His hand was gentle when he took her money. “If you’d like, ma’m, you can just phone in your order and I can have my boy deliver it to you each week, that is, if you’d like. It’d be an honor for us, ma’m.”
“Why thank you, Mr. Butters.” She turned her head in his direction and smiled. She wanted her face to show she was grateful.
In the afternoon she studied the cookbook again and that evening she cooked a meal for the first time in her life.
“What did you make?” Forrest asked as he sat down, his child voice full of admiration.
“Fish and mashed potatoes and spinach,” she announced in triumph.
After a few moments of silent eating, she discovered all. The spinach was burnt, the fish was too dry and the mashed potatoes watery. “It isn’t your fault,” Forrest said softly. “You shouldn’t take it on yourself.” She managed to eat it, and heard his fork against his plate from time to time, but when she rose to take the dishes to the sink, she found his plate heavy with food. Her face flushed hot with anger and embarrassment. Even though he hadn’t complained, leaving her brave efforts untouched was the same thing as being cranky about it. Probably just as well that he couldn’t see her face.
“How much did the groceries cost?” he asked.
He had to ask, didn’t he. “Forty-five dollars.”
His silence rankled as much as his refusal to eat. She knew that was nearly the amount the state gave as his monthly support, but she couldn’t help what things cost. “I had to get lots of staples to start us out. It won’t be so much the next time.”
“Still, we’ve got to eat by ourselves and be a normal married couple.” He said it as if to himself and then was quiet while she made her way back and forth from the table to the sink. “I’m going to sell another calf. Food for food. Maybe I’ll have to sell one every month for a while until—No.” In that one word his voice fell as if a heavy idea had descended. “Sell Snort instead. Snort’s for pleasure. The calves are for business.” The counter was closer than she expected and she bumped into it, clattering a teacup into the sink. Her concentration had been broken.
She learned many things in the next weeks—that Forrest refused to eat what wasn’t to his liking and that he told her so, that ovens burn arms and elbows, potatoes in potato bins should be counted because forgotten ones begin to smell, pans and spoons get lost because unseen, heads get smashed on open cupboards, relatives come uninvited and announce that ants have invaded kitchen counters, dinners get cold waiting for husbands still outdoors, and forty-five dollars’ worth of food doesn’t last forever. But she also learned that Forrest’s velvety voice meant “come here, honey”, that his whistling as he moved around outside gave her a warm reassurance of his presence, that snuggling in bed at night made the troubles of the day recede. We’re living on burnt hamburger and hope, she typed in a letter to Icy.
And so this was life, the Ramona version of Hickory Hill’s damask dining room of tinkling crystal and Ares and Ain’ts conversation. She could entertain here too, she thought one day not long after her initiation into cooking. It would be like fresh air to have someone other than Forrest’s family. She invited Dody and her current naval officer boyfriend to dinner, and she called Willard Butters to order a flank steak. She wasn’t quite sure what one was, but she remembered Mother telling Delia to order one once. She had no idea what it would cost, either, but this was to be her coming out, so to speak, and she wanted it to be special. After all, Dody had been instrumental in putting her where she was. Her fingers searched the cookbook to find what to do with this thing called a flank steak.
By midmorning the sucking dry October winds from the desert to the east had begun. Dust settled over everything so she closed the windows. She thought this must be a Santa Ana, like that Indian Earl Duran had said. What had he said? “Suck milk right out of a cow’s tit.” She chuckled to herself. The house became stifling so she had to open the windows again. She would dust right at the last moment before Dody came. Other cleaning could come first. She started with the bathroom, wiping up the floor and sink and toilet and bathtub, but how was she to know if they were really clean? It would be an embarrassment if they weren’t. She could go ask Alice to look at it for her.
With Chiang leading, she stepped out of the house into the dry mountain heat. She squinted in the brightness and her eyes watered a little. Chiang sneezed from the dust. They passed the tom turkey pen right by the house. It was her responsibility to fetch Lance or Forrest immediately if she ever heard the toms fighting, but how was she to know what turkey fighting sounded like? They were always squawking. She didn’t want to alarm the men and then be embarrassed by calling them for nothing. Forrest said that if a rattlesnake got into the pen, the toms got around it in a circle and mesmerized it by a low clucking until someone would get rid of it. Right now the sounds were just squawks and flapping wings, no clucking as far as she could tell, so she and Chiang walked on by. She wondered what Chiang would do if she saw a rattlesnake. No matter how thorough Lee had been at The Seeing Eye, she doubted that he’d trained Chiang for that. All she could do was walk and listen.
The route along the one lane dirt track to Mother Holly’s was familiar to her by now. Nearly every day she thought of some reason to walk the pathway. It was the only time she got out, and Mother Holly and Alice were the only people she knew. She could tell by weeds brushing her legs if she aimed too far to the left or right. The heat baked right through the soles of her shoes. Fine grit blew against her face. She kept her eyes closed as she walked. Dust blew in under her eyelids anyway, and she still felt the glare. The wind caught a newspaper in a tumbleweed and it crackled across her path. “Alice?” she called when she thought she was close. Chiang led her to the door and Alice came out, cheerful as she always was. On the way back, they stopped at the barn to pick up empty milk bottles and money from the box where neighbors had left it after taking fresh milk that morning. Jean’s job was to sterilize the bottles each day.
In the house Jean showed Alice the bathroom. “Is the bathtub clean?”
Alice hesitated. When she spoke, her voice was a threadlike vibrato. “No, Jean. There’s a horrid ring.”
“Oh, I thought I got it clean.” She felt her shoulders slump.
“I’ll do it, if you like.”
“No, I’ve got to learn.”
“Here, put your hand here.” Alice stretched Jean’s hand over the ring. “You can feel the dirt. It’s not as smooth as the clean area.”
She felt a gummy line. Mother had never told her how to clean. In fact, she doubted if Mother had ever cleaned a bathtub. She couldn’t tell Alice that, though. There was much to learn, and Alice could help, but she shouldn’t depend on her, or on Mother Holly or on anyone too much.
Jean had no time for her piano that day. She made a peanut butter sandwich for lunch and sank down on the picnic bench. A fine covering of dust skinned over her lemonade. By the time she bit into the second half of her sandwich, the peanut butter had glued together two boards of dry, stiff, tasteless bread.
In the late afternoon, Jean was cutting turnips in the kitchen when Mother Holly came in.
“Who who?” It was her usual greeting, like a mockingbird, lyrical and loving. “Jean, I just got some tomatoes from Heddy’s garden. They’re big luscious ones, ripe today. I thought you could use them tonight.” She put them in Jean’s wet hands. “Oh, Jean, Forrest doesn’t like turnips.”
“Yes he does.”
“But he’s never eaten them.”
“He’s going to eat these.”
“You should just cook what he likes. He used to say to me to find something he liked and cook it for him every night.”
“I’d eat whatever was put in front of me if that was what had been prepared. Even if it was scorched spinach.”
“He likes things that go down easily, puddings and smooth things.”
“Last night I made mashed potatoes for him. Again. He took two bites and said ‘I won’t eat
this.’”
“You shouldn’t take it to heart. He’s always been a finicky eater.”
“Because he was allowed to be. Before dinner he eats handfuls of peanuts and then he won’t eat what I fix. I can’t tell him not to eat peanuts. He’s a grown man, not a boy. But he’s going to eat these turnips or go hungry.”
Mother Holly said nothing more. Jean felt her gaze. Maybe she’s realizing I’m right, Jean thought. Maybe she’s recognizing that her indulgence of him has made it harder for me.
“Things will get easier, dear.”
“Thanks for the tomatoes.”
Anticipating the meal with Dody brought back the feeling of closeness they had shared years ago. But how could she achieve even a semblance of Andrebrook style on a redwood picnic table in the kitchen? At least she could move it into the living room for the evening and serve the meal in courses. She began to drag it across the floor, then had to turn it on its side to get it through the doorway. As soon as Forrest came in the door she’d have to tell him she moved it.
Dody’s presence when she arrived that night with her new man brought a touch of the old life back, but it also made Jean aware of the tremendous breach she had crossed in coming west. Dody seemed so much more polished than anyone out here. The salad course went smoothly except for Chiang snoring.
“When I first heard that snore on our honeymoon, I got worried,” Forrest said. “Then I leaned down over the foot of the bed, and when I learned it was coming from there, I was relieved.”
Here he goes again, Jean thought. She got up to get the next course from the oven.
“That varmint wouldn’t let me get close to her for weeks with all that whining and howling and carrying on. She wanted to be in bed with Jeanie and have me sleep on the floor.”
That might have been funny the first time he said it, but he was so pleased with himself for thinking it up, that he’d said it to everyone by now. She leaned down to get the steak out of the oven where it was warming. He had no right to tease me about Chiang who’s been so good to me. She pursed her lips, stabbed the meat with a fork and plopped it on a serving plate. It landed off center and, unbalanced, it flipped off onto the floor. Jean gasped.
“In fact I want you to take a picture of us like that, Dody. Chiang and Jean in bed, me on the floor.”
He’s still talking. Good. They hadn’t heard the meat flop. She bent down and reached out along the floor. Nothing. She had to find it. She had nothing else to serve. Good thing Chiang was asleep or she’d find it first. Her throat constricted and she put the serving plate on the floor, lifted her skirt above her knees, kneeled down and patted around on the floor with her hands. She felt a fine grit on the linoleum. The refrigerator hummed, rattled, and then stopped. Dear Lord, don’t let anyone get curious and open the swinging door. Eventually she found the steak, but what shape was it in? Just how dirty was it? She couldn’t be sure. The floor was covered with Santa Ana dust. The day had raced by and she had no time for floor cleaning. Gingerly, she tried exploring the hunk of meat with her fingers to detect any disaster, but it was too hot to touch. There was only one thing to do. She stabbed the meat again, flopped it back on the serving plate, stood up, rinsed her hands quickly and delivered it to the table.
If Dody noticed, she had the courtesy not to mention it. Now that was friendship.
Chapter Twenty-one
“She could really make it come on hot. War or no war, give me a Jap woman any day.”
Jean raised her head. Earl Duran’s words coming through the open window shocked her, incongruous in his colorless, off-key voice. Forrest laughed roughly, in a way she hadn’t heard before, but when he came inside, his voice was velvet.
“Jeanie, where are you?”
“Here. You were gone a long time.”
“That crazy old Indian still can’t drive. He doesn’t know first gear from reverse.”
“I thought you said he was a teamster?”
“Did. But he drove a team and wagon.”
“Then how does he manage a truck?”
“We do it together. I work the gears and pedals and he steers and talks to me.” Forrest let out a smug little grunt. “There’s more than one way—”
“Forrest, you never told me you did that!”
“Earned ten big ones today at the Bradley place. I can’t have the governor think I married you just for your money. I’ve got to earn you new every day, Jeanie.” Smelling of hay and sweat, he kissed her just below the left eye.
“Forrest, what were you and Earl talking about just now?”
“I guess my letters about a job worked.”
When Forrest didn’t want to talk about something, he didn’t, and that was that.
“After we came back from putting up Bradley’s hay, we stopped at the feed store. Whiting found out about a job loading grain at the depot. Work for three. Shoveling grain from a rail car into gunny sacks and sewing ’em up. Earl and I grabbed at it and the Bradley kid did, too.”
“That’s good, I suppose, but when are you going to do it?”
“At night. Seven to eleven or so.”
He was a tornado of energy, rarely home, always hiring out to other ranchers for odd jobs, and now this. Meanwhile Jean contributed to the new Holly economy in the only way she knew, with scant dollars collected each month from giving music lessons.
The first Ramona Christmas was meager, differing from other days of the week only in the big breakfast gathering at Mother Holly’s with Helen and Don, and Lance and Mary Kay there, too. Forrest had said he wanted to spend the day at home, just the two of them, like a normal married couple. Jean made a ham. A little dry, but adequate. She gave him a sweater she’d knit. He gave her Evening in Paris perfume. That was all. Then came the restless quiet of a long, uneventful afternoon. It was wild, cold, and blowy outside. The wind sliced through clapboard joints and curled under doorsills, but there was no snow. There was no tree, no big family dinner, no gathering of cheering voices, no piney fragrance or smell of molasses and cinnamon from the Indian pudding. She tried to remember some Christmas carols to play on the piano, but without voices to accompany them, the melody sounded thin.
She thought of how, as children, she and Lucy would race over to Tready’s after the formal, slow-paced opening of presents, how itchy she would be to see what Tready got, and how Tready would always come back to Hickory Hill. She’d go through the presents one by one, taking things out of boxes and putting them carefully back in. But telling Forrest about it all would only underscore the sparseness here.
A long, newsy letter from her parents wished them a happy day and said they’d come to visit in February to see what they needed and have Christmas then. Mother Holly had read it to her the day before. She wished she could hear it again. Besides a letter from Icy a week earlier, only one other piece of mail had arrived.
Forrest paced around the house. “Do you want to open Dudley’s present?” His voice sounded tentative, almost shy. He handed her a box still wrapped in heavy paper and twine, from Uncle Dudley in Connecticut. The two sat side by side on the picnic bench in the kitchen. She explored the package, feeling the bow and ripping the paper slowly, as if to prolong the experience.
“What is it?” Forrest asked. It was his child voice, all soft and wondrous.
“Stockings. Silk stockings.” She counted. “Twelve pairs. Poor dear Uncle Dudley. He doesn’t know. What am I ever going to do with twelve pairs of silk stockings out here? They run if you even look at them wrong.” Her voice rose to a squeak. The inappropriateness of her only gift from home struck wide the chasm of difference, and she cried with a suddenness that unleashed weeks of tiny, unspoken aches. Opera and black velvet capes and dinners in the Village and taxis on Madison Avenue and the hush before the first chord at the Hartford Symphony and Farmington Country Club parties—where was all that now? That’s the world silk stockings belonged to, not the world of turkeys and pastures and Indians and dirty stories.
She knew Forre
st guessed what she was thinking when he enfolded her in his arms. For a long time he cradled her, letting her cry, not trying to stop it, just holding her, quiet and still. She drew in her breath in a series of little inward gasps. “But, Forrest, I want to be here. I chose this and I don’t want what I had. I want you and us and life. Here.”
But the great gulf in her life and the pain it created was no longer private, and she wept for the sorrow the revelation caused him. She thought it probably was a relief for him, too, when the Ingraham clock struck ten and they could go to bed.
The next day dawned cold and damp. The air felt wet, smelled wet, even tasted wet. “It feels like New England,” Jean said.
“Weather for a jacket,” Forrest said, “or a bear.” He opened the door, ready to do the milking. “Must be foggy.” He stood at the door for some moments letting cold air seep into the house. Jean shivered. Then he closed the door and turned back inside. Jean felt his arms go around her, drawing her to him carefully, slowly. “You’re a treasure, Jeanie, maybe a little too delicate for out here, but you’ll grow. We both will.”
She pressed her face into his chest.
“Maybe that’s what marriage will do,” he said softly, “stiffen you into manhood and gentle me into a softer womanhood.” He kissed her, lightly at first, but then firmly, opening her mouth, welding the two together, seeking some union, seeking the assurance that in spite of yesterday she was his. She knew she was, but maybe he didn’t. “How about if I quit early today so we can take a walk?” He spoke his offering softly. “You can learn what’s here around you. We can walk up the road and you can meet Karl and Heddy at the chicken ranch. They’re nice folks and you could stand to have a few friends here. Or we can go over and sit at Indian Rock. Or anything you want to do.” He kissed her again on her forehead and went out the door.
Jean waited longer than other days for him to come back from milking. The fog muffled the usual morning noises and left her utterly alone. It was a striking thing he’d said—stiffen her into manhood and gentle him into womanhood. At first she wasn’t sure she’d heard him right. This was a different side to him, more introspective. It wasn’t the funny, exaggerated western speech he liked to imitate, but something much deeper. He’d never shown it before, and it gave her hope. She shivered and put on a sweater.