Miller's Valley

  But I guess what really pushed the whole thing over the edge was that the big one killed Winston Bally. “Poetic justice,” I said when I heard about it, but my mother gave me such a look. Winston Bally had been driving through the valley, making his rounds, when he blew out a tire on a dirt track that led to an old trailer where one of the oldest Janssons still lived. He walked down the track to the trailer, but Mr. Jansson wasn’t home. He was already over at his nephew’s house, where his niece by marriage, who he’d always liked better than his nephew anyway, was convincing him to go to the high school evacuation center, at least until the rain stopped.

  When they finally found Mr. Bally’s body, after the water went down, it turned out he’d had a heart attack. My mother said all you had to do was look at his color and his belly to know it had been a long time coming. But no one ever stopped talking like it was the water that killed him. Ed said the news made it sound like he was some kind of hero, like he’d given his life for Miller’s Valley. Or the Valley Federal Recreation Area, more like it.

  I missed it all because I was working long hours, during the day as an assistant at a research lab at the medical school and four nights a week waiting tables at an Italian restaurant. I didn’t have a uniform, but the white shirt they wanted me to wear always had red sauce stains, and I wound up buying a lot of replacements. The tips were a whole lot better than they had been at the diner, and I got free meals at the end of every evening. Some days were slower than others. When it was hot outside people weren’t so inclined to want penne Bolognese or clams oreganata, but I liked them anytime. There were a lot of things I’d never tasted until I left home. I tried to get my mother to try calamari, but she said she knew bait even when it was on a plate with lemon wedges and she’d just have the meatballs. Mr. Guarino, who owned the restaurant, had let my whole table eat for free after my graduation.

  “Always on time, always polite, always good service,” he said to my mother with his hand on one of my shoulders. I still had on my academic robe because I knew it made my mother happy to see it.

  “I should hope so,” said my mother as though those were the minimum requirements, which in her mind was true.

  It was only a ten-minute walk from the lab to the restaurant. In the summer the city streets felt like the fields around our house, the tar all soft and spongy like wet ground under my feet. I always put on my black skirt and white shirt in the bathroom in the lab, then put my white coat over them so I wouldn’t look so much like I was on my way to a waitressing job. Although the waitressing was easier and paid more than cleaning up the lab cages after the rats and mice. I was sad, that last week. Mr. Guarino was a nice man, and his nephew who tended bar and the other two waitresses had been nice to me, too. But I couldn’t wait tables during med school. My adviser made it sound like I wouldn’t be able to find time to sleep or eat during med school.

  I was waiting to cross the street in front of the Roma Ristorante when I heard someone yelling down the block. I looked around but the sidewalk was crowded, people leaving work for home, so I kept going. I’d just stepped off the curb when I heard “Mimi!” right behind me. I turned around. It took me a minute even though I’d seen pictures over the years.

  “Donald,” I said. “Wow. Donald.”

  “Mimi,” he said. “I’ve been calling you for the last five minutes.”

  “Out of the road,” roared a guy in a GTO as he blew past us.

  “He’s right,” I said.

  “He didn’t have to be such a jerk,” Donald said as we stepped back onto the pavement.

  “What are you doing here?”

  “I came to find you.”

  “How did you even know it was me? You haven’t seen me since we were thirteen.”

  “Your mother told me where to find you. Didn’t she tell you I was coming?”

  I shook my head. “You look just the same, too,” Donald said. “Plus the doctor’s jacket.”

  He was right, really. Donald and I had both been the kinds of kids who looked like adults. We had even had adult personalities. It was like we’d grown into ourselves, or at least I had. When Donald was a kid his face had looked square and heavy, like it was too big for the rest of him. Now it looked good. He was handsome. I was handsome, too, I guess. That was the kind of face I had.

  “Did you go to the valley first to see your grandfather?” I said.

  “I’m going after this.”

  “It’s kind of a ghost town. They’re going to flood it, finally, but don’t tell your grandfather I said so. I think he’s the last person who believes it won’t happen.”

  “I don’t think he really believes that. He just wants to. Your mother sounds okay with it. She sounded good when I talked to her.”

  “You know, she’s the same. Everything else there is pretty much the same. LaRhonda is just the same, except she has kids.”

  “I heard. That’s scary, the idea of LaRhonda being somebody’s mother. I hope she’s nicer to her kids than she was to us.”

  “She was mean to you.”

  “She was mean to you, too,” Donald said. “You just didn’t seem to mind.”

  “How’s your mother?” I said.

  Donald shrugged. “The same,” he said. “My stepfather is a good guy. He and I really get along.”

  There was a long silence. We had exhausted everything there was to say standing on a street corner with someone you haven’t actually seen for a long time.

  “Wow,” I said finally. “I can’t believe it’s really you.”

  “It really is,” Donald said.

  I looked at my watch. Eddie and Debbie had given it to me for my graduation. It was pretty and real gold, as Debbie kept saying, but it didn’t have any numbers and it was hard to read. It wasn’t really a good watch for a doctor. “The band is lizard,” Debbie had said, and I made a fuss, but I needed to get another one.

  “I can’t be late for work,” I said.

  “Can I take you to dinner?” Donald said.

  “We can eat free after closing,” I said. “If you like Italian. It’s good Italian.”

  “I really like Italian,” said Donald.

  “Can you wait until ten o’clock?”

  “I’ve been waiting almost ten years,” he said, pulling at his upper lip just the way he used to, and I laughed, and then I got what he meant and looked away and then down at my watch again. If Steven had said something like that, I would have known he didn’t really mean it, that it was a line, that he’d been rehearsing it, maybe even used it before. But if Donald was still anything like he’d once been, he always meant exactly what he said.

  “So you’re not engaged anymore,” he said.

  “I was never engaged.”

  “My grandfather said you were engaged but you weren’t anymore.”

  “I was never engaged.”

  Donald nodded. “You didn’t tell me what you’re doing here,” I said to him.

  “I told you,” he said. “I came to find you.”

  I figured it would take a week to move the stuff of a lifetime out of my mother’s house. But it wasn’t anywhere near that long, or that much. After the last public meeting but before the state issued its final decision, she’d started packing up little by little. She threw away a lot of things, too. Not my things, though. She’d been good about that. She’d packed up boxes of stuffed animals Tommy had won me at the county fair and old copybooks with class notes written out in pencil and even the bridesmaid dress I’d worn at LaRhonda’s wedding with its dyed-to-match shoes. I put it all in the back of my car and figured I’d stop at the dump on my way to the highway. Donald and I had a decent-size apartment for a medical student and a history teacher and basketball coach at a Catholic grade school. We were in one of those mean-looking buildings they put up when I was a kid, the kind with balconies nobody ever uses that are the size of refrigerator boxes. But the place had a nice living room with a view of the city lights out the window, and a bedroom that fit more than just a
bed, and a kitchen where two people could cook if we ever cooked, which we didn’t because most of the time I was at the med school or the hospital, and Donald was partial to things like hoagies and cheesesteaks that he could pick up wrapped in wax paper at the deli on the corner. It was a nice apartment if you weren’t too bothered by the roaches, but it didn’t have room for that butt-ugly dress LaRhonda made me wear and my bio workbook from high school. Although it was kind of nice to look back at how good I’d been at bio even then. That old paperback copy of The Group was in there, too. My mother must have found it hidden in my closet. That one I figured I would reread.

  On top of all the junk in one box was a picture that had always been on the dresser in my parents’ room. My mother and my father were standing together in front of a pine tree near the end of the driveway. My father was wearing a navy blue suit and my mother was wearing a blue suit, too, but a pale blue, the color of the sky. My mother had on an orchid corsage. My father’s younger brother, Ed, who had died in a car crash right after my parents got married, stood on one side of my father in a suit that looked like it was new and maybe bought on sale because it was brown and didn’t fit right, all pulled open at the lapels and below the buttons. Ruth stood by my mother. She was the only one smiling. She was fifteen years old and, by anybody’s lights, pretty, shiny, full of joy. My mother looked almost old enough to be her mother, although it was 1942, when any woman I saw in pictures looked old or at least adult, even in high school photographs.

  “Did you put this in here by mistake?” I said.

  My mother turned from packing up some pots and pans. She’d been using the same flour sifter since I was born, maybe since she’d been married. It had more dents than my father’s old truck, which was going to the junkyard. “I thought you’d like to have that,” she said. “You can put it right next to yours unless Donald wouldn’t like it. I suppose he doesn’t have one of his own parents. My recollection is that they got married in Atlantic City by some JP who used to do ceremonies in a tent at the end of a pier, right next to the roller coaster.”

  “He’s got one of his grandparents,” I said.

  “I was at his grandparents’ wedding, believe it or not,” my mother said. “I had a pink party dress with a sash and a big bow. It had a low waist the way they did then. His grandmother’s dress was kind of shapeless, really, like a nightgown. That was the style.”

  She was right. The dress was kind of shapeless, and both of Donald’s grandparents looked so serious, like they had done something terrifying. Which I guess was about right. Although I hadn’t felt that way when Donald and I got married. I hadn’t felt frightened at all. We hadn’t gone to a JP on a seaside pier, but there’d been just the two of us and our families at the college chapel and then dinner after at the Roma. I found a Mexican cotton wedding dress at a little hippie store near school. It was half price because it had a stain on one side that I got out by soaking it in milk, which my mother had taught me would clean off almost anything. Donald’s mother was more dressed up than I was. “Well, honey, this sure is different from our wedding,” said Debbie, who I recalled had complained over and over about having to keep the guest list below 250. Even if we’d invited everyone we knew there wouldn’t have been 250 people. There wouldn’t have been a hundred unless you counted the kids in Donald’s class, who were sad that they weren’t invited and who all got to try on his wedding band on Monday morning, since there was no honeymoon. LaRhonda was apparently annoyed that I hadn’t asked her to be my matron of honor, but my mother told her it wasn’t that kind of wedding.

  “Why didn’t you tell me he was coming?” I’d asked my mother after Donald showed up out of nowhere that day outside the restaurant.

  “I figured it would go better if you didn’t have time to think it to death,” she said. “I know you, Mary Margaret.”

  I held the picture against my chest and looked around the old kitchen. “I don’t know how you’re so calm about all this,” I said to my mother. “How can you stand to just leave? Your family has been here for almost two hundred years.”

  My mother kept taking the baking stuff out of the back of the bottom cabinets. “My family isn’t here anymore. You and Ed and the kids are all down in the city. Clifton’s not too far from all of you.” Both of us were thinking the same thing when she said that, I bet. Both of us were thinking about where Tommy was. I had a feeling about where Tommy was, but I couldn’t say it to myself, much less say it out loud to our mother. The longer he was gone, the younger he got in my mind, so that now when I thought about him, or dreamt about him, he was that high school senior with a flop of milk chocolate hair and a grin that lured even nice girls into his backseat. Maybe that’s the way it always is. When I thought about my father, it wasn’t as that damaged man dragging his leg into Ruth’s living room. It was always in the barn at daybreak shifting hay or in the truck headed out to fix someone’s machinery or in his little workroom squinting at the back of a clock radio. Sometimes I dreamt about the two of them, my father and Tom, and when I did Donald said I talked in my sleep, and he would hug me tight and kiss my hair.

  I’ll admit, it wasn’t like it was with Steven with Donald. It was kind of like the difference between pound cake and ice cream. But I like pound cake, always have, always will. And ice cream every day just makes you sick. My mother said Steven had dropped by her new house and brought her a rosebush to plant by the door. “He still has a case on you,” my mother said, “which is too bad. Although it was the best thing about that boy, that he recognized what he was getting with you.”

  “I don’t know what I was thinking,” I said.

  “Oh, I know exactly what you were thinking,” said my mother, taping a box shut.

  “George Gresser,” I said.

  “Never you mind,” she said, and then added, “Lesser. George Lesser.”

  There wasn’t much more to do at her place, so she sent me over to do the final packing at Ruth’s house. I dreaded it, but I couldn’t tell her that. I’d seen so many people dead by that time, including the cadaver four of us had taken apart piece by piece, my first year in med school, that we’d named William Penn. But I still couldn’t walk into the living room of that little house without seeing my father sitting in the chair, his head tipped to one side, his eyes filmy and fixed on something, whatever it is you see when you exhale for the last time. I’d seen a man who had had a stroke in my ER rotation and thought of my father, and another who was doing physical therapy but not with a good humor and thought of my father, and another who couldn’t speak and was talking in gibberish. “Aphasia,” said one of my fellow students, pleased with himself, but all I could think of was a man saying “bottle” over and over again. The problem with becoming a doctor is that you learn to think there are answers for things. But deep down inside I still believed in mysteries. I didn’t know whether that was going to make me better, or worse, at my job. You learn so much science, but the best doctors I saw around me understood the human heart. I hoped I could hold on to that.

  My mother hadn’t bought a house in the new development, despite Ed’s best efforts. “She is a stubborn woman,” he said, and Debbie said, “You just figured that out?” which I have to say I didn’t like one bit, although my mother was about as stubborn as a woman could be. I don’t think she liked how close the development houses were to one another. Plus she said she needed a place with what she called a mother-in-law setup, which I’d first heard about from Steven a couple of years before. Up top in her new house was where she lived, a sunny living room with that wall-to-wall carpeting she’d always wanted, open to a kitchen with a breakfast bar, and then three bedrooms down the hall, one large, two small. Then if you went around to the back of the house there was another part that took up half the basement and had big glass doors to the patio and yard, which was kind of a waste because Ruth was never going to go out those doors. But Ruth had a nice light living room herself and two bedrooms.

  I’d always figured that my
mother would never leave the farm and the valley because it was her home, and because she wouldn’t be able to get Ruth to move. But now I knew that I was more attached than she was. When she’d said, “Let them,” about drowning the place where I’d lived most of my life and she’d lived all of hers, I realized that if she’d had her way she would have left long ago, and that made me realize that for most of her life she hadn’t had her way about much. As for Ruth, my mother had always figured she could handle her. When I’d called her at the new house for the first time she said Ruth was already in her place downstairs. “Carrying on,” she said.

  “I gave her a sedative,” my mother said. “How else was I going to get her out of there? I gave her a sedative and two of the boys from the ambulance squad brought her over here and hauled her in and laid her down on the bed. A brand-new bed, by the way.”

  “You gave her a sedative?”

  “In her iced tea,” my mother said as though it was the most normal thing in the world and I should have thought of it myself.

  I should have thought of it myself. “What exactly did you give her? What dosage did you use?”

  “Mary Margaret, I was administering sedatives when you were still in diapers. All that matters is that your aunt is in her new place, I’m in mine, and we’re done with the rest. I have some packing up and cleaning out to do if you want to be useful.” And so I was making myself useful.

  There wasn’t much packing to do at Ruth’s house, either. Cissy had already carted all her dolls away, repaired and cleaned some of them, and taken them to the new place, which had a wall of bookshelves that were just the right kind of thing for doll display if you were interested in doll display. “Someday your daughter will play with these,” Cissy said to me as she placed them side by side, but Ruth got that look on her face and I knew that would happen over her dead body. “They don’t look the same,” she said. That’s what she said about everything. The stove didn’t cook the same. The TV didn’t work the same. “I could have let them drown you, Ruth,” my mother called from the top of the stairs. “She’s always been hard,” Ruth muttered.