I felt slapped. Right in front of Joel.
“Joel, I’m afraid I have some chores for Marnie to get to. Nice to see you.” She literally escorted him to the door. I couldn’t believe it! Not even allowing Joel a moment to say good-bye. She was acting as if Joel were a dust kitten she needed to sweep out.
“See you, Marnie,” said Joel, and he left quickly, shutting the door behind him.
“Mother, how could you? You were positively rude. What’s wrong with seeing a movie with Joel? Joel is a super person. He’s very important to me. And just because the Petersons are coming to dinner! Mother, they come all the time.” What would Joel say to the senior girl he’d call next to go to that movie with him? I thought about dating a sophomore girl once, but she had to have her mother’s—no, make that Mommy’s—no, Mummie’s—permission to go anywhere.
I angrily brushed away tears, swallowing a lump in my throat. How could Mother be so thick? So unsympathetic?
She didn’t seem to notice my tears or hear my complaints. “Set the table for six, Marnie. Use that beautiful slubbed woven cloth we got from the weaver in Tennessee. And the wooden-handled knives, forks, and spoons.”
“But—”
“There isn’t time for arguing, Marnie. Set the table.”
Maybe because there are just three of us, two grownups and one daughter, we don’t have many arguments. We get along. My mother’s first rule is, If you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all. Every now and then we have a long silence. Mostly we shrug off the hurts and annoyances and go on being pleasant.
So I didn’t have the background to yell at my mother. I’d never done it before.
But then, she’d never thrown out my almost boyfriend before, and refused me my first really truly date.
I would just as soon have smashed the plates as set the table with them. “Mother, what’s so important about this dinner?”
The Petersons come over a lot. Mr. Peterson and my father work in the same brokerage firm and Mrs. Peterson and my mother are old sorority sisters who like to have coffee in the mornings and talk about setting up a kitchen enterprise, the way energetic superwomen in the magazines do. But nothing ever came of it.
My mother was a whirlwind in the kitchen, which was very unusual. She likes to cook, and does it slowly and methodically—says it’s a deep pleasure and shouldn’t be rushed. That night she whipped through the preparation of an involved meal in a fraction of her normal speed. And she wouldn’t answer my questions. She wasn’t being obstructive: She just seemed to have her mind on fifty other more important things.
Nothing has ever been more important to my mother than me. Yet I had the distinct feeling that I was at the bottom of her thoughts, that she’d brushed me out the way she’d removed Joel.
“Not five plates, Marnie. I said six. Lucas is coming, too.”
“Lucas! You know I detest Lucas.” It was the ultimate blow! To be forced to exchange an evening with Joel for one with Lucas.
“I know nothing of the sort. I just know that you and Lucas are involved in this.”
“Involved in what? Are we all plotting the perfect crime?”
My mother laughed gaily. She took my face in both hands and kissed the top of my nose with a queer tenderness. “No, baby. The perfect life.”
Maybe they were arranging a financially intelligent marriage between Lucas and me. One that would produce genetically satisfactory grandchildren for them.
But I was finding it hard to breathe. Goats and strawberries.
Lucas just knows my weak spots, I told myself. He knows that nature is something I detest, so he made that up to shake me.
I set the plates down carefully, because I was still tempted to break them and they were too beautiful. Thick, handmade pottery my mother had acquired on each of the long southern weekends. Lovely, lacy wildflowers had been pressed into the wet clay before baking and glazing, and the plates had an ethereal suggestion of meadows in bloom. If they were mine, I’d keep them on a shelf to look at, but Mother likes to use her good things.
Cork trivets for the casserole in the oven. This was made of soybean mush, fresh tomatoes, peppers, and three cheeses, and it tasted exactly like lasagne, so I always wanted to know why we couldn’t just go ahead and have lasagne. Mother would say irritably, “Marnie,” as if my name were a nutritional explanation.
I tossed the huge salad: lettuce, sprouts, bits of red cabbage, tomatoes, green peppers, onion, raw cauliflower, and broccoli. I wrapped the whole wheat rolls in the cotton cloth my mother embroidered for wrapping rolls in. ROLLS, it says.
The sight of the embroidery suddenly made me understand something. A pattern to my mother’s life.
I don’t think I had ever really thought about her life before. I guess I thought that grownups, and my parents in particular, were “done.”
Cooked, so to speak.
Isn’t the definition of a grownup “finished”? Not dead-type finished, but polished-type finished, as in—well, you know. Done.
Done growing up, done changing, done fretting about “life” or “truth,” because you were there. Wherever “there” was.
But Mother never got “there.” All that decorating. All that floundering between the perfect houseplant and the perfect club. All those coffee hours talking. All those books about every subject under the sun. All those peculiar skills she would suddenly learn—from Aran-style knitting (I got a gorgeous pullover from that stage), to dying her own wool, to an abortive stab at stained glass window-making. All those causes—everything from Save the Seals to the Bloodmobile, and none of them sticking with her.
She’s there, I thought. Whatever is coming tonight is what she really and truly wants.
It was like standing on a cliff, and knowing your mother would pull you right over the edge with her if she thought it was right.
But the doorbell rang, like Mr. Ricks’ whistle, and startled me out of my thoughts.
Chapter III
FOR THE VERY FIRST time in my life, Mr. Peterson did not say hello by telling me he was indubitably honored by reacquainting himself with my charming presence. He actually hugged me. “Hey, girl! Ready to roll?”
Mr. Peterson? Slang? Affection?
Mrs. Peterson hugged me, too, which wasn’t unusual, but this time she said absolutely nothing at all (which was impossible, she must have had her larynx removed) and just looked at my mother with glistening eyes.
Lucas slunk in behind them, looking as if he were hostage to a pair of untrustworthy revolutionaries in some disease-ridden hole of a country. “I was in the middle of a good book,” he told me, snarling.
He thought he’d had to give up something for this dinner!
“They tell you yet?” he said.
Everybody but me knew exactly what was going on. They all looked at me gently, as if I were a sweet, small child who couldn’t be expected to understand, but they loved me anyway. “No,” I said.
And then my father came bounding in from the office. My father, who usually dragged home, sagged on a chair, to listen to the news with all the enthusiasm of one hearing coffin nails hammered. He picked me up and swung me around the way he used to when I was tiny and liked to hide in the linen closet before bedtime. “We got it, honey, we got it!” he said gleefully. He dropped me, hugged Mother, hugged each of the Petersons, including Lucas, who nearly died, and everybody laughed.
Everybody except Lucas and me.
I could not recall having anything in common with Lucas before. “Tell me,” I demanded.
“I think we should have our dinner first,” said Mother. “When we’re relaxed and full and calm, we can talk at our leisure and make things absolutely clear without omissions.”
“What a good idea,” said Mrs. Peterson, “Now, Marnie, I want you to start calling me Aunt Ellen. And Mr. Peterson Uncle Bob. From now on meals are going to be a family affair and we have to set a precedent, don’t we?”
They all giggled again.
The Petersons, giggling. It was one for the books. Elegant, wordy, staid, and giggling.
Lucas played with his casserole. My stomach was knotted so badly I couldn’t even eat the hot rolls with sweet butter. (“Margerine,” says my mother, “is an unnatural food. We eat what God set on earth for us to eat and our bodies will be healthier for it.”)
I know what it is! I thought suddenly, and the mouthful of salad went down after all. We’re buying a weekend place in the Smoky Mountains. Probably can’t afford it except as a joint expense. “It” must be the special A frame or log cabin they’ve been yearning for.
A weekend vacation house. I didn’t mind that. I might even go once or twice, when I didn’t have anything special to do here at home. As long as Susannah could come along, of course. Otherwise, what would there be to do in the country?
And that explained all Mother’s excitement: another place to decorate.
I sighed with relief, and then I became aware that the entire table was silent and looking at me again. Even Lucas—with a sort of pity and interest which was a perfectly infuriating combination.
“You’re a spinning top, Marnie,” said my father gently. “We love you, very very much, but we don’t love your frenetic life or your jumble of worthless activities. We feel you’ve become alienated from the way of life we want you to have.”
Worthless activities? Did he mean cheerleading, or special chorus?
“And you, too, Lucas,” said my father, facing Lucas, who flushed. “Caught up in all sorts of goals and values that just don’t matter. Urban city-type feelings we don’t want in our precious children.”
I set my fork down, little waves of worry breaking over me.
“We’ve been waiting to hear whether we got the land we wanted. Several other people were bidding on the farm and we couldn’t say much until we knew for sure. But today our lawyer called from North Carolina and right now the Petersons and the MacDonalds are the joint owners of a two-hundred acre farm.”
For weekends, I told myself. For July.
“For all of our sakes, Marnie, for yours, mine, Ellen’s, and Bob’s, your mother’s, and Lucas’s, we’re leaving the city. No more rat race. We’re going back to the land. The six of us. Together.”
Chapter IV
“WHAT DO YOU MEAN, back to the land?” I said.
My tongue felt like soybean mush. A substitute.
“Real honest farming,” said Mr. Peterson. Uncle Bob. It was astonishing how his affected vocabulary had dropped from him, as if it had been a disguise no longer needed. “A mule and some goats and a flock of hens for eggs. Our own woods to supply our own firewood. Water from our own springs. Strawberries fresh from our own field. Asparagus rows, orchards, vegetable patches, fields of corn.”
“A mule?” I repeated. I don’t believe this, I thought. A mule? An hysterical giggle began to percolate in my chest. What would I say to Joel, for whom civilization was downtown?
“We’ve wanted to get out of this life for a long time,” said Mrs. Peterson. Aunt Ellen. “But we just couldn’t see our way financially.”
“But now we’ve got our land,” said my mother in jubilation, as if her candidate had just won the presidency and inflation would end in sixty minutes. “And we’ll be selling the microwave ovens, the televisions, the blenders, the stereo sets. We,” she said, and she actually took Aunt Ellen’s hand across the table and clasped it tightly, “we are going to be free.”
“Free from what?” I said.
“The demands and burdens of city life,” said Uncle Bob.
“I told you so,” said Lucas.
I hate people who say I told you so. Especially in Lucas’ stupid newborn foghorn. “I know a good shrink you could go to,” I said to my father. “Psychiatrists are all the rage now. Maybe that’s what you need.”
He gave me a funny smile, “That’s what we’d need if we stayed, Marnie. But we’re getting out now. And most of all for your sake.”
For my sake?
“Look at Lucas, swept up by the need to score high on college boards, the need to be a National Merit finalist, the need to achieve ninety-five averages in math, the need to win every debate, the need to write term papers that would be acceptable in college. His whole life is a book and a desk. And you, Marnie! Unable to survive without your television comedies. Impossible to live with unless you get your daily overdose of Pepsi or Coke. You can’t function without shallow friends babbling on the telephone. Can’t appear in school unless you dress in exactly what everyone else has. We have to get you kids away, teach you something of the real, beautiful world, before you’re completely corrupted.”
If growing up is knowing when not to hit your head on a brick wall, I grew up quite a bit in that moment. I knew there was no use defending my activities, my friends, or my school. And it was definitely not the time to mention my pressing need for rhinestone-studded disco slippers.
I’ve got to make concessions, I thought desperately. Fast, because they aren’t kidding. This is no whim. Not a night course in stained glass ornaments. They mean this.
“I won’t watch TV anymore,” I said quickly. “It’s a good idea for you to sell the television. I should read more. And TV isn’t that important. I can understand—”
“Marnie,” said my mother, “it’s deeper than that.”
I knew how the sailors felt when Columbus told them, Oh, by the way, we’re planning to sail off the edge. Trust me. The world is round.
Trust them. Farming is fun. You, too, can own a mule.
“I still don’t see how you plan to get any money,” said Lucas. “I mean, even if everything grows and we raise our own food and heat with our own wood, we’ll still need money. We’ll have to buy shoes, and pay taxes on the land, and pay for the telephone and the electricity and the diesel fuel for the tractor.”
“One cash crop should cover the few needs we’ll have, Lucas. As for the telephone and the electricity, we aren’t going to have either one. We have bought a small Gravely tractor and a chain saw, but that’s about all that will need fuel.”
“A chain saw?” I said. “What is that? A medieval instrument of torture? You’ll chain us to a saw to make us cut wood?”
They howled with laughter. Good old Marnie, always in there with a one-liner. But nobody explained what a chain saw was.
For some time the adults spoke reverently about “the land.” Obviously country land was superior to city land, which lay under cement sidewalks and didn’t count. Uncle Bob told us how he had lived a life of quiet desperation, and finally, like Thoreau, had decided to live for truth and beauty.
“But I have an important debate coming up,” said Lucas. “And next year is my senior year. I have plans.”
“You’ll go to school in the country, Lucas. Probably a better system there anyway. But school doesn’t really matter. Your real education will be on the land. Coming to grasp nature’s plans and your place in them.”
Aunt Ellen said, “I’ve had conferences with your principal. Since you’ll be missing the last six weeks of school, you’ll be taking final exams week after next and because both of you have good grades, I expect there will be no problem getting credit for the whole year. Now, we won’t enroll you in school once we move, because we’ll need you working with us to get the farm started up. Next September you’ll start locally. But don’t worry about it. School isn’t a priority.”
“It is for me,” said Lucas.
Uncle Bob put an arm around his son. “This will be good for you, Lucas. I know you think you’ll miss something. But take my word for it. As a brilliant writer once said, ‘The reason they’re called lessons is, they lessen from day to day.’”
I thought about that. “What brilliant writer?” I said suspiciously.
“Lewis Carroll. In Alice in Wonderland.”
“That seems suitable,” I said. If anything had gone mixed-up, inside-out, and topsy-turvy, it was our lives, right this minute.
“Just think,” said my mo
ther dreamily. “Walking on thick green grass. Over our own meadows, along pine-needle paths in deep woods.”
“There’s more to farming than poetry,” said Lucas. “There’s manure, drought, crop failure, poor soil, insect attacks or blight, and—”
“And we’ll learn how to handle that sort of thing together,” said his father.
“What am I supposed to tell people at school?” I demanded. I could just see myself going up to Joel and Susannah and Eve and Kay and all Joel’s senior teammates, and telling them I was off to the southern mountains with Lucas Peterson, a mule, and lots of good honest dirt.
“Tell them you’re going to be free,” said my mother.
Lucas began to laugh. Obviously the thought of Marnie MacDonald telling Joel Fiori’s crowd that she was going to be free at last made his evening much better.
“Free,” I said. “If I were free I’d make a different choice.” And then I thought of Susannah. “Mother, I could stay with Susannah. Her parents wouldn’t mind.”
“Marnie, it is one thing to spend a weekend now and then with a friend. I assure you that her parents would not take on another child for several years. You are only fifteen. Anyway, the whole point of this is to get you away from here as well as us.”
“Isn’t it surprising?” said Aunt Ellen. “They’re so young. I would have thought the young could understand change better. Embrace change just for the sake of change.”
“The young,” said Uncle Bob, “often cling to familiarity.”
“The young,” said Aunt Ellen, “often—”
“Will you stop calling us the young?” said Lucas. “We are not a litter of something.”
“I want to know why you didn’t tell me?” I said. “Fifteen is old enough to be told about volcanic eruptions in one’s family. Fifteen is even old enough to be consulted.”
“We tried, Marnie. You wouldn’t listen. You kept rushing around, refusing to take the time to hear what we had to say. Frantically going from one thing to another in your empty life.”