Miller's Valley
“How’s chemistry?” I asked.
“I’m never going to be a whiz like you, but since you went over that last chapter with me I’ve got a better idea of it. I’m going to pass, at least.”
“Of course you’re going to pass.”
“They grade on a curve. They have to. There are some real dummies, although some of the girls are smarter than you’d think.”
I licked some frosting off my finger. “Your grandmother’s okay?”
“If you listen to her she’s at death’s door. One of the things I like about your mother is she never complains about her health.”
“She’s never sick,” I said. “I don’t know why. Willpower, I guess.” And we both laughed, and then Callie sucked in her breath the way people do when they’re getting ready to say something they think you won’t like.
“I just needed to talk to you without your mom and dad around,” she said.
“You’re moving away,” I said.
“I wish,” Callie said. “What would I do with Clifton without you and your parents and my mom and grandmother and everybody? I need to stay put at least until full-day kindergarten. It’s about Tommy. I need you not to leave Clifton alone with him.”
It was quiet inside the car. Someone was honking a couple blocks over, but then they stopped. Finally I said, “Don’t worry. I never would. Never ever.” Saying it like that made me know it was true, and why it was true, and it must have showed on my face because Callie put her hand on my arm and rubbed it the way she did with Clifton sometimes when he was crying.
“I know this has to be hard for you, Mimi. I know you love the guy. But I just don’t think he’s reliable with a little kid, you know?”
“I know. It must be hard for you, too.”
“Not really. I got to be honest, I didn’t really know him that well. You know the way he was, like he could sell ice to the Eskimos. He picked me up at the Dairy Queen one night, and the next thing I know I’m in the backseat with my feet out the window. In a way I don’t regret it because how could I regret Clifton? I knew from the beginning that I was going to be on my own. Well, not really, because your mom was a lot nicer about the whole thing than I thought she’d be. But you know, Tommy and me, it didn’t amount to much. I’d like it if he liked Clifton and Clifton liked him, but I’m not so sure what’s going to happen at this point.”
“Is he giving you any money? He has money.”
“It’s fine. Your mother has been great about stopping by with groceries and buying Clifton clothes. She buys him the cutest things.” I knew that. I knew, too, that my father had told her to stop doing it. “A father should support his own son,” he’d said to my mother. “You shouldn’t let him off the hook.”
“Don’t let Tommy off the hook,” I said to Callie.
“Really, it’s okay. Sometimes he drops over some milk, or toys. He doesn’t really know what to do, you know? He brought Clifton a bike. Like, a big bike. I don’t think he knows that he’s three. Or what three-year-olds like. Or something. So that’s another reason. I’m fine with him seeing Clifton at your house, or when he’s with you. But not taking him out, you know? I’m not sure what he’d do with him.”
What could I say? She was right. Even when I was around, Tommy looked at Clifton like he couldn’t quite figure out what to make of him. Half the time when he was supposed to come to the house and see him he never showed up. Once or twice I ran into him by accident. The day after I talked to Callie I saw him when I was coming out of the library. Mrs. Farrell kept saying that she wanted me to enter the state science fair and I was searching for something I cared enough to spend six months studying. I kept thumbing through books about diseases and space exploration, but I hadn’t found anything I really wanted to do yet.
“What are you doing here?” I said when I saw Tommy in the parking lot between the library and the high school.
“Meeting up with a guy,” he said. He acted like he barely knew me, kept looking around the lot as he smoked a cigarette. He didn’t offer me a ride, and I wondered if he was nervous because he figured our father was coming to pick me up and they might get into it again. I wouldn’t have driven with him anyhow. His eyes looked funny.
“What are you doing here?” he said. “Isn’t it late for school? What, you have cheerleading or something?”
“You’re kidding, right? I’m working on a topic for the state science fair.”
“So, no cheerleading I guess.” He sucked on his cigarette like it was oxygen. He had a skull tattooed on the back of his hand. Every time I looked at him something inside me felt jagged, like I’d swallowed a razor blade and just had to hold really still so it wouldn’t move around and slice my insides up.
“You should come see Clifton,” I said.
“I saw him.”
“When?”
“I don’t know, a couple days ago,” he said. “You were there. I brought him that thing, what was it?”
“That was two weeks ago. He’s your son. You should see him every day.”
He flipped his cigarette to the ground and mashed it with his heel. “Who died and made you God?” he said.
“What happened to you?” I said. I must have been crazy to ask that question, or really tired. Between work and studying and helping my father with the farm and looking after Clifton and looking after Ruth, I didn’t get that much sleep a lot of the time.
Tommy smiled then, but it was that kind of hard humorless smile that’s worse than no smile at all. “Little sister, you have no idea,” he said.
“Try me.”
It was like for a moment a mask was lifted and from his eyes shone the old Tommy, the piggyback-ride Tommy, the bring-me-a-tadpole-in-a-jar Tommy, and the razor sliced at my gut and he must have seen it. For the first time since he’d gotten out of that rattly car in front of the house he really looked at me like he saw me. I could feel a sweet-sour smell coming off him but I could see Tom in his eyes.
“I wouldn’t do that to you, Meems,” he said. He hadn’t called me that for a long time. He called me that again a week later after I got back to the slope where the tractor lay, its engine quiet now, the ambulance guys working with my father to get it off him. I saw the old Tommy again just for a minute, even through all that blood. “I really blew it this time, Meems,” he’d said, and he coughed, gagged, spit a big maroon clot onto the ice, and then passed out.
One day I came home from school and there was a strange car in the driveway, an Oldsmobile 88 with a faded blue paint job. It looked like an old-lady car, which was what it was. Mrs. Jansson’s mother had driven it for a few years and then had died suddenly of some heart thing. So it was a dead-old-lady car. And now it was mine.
“You deserve it for sure,” my father said, as though it was a brand-new convertible. But I didn’t care. I could get myself where I was going now. I couldn’t ever remember feeling so free.
“It will come in handy,” my mother said, by which she meant Tommy. She had an idea that I would be driving him around to doctor’s appointments so his leg could improve. They said in town that the doctors wanted to amputate, but my mother had crossed her arms across her shelf of a chest and said, “Not my Tom, you won’t.” They’d airlifted him to the big hospital and spent hours reattaching his leg where the skin had been split open and the bone splintered, and while they weren’t optimistic, over time the join had taken. My mother hardly slept at all for almost two months, first using her vacation time and staying with an old nursing school classmate who worked at the big hospital, later putting in her shifts at our hospital and then driving an hour north and sitting by Tommy’s bedside. Maybe she saw some of that old Tommy, too, as she sponge-bathed him. Or maybe she saw the Tommy I’d never even known, the baby she’d cradled, the small boy she’d chased around the yard.
“He’s going to need a lot of rehab,” she said at dinner, big blue thumbprints of tired under each eye, dishing out the packaged mac and cheese. There hadn’t been a whole lot of cooking s
ince the accident. We’d eaten what I brought home from the diner on weekends, and sandwiches and canned soup during the week. Good thing my father wasn’t picky.
“Dear Mimi,” Donald wrote. “I hear your brother is doing a lot better. Tell him I said hi. I’m on the swim team so I don’t get home until late most nights so sorry this is so short. I’m going to one of the University of California colleges but I don’t know which one yet. You will be the first person I tell when I know.”
When I took some brownies I’d made back to her place, my aunt Ruth said with her mouth full, “And to think, your brother made it through the service just fine and almost gets himself killed on your father’s tractor.”
“I don’t know how you can say he made it through the service just fine,” I said.
“Well, he’s still alive, isn’t he? Lots of those boys aren’t. He’s still alive and he’s got all his limbs and his faculties.”
“Never mind,” I said. I was losing patience with Aunt Ruth’s certainty about the things she thought. It was easy to figure out how people ought to behave out in the world if you never went out in the world yourself.
People said Tommy made a miraculous recovery, which is to say that even with a cast and crutches he was soon showing up at the Rusty Hammer with a woman on either side of him, soon promising my mother he would come to Sunday dinner and then not showing up while the roast curled hard and dark around the edges in a warm oven. To tell the truth, I think that’s another reason why my mother kept pushing for Callie and Clifton to move to the farm, to reel Tommy back in, although he was just as likely to blow off a visit with Clifton as a Sunday dinner.
Once he got pulled in for a drunk and disorderly and my father went and got him and let him sleep it off on the couch. The second time the cops called, my father said, “He’s all yours.” The police let him out anyway, because he was a veteran, because they’d known him in high school, because he was Tommy and sat in the little holding cell and got them laughing, even changed as he was.
I never drove him in my new car to the doctor after all; he never even saw the inside of my new car. When he went to the rehab facility, I guess he had some girl drive him, and my mother complained that he’d stopped going long before he ought to. LaRhonda rode in my car a few times when hers was in the shop; she was always driving over the curb on Front Street or backing into a tree. At the body shop where Tom had worked, briefly, I heard the guys called her car the cash cow. I could tell she wasn’t enthusiastic about my old sedan. “I’m praying on your brother,” she said one day, touching up her blush in the rearview, and it reminded me of why we weren’t really friends anymore.
She’d given me a small box of books that day because, she said, she was putting away the things of the flesh, although it seemed kind of insulting that it was all right for the things of the flesh to wind up with me and I noticed she’d left out Forever Amber, that we’d read together in her bathroom when we were both twelve. Instead there was a book about cowgirls called Giddyap! that was pretty much all sex scenes except that the sex seemed ridiculous if you knew anything about what it would feel like to lie on the floor of a barn with no clothes on. There was a book called Human Sexual Response that was creepy because it took some of the stuff from the cowgirls book and turned it into science, with black-and-white drawings. And there was a really sad book about a bunch of college girls who thought they were going to be someone and then just turned out to be married and unhappy. There was one good sex scene in that one, though. The book was called The Group and it was the only one I wanted to keep, but I couldn’t figure out how to get rid of the others. They felt like boomerangs, that would somehow find their way back to me and, more important, to my mother’s attention.
I stashed them behind the dolls Cissy had made for me over the years, even though I’d never been much of a doll girl, but then I thought better of it. My mother was always taking the dolls down from the shelf and batting them against the wall to shake the dust loose because my mother felt about dust the way the evangelicals at the Church of the Living Lord felt about the devil: everywhere, and the cause of all evil. So finally I hid all three books behind the little door at the back of my closet that led to the pipes and wiring, although I kept taking the one about the college girls out and rereading it, trying to figure out why they’d all had plans but the plans had amounted to nothing, and whether the one at the end was really having sex with another woman. I bet LaRhonda hadn’t even read that one. I didn’t have much time to read myself, what with Clifton and the diner and my school assignments, and I wasn’t much for made-up stories, but it was a good one, so good that somehow it didn’t feel made up at all.
The only person who was really happy about my car, other than me, was a boy named Richard Bachman, who was first in our class to my number two. “Dear Mimi,” Donald had written. “My grandfather says you’re going to be the valedictorian. Wow! I’m not surprised.” But that was just Donald’s grandfather talking out of loyalty. There was no question that Richard was going to beat me out, which was fine. He was the youngest son of the Presbyterian minister, and while his five brothers and sisters were fair-haired, fair-skinned, almost transparent people of Scandinavian appearance, Richard was Korean. His parents had adopted him, and it showed how idealistic the God crowd was that they thought he would fit right in in Miller’s Valley. I don’t know how he survived high school; I had two classes with him each year, science and English, and I heard more slant-eyes comments than I knew what to do with. “Don’t feel sorry for that boy,” my mother said. “He’ll leave the rest of them in the dust.” Last thing I heard Richard was the chair of the neuroscience department at one of the big state universities, so as usual my mother sussed out the future correctly. Although not about Tommy, who she said would surely have learned his lesson once and for all from his accident.
One afternoon a week Richard and I had special permission to drive to the state capital to work on our science projects. It was a little over an hour’s drive, and we kept the radio on so we wouldn’t have to make much conversation, although from time to time Richard would say, “Great song,” to show that he wasn’t a total loser. We had even been given a parking permit card for the Office of Mines, Soil, and Water. Richard was doing a project on plant life and the development of coal deposits in the region. I said I thought that sounded interesting, but I didn’t really think so. I had decided to do my project on the water table in Miller’s Valley and the effect the dam had had on it since its construction.
“So, what about it?” Richard said.
“I’m not sure yet.”
“You’re going to need a hypothesis soon,” he said.
“Well, hello there, young lady,” said Winston Bally.
I don’t know how Winston Bally knew I was working in the water offices. Maybe they let him know any time someone asked for information about the Roosevelt Dam. On our third visit to the state capital he walked into the conference room with a big smile as though we were old friends. He started picking up the dusty microfilm boxes stacked on the table next to the microfilm machine, which came on a little cart with wheels like the one we kept desserts on at the diner, so we could roll the cakes and pies around and show them to people. Finally he said, “I knew you were the smart one. I could tell from the beginning.”
“I’m doing a science project,” I said.
“So am I,” said Richard, reaching across the table for a handshake, like he was a grown-up, which is how he’d always acted. “Coal deposits. Are they a product of compressed plant material?”
“That’s not exactly a new idea, son,” Mr. Bally said.
“I’m going to show it’s false with data.”
“Good for you. And what about you, Miss Miller?”
“I don’t know yet.”
“You looking at the data, too? At this data? The dam and the valley? That should be interesting for you.”
“I haven’t decided what I’m doing yet.”
“I’d be hap
py to help,” Mr. Bally said. “I’m an expert on the subject you’re studying.” He picked up one of the microfilm boxes. “Judges in these contests like primary sources.”
I knew that. Judges in these contests always liked primary sources. I was already using one. “Tell me about Andover,” I’d said to Cissy Langer, sitting in her back room with a wall full of piggy dolls staring at me.
“Oh, my goodness, Mimi, what a question,” she’d said.
I took the glass of iced tea, and I took the plate of chocolate chip cookies, and I set my tape recorder between them. I’d borrowed it from the school librarian.
“I’ve already got some primary sources,” I said to Winston Bally in the conference room.
We all pick and choose the things we talk about, I guess. I’d listened to my mother and Cissy talk about growing up together for maybe hundreds of hours, about sharing a seat and red licorice ropes on the bus, about getting licked for wearing their Sunday dresses into the woods one day, about the years when they both moved back in with their parents while their husbands went to war. And somehow I’d never really noticed that all the stories started when they were ten, that there were no stories about the four-year-old Miriam, the six-year-old Cissy, about the day when they were both seven when Ruth came home from the hospital, a bundle of yellow crochet yarn and dirty diaper. It made sense, I guess, since it turned out Cissy had grown up in a place whose name I’d never even heard because it had been wiped off the map before I’d ever even been born.
“My whole family lived in Andover,” Cissy said. “My mother and father were both born there. There wasn’t a real church, or a school, either. My grandfather used to say Andover was nothing but a wide place in the road. The next biggest place to Andover was the valley, if you can believe it. But we had a little store that sold all kinds of things, pots and pans and cheese and newspapers, you know, and there was a little chapel that some Shakers built in the woods and that’s where my parents were married. I’ve got pictures somewhere.”