t have yelled.

  Should she run?

  The big car rolled forward, then took on speed. When a cloud of dust was boiling behind it, she aimed the tractor back down the row.

  People!

  DOROTHY

  Back to sleep already? But you haven’t touched your Ovaltine. Sure you don’t want some? I saw in a magazine that it “solves the food problem in cases of diphtheria, typhoid, and pneumonia.”

  Well, we won’t worry about that. Time for a little sponge bath before June gets here! Ivory Soap—“so pure it floats.” Don’t you love how clean it smells?

  Lift your arm, dearie.

  So, as I was saying, soon as they found out I was late, my parents sent me away. They cast me out on JoJo, who the Lambs got rid of for her place in the stable—Mrs. Lamb’s car needed her spot.

  I can still see us, plodding our way down country roads. We ate from gardens—muskmelons and carrots with the dirt still clinging to them, pole beans and tomatoes from the vine. I slept under bushes, hayricks, or under JoJo herself, where I’d gaze up at the pink flesh of her belly, now contracting, now expanding, now contracting with her breath, reminding me that we were alive.

  On the eighth day, a Sunday, we reached Fort Wayne, where I sought the address I’d committed to memory: 602 Tennessee. At sunset, I knocked on the door of a tar-paper cottage close enough to the river that the air smelled like turtles.

  No answer.

  Knocked again.

  No answer.

  I was turning around to go when I was jerked inside. Mother’s cousin Mildred sat me down, told me to shut up, and stated her terms.

  Monday I was to do the laundry.

  Tuesday was ironing: Clothes. Sheets. Towels. Undies. Hankies. Pillowcases.

  Wednesday the floors got scrubbed. The rugs got beat.

  Thursday, it was pies. And cookies. And cakes. Enough dessert for every night of the week.

  Friday it was wood. Chop it.

  Saturday, draw water for the bath. This was on top of the water I had to carry for daily use, not to mention the three squares a day that needed cooking.