by Lynn Cullen
No church on Sunday. No visitors ever.
She watched me from her high-backed peachy-beige chair, the cords of her neck taking turns at swishing her square jaw. Her hair and eyes were the dirt-brown of the knitting that foamed from her busy needles.
“Well?”
I said yes.
But I was young. When I wasn’t chopping wood, crimping crusts, or heating irons, and Mildred was at her factory job at the electric works, I found time to explore in spite of my growing belly. I developed a taste for the chocolate-covered doughnuts at G. C. Murphy’s. I took JoJo out to Robinson Park, where I rode on the merry-go-round by myself, though my heart did burn at the sight of all the couples. I took walks to the iron bridge in Lawton Park, where I dropped shiny buckeyes, pried fresh from prickly shells, into the thick brown water of Spy Run Creek. When my belly got too big, I stayed home and watched snow pile up to the windowsills.
Each night, as Cousin Mildred knitted, bubbles rising in the glass of beer next to her elbow, I waited in my room until an excess of drink and wool had slumped her in her throne. Then I would retrieve my secret prize.
Caressing the bumpy cherubs on the lid, I wound the key then pressed the fragile knob.
Every time it popped open, I laughed. How my darling trilled and warbled, switching to and fro as it jerked its feathered wings, every bit as lively as a living, breathing bird. I was touched to think how much Edward loved me to give me such an expensive gift.
He was coming for me, I knew it. I looked for him to be plunging through the fresh white snow. When he didn’t come then, I waited to see him picking through the soot-blackened crust. When not then, I watched as the robins returned; while it rained; when the violets raised bright faces in the grass. It came as a shock to me, then, when my water broke and still Edward hadn’t arrived.
I was in the outhouse when it happened, after lunch. The gushing confused me for a moment—I couldn’t feel the water pouring out of me, yet there was a puddle at my shoes.
Mildred was knitting an oblong as brown as a beard when I waddled in.
“The baby is coming.”
Mud-brown eyes looked over glasses, but her needles kept twitching.
Maybe she didn’t hear me. “The baby’s coming. We need to send for the doctor.”
I gauged my belly for pain. None yet. Maybe having a baby wasn’t so hard.
Mildred twitched her beak, put her instruments in a basket, then threw a brown shawl of her own making over her shoulders and left. Not knowing what to do with myself, I pumped the washtub full of water and got out the washboard.
What must have been hours later, I was scrubbing beer stains from Cousin Mildred’s slip when she came into the kitchen with a man. His blue eyes, patrician nose, and red lips would have been handsome had they not been fighting for the center of his face. Vacant stretches of flesh spread out to his forehead, ears, and chin. I couldn’t help but stare at him, trying to pull his features apart in my mind.
He said, “Get undressed.”
I blushed and asked him where.
He turned to Mildred. “Where do you want her to go?”
Mildred nodded to the kitchen table. “On there. She can scrub it afterward.”
I stared into the cloudy water licking the sides of the galvanized washtub. A pain was cranking down on my belly like a vise into a strip of balsa wood.
Mildred came over and jerked my hands from the water and with them, the dripping slip. She peered at it, then stuck her finger through the hole where the beer stain had been. “What have you done, you stupid girl?”
Before long, I was on the kitchen table, another contraction cinching my abdomen, tightening, hardening, lifting it like a rock.
I heard myself scream. “Mother! Help me!”
On a hard-backed chair across the little kitchen, Mildred looped yarn around her needle tips. “She doesn’t want to help you.”
The contraction held, gripping so hard I felt torn in two. And then, it uncoiled, slowly. I fell back, my hair plastered to my cheek. I would bring out this baby safely for Edward.
Another contraction began to crank down on me.
The doctor, drinking coffee at the sink, put down his cup and came over and trained those double-barrel eyes between my legs.
“Hmm. Breech.”
“Breech?”
“All I see is your baby’s butt. Damn thing is trying to back its way into the world.”
I was surprised a doctor would talk so crudely. I thought they were more educated than that. But all I could do was grind out a groan. Every fiber in my body was straining to push that baby out.
The doctor lightly slapped my naked thigh, like he would a balky pony. “You can’t push, kiddo. If you let it get sucked back in between pains, you’ll cut off its oxygen and it’ll have brain damage. Do you want your kid in the State School?”
Mildred said, “Let her push.”
ELEVEN
Indiana-Michigan Line, 1934
Having fed John and tidied him, Dorothy went out on the back step to escape the heat already building up in the house. The wind sent whorls of hot dust skipping across the barnyard and ruffling the gritty feathers of the chickens. Dorothy was sure she could hear the hiss of the soil drying, or maybe it was the grass dying in the yard. The life was leaking out of something.
She picked up Venus, who’d been rubbing her ankles with her head like she was peeling a potato. She held the vibrating cat to her face, the better to not see Ruth, who had finished cleaning up after planting and was now fast-walking around the side of the house to the machinery shed into which Nick had recently gone.
She let the cat spring from her arms. She was acquainted with yearning for a man that you couldn’t have. She knew the craving that ate into you when you woke up in the morning, and kept on gnawing while your husband fixed breakfast for the family, while you watched the kids run down the road for school, while you tinted pictures for Mr. Cryder, while you paid the life insurance man, picked weeds, opened cans for dinner, did the dishes, cleaned up the kids, read them stories, made them sleep, and then came out to your husband, who was sitting at the dining table in the lamplight, with bills spread before him as he figured out how to rob Peter to pay Paul. The yearning consumed you every waking moment, and many sleeping ones, too, just boring into you, chewing and chewing, like a moth larva into your best wool sweater.
Had William known of her obsession? You would not think so, not as kindly as he had treated her. Who would scheme and plot his way toward making his wife’s whims come true, scrimping and sacrificing, yet knowing all the while that she didn’t love him?
Florida. The word conjured up palm trees and coconuts, trained parrots and bathing caps, shuffleboard games and dark glasses, with June’s doctor-husband waving from the porch of their resort hotel. The year before William’s death, June had sent for her in Minnesota. While June went to work at her new job helping Betty Crocker, Dorothy’d sat in June’s mansion with that nice Adela and watched June’s home movies. She had studied the Florida reel keenly, with Richard’s fancy new projector ticking in the dark, filing away the details like William did with his ham radio books. She had long dreamed of picking up a seashell on the beach like June in the movie, to listen if you really could hear the ocean roar.
She’d had the itch to go to Florida for years, making the mistake of telling William so, back before the girls were in high school. Once he’d heard, he was a man possessed. They were going there! Nightly, he scrutinized his books, searching for the money, even though he was always falling short with the bills.
Her arms crossed over her nightie, she would come out to him, still up working. “Oh, don’t worry about it, William. We’ll get there someday. We’re not dead yet.”
He would put down his pencil, his brown eyes pinched behind his wire glasses, his long chin even longer with sorrow. He absentmindedly patted Ginny, the raggedy dog who had followed him home and now never left his side. “We’ll find the money somehow, D
orothy.”
Sometimes she feared that he had shortened his life by worrying about money for the Florida trip. You don’t do what he did for a wife who’s in love with another man. But now, as she stood on the back steps, a queasy bubble of guilt slithered through her stomach.
Do you?
She bustled down the treads.
“Ruth!” she yelled from the middle of the farmyard. The chickens tottered over, thinking she might have something for them. “Ruth!” Oh, Ruth, don’t do something that you will hate yourself for.
Ruth’s kids, all bobbed haircuts and knobby knees, tumbled out of the house.
“Is Aunt June here?” Jeanne cried.
Margaret elbowed her way past her. “Where’s Aunt June?”
“Wait!” The twins shouted, in a second tier of elbowing. “Wait for us! No fair!”
Ruth stepped out of the machine shed, twitching at her dress. “What, Mother? Why is everyone yelling?”
Dorothy felt as foolish as Henny Penny. But the sky really was falling for Ruth, she just didn’t know it.
“I—I thought I saw something.”
Nick strolled from the machine shed, rubbing a tractor part with an oily rag. He stopped next to Ruth.
Just then, one of the twins pointed a grubby finger. “Look!”
Against the heat-bleached sky, a distant car, yellow as a rain slicker, unfurled a dust cloud into the far-off fields. The vehicle rambled past the Squibbs’ farmstead, dipped in a hollow, then reappeared to roll past pastures in which black and white Holsteins lifted heavy heads to watch. It chugged into woods that contained the tumbledown plank cabin of John’s ancestors, then popped back out alongside the trampled field that Ruth had just planted, past the dried-up watering pond, past wire fencing spun between knotty log posts, behind which JoJo nosed at weeds.
A hot breeze flicked the bedspread on the side-yard clothesline when at last the car turned down Ruth’s dirt drive. The kids jumped and cheered as it lumbered past tree trunks painted white halfway up, past the house with its scraggly skirt of privets and into the yard, where it rumbled to a stop.
Dorothy’s heart surged as June stepped out of the cab and removed her dark glasses. With her blond waves and her yellow traveling suit with its crisp lapels, she looked like a movie star. But Dorothy didn’t tell her that. She wouldn’t be doing June any favors by giving her a big head.
“Stand up straight, Junie.”
June laughed in that way that had so tickled—so relieved—Dorothy since June was a baby. “Hello, Mother.”
TWELVE
Indiana-Michigan Line, 1934
Silk-stockinged legs swung out of the taxi. Ruth’s sister, June, planted brown and white spectator pumps in the dirt of the farmyard, unfolded her willowy figure, stood, then brushed off her lemon-yellow suit with the hand not carrying her train case. Ruth swiveled her gaze to her daughters, gaping at their aunt as if she were a goddess descending to earth, then back to that ridiculous suit. It was yellower than the cab. On a farm. With dirt, barn cats, and eighteen chickens. Good luck with that jacket in this heat. And those pearls! Who was she trying to impress, the cows?
“Margaret! Jeanne!” June held out her arms, Lady Bountiful. They ran to her. They never ran to Ruth that way.
June’s husband, Richard, got out, gave a regal stretch, then looked around as if he were Old King Cole about to call for his fiddlers three. June hugged the big girls then beckoned to the little ones.
“Irene,” she said in a teasing tone. “Ilene. Come on.”
The pair hung back, holding hands. Nearly eight years old and they were acting like babies. Ruth was almost annoyed at them. She was annoyed at Nick, next to her, shifting uncomfortably as sweat darkened the chambray under his arms.
“It’s just Aunt June,” she called to them. “Don’t be afraid of her.”
June gave Ruth that smile that made Ruth so furious. Just frown if you want to frown!
June waved the girls in. “Come on, pumpkins.”
They ran to her with a squeal. Little traitors.
The driver dropped their suitcases—stitched leather, not cardboard like hers—by the porch. Richard handed him money, tucked his wallet in his pocket, and approached the twins. “What do we have here? Puppies?”
The bigger girls shied closer to June. The twins, now having regressed into infants, burrowed their faces into her side. Ruth wondered idly if they might stain that sunshine suit.
“Say hi to Uncle Richard,” she ordered.
They clung to her sister.
A fancy touring car zoomed by—not the one she’d seen earlier, she didn’t think—making the taxi wait at the end of the drive before it could leave. Wouldn’t you know, June comes and they have a regular traffic jam of luxury liners out here. It wasn’t yet eleven in the morning.
June gently extracted the twins from her suit. “Girls, put out your hand like this.” She extended her own white gloved hand. “And then say, ‘So nice to see you, Uncle Richard.’ ”
They looked up at Aunt June, big-eyed as owls. Margaret inched toward Richard, then crept out her hand.
Enough of this nonsense. They knew better. They weren’t born in a barn. Hand out, Ruth thrust herself at her sister’s husband, sweat soaking the thin cotton of her dress.
“So nice to see you, Uncle Richard.”
She regretted the mockery in her voice the minute she felt his soft hand in hers. He must think she was a beast. She had not yet recovered when, in one polished move, he bent forward and brushed her cheek with a peck.
“How are you, Ruth?”
She froze, flabbergasted. Was she supposed to kiss him back? It was like all those other unwritten rules made by society people to trip you up. If you’d been brought up by a recluse, how were you supposed to know that classy folks never mentioned the price of a possession, no matter how great a deal you got? Or that it was gauche to heap your plate at a potluck? Or if you were supposed to kiss back your brother-in-law when kissed? She had purposely made sure she was seated the other times she’d greeted him, to avoid this kind of nonsense.
In a snap decision, she darted forward, catching his ear with her open mouth. She saw the wetness upon his lobe as she pulled back. She steamed with humiliation.
“Good to see you,” he said. His excellent breeding didn’t allow him to flinch.
Suffering, she turned to June, who surprised her with a hug. Adults in her family didn’t hug. She raised her hands awkwardly toward June’s arms. Her hands were still in midair, lifted as in worship, when June released her.
“Ruth, you look marvelous!”
Self-cut hair, homemade dress, dusty brogans. Real marvelous. “You, too.”
“I mean you really do. You look—happy.”
Ruth recrossed her arms. She had never known what to do with a compliment.
Evidently undaunted by Ruth’s plastering, Richard grabbed Mother. “Dorothy!”
Mother demonstrated the familial rigor mortis when he nailed her with a kiss. At least she had the sense not to tag him with a sloppy one.
He pulled back to behold Mother. “How are you feeling, Dorothy?” He cocked his head, smiling as he waited for an answer, as if he really wanted to know.
Mother looked confused. “Fine.” She let June hug her.
“Well, here we are, Mother,” June exclaimed, “at your command!”
She could lay off the Betty Crocker act anytime now. Everyone knew why she suddenly made the trip—she felt sorry for Ruth. Mother must have told June how badly the farm was doing. What was Ruth supposed to do? Fall to her knees and beg for more help?
Ruth caught sight of Nick standing behind her, smiling uncomfortably. She gave him a fierce wave forward.
Was she to introduce him to June and Richard, or introduce them to him? More of those hateful rules!
“June and Richard, this is—”
For crying out loud! She forgot his name!
Everything froze for a long painful moment.
June shook his hand and glanced at Ruth.
Ruth pursed her lips. I’m dying. You happy?
“Nice to meet you, Nick,” June said.
Nick murmured something in Italian then ducked his head before returning to Ruth’s side. She felt a hand on the small of her back. He was rubbing her damp dress, much as her children used to finger their baby blankets.
Ruth flinched and stepped away, leaving his hand rubbing the air.
June’s gaze lingered on his hand before she raised it to Ruth’s face.
She saw.
THIRTEEN
Indiana-Michigan Line, 1934
June couldn’t remember her sister ever being happy. If Ruth was given a baby doll for her birthday, she asked why it didn’t have eyes that closed like June’s doll did. When Dad burned trash in the rusty barrel in the backyard, she was sure June got the privilege of stirring the ashes more often than she had. At swim lessons at the YWCA, Ruth was certain that the skinny lady at the front desk rented June the less mildewed bathing cap. If Mother pinned satin bows in their hair, Ruth thought June’s must be bigger or silkier or prettier. She was always sure she was being cheated.
June would agree—Ruth did seem to get shortchanged when it came to luck. It was Ruth’s bicycle tire that would go flat when June and she were out riding as girls. It was Ruth, when she and June were walking their bikes along the State School fence, to whom the dull-eyed grown boys would offer their private parts through the iron bars, sending both she and June screaming. It had been Ruth’s kitten that had taken ill with distemper and died; Ruth who’d fallen while ice-skating and fractured her tailbone; Ruth’s effort as a toddler to sit close to Mother that would break Mother’s finger.
Throughout all of this, June took no pleasure in her sister’s misery, no joy in her misfortunes. She wanted the best for her sister, to this day, even after what she’d done. This afternoon, therefore, as she studied her sister, looking unexpectedly youthful and refreshed as she kissed Richard hello—an astonishingly sociable move for Ruth—June felt nothing but relief. She didn’t know how her sister carried on from day to day. Just the thought of John, lying mute on his bed in the bowels of that dark house, made June nauseous. The fact is, she had avoided seeing him since he’d become ill, always thinking she’d come as soon as he awoke. She never dreamed that his illness could drag on for so many years.