Even then I could tell that her anger was a mirror of her love. She loved Tommy so, and so did I, and my father did, too, although it was more complicated with the two of them. Everybody else liked him a lot, mainly in spite of themselves, except maybe the fathers of the girls he dated. He was good-looking, LaRhonda was right about that, but it was more the vitality of him, like a combination of heat and light he gave off. Once I had to find him in the high school hallways, when I’d missed the bus and had no way of getting home, and all I had to do was look for a big clot of kids in front of the lockers. There he was, right at the center.
“Hey, corncob,” he’d said, not denying me like most teenage brothers would, and the girls in the group smiled stupidly. He’s even sweet to his sister, they were thinking. “She’s something, isn’t she?” he added, looking around, then making a pistol of his finger and pointing it at one of the guys: “Hey!” A brother warning. No boy had so much as looked at me twice at that point except to ask to copy my math homework, and Tommy in the high school hallway was acting as though I was hot stuff.
When my mother finally spit out the story, in fits and starts, fits being the right word because she was ready to have one, I could just see Tommy in a borrowed canoe, pushing the oars through the murky floodwaters as his biceps knotted and smoothed out along with the motion. By the time he got to the house the rain had slowed down and my parents were looking over the flood insurance policy, which my mother always kept in the top drawer of her bedside table. Tommy had steered the canoe right into the hallway and left it there while he went upstairs to sleep. In the morning the canoe was sitting on the hall runner, and the runner was sitting on about three inches of silt. If my mother had been a different sort of person she would have cried.
It probably wasn’t the best time for Tommy to say that he’d enlisted, no coffee, no breakfast, two dead cows listed over like spotted dirigibles in the middle of the road. “I joined the Marines,” he said as he and my father looped a length of chain around a cow and towed it off to the side of the barn with the truck.
“So he wasn’t really in the canoe when he told you?” I said.
“My God, Mary Margaret, what does that have to do with anything?” my mother said as she scrubbed at the dirt on her lower kitchen cabinets and tossed me a sponge.
No one actually handled it particularly well, except for me because I knew to keep quiet. The worst was when Tommy came in from a trip to the barn, tracked mud into the back room that my mother had just finished mopping, and said, “Aunt Ruth says she’s thinks it’s a patriotic thing to do.” My mother dropped the mop so it made a sound like a gunshot when it hit the floor and went right out the back door even though it was still slick mud out there and she was wearing sneakers with a hole in the toe.
“Oh, Tommy,” I said.
“Come on, now, Miriam,” my father called out the door. You could hear my mother yelling as clear as the sky, which to mock us all had turned sweet baby blue with a big hot yellow ball of sun overhead, like it was saying, Rain? What rain?
“Remind me again how many children you’ve raised, Ruth,” my mother yelled.
What sounded like silence was probably Aunt Ruth replying in a normal tone of voice, but it didn’t last very long so she probably didn’t get to finish her sentence.
“Let me remind you of how I come by my opinions on this,” my mother continued. “I am the mother of these children and if you want to offer your opinions on how they ought to be raised and how they ought to behave then you can do it from somewhere else than the house you live in on my property, on my charity—”
“Oh, man,” Tommy said.
“Son, I should beat you with a stick,” my father said.
“I’d like to see you try,” Tommy yelled, and then there were two yelling fights going on until Tommy stomped out of the house and my mother slammed the door of Ruth’s house and they met in the middle of the gravel drive and walked past each other like they were strangers, or invisible.
“I need milk,” cried my aunt Ruth out the window, making me wonder if anyone in my whole family had a sense of when to shut up.
“We got a whole barn full of cows,” my mother yelled as she pushed past me. “Milk them yourself.”
There was nothing but silence that night through the heating vent. My mother wasn’t talking to my father, and neither of them was talking to Tommy, who went to Donald’s grandmother’s funeral with one of his friends instead of with us. Every once in a while we had to stop the truck so one of us could move something from the middle of the road that had drifted in with the water, and twice we passed cars that were just stopped where they’d been left. But as soon as we got out of the valley it was like nothing had ever happened. There were people cleaning their gutters, little kids running around lawns with balls and bats, one little girl sitting on her front steps blowing bubbles that broke pop pop pop on our car. I waved to her and she waved back.
There’d been trouble over hats: all our dark hats were winter hats, wool or heavy felt, and all our summer hats were hats for a happy day, with ribbons and artificial flowers. “We could not wear hats,” I said. My father got a look like, don’t, and my mother got a look like, dare you to say that again, so I didn’t say anything else.
My mother wore a black straw that she finally found, bent on one side of the brim, and said I could get away with a wide black grosgrain headband, which always gave me a headache. She thought black clothing was unsuitable for young girls, so I had to wear a navy blue dress with red polka dots, which I thought was even more unsuitable. Donald wore a gray suit jacket and tan pants, which didn’t look very good, either. He looked at me when he came past with his grandfather behind the coffin but he didn’t seem like he saw me. He was changed somehow, just by what had happened. He looked older, walking side by side with his grandfather, like they both were men. Donald’s mother walked behind the two of them, holding a handkerchief in her hand.
We were back in First Presbyterian, where we’d been after the flood, and the church smelled like old fried hamburgers and coffee burnt in the urn. Usually after a funeral there was a lunch downstairs in the church hall, but it was still a mess down there, and everyone from the valley was anxious to get back to their homes and clean up. There was another funeral that afternoon, too, but at the Baptist church, a man who had tried to outrun the flooding in his car, and failed. Donald’s grandmother hadn’t wanted to leave her house, but his grandfather had talked her into it. He hadn’t heard or felt anything when she tipped off the back of the boat into the moving water. She’d washed up near her own front steps.
“Did you get to say goodbye?” I asked Donald outside the church. I wasn’t really sure what that meant, but people were always saying it after they went to the funeral home, that they got to say goodbye.
“Not really,” Donald said. “Have you ever seen a dead person?”
“No,” I said.
“They don’t look the same. Plus somebody had to lend her a dress to be buried in. It didn’t look like the kind of dress she would wear.”
“She was a really good grandmother,” I said. I didn’t have any grandmothers myself, but Donald’s grandmother hung his shirts on the clothesline so carefully and was always making pies. When I would go over to the house during the summer she’d bring lemonade out to us at the wooden picnic table in the backyard. “What do you two have planned for the rest of the day?” she’d ask, as though maybe we were going to do something really exciting instead of sitting there smacking horseflies and being bored, talking about our summer book reports. I felt bad because sometimes Donald did his report and then he disappeared again, so it’d turn out that he’d written two pages about White Fang and it wasn’t even going to count for anything unless that was on the summer reading list at his other school, too. He was teaching me to play chess. “You’re getting to be good,” he’d said to me after a couple of weeks. “I know your grandfather wishes I could play, but I can never quite get the hang of it,” D
onald’s grandmother said. His grandmother was more the bridge type. When her bridge club met at her house she let us bring out the lunch plates. “Your grandson is quite the gentleman,” one of the ladies said once, and Donald got all pink but it was true.
“I didn’t expect Donald’s mother to be blond,” I said when we got home, and my mother snorted.
“She needs her roots done,” she said, hanging up my father’s suit.
“I feel bad for him,” I said. “He really really loves his grandmother. He talks about his grandmother and grandfather all the time but he hardly ever talks about his mother.”
My mother sat on the edge of the bed. She looked sad, suddenly, and tired, instead of mad the way she’d been since Tommy’s news. There were marks around the edge of her feet where her dress shoes pressed in, like watermarks on a boat.
She took hold of both my hands. “The next time you see Donald, you tell him, I know how much your grandma loved you. That always makes people feel better, hearing that. And in his case it’s true, too. That woman loved him to pieces.”
“I know how much your grandma loved you,” I repeated.
“That’s right,” my mother said.
But I didn’t get to do that because I didn’t have a real conversation with Donald again for close to ten years, and then it was in the middle of a busy city intersection and those words had gone right out of my head.
My aunt Ruth asked about the funeral when I brought her her dinner. “Meat loaf,” she said, and she didn’t sound pleased. She never sounded pleased about beef noodle casserole or chicken à la king, either, but she did seem to perk up at pork chops and ham. I guess she was a pig girl. Her parents had had some pigs, and a goat named Buster that got hit by a truck and died, but not before doing a good amount of damage to the truck. Whenever she talked about her childhood, my aunt talked about Buster and how he would follow her around like a dog, mouthing the skirt of her dress gently.
“That goat smelled to high heaven,” my mother always said, but not in front of Aunt Ruth because the two of them were hardly ever in the same room. When they needed to communicate with one another, they did it through me. Get your mother to have new heels put on these shoes. Tell your aunt not to put the heat on so high. Tell your mother those beans were tough as rubber bands. Let your aunt know she can go hungry for all I care.
My mother scarcely ever went to the little house behind ours where my aunt Ruth lived, and my aunt Ruth never left the house. I knew there had to have been a time when she did, because she’d gone to the high school and been sort of engaged, once, to a boy in her class who went to Italy during World War II and came back with a war bride. “Aunt Ruth’s heart was broken when her fiancé came home with a wife,” I said one night lying on the sofa after dinner, and my mother snorted loudly as though she’d never heard anything so foolish in her life. It was the way she’d snorted when my father had come home drunk one night from the Elks and recited a poem in the front yard. “Under a spreading chestnut tree the village smithy stands,” he shouted, and my mother stood in the doorway snorting.
“Pop, you’re embarrassing yourself,” Eddie had said, standing behind her.
There was a part about the smithy not owing anyone anything, and my father started to cry, and then he sat down in the dirt and Eddie brought him inside. “Leave him on the couch,” my mother had said. “I’m not sleeping with him in that condition.”
I was the closest thing my aunt Ruth had to the outside world. I dropped off her movie magazines and before I ate my own dinner I brought hers back to the tiny house down the driveway, where it stopped being paved and turned into a gravel path. My father plowed all the way back to Ruth’s house on snowy days and shoveled out the narrow overgrown walkway to her front door, which always seemed like a waste of time because Ruth wasn’t going anywhere. For a long time, when I was young, I tried to dream up ways to get her to leave the house, but after seeing her up in the attic during the big flood I was pretty sure it would never happen.
Donald used to visit her sometimes, too. He’d listen to her talk without starting to fidget or look at the door the way most people did. LaRhonda wouldn’t even go to her house. “She’s weird,” LaRhonda said. “She likes company,” Donald said. “He’s got nice manners, that boy,” Aunt Ruth said about Donald, “and I knew his mother so I can tell you they didn’t come from her.” She’d put out a glass of milk and two Oreos on a plate for each of us. Ruth’s rules, or one of them: she wouldn’t serve us tea, iced or hot, because she said it was a stimulant. She drank it all day long herself.
I spent a lot of time at her house over the years. We must have done a hundred jigsaw puzzles, pictures that the box said were by Monet and Degas or photographs of gardens and houses and barns like ours but nicer. As I got older the puzzles had more and more pieces, so that now we were working on the cathedral of Chartres with pieces so small that we kept losing them and finding them again in the folds of our clothes.
During the day when I was at school Aunt Ruth watched soap operas and read Reader’s Digest Condensed Books. She liked the ones by Mary Stewart and Taylor Caldwell. She said they were romantic. When I was in her house during the day, on weekends or if school was canceled because of snow, she turned off the TV and put her little bookmark, the one with violets pressed between plastic and a purple tassel at one end, into her book. I don’t know whether turning off the TV was her idea or my mother’s. My mother thought watching television during the day was as lazy as staying in bed if you weren’t sick. I never ever managed to get up early enough to bring my mother breakfast in bed on Mother’s Day. She’d wander in while I was putting a late daffodil in a juice glass and pour her own cup of coffee. “Just stay in bed until seven,” I told her once.
“Don’t be silly,” she’d said.
Aunt Ruth liked game shows, too. One day in second grade I hadn’t wanted to go to school because I realized at the bus stop that I hadn’t done the spelling homework. I pretended to run back for it and then I hid in the barn until I saw a flash of yellow pass by through the spaces between the warped old boards. Then I went up to Ruth’s house. She was watching The Price Is Right, yelling “twenty-nine cents” at a bottle of Windex. I don’t know why she thought she’d know the price of anything. She hadn’t been in the supermarket for years.
She startled when I came through from the kitchen. “No school for you?” She stood and peered out the window. “It can’t be a snow day.”
“It’s April,” I said.
“I’ve seen snow in April, smarty-pants,” she’d said as she clicked off the TV and the picture disappeared to a black dot. “I saw snow in May once. We built a snowman on the lawn, your mother and me. We gave him a tulip to hold, that’s how late it was.”
“Teacher conferences,” I said.
“I don’t have enough jam for both of us,” she’d said. My father usually brought Aunt Ruth her groceries. Sometimes there was a box of chocolate-covered cherries. Chocolate-covered cherries were my favorite things in the world. Later I figured out they weren’t so good—the cherries aren’t much like cherries, with a consistency more like a pencil eraser and that strange chemical sugary taste of the stuff that surrounds them. LIQUEUR, it said on the foil, but it wasn’t. I liked to bite off the top, suck that stuff out, then tap the cherry onto my tongue. They were special then, chocolate-covered cherries. Like shrimp were special. A shrimp cocktail was a big deal. Once LaRhonda’s parents had a party for their wedding anniversary. They had enormous platters of shrimp with hollowed cabbages filled with cocktail sauce, and Mrs. Venti had too many White Russians and called her husband a pig and tried to drive off in their Cadillac but couldn’t get it out of neutral. But all anyone really remembered was the shrimp.
There was one chocolate-covered cherry left that day, and Ruth gave it to me, which I knew was a real sacrifice. “If our place caught fire would you run down and rescue me?” I said.
“Your daddy would rescue you,” she said.
&nbs
p; He didn’t rescue me that night, after the school called and asked how come they hadn’t gotten a sick note. “I should paddle you,” my mother had said, but she sent me upstairs without chocolate pudding instead. “You know where she was all day,” I heard her say to my father.
My mother and my aunt Ruth were as different as two sisters could be. My mother was sturdy and strong-minded. She had short hair that got permed in town once a month, first thing in the morning after she got off her shift; she’d sit in the chair trying to kill the smell of the chemicals with a cup of strong coffee Patsy made her in the back room, right next to where she mixed the chemicals.
My aunt Ruth’s hair had natural curl, so that it waved around her face, and was the color hair is when you’re a grown woman who was blond as a little girl. She was thin and almost unnaturally fair, so that you could see a road map of bright blue veins running up her arms and legs and even beneath the surface of her face, with one vein running crosswise on her forehead and disappearing at the corner of one eye. Once I said that maybe Aunt Ruth didn’t like the outdoors because she was afraid she would burn—it was a night when I was sleeping with no pajama top and a back full of Bactine because I’d stayed by the pool at LaRhonda’s house too long—and my mother said, “Don’t be silly, the woman used to sit out at Pride’s Beach all day long in summer in a swimsuit.” There was a whole big story in the way she said it, like maybe she was off working or studying or helping her mother while her sister was lounging by the cool water, sunning herself. But it was hard for me to imagine—not the part about my mother, but the part about Ruth out in the wild. When I was younger Aunt Ruth and I had practiced having her leave the house; I would stand at the end of her little walkway with my arms open and a big artificial smile on my face, a school picture smile. One day she managed to take two steps through the door and onto the slate pavers, then said, “Oh, goodness, no,” and backed inside.