I had heard them laughing and whispering to each other, as their bedroom was right next to mine. For a while I had stood in my bed and pressed my ear to the wall, hoping to hear some secrets, but had caught only snippets and giggling.
“How long are you staying with us?” I asked.
“Why? Are you already sick of me?” She smiled and took a drink of her sweet tea, which she drank from my favorite glass, decorated with a picture of Casper the Friendly Ghost dressed as Paul Revere.
“No, I don’t want you to ever leave.”
She laughed at that and laid her head against the back of the chair. She closed her eyes and stretched, arms jutting out with hands curled into fists. “That may very well be the case,” she said, “I might just stay here forever, if your daddy doesn’t run me off.”
“There’s a picture of you in Edie’s history book.”
She opened her eyes, but didn’t straighten up right away. She looked at me as if I had just announced that a nuclear bomb had fallen on Refuge. She didn’t say anything, but the smile faded from her face.
“The one of you in New York City —”
“I know which one,” she said, each word quick and measured, looking up at the porch ceiling. “Don’t mention that to Stanton, all right?”
“I won’t,” I said. “I’ve known awhile, but I wouldn’t tell him. It upsets him.”
She took a deep breath.
I stopped rocking and felt a momentary defense for my father rise up in me. I was filled with the anger that he sometimes carried around behind his eyes, and I didn’t know where it had come from. That’s what it was like to be the child of a Vietnam vet, though: we’re always caught between defending our fathers and not understanding them. “Do you feel bad, for doing that? For that picture?”
She sat up stiff again and a tenderness spread itself out over her face, centering in her eyes and moving outward until it had changed the whole shape of her forehead and mouth. “No, Eli, I don’t. Not for a minute.” She shook her head a little, as if she didn’t even know she was doing it. She looked so pretty to me, the way her face had come down to a little patch of sunlight that was falling through the screen. A block of light spread across her freckled nose and turned her eyelashes golden. “You should never feel bad for doing what you believe in. Your daddy was off fighting in Vietnam, and he believed in that. And I was up in New York City, fighting against the war. And I believed in that.”
I didn’t know what to say, so I just looked at her, feeling stupid and too young and full of some kind of longing I could not put a name to.
“I hate that it hurt him,” she said, quiet. “But at the same time, I wish he could see that I was doing it for him.”
Then she sat back again, and her eyes drifted out over the yard to fall onto my mother. After a time I turned my head so I could see Mom, too. She had squatted down again, on her knees in the dirt, studying the strawberry plants. She had her hair pulled up in a tight bun, which made her look much older than she usually did.
“She’s the best friend I ever had,” Nell said, and I turned back to face her. She had lit another cigarette and was still looking at Mom. “She’s having a hard time out of Josie right now, you know.”
I clenched my hands before me and stared at the way my fingers fit together. “I know it. They fight all the time.”
“I tried to talk to Josie about it last night,” Nell said, each word coming out with a blue puff of smoke. “But she’s impossible sometimes. She just won’t listen when she doesn’t want to.”
“I know all about that,” I said.
“Lord have mercy, she’s stubborn. Like Stanton.”
“He says you’re stubborn.”
“Does he, now?” She laughed and took another draw off the cigarette. “He can’t see that the real problem between us is that we’re just alike,” she said, but then shot me a surprised look, like she didn’t mean to say such aloud.
“Where’s Josie at now?”
“Lord, I don’t know,” she said. “Gone off somewhere with Charles Asher.”
“He’s rich.”
“Is he?” She leaned forward a bit, as if genuinely surprised. “He doesn’t act it.”
“His daddy owns the hardware store and the drive-in. He was in the war, too. Somebody at school told Charles Asher that everybody who went to Vietnam got laid over there and took dope all the time.”
“Well, that’s not true.” She looked at the cover of her book and ran her hand over it, like someone wiping fog from a bathroom mirror.
“I know it,” I said, my words darting out. I loved this story and wanted to tell the rest of it. I worshipped Charles Asher. “He busted that boy’s mouth and got suspended for two days.”
“Well,” she said, “I guess he did what he believed in, too.” And then she looked out on the backyard again, but it seemed to me that she was looking past my mother and the garden, past the ridge of good beech and hickory trees that rose up behind our house, even past the air, so thick with heat that it seemed like something solid one could walk through. I wondered what she was studying on, but figured it was something that grown-ups daydream about without realizing why.
To break this spell that had befallen her, I felt like I had to keep talking, so I asked her something I’d been wondering for a while now. “How come you never married?”
Nell didn’t answer me, and I couldn’t figure why. This seemed like a perfectly good question to me. Everybody else I knew her age was married, after all. She was still looking beyond everything, still caught up in some faraway thought that had carried her far away from me and the porch.
I repeated myself, louder this time. When that didn’t work, I said “Nell” in a tone my teachers used when someone’s attention had turned to the windows. And it worked, so she looked at me, startled. “What was it?” she asked. I asked my question for the third time.
She laughed and two little snorts of smoke came out of her nose. “Because I never wanted to get a divorce, I guess.”
I didn’t understand what this meant, but nodded anyway. I thought this was the adult thing to do.
“Not everybody has to get married, you know. I mean, it’s not required or anything,” she said, in that way she had of speaking when she felt very strongly about something. She felt strongly about many things. Somehow she seemed a bit miffed, too, but as soon as I thought this, a little smile showed on her face.
“Unless you want to have kids,” I said.
Nell seemed at a loss for a reply, which was unusual for her, so she picked her book up off her thigh and held it in one hand before her face. “Well, you ought to get you something to eat. Go on, now, buddy,” she said. “I need to read my book.”
I left her there and went into the shadows of the kitchen. Mom had pulled all the shades in the house to keep the heat out as much as possible. We only had a small air conditioner that hung in the living-room window, but it was never turned on unless the heat became unbearable. Even then, it didn’t do much more than cool the living room. Sometimes we would all stand in front of the sputtering white box, pulling our collars down so the cool air would wash over us. It hadn’t been hot enough for that yet this summer.
I loved the kitchen when it was quiet and free of everyone else. It seemed to be the cleanest room in the house, with its scent of lemon Joy and the white stove, which was so shiny and clean it looked like something that ought to be in a doctor’s office.
I took a loaf of Bunny bread from the breadbox and fixed myself another sandwich on a melamine plate. I shook out a line of Pringles in the space between the two triangles of bread. Nell had left the gallon jug of sweet tea out on the counter — she often forgot to put things away — so I poured some of that in a jelly jar.
I sat in the kitchen without turning on a light and ate, enjoying the quiet. Our house was not quiet very often, especially in the summer, when Charles Asher practically lived there and Stella would come in the door without knocking, already talking befo
re she had pulled the latch, or Edie ran in to ask me to go somewhere. There was nothing now except for the nit-nit-nit of the stove clock and a redundant but comforting drip from the kitchen faucet.
Since it was so quiet, I could think properly, and I tried to chalk up things that I might do over the rest of the summer. I thought about how Edie had said I ought to ask my father about the war, but it seemed the better thing to do would be to venture into my parents’ room and find the letters that Daddy had written to my mother while he was overseas.
I knew this would be wrong of me; my mother was very strict about no one ever going into their bedroom. But Daddy wouldn’t ever say anything about the war, and now he was having these bad nightmares about it, and I needed to know more. I chewed on my sandwich and considered all the options and thought I would wait until the day after tomorrow, as I knew that Fridays — Town Day — were when my mother and Stella always loaded up and went to the Piggly Wiggly together. Daddy would be at work, and Nell and Josie were sure to be out doing something or other. I’d invite Edie to join me.
From outside I could hear Nell singing. I crept to the door and looked out. She had spread the book over her thigh again and was lying back now, her hands folded atop her chest like someone in a casket. Her eyes were closed, but she was singing, “Go lightly from the ledge, babe, go lightly on the ground” — the Bob Dylan song she played sometimes on her little green record player. Her folded hands patted out the beat on her chest. Listening to her, I realized that Nell was maybe the saddest person I had ever known, although she hid it. I thought maybe she was sad for the same reasons as me. Because sometimes, there was too much goodness in the world to bear.
Later in my life I would come to understand that history books are the least reliable witnesses. When I was ten years old, though, I believed everything that was taught to me at school. America was a completely generous presence in all regards. The Indians were heathen murderers who had to be driven out so we could settle the nation in a civilized, God-blessed fashion. The Revolution was a war fought in smart blue and red uniforms wherein men with freshly powdered wigs acted as gentleman while they killed one another. The Civil War was as simple as the North fighting the South to free the slaves. America had saved all of humanity in both world wars, with little help from anyone else.
Although I bought everything that the history books doled out to me, I never completely believed my own parents’ love story. Whenever they talked of those first months when love bloomed up between them, there were always a few things they didn’t talk about. The whole story of their romance — as told by them — was a jigsaw puzzle with pieces that had been badly cut out and could never make a solid square.
But I was an expert at eavesdropping, so I knew the real story, although none of them realized how much knowledge I possessed. This is the true story, with some of what they told us thrown together with the things I overheard while hiding beneath the porch or pausing at doorways or hovering at corners.
My mother, who had no family at all, had been raised at the Refuge Methodist Children’s Home, which was a fancy name for an orphanage. All she knew about her family was that her mother had come there, pregnant and unwed, at sixteen and had fled the day after the birth, never to be heard from again. So she was a girl completely alone in the world. Because she excelled in the orphanage school, she was handpicked by the home’s director — a stark-looking but tenderhearted woman called Miss Feltner — to receive a scholarship that enrolled her in the private high school run by Kate Sloan College. There were only twenty-five people in her graduating class, and my mother hadn’t liked a one of them. “They were all snobs,” she’d say. “They all thought they were better than me because I was an orphan.”
While Miss Feltner and her staff had always been good to her, my mother had never known what it felt like to have a family until she wandered into the House of Wax, the record store on Main Street, and found Nell working there when they were both seventeen years old. Although my mother was a little bashful and Nell had never met a stranger in her life, something clicked between them and they became instant friends.
(What was always left out of this story as told to me was that my mother was two months’ pregnant at the time. I was hidden beneath the supper table when my mother told all of this to Stella, with Stella’s knees an inch from my face. I don’t know why she didn’t feel me breathing on her legs.) “I just went wild that year,” Mom said. “I guess I felt like nobody loved me, and I wanted some attention, and I ended up pregnant by this boy who didn’t care anything for me, and I didn’t him either.” He left the day after their high-school graduation, never to be seen again.
Hearing this story filled me with a dull kind of grief. This was heavy knowledge for a little boy to carry, but we all have some kind of load like this as children, and we all bear it the best we can. All I could think of was Josie, and whether she knew.
Nell took Mom home with her, and that’s when Mom first saw Daddy. My mother liked to say, very often, that she had never felt as free in her entire life as she did that day. Sitting in Nell’s mother’s big red Buick, one arm propped in the open window as she watched the town slip away and the countryside open up on either side of them, like a green, busy hymnal spread out, its spine the road. High summer. “There were tiger lilies all down the side of the road,” she’d remember, and I imagined great orange-red waves that bobbed and swayed in the wind of the passing car. Nell’s house was out on the river and my mother had never been allowed out there before. Everyone she knew believed that if people didn’t live in town, they weren’t worth knowing. She did not agree.
They raced down the winding road, bouncing across the rickety bridge, plowing through the rising dust of the dirt road that led to Nell’s house. She sped around this curve and that one until she came to a jaunting stop near a small white house.
“This is it,” Nell said and when the dust fell away, settling on the big leaves of the big trees all around the yard like sifted flour, my mother stepped out of the car.
And that’s when she first saw my father. He was bent into the engine of his truck, with no shirt and grease smeared up his arms. He wiped his hands on his pants and shook her hand, smiling. “I knew, right then,” Mom said when she looked back on that day.
Meeting Nell and Daddy’s own mother, Yvonne, was almost as good. Yvonne was a tall, long-fingered woman who was always in motion. Her husband had been killed in World War II, and she had found no need for another man in her life. “I got by just fine without him,” she liked to say. She died before I was old enough to remember her, but was always a legend in our family.
After supper, my mother insisted on helping with the dishes. Afterward, they all sat on the porch drinking sweet tea, and Nell and Yvonne sang hymns to the gathering dusk. Yvonne kept an orange-and-black Gibson guitar propped up on the porch glider, which she snatched up before every song to strum out the key they would sing in, a capella. They closed their eyes as if no one else was there and harmonized what Yvonne called “gloaming songs,” which is where my mother first heard her favorite word. They sang:
“Now the day is over, night is drawing nigh;
Shadows of the evening steal across the sky.
Now the darkness gathers, stars begin to peep;
Birds and beasts and flowers soon will be asleep.”
While they sang, my mother thought she might have stumbled upon some enchanted place where people sang when they wanted to, and laughed while they were together, and actually enjoyed one another. She had never witnessed such a thing in her whole life. “And Lord, their voices,” Mom said every time she recalled that evening. “It was almost too much to bear, it was all so good.” By the time they started singing “Softly and Tenderly” to the graying world, she couldn’t help it: she started singing with them. For the first time in her life, she didn’t care if she was a good enough singer or not. She just wanted to sing, and when she did, Yvonne and Nell both smiled and nodded to her, egging her on
until she sang with complete abandon.
When the song was over, Yvonne told my mother she was welcome to their home anytime. “We’ve eaten together, and we’ve sung together,” she said, “so we’re family now.”
Then Yvonne grabbed the Gibson and sang “You Are My Flower” with her eyes closed, her left hand sliding up and down the fingerboard like an expert guitarist.
Later that night, my mother thought of what Yvonne had said about them being family. She lay in the twin bed across from Nell’s, unable to sleep because of her joy.
After only a few visits, she found herself sitting on the back porch with my father, alone. “We talked about everything,” she’d say.
He was already crazy over her by the time she told him that she was three months’ pregnant. So there was no turning back. “He said it didn’t matter,” Mom told Stella. “He said the past was the past and that everything would be fine. He even said he’d treat the baby just like his own. He promised.” Stella leaned forward, causing her knees to loom dangerously close to my face. “And did he?” she asked. Apparently my mother nodded. “Well, that’s all anyone can ask,” Stella offered. (Was it possible that something so large was handled so simply? With my father it was. When he loved someone, that was all that mattered. Mom had turned eighteen and was able to leave the orphanage, so it was all decided. Besides, he had some news of his own: he had already enlisted.)
My parents were married in my grandmother’s living room. I have studied the picture of that day many, many times. They’re both looking right into the camera, leaning into each other. Already they are a part of each other, as if shoots of light are evident there between them, connecting them. My mother is wearing a straight blue dress (there is no sign of so much as a bump, much less a pregnant belly) with a white rose corsage pinned high above her heart. She has a stiff white collar and high heels, and her face looks exactly the way it did when she was dancing. My father is a movie star in a plaid blazer and tan slacks. He looks like Paul Newman and has pennies in his loafers. What I love most is the way they are holding hands, like people in an old painting: his palm out as if cupping a cool drink of water, my mother’s hand lying atop it, straight, yet relaxed.