An April Love Story: A Cooney Classic Romance

  “Empty! My life is crammed. And I have so much more to do here. I don’t want to leave school, I don’t want to do this!”

  “We know what is best, Marnie. Moving to the country will be a blessing for you.”

  “A blessing! What am I supposed to do? Rejoice in the raising of lima beans? Thrill to the odor of manure on my shoe? Sing with joy at the prospect of pruning a tree?”

  I had hurt them. Deflated them like balloons. They sagged, the exhilaration gone. They looked older, and less ready to go on a vacation.

  I felt like a monster. I found myself wanting to apologize. But they were the rotten ones! But I had never, not purposely at least, been unpleasant to my parents. The hurt look on my mother’s face whipped me.

  “Well, I,” said Lucas, “I, personally, am not going.”

  “Nonsense,” said his father.

  And Aunt Ellen produced a notebook and they began to compose the newspaper ad for the yard sale at which we would sell everything we owned.

  Chapter V

  BY LUNCH MONDAY THE entire high school knew about it. I was the most popular girl in school, and mostly with the boys. It seemed so unfair. After all these years of wanting to attract them by my scintillating conversation, my sleek gleaming hair, my flawless makeup, they came in droves to hear how I was going to dig my own well.

  “Now, how will you do field work?” said our best tennis player. “Horse, mule, or tractor?”

  “Tractor. We don’t really want to spade up fifty acres by hand.” I was quoting. I had been told that we must keep a united front and I must not tell people I was being dragged along.

  “Is it true you won’t have electricity?” said the student government president, whose policy was never to look at sophomores. Diego was unbelievably handsome. He sat down beside me, squashing between me and Susannah. Susannah loved it. I had mixed feelings. “Yes, we’re selling every appliance that uses electricity. No, we’re not going to generate electricity by wind or solar power as far as I know.”

  A lot of the boys thought I was lucky. “I wish I could go,” they said. I wished it, too.

  But most people were not envious. “Your folks are flaky,” said Kay flatly.

  I had made a promise. But it was the final insult to have to defend my parents when I too thought they were flaky. “No,” I said, “just different.” I tried to imply that Kay’s boring family would never do anything exciting like this. Then I thought, Oh, to be in a boring family like Kay’s!

  “And Lucas Peterson is doing this with you?” said the squash team champion. “I didn’t know Lucas ever had any exercise beyond turning the page in his library book. He’s going to split firewood, sink fenceposts, dig gardens, build henhouses, and fix generators?”

  “Mercy!” said Eve. “Are you going to do all that, Marnie?”

  It had a familiar ring to it.

  “But that’s horrible,” said Anne. “They can’t tear you away from civilization like that, can they? Especially with a wimp like Lucas.”

  “Lucas isn’t wimpy,” I said, and I could have bitten off my tongue. Lucas wasn’t my family, no matter what Mother and Dad claimed about togetherness. I didn’t have to defend him.

  “Just the word farm makes me shudder,” said Susannah. “Getting up at four in the morning, milking cows covered with flies.”

  “Goats,” said Kay, “they’re keeping goats.”

  Everybody began to snicker. I wasn’t Marnie MacDonald anymore. I was a weird kid whose weird parents were going to raise goats.

  “But how can you function without electricity?” said the student government president. “Wash your clothes on a rock in a river? Heat your bath water on a stove? Run that stove on wood?”

  Just the sentences made my knees weak. And I had a sneaking suspicion nobody was going to hire a maid to do any of that, either.

  “Gosh,” said Kay. “In winter it’ll be dark by four o’clock and you won’t have any lights. I guess you can play Abe Lincoln. Dip candles and wear hoop skirts.”

  “Abe Lincoln,” said Lucas, materializing from nowhere, “hardly ever wore a hoop skirt. Come on, Marnie.” He took my arm and hauled me out of the cafeteria.

  “What do you think you’re doing?” I said through my teeth. “You’re not a shepherd yet, Lucas Peterson, and I’m not your sheep. Stop leading me.”

  “They were laughing at us,” said Lucas. “And I won’t have it.”

  We sat on the granite steps of the courtyard entrance. The sun was warm and yellow, but it failed to make me feel good. I felt like a storm—wild and black and angry.

  “It’s the end of my life,” said Lucas.

  But then I couldn’t stoop to agreeing with Lucas, either. “Oh, don’t be so melodramatic,” I snapped. “We’re just moving. Millions of families move every year.”

  “You sure changed sides in a hurry.”

  “So I won’t be on the same side as you.” I could just see Lucas, when wood-splitting time had come, retreating to a cozy corner to write haiku about the joys of pastoral living.

  Lucas regarded me as if I were an ice cream cone he’d dropped in the gutter and been forced to eat anyway. “This is going to be the longest year of my life.”

  “Year?” I grabbed him. “Have they decided to do it for just one year? Oh, Lucas, I can endure anything for a year. Even you. Really and truly, and then we’ll come home again?”

  He extricated himself fastidiously from my fingers. “No, Marnie. They’re going for good. It isn’t a whim or a hobby. But I’m going on to college, no matter what happens. Nothing is going to keep me from my goals.”

  For a moment I almost wanted to know what these goals were he so passionately wanted to achieve. Most of the boys I’d ever talked to were like Joel, completely at sea, no idea what they wanted. Then I remembered this was elbow-kneed, wimpy Lucas. “You got your braces off,” I said.

  “Yeah. This morning. Turns out orthodontist bills are one of the things we aren’t taking with us.”

  He looked different with white teeth. “Smile, Lucas.”

  “Marnie, I’m not your boyfriend. Save the flirting for Joel.”

  “Flirting! With you? Why, you—”

  And then he did smile, proud of getting a rise out of me. And he had a beautiful smile; not at all the sort of smile you would expect a Lucas to have.

  Between classes, Joel bought me a candy bar from the vending machine in the lobby. I thought, Not only will I never see Joel again, I’ll probably never see a vending machine again.

  It was impossible to explain Joel, and all that he had stood for, to my parents. Impossible to explain why I was crying and what they expected me to give up so easily.

  “You are mourning for a vending machine?” yelled my father. “Marnie, weep for children starving in Cambodia, weep for Jews persecuted in Russia, but for God’s sake, don’t weep over a vending machine.”

  “You know what I keep thinking?” said Susannah.

  “No, what?”

  “Dating is sort of a ladder. And you were up quite a ways. And Joel should have been one of your steps. Next year when he’s at college you should be on a different step. But your parents have knocked you right off the whole ladder.”

  “From now on there’s no one but Lucas,” I said glumly.

  “Maybe he’ll grow on you.”

  “What, like some insidious cancer?” Neither of us knew whether to laugh or cry.

  My parents’ friends and acquaintances were astonishingly envious. (Except for the ones who figured we had an infectious disease and kept away.) They’d come over to talk longingly of having a raspberry patch and a few hens for fresh eggs. “Pretty exciting, huh, Marnie?” said the senior vice president of Dad’s old brokerage firm.

  My longings were confined to escalators leading to the jewelry department, disco dances with glittering lights, and the senior prom to which Joel would never ask me because I would be gone. “No, it’s awful.”

  “You’re a city girl, are you??
??

  “A happy city girl.”

  “Well, hang in there, Marnie. You’ll have Lucas for company. That’ll help a lot,”

  He was serious.

  I went to the movies with Joel after all. And once, roller skating. It was fun, but not much. It bore too much resemblance to the last meal before the execution. Still, it was nifty to have a handsome, strong boy like Joel squiring me around so much.

  The days passed with terrifying speed. There was no time to worry about the finals: I just took them, with Lucas at a desk in the same room taking his finals; and we both did okay. Not fine, but okay.

  I tried arguing with my parents. “Doesn’t work, does it?” said Lucas mournfully. “They pay about as much attention to me as if I were lecturing on theories of economic controls for the Rumanian peasant.”

  Besides, our parents were so happy. There is something unapproachable about total happiness. It seems sinful to kick it.

  Every night either we would go to the Petersons or they would come to our apartment, and Lucas and I would read up on bee-keeping, or wide row vegetable planting, or the art of building a stone wall. I found I had a sixth sense to tell me when Lucas was going to roll his eyes: I’d roll my own back and somehow we’d hang onto the shreds of sanity.

  I got to keep my bed, my blankets, quilts, and designer sheets, the clothes my mother deemed suitable (the ugly, sturdy ones), and whatever else would fit into my chest. That chest was our best antique: a pre-Revolutionary six-board blanket chest my great-grandmother got at an auction some sixty years ago. It’s beautiful, but it doesn’t hold much. When I put in my old gray wool Eeyore, the stack of chorus programs beginning with the Christmas one in third grade when I fell off the risers, the old plastic doll I washed in the tub with me every night right up to junior high, my journals and diaries (I tended to make six entries and forget it), my photograph album, and my piggy bank from a kindergarten birthday party, there was hardly room for the add-a-bead necklace that all my friends got together to buy for me.

  Everything else in my fifteen-by-fourteen bedroom, with its two walk-in closets, its matching bureaus, and its nine shelves, had to go to the yard sale. Susannah and I spent hours combing through, deciding what to keep. Susannah loved it. She got more treasures than the last two Christmases combined.

  I felt cut.

  Aunt Ellen celebrated the last meal she’d make in their apartment by cooking homemade old-fashioned gingerbread with whipped cream.

  “I wish you two would be more responsive to all we’re doing for you,” she said, dusting her hands on her big white canvas apron. She was sewing a matching one for me.

  “But,” said Lucas, and he stopped.

  “I know what you mean,” I said to him. “There are so many buts it’s impossible to choose one and get started on it.”

  “Have you two declared a truce?” said Aunt Ellen.

  “Beggars can’t be choosers,” said Lucas. I threw my gingerbread at him and got him right in the face.

  “Mother, I have to be allowed to take more with me.”

  “No room, dear. We’ll have five rooms. Your father and I’ll have one bedroom, The Petersons another, Lucas will share the third bedroom with the pantry shelves we’ll build to store all our home-canned produce, and you’ll have this dear little loft over the living room. Marnie, you’ll be so cozy in winter, as the heat rises from the wood-stove. It’s going to be so lovely.”

  “I said, can I take more with me?”

  “No, dear, we’ll be too cramped for space. Now, what do you think we can get for these two electronic games of yours? And this stack of your records, are they worth anything?”

  Aunt Ellen’s neighbor’s friends had a house in the suburbs with a big yard and good traffic, so we hauled everything over there to tag and sell. The lamps, blender, rotisserie, waffle iron, stereo, crystal, Ping-Pong table, bridge table, five window air conditioners, about a million books (Lucas was in pain over the sale of each one of these), all my old stuffed dolls and toys, Aunt Ellen’s electric towel-drying rack, my father’s hair dryer, Uncle Bob’s electric typewriter, Mother’s Cuisinart.

  “This is not a joke, then,” said Susannah. “I’ve kept hoping somehow it would turn out to be a joke. After all, this is April first.”

  “No, it doesn’t seem to be a joke,” I said. We cried a little. It wouldn’t make my mascara run because I wasn’t wearing any. Mother threw out my makeup. From now on, she explained, your sparkle will be your own personality. Does it matter, I said, that my eyebrows are blonde and I have only seven visible lashes per lid?

  She laughed joyously. She knew I would love this “land” of hers once I got there.

  My father tied down the last box, wrapped the last old rug around an exposed table corner, and locked the door of the rented moving van. “Let’s roll,” he cried gaily. My mother and father and Aunt Ellen and Uncle Bob and scores of their friends hugged each other with wild abandon—a phrase from some poem I once had to read in English. I hugged back to prevent a lecture on my shallow vending-machine values. Lucas looked as if he were having a wisdom tooth removed by a garage mechanic.

  “Good-bye,” said Joel uncertainly. We both blushed. A kiss was impossible with laughing grownups watching.

  “Good-bye,” I said, my well-rehearsed speech vanishing, replaced by a film of tears.

  “Well, son, you want first turn at driving?” said Uncle Bob.

  “No,” said Lucas curtly. I had never seen him without books before. I wondered what Lucas had been allowed to keep. What they had made him give up.

  “Good-bye,” cried Susannah, hugging me.

  The men got into the moving van, and we women squeezed into the Petersons’ old Volkswagen bus, jammed with cartons and trunks, and we were off, clad in blue jeans and hope, for the good life on a farm in North Carolina.

  Chapter VI

  IT WAS SPRING WHEN we got to the farm that had been bought without my knowledge or my consent. A scrawny tree resembling a woody weed dotted the woods with lavender ribbons. Wild dogwood frothed pink and white in the pines, and in the field, daisies, black-eyed Susans, and all the members of their tribe waved in the wind. The hills were like green goose pimples on a giant’s skin: odd rounded bumps, covered with rough pasture and an occasional gnarled tree.

  I was not prepared for North Carolina to be beautiful. I hated the place for not being dreary and dark, like my thoughts.

  The little village where we would shop had only a handful of stores. Even the Sears Roebuck store had nothing in it but catalogs to order from. The largest stores were the tractor dealership and FCX. Farmers’ Cooperative Exchange, said my mother knowledgeably and happily.

  The only thing I wanted to exchange was my life.

  Off the main street was a rather small brick building with a sign in front that said, Valley Consolidated High School. The bevy of yellow school buses behind it made me ache for school. For my school, where Joel and Susannah and special chorus and the cheerleading team were going right on without me.

  Our farmland consisted of two bumping hills sprinkled with apple trees, which had just come into blossoms so beautiful it hurt my throat to see them. “Like bridal lace,” said Aunt Ellen, and she was right, but that made me think of falling off Susannah’s dating ladder, which made me angry again.

  Our home was seven miles from the village. On our narrow, long lane were two other houses. I wondered where the schoolbus would pick up next fall. If the other houses had teenagers in them. If they spoke English.

  “This is not Tibet, Marnie,” said my mother irritably.

  Lucas and I stood staring at what was to be our home while the adults peppered us with superlatives describing the place. “The previous owners thought the orchards were too much hard work,” said Uncle Bob, “and they left for the city and factory jobs.”

  “More misguided souls,” said my mother.

  “Smart as whips,” muttered Lucas.

  The house was an old frame building
with front porch, side porch, and back porch. From the front you could look out over our little valley, gaze up the rounded hill in front of us, and see beyond it, smoky and blue, the distant mountains of the Ridge. From the back, a huge garden space sprawled in weedy abandon. The side was enclosed by a thick, dense screen of white, blooming shrubs.

  I didn’t want to look at mountains or shrubs or weeds. I wanted to use my binoculars out the east window of my eleventh floor and watch the construction of the high-rise parking lot going up where an old hotel had been.

  We went into the house. I began to see more clearly why the previous owners had left for better surroundings. There was nothing indoors that was not going to require scouring, sanding, painting, or staining.

  “Mother,” I said, after a complete tour, during which I opened every single door and cupboard.

  “Yes, dear?”

  “Where is the bathroom?”

  There was a pause. She seemed to deliberate how to answer that.

  “Uh oh,” said Lucas.

  “I guess I forgot to mention it, Marnie,” said my mother, “but this house doesn’t have indoor plumbing.”

  “I think this is Tibet,” said Lucas.

  “Do you mean to tell me this house doesn’t have a bathroom?” I shrieked. After two solid days of driving, when all I wanted was a tiled bath and a long soaking tub or a good hot shower and some nice humid privacy where I could cry in peace—and there was no bathroom?

  Lucas and I located the outhouse without difficulty. It looked just the way they do in cartoons. “Another field trip,” said Lucas.

  “The first of many, I’m afraid,” I said. “Lucas, I can’t believe this.”

  There was no question of whether to laugh or cry. Crying won very easily.

  Sitting on the side porch was a pile of split wood. Uncle Bob lit a fire in the huge black wood stove in the kitchen and hauled buckets of water from the well pump to heat up in an enormous bucket on the stove. “In summer,” said my father, “we’ll rig up an outdoor shower. Gravity will be enough to make the shower work from the spring up on the hill, and the sun’s heat will warm it up right through a rubber hose.”