“Nah, that’s the weird thing. Every place is really different. Like where I am in South Carolina, the food’s different, the houses are different, even the flowers. But the people now—they’re pretty much the same. You got guys from all over and it seems like they should be real different, but once you get to know them they’re a lot like the guys I knew in school, you know?”
I didn’t know what to say to that. This was the most adult conversation I’d ever had with Tommy, and I didn’t want to say the wrong thing and have him all of a sudden look at me and remember that I was barely a teenager.
“You got to be smart,” he finally said, not looking at me. “You walk around thinking everything’s going to stay the same, you know? But everything changes all the time. Ten, twenty years, this whole place will be different than it is now. It’s like, how come we’re so stupid, to think that things are going to stay the way they are forever? We should know better, right?”
“Nothing changes around here,” I said.
Tommy laughed. “Yeah, I hear you. I know it seems that way. I went into the diner the other day and it looked like the same guys were sitting in the same booths they were in the last time I was there eating the same food.”
“They probably were.”
“Yeah, probably. But you can’t be like that, you know? You don’t want to get stuck. You don’t want to wake up someday and just be sitting in the same place doing the same stupid stuff. Especially not somebody like you. You need a plan.”
“Like what?”
“You know what I mean. Like Ed. He was gonna be an engineer, he went to school, now he’s doing it.” I didn’t want to say that Ed’s life seemed about as boring to me as a life could be, even more boring than mine, so I said, “What’s your plan?”
“Uncle Sam has a plan for me,” Tommy said, with a little barking laugh. “I don’t know exactly what it is yet, but it’s all up to him. You come up with your own plan, Meems. No matter what happens.” That last sentence froze me, like it might be the beginning of a hole opening in the ground around me. I was too young and stupid to realize that the hole had already opened. But sometimes now when I think about that day, the two of us sitting close so our rib cages were almost touching, I think that Tom saw it right there at our feet.
He took a deep drag on his cigarette and then rubbed it out on the rock. “You’re smart,” he said, and he stood up. “You’ll figure it out. I don’t know much about much, but I know you’re going to be okay.”
“Yeah?” I said, wishing I did, too.
“No question. No question. How’s that crazy LaRhonda?” he added, and I knew our real conversation was over.
“Still crazy,” I said to make him happy.
“The military makes you grow up,” I heard my father say that night. “He’ll get himself some discipline, come back here and run this place.”
“Oh, for pity’s sake, Buddy. If the government has its way there won’t be a here to come back to anyhow.”
“Don’t you be saying that. The government talks and talks. They don’t do. This farm will be here long after I am, and Tom will be taking care of it the way I did.”
“It’s a different time,” my mother said, and I heard my father push his chair back and go out the back door.
When Tommy left it was one of the only times I’d ever seen my mother tear up, although she got it under control before my brother got in the car. But I hung back in the kitchen doorway, in the shadows. There was a story in our family about me, about how when I was real little we all went to a birthday party. The big kids had been playing Farmer in the Dell, which I liked at first because I thought the song was about us. The farmer, his wife, the cow. There was even a nurse in it. But when we were driving home I started crying in the backseat of the car, and when my mother asked why, I’d said, “The cheese stands all alone. Poor cheese.” The boys thought that was hilarious. Poor cheese, they said for a while, whenever I would cry. That was me, standing in that dark doorway. Donald gone, Tommy going again. Poor cheese.
“Don’t start smoking, corncob,” Tommy called to me. “It’ll stunt your growth.”
My mother glared at me over her shoulder, probably glad for a reason to be mad instead of sad. “If I ever smell cigarettes on you, Mary Margaret, you’re going to wish you’d never been born,” she said.
“I’m just teasing, Mom,” Tommy said, putting his arms around her.
“You be careful, son,” she said.
“Always, Mother,” he said seriously, and then he winked at me over her shoulder and I finally ran out of the house and put my arms around his waist.
“You have to come back,” I said. I kissed Tommy on the cheek and it felt like a man’s cheek, rough and bristly.
“Of course he’s coming back,” my father said, putting Tommy’s duffel in the back of the truck. “Where else would he go?” But I noticed Tommy didn’t say a thing, just looked straight ahead through the windshield, that same look Donald had had when he drove away, that I thought of as the leaving look. And when I turned, my mother was sitting down on the back step, and I went to sit beside her, both of us quiet and still, neither of us wanting to break the silence.
The summer I was fifteen LaRhonda’s father gave me a job at the diner. I was off the books because I wasn’t old enough to get working papers, which meant that he could pay me even less than he paid the regular waitresses whose vacations I covered. Mr. Venti made it sound like my reward would come later. “You do a good job at the diner, someday you can work at the steak house, where the real money is,” he said. Like being a steak house waitress was my goal. Which it wasn’t. Ever since that talk with Tommy I’d been thinking about a plan, although I had no idea yet what it was, just what it wasn’t. No diner. No steak house. Everyone said I should be a nurse because my mother was. I was leaving that open for the time being.
“You’ll make your money on tips,” Mr. Venti said, and there was some truth to that, but not so much. When a kid you’ve known since she was playing in a mud puddle serves you pie and coffee, you’re disinclined to do more than put a dime under your saucer. Some of my father’s old friends didn’t even do that. “She don’t need the money,” I heard one of them say to another as he hoisted his big belly away from the counter and off the stool, like my parents were rich people and I was just playing at working. On the other hand, none of them ever tried to put his hand up my skirt. I was shocked the first time I saw that happen, as one of the younger women walked past a booth carrying a tray of breakfast specials. Dee saw the look on my face and said, “Grab-ass, baby. The waitress’s cross to bear.” Not just from the customers, but the grill cooks, who would mess your orders up but good if you didn’t play up to them. Except for me, again, because I knew the boss.
Mrs. Venti worked at the steak house as a hostess. My aunt Ruth said she didn’t understand that, that the Ventis surely had enough money that she could afford to stay home. “I’d just sit around and play cards,” said Aunt Ruth, who had played more hands of solitaire than maybe any person on earth. But Mrs. Venti was at the steak house most nights, in black high heels and a satiny dress with some sort of sparkle on the neck or the skirt, saying “Right this way” and cradling a pile of menus as though it was a newborn. I think she just did it to have something to do and somewhere to go. Unlike my mother, who couldn’t go to the market without running into someone who wanted to pass the time, Mrs. Venti didn’t have a whole lot of friends. Maybe not any. I told my aunt Ruth that I figured she wanted to get out of the house at night.
“Getting out of the house is overrated,” said Ruth, putting down a line of cards slowly and then squinting at the result. By my calculation my aunt Ruth hadn’t gotten out of the house for ten years by then.
Of course, Mrs. Venti getting out of the house had turned out to be part of the problem, and was one reason why I was waiting tables at the Villa Venti Diner (“Good food, good folks, good prices”). LaRhonda was the one supposed to be covering the vacation shif
ts, but she was two thousand miles away on some special ranch for incorrigible girls. Word in town was that she was in trouble, taking one of those trips to an aunt that ended with a secret adoption and a permanent reputation. But she wasn’t. LaRhonda was one of the few girls in town whose reputation was much worse than the reality, so bad that my mother had stopped me spending the night at her house six months after the big flood, although LaRhonda was still allowed to stay at our house.
“I couldn’t let her if Tommy was still around,” my mother had muttered at the sink.
The problem was that LaRhonda always had to be ahead of everybody else. She was sure ahead of me: heels, makeup, hose, padded bra, home permanent. She was the first one to have a little stereo in her bedroom, that she could fold up into a kind of suitcase and tote to pajama parties. She got the first Beatles albums and the first transistor radio. “What’s that?” someone would ask, usually a boy because the other girls didn’t want to give her the satisfaction, and she’d flick the radio dial with her thumbnail, which was painted pink.
So she acted as though she was first to do a lot of other things, too, and she did a pretty good job of convincing people. You’d cut under the bleachers at a football game and there LaRhonda would be talking to one of the seniors with barely a playing card’s worth of space between them. Or you’d see her in some boy’s car sitting way in the center of the front seat. “It looked like there were Siamese twins driving,” my mother said one day when she’d stopped at a light on Main Street behind a yellow Mustang.
I guess I was the only one who knew that it wasn’t what it looked like, that when the Mustang’s driver would try to feel LaRhonda up she would slap his hand, that when the guy under the bleachers tried to stick his tongue in her mouth she would turn her head away. “They are disgusting,” LaRhonda would say, and if you’d heard her you would have known that she was telling the truth. But those guys were angry that she promised something and then didn’t deliver, and so they made sure everyone thought that she’d delivered plenty. I don’t know how her parents heard, but the day after freshman year ended LaRhonda was on a plane to a place where she was going to learn to ride a horse and cut hay to build character, two things I’d learned how to do almost as soon as I could walk. Although come to think of it my character might have been exactly the sort the Ventis were trying to build in LaRhonda. I’d learned to think of myself as not that kind of girl because boys never acted as though I were, and it wasn’t until I was older that it occurred to me that that was because they were afraid of what Tommy might do to them. Which he would have.
“You’re a good influence on her, Mimi,” Mrs. Venti sighed, handing me two of the pink uniforms the diner waitresses were assigned.
“There’s not one of us looks good in those things,” said Dee. “Plus it’s hard to get stains out. Did she tell you you have to take them home and wash and iron them yourself?”
“I like to iron,” I said.
“Save me,” Dee said, picking up a coffeepot.
The women I worked with were hard women, widows with kids who lived with their parents, middle-aged never-marrieds who’d given up on something better, women who wanted factory jobs but couldn’t get them because they paid more and men wanted them, too. But they were nice to me. I got to be an okay waitress faster than most, at least according to them, but there were still times when the place would get real busy, breakfast after church or early bird dinner on bowling league nights, and I’d get overwhelmed by a four-top with four different dinner orders, Salisbury steak (no gravy), fried chicken (no vegetable), open-faced roast beef sandwich (extra gravy), fish cakes (extra tartar sauce), and one of the others would pick my plates off the grill shelf and help me out. I think they were glad I wasn’t LaRhonda, who they’d have to be careful around all the time and who they knew from experience was not a bit friendly.
They were always teasing me about the love letters in my apron pocket that I would pull out when I was putting my tips in my bag in the back. But they weren’t love letters and they were always from the same people: Tommy, LaRhonda, Donald.
Hey sis, it’s hot in Bancock. I got you something. See you at xmas.
Your brother, Tom
(How come I was in Miller’s Valley and knew how to spell Bangkok and Tommy didn’t? Why did he say he would come home at Christmas when he hadn’t been home in more than a year?)
What’s up, MM? It’s not as bad here as I thought. There is a girl named Sandy who is from Chicago and has even more albums than I do. She tweezed my eyebrows and they look a MILLION times better! What’s up with you-know-who?
(Which who was you-know? The basketball player, the guy from the construction crew, Pete Walker, who sat behind LaRhonda in English? And why did her parents think it would do her good to spend the summer with a whole lot of girls who had been in the same trouble that she was, most of them probably the real thing?)
Dear Mimi,
I am learning to play golf. My mother got married. My stepfather is a salesman and he plays golf, too. How is everything there? My grandfather says he sees you some times. Do you still play chess?
Sincerely, Donald
Sincerely?
“Cheap bastards,” said Frances, the waitress who’d been around longest, looking at my piles of quarters and nickels as I put the letters back in my apron pocket. There were two bills from two tables I’d had first thing, one of them from the Reverend from the Baptist church who always left a nice big tip because he never had to pay for his food. “Roman collar, no check,” Frances told me my first day. I hadn’t known what it was called until then.
“I have to go,” I said, scooping the money up. I had two jobs that summer, and I couldn’t be late for the second.
Tom hadn’t been overseas for long when an old friend of my father’s named Pete Fenstermach showed up at our house in his truck. He’d pulled into the driveway with a sound from his tires that didn’t look good for the visit, had gone around to the passenger side and pulled his seventeen-year-old daughter from the cab by her arm. It was January, but she wasn’t wearing a coat, just a big old man’s shirt and a pair of jeans underneath. She tried to pull away but her father was stronger than she was. I knew her to say hi to—she was a couple of years ahead of me at school, the kind of girl, pale and big-eyed and thin, who looked pretty sometimes and other times just looked plain. It took me a minute to remember that her name was Callie.
“Daddy,” I said.
Mr. Fenstermach and Callie came in through the back door, into the kitchen. My mother put her hands on her hips and looked the girl up and down as though she knew just what she was looking for, and then she sat down hard in one of our kitchen chairs. She put up her hand as Mr. Fenstermach, red in the face, started to open his mouth.
“Pete,” my mother said in a way that shut him right up, and then to Callie, “How far along are you?”
I remember I leaned so hard against the refrigerator that I could feel it humming through the backs of my legs.
“Go see your aunt,” my father said.
“No,” my mother and I said at the same time.
“Six months,” said Callie.
“You know who did this to her?” her father shouted.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” my mother said. “You wouldn’t be here if it was anybody but my Tom.”
My Tom. My mother never called me her Mimi, or called my brother her Eddie. It was always her Tom. I couldn’t even argue with it. He was my Tom, too. Since he’d left, the house had seemed like a baby’s rattle with all the jingly things inside gone.
“He’s gotta marry her.”
“I hear what you’re saying, but he’s over in Asia someplace and we don’t even know when he’s coming back or whether the mail’s getting through to him.”
“You get him back here,” yelled Mr. Fenstermach. “I’ll go over there and drag him back here myself.”
Callie whispered something. “What’s that?” my mother said.
“I’m n
ot marrying anyone,” she said.
“You’re not planning on giving this baby away to strangers, are you?” my mother said.
Callie shook her head. “I can handle it,” she said, and, quiet as it was, she said it in this kind of voice that made me believe her. The men argued some, but my mother kept quiet, and Callie wouldn’t budge. And then it was all over, or just beginning.
I got the impression that my mother had known long before that afternoon. She was discreet, my mother. She had to be. You can’t be a nurse in a small-town hospital, know who has a crooked spine and who has a killing cancer and whose hysterectomy is because she used a Lysol douche to try to keep from having an eighth child in ten years, and not be the kind of person who can keep a secret. My mother had two texts on the wall of her bedroom in gilded frames, the Lord’s Prayer and the Florence Nightingale oath. “Hold in confidence,” it says about a nurse’s obligation. It was never my mother who gave things away; it was the looks on other people’s faces when they saw her.
I had a fifth-grade teacher who I could tell my mother didn’t like, and who didn’t like her, and it wasn’t until the week my mother died, when I was telling her stories to take her mind off the pain in her gut, that she said to me, “That Mrs. Prentiss? She beat her boy. I was sure of it. She or her husband. But I couldn’t prove a thing.” I don’t think she would have told me even then if both Prentisses hadn’t been dead, and their son living somewhere out west. I remembered the wary look Mrs. Prentiss had had those few times my mother had come to school.