Circle of Three

  “What happened?

  “So this guy, he decides he gets a free ad for his service station in the brochure, plus he wants to give out discount coupons for oil changes and lube jobs to all the students. And Brian said no, no advertising and no selling, no discounts, no nothing. Guy says screw you and won’t teach the course, but Brian held firm and that was that.”

  “Huh. Is Lois a good teacher?”

  She shrugged, made a face.

  “She is, isn’t she?”

  “I don’t know, I guess. I’ve heard she’s okay.”

  “Oh, great.”

  “But it doesn’t matter.”

  “I know, I’m just not used to this.”

  “What, fighting with people?”

  “All of it. The last time I worked, I did research for professors. I looked things up and took notes. I usually communicated by memo.”

  “Yeah, but you’re doing a great job. You’re good with people, you are, Carrie. I know Brian’s full of it sometimes, but you are just doing an excellent job, he’s right about that.”

  I thanked her, really touched. Chris was such a generous person. But it bothered me that I didn’t care enough. Deep down, her praise and Brian’s didn’t mean much to me.

  I kept putting off calling Jess. Brian wanted him to teach fly-fishing again, as he had last year. I let the whole week go by, I didn’t even know why. On Friday, with the weekend looming, I couldn’t keep procrastinating.

  I stared out at the cold, gray day through the plate glass window, thinking about a story Chris had told me about her son, Andy. He’d gotten in a fight at school last week. The class bully had called him a girl because he was small and he played the violin and the piano. Andy had gotten the worst of it, and Chris had to go for a parent-teacher conference on Monday.

  Jess and I met thirty years ago over a fight on the same school playground. We were just starting sixth grade. He wasn’t in my class, but I knew him by sight. In fact, I knew him a little better than the other kids who weren’t in my class, because already he’d started to acquire a reputation for wildness. And eccentricity. He was a country rather than a town boy, a big and meaningful distinction in sixth grade; he kissed cows—I knew that for sure because it was major playground gossip. Yes, he kissed cows, the ones on his father’s dairy farm, and he admitted it—unwisely, he must have realized in retrospect, but by then it was too late. (One of my vividest memories of our later, adolescent love affair was the night Jess talked me into kissing one myself. On the nose, between its dewy, wide-spaced, long-lashed eyes. “See, Carrie? She likes it.” She had seemed to, she being a two-year-old brown and white Guernsey named Magnesia.) He rode the school bus and got off at the bottom of a muddy lane in the middle of nowhere, and the fact that his house was invisible from the road—sycamore trees and a rise in the lane obscured it—added to the mystery about him. Or the rap against him, the communal school sense that Jess wasn’t exactly like everybody else. Which was all it took in Clayborne in those days—probably now, too—to isolate a child and make him Other.

  The fight in the school yard wasn’t about cow kissing, it was over Jess’s mother, who was “crazy.” This was news to me. I was on my way home when I happened upon Jess and Mason Beckett beating each other up. Three of Mason’s friends stood around in a nasty, excited circle, screaming that Jess Deeping’s mother was a loony, a nutcase, a psycho, Mason should kill him, kill him, rip his nuts off. But it was the other way around: Mason was on the bottom and losing, and until his buddies jumped in to save him, I thought Jess might kill him.

  I was a tomboy, but I was small, and a girl, and there were four of them. All the same, I came close to leaping on top of the pile of flying elbows and fists and just seeing what happened. My instant allegiance to Jess’s side wasn’t a mystery: he was the outnumbered underdog, and Mason Beckett was a known jerk. Later we romanticized it, but at the time, coming to his aid seemed only natural.

  Instead of piling on, I ran in the school building and got the first teacher I saw, elderly Mr. Thayer. He stopped the fight, which had gotten pretty bad—skinny, gangly Jess had blood all over him, and not just from Mason’s nose. “He started it!” all the boys swore, and I, Mr. Thayer’s only impartial witness, couldn’t honestly confirm or deny it. But I knew why the fight had started, and even though it was scary to rat on four big, resentful boys, I didn’t hesitate. “They were taunting.” A new word; I’d learned it that year. It meant teasing, and it was specifically forbidden on the playground. “They called his mother crazy, they said she was in the loony bin, and they said he was crazy, too. They called his mother names.”

  Jess wouldn’t look at me. Mr. Thayer had him by the shirt or he would have turned his back on me. I wanted him to look up, acknowledge me. Well, what I wanted was for him to thank me. But he stood with his head averted, wiping blood out of his yellow hair, and never looked at me once. A disappointment for me—almost a betrayal. I’d thought we were together now, a team. A pair.

  Years went by and we never spoke. But I watched and noticed him, and I knew he noticed me. Once, sitting behind him at an assembly, I fixated on the back of his neck. If I cut my hair off, would my neck look that thin and fragile and nervous? Did girls have those two weedy tendons, sensitive cords that appeared and disappeared with the turning of the head? After that day, I paid special attention to the backs of boys’ necks—in fact, I still do. Some were flat and uninteresting, some were short and muscular, barely there (like Brian’s), some were long and reedy, giraffelike. I was always taken by the kind that had a shallow indentation between the two tendons. That little declivity, that gentle dent, was associated in my mind forever with callowness and pride and skittish bravado.

  I found Jess’s number in the Rolodex, although I already knew it, and punched in the digits carefully. On the fourth ring, his answering machine picked up.

  “Hello. This is Jess Deeping,” came his surprisingly stiff, formal voice; for a second I didn’t recognize it. “Please leave a message when you hear the tone, and I’ll call you back as soon as I can. Thank you.”

  I hung up.

  I pictured him at his desk in his cluttered office, composing his message, reciting it into the machine, maybe trying it again, not satisfied the first time. He’d want it to be right; he’d want to sound cordial and serious. He’d think that was important.

  His office was once the living room of his parents’ house; the “parlor,” his mother called it, he’d told me. We used to do homework on the sprung, Indian-bedspread-covered sofa, me at one end, Jess at the other. And there was a window seat in an alcove you couldn’t see from the parlor door because it was in the corner. We’d sit there in the late afternoons, out of sight of sad, slow-moving Mr. Deeping if he happened to pass by. That’s where Jess kissed me the first time, in that window seat on a rainy afternoon in the spring, and afterward we wrote each other’s names on the fogged-up windowpanes. In those days the view was of a broad, shallow pasture against a blur of maples that obscured the flood plain and the river. Jess bought the long strip of land beyond the pasture a few years ago, cut down the trees, and built a dock on the river. He swam from it, fished for trout, and tied up his little boat, the Cud. His house hardly resembled the old stone farmhouse he grew up in, he’d added to and knocked out and renovated so many of the small, dim, low-ceilinged rooms. All that was left of the original was the parlor. His office.

  I dialed his number again. Cleared my throat while his message played.

  “Jess, this is Carrie, calling from the Other School. I don’t know if you knew, but I’m working here now. Um, Brian was wondering if you’ll be teaching fishing again next June. Would you call and leave a message, please, one wayor the other? Any time over the weekend. Okay, thanks.”

  I almost hung up.

  “And—I also wanted to say, I’m sorry, again, about the, um, ark animals, and how all that—went. My mother—oh, God. Well, you know. Anyway.” Yes, I’m great with people. “Ruth misses you, s
he says hi. Wants to come see you one of these days. She’s got an idea that she can drive around on your back roads by herself—I can’t imagine who put that in her head. Well, okay. Be seeing you. Don’t forget about the course. ’Bye, Jess.”

  I didn’t know if I was hinting around for an invitation or not, I truly didn’t. But he called the next day, Saturday, and invited Ruth and me to tea. Yes, tea. Thirty years later, he was still doing the unexpected.

  7

  Two of Everything

  “MOM, THIS CAR is such a tool. You know what Connie Rosetta’s father gave her for her sixteenth birthday? A brand-new Cabrio. In the school colors.”

  “What’s a Cabrio?”

  “God, Mom. It’s a VW convertible.”

  “Oh.”

  “This is the dorkiest car in the whole town. Who would buy this car?” A Chevy Cavalier, crud colored, with nothing but a radio, not even a tape deck. Automatic, of course, so you couldn’t downshift or rev it in neutral or anything. “Who bought it,” I asked her, “you or Dad?”

  “I guess we bought it together.”

  “God.”

  “Be careful on these curves, you’re almost speeding. Are you watching your speedometer?”

  “Yes, I’m watching. Hey, look, Jess got a new sign.”

  “Slow down.”

  “I am. Isn’t it cool?”DEEPING FARMS, it said in white and gold on a green background, on a wooden plaque just inside the old stone gateposts. I steered the Chevy onto the gravel driveway, slowing to a crawl for Mom’s sake. “Why is it ‘Farms,’ though? Doesn’t he just have one farm?”

  “He has another place out past Locust Dale, I think. Smaller. A tenant runs it.”

  “I didn’t know that. Hey, whose car is that? It’s not Mr. Green’s.”

  “Who’s Mr. Green?”

  “Jess’s hired man. Think he got a new car? Jess, I mean.” Not new, I saw; used. A gray Ford Taurus almost as ugly as this one. God, I hoped it wasn’t Jess’s. But I also hoped there wasn’t anybody else here. I wanted it to be just us three.

  Except for the house, Jess’s farm is really beautiful. Everything matches. All the barns have stone foundations, and they’re all painted bright white with red trim. Even the silos are white with red tops. The fences are neat and straight, not falling down or rotting or rickety like you see on a lot of farms, and Jess even keeps the messiest places, like the muddy yard where the cows mill around waiting to be milked, as clean as he can by putting fresh straw down and also sometimes rotating them to an alternate waiting place while the other one dries out. When I first saw the farm, I couldn’t get over how perfect it all looked, like a play farm, the kind little kids build with toys for their train set. There’s shit and everything, I mean, it’s definitely a real farm, but—like, even the cows are clean, they don’t clump around with filthy butts from sitting in muck all the time. It must take a lot of extra work to keep your farm looking nice. Think how much easier it would be to let things slide. And tempting, too, because you’d probably get the same amount of milk out of the animals. Jess must have a lot of pride.

  “You can turn around in the circle,” Mom said. “Stop right here, this is good.”

  “I know, I am.” I stopped, put the car in P, turned the key off, pulled up the hand brake. Before we could get out, we were surrounded by a pack of wild dogs.

  Except they weren’t really wild and there were only four of them. A stranger would’ve been scared, which I guess is the point. I got out and clapped my hands and Red, the oldest dog, came right up to me. Then Mouse, the little gray one. I had to get down on my knees to make Tracer come, she’s the sheepdog mix, and old Tough Guy never did—so far I’ve never even petted Tough Guy, he’s too scared. Jess said he bit the UPS man once, but only because he accidentally kicked him.

  “Hello!”

  “Hi, Jess!” I jumped up, grinning, not sure what to do. He looked good, and really glad to see us. I felt like hugging him, but I didn’t for some reason. Something about Mom. Like maybe she’d think it was disloyal to my dad or something.

  “Glad you could come,” he said, and started walking backward, toward one of the big stone and wood barns instead of his house. He had on brown corduroy pants, a regular blue shirt, and an old leather jacket, unzipped. And sneakers. He’d just combed his hair, you could tell by the comb tracks; he wears it straight back and kind of long, and it’s just starting to recede in front. He’s tall and on the skinny side, but I know he’s strong because I’ve seen him lift a 120-pound calf like it was my book bag.

  “Tracer knows a new trick,” he said, still walking backward. “Want to see it?” Tracer’s the smartest of the four dogs. When Jess found her she already knew how to shake hands, but he taught her how to turn it into a high five—it’s so funny. He called her and she ran over and sat down in front of him. He stuck his hand out and made a gun with his index finger and his thumb and yelled, “Pow!”

  Tracer dropped to her stomach, rolled over, and stuck all four feet in the air.

  What a riot—Mom laughed almost as hard as I did. Then I tried it, and Tracer did it again, perfectly. “What a great dog! She’s so smart.”

  “She’s a genius.”

  “What else can she do?”

  “Well, we’re working on milking the cows,” he said, not cracking a smile. We looked at him for a second, then burst out laughing. “Let’s go in here first,” he said, “unless you’re starving. Are you?” We said no, not really. “Good, because there’s someone I’d like you to meet.”

  I’d never been in this barn before. It was smaller than the main barns; I figured it was for tractors and machinery and big equipment. The red double doors were as high as garage doors. Jess hauled one open and we went in. Yeah, tractors and combines or whatever, big yellow vehicles sitting up on huge black wheels, blades and paddles and rusty metal teeth behind. It smelled like gas, sawdust, dead grass, and paint, and it was almost as cold inside as outside. Straight back, a light was on in the high, beamed ceiling, and I could see a man with his back to us hunched over a sawhorse, sawing wood.

  Damn. I didn’t know we had to socialize, I thought it would be just us. We started walking toward the man, and about halfway down the echoey plank floor, it hit me who he was and what he was doing: that Pletcher guy, making ark animals. Jess tricked us.

  Sure enough, he said, “Carrie, you remember Landy, don’t you?” and to me, “Ruth, this is Mr. Pletcher, my neighbor. Landy—Carrie Van Allen now, and her daughter, Ruth.”

  Landy, what kind of a name was that? He was short and slight and he smiled without showing his teeth. “Carrie? Well, I declare.” He put his saw down and took off his old, stained John Deere cap. He had dull, straw-colored hair, thinning in back. He shook hands with Mom and she said, “Landy, it’s been ages. How’ve you been? You look just the same.” He must’ve always been ugly, then. I had to shake, too, and his hands were rough as sandpaper, with big knobby bumps on the knuckles, it felt like holding an old sock full of stones.

  “Why, you do, too,” he said, “I’d’ve known you anywhere,” and turned red under his beard stubble. He had on work clothes, denim coveralls under a filthy beige wind-breaker, and clunky, mud-caked boots. “How long have you been back home?”

  “About three years now. We’re living on Leap Street, Ruth and I. We—I lost my husband in August, I don’t know if Jess told you.”

  “He surely did, and I was sorry as I could be.” His face got even more crinkled and wrinkly. “I know how it is.” How? How could he know how it is?

  “Thanks,” Mom said quickly. “Well, what’s all this?”

  As if we didn’t know. Jess told us all about it that time he came over and tried to get Mom to take the crazy ark job. This guy’s father, Eldon, used to be a tobacco farmer back in the 1970s, and he was fairly rich and also sort of a wild man, he played cards and drank a lot and ran around on his wife. Then he got stricken with lung cancer, which is pretty ironic, and on his deathbed he converted to
religion because of a dream. He made God a promise, or more like a deal—if He would spare his life, he’d give up his sinful ways and start a new church based on the story of Noah. And to glorify the Lord he’d build an ark, fill it with animals, and sail it on the Leap River for forty days and forty nights. Well, sure enough, God spared his life, so he had to start a religion called the Arkists. But unfortunately for him, he never did get around to building the ark, and now he’s dying again, this time for real because he’s like eighty or something. So he got his son to say he’d do it for him because otherwise he’ll go straight to hell, and the only problem is that Landy’s bitten off more than he can chew because hardly any of the other Arkists are helping and time’s running out, which is where Jess was hoping Mom would come in. I think all these people are totally nuts.

  Landy started showing Mom his handiwork, which was pretty pitiful. “I’ve only done four so far,” he said, dragging boards or something out from under another sawhorse, these flat wooden shapes painted brown, gray, and yellow. If you looked hard, you could tell the gray one was an elephant and the yellow one was a giraffe, but the two brown ones could’ve been anything.

  “Bears, right?” I guessed.

  His shoulders drooped. “This one is. That one’s a kangaroo.”

  “Oh, yeah. Very nice,” I said politely. “But don’t you have to make two of everything?”

  He ducked his head and rubbed the back of his neck and mumbled.

  “Pardon?”

  “Uh, that’s under discussion. Hoping to get around that. Still debating.”