A Big Storm Knocked It Over (20 page)

“Don't be so ridiculous. Motherhood swallows a person. The other day I went to talk to this corporate guy about a party, and I realized he was staring at me. I was wearing my big hat with the flowers on it. I was in ecstasy—all alone with a
grown-up!
”

“Life is too complicated,” Jane Louise said. “I don't like to be complicated. It makes me nervous.”

“It's been complicated, and you've been nervous, since the first day I ever met you,” Edie said. “You've managed to have a pretty good time. Let's go home.”

They walked for a while in the warm spring air, and then they parted. Both of them had errands to do. They had been instructed to go home and not meet the babies in the park—this was their afternoon off, after all.

Jane Louise walked slowly through Washington Square. All along the east side of the park were parents with little children.
There were children everywhere, like swarms of birds. On the west side college students held hands, and unsavory types attempted to sell drugs.

Her anxiety came and went in little waves. She felt curious and light-headed with nothing to carry.

It was nearing the end of the academic year. Everywhere she looked students were lugging boxes of books, clothes, and standing lamps out of their dorms. She stood on the sidewalk and watched a serious young boy haul two duffel bags into the trunk of his father's car and dash into a building. His father, a gray-haired man with a wide chest and a linen sports jacket, was loading the trunk. Jane Louise stood perfectly still, blinded by the sunny glare. Hazy light poured down around her.

Someday Miranda would grow up and go to college. Day would follow day: She would lose her baby teeth. Her adult teeth would come in. She would go to school, learn to read, go to high school, have boyfriends, leave home. To her amazement, Jane Louise found herself in tears. Her throat got hot, and tears poured down her cheeks. She felt powerless to brush them away or to move.

The gray-haired man walked past her, carrying a pair of suitcases. When he saw her, he stopped and set his cases down.

“Are you okay?” he said.

“I was just thinking about my child going to college,” Jane Louise said.

“How old is your child?” the man asked gently.

“Just five months old,” said Jane Louise, and she began to sob. “You must think I'm a nut.”

The man looked at her thoughtfully. “When my kid went to sleep-away camp for the first time, I wanted to lie down in the driveway and eat dirt,” he said.

Jane Louise looked up at him. He filled her vision entirely. The
hazy sunshine swirled around them. She grabbed his wrist and kissed his hand. He was wearing a beautiful gold watch.

“Thank you,” she said. “Oh, thank you.”

Then she collected herself, The man picked up the suitcases.

“It'll be all right,” he said. “You'll grow into it.”

“Thank you,” said Jane Louise again, and she began almost to run in the direction of home.

At the end of June they went to Marshallsville. Eleanor had found a crib at a rummage, which she put into a shady, underused room at the back of the house near the guest room where Teddy and Jane Louise slept in the ornamental bed. Jane Louise packed one large case of crib blankets, bumpers, crib sheets, and stuffed animals.

Teddy, who had bought a secondhand car from a colleague, drove up one afternoon with Mokie, drove down again, and then he and Jane Louise packed. They strapped Miranda into her infant seat and took off. A few days later, Mokie, Edie, and Tallie would appear to stay in the rented house of the appalling Paul and Helene Schreck.

Jane Louise sat in the car looking out the window and dreaming. This would be her first summer as a mother. She would take Miranda to the lake in the afternoon, when the sun was not so fierce, and she would hold her tight and walk her into the water. She would nurse Miranda in Eleanor's old rocking chair.

Having a baby in a small town made all the difference. She was no longer some transient friend of Edie's, or Eleanor's daughter-in-law: She was the mother of a child—a Marshallsville child. She had gained citizenship. People who had never spoken to her before now spoke to her: A baby provided a common language. If Jeanne Pugh at the hardware store had never said more than hello, she now quizzed Jane Louise on Miranda's development, and compared notes with her. People she barely knew now began to say things like: “Why don't you and Teddy start thinking about moving up here? Old Mrs. Burner's house is for sale, and the Phillips want to sell, and there's that nice house on the river—it's a little damp, but it has that view.”

Down at the beach, the lifeguards—all college girls—greeted her warmly and cooed over Miranda. Late in the afternoon Peter, who was Miranda's godfather, would stop by, pluck her from Jane Louise, and dip her tenderly in the water. It often seemed to Jane Louise that this life, so orderly and well arranged, had parted just an inch and let her in.

Her companion on the beach was Teddy's godchild, Harriet, who said she did not want to be called Birdie anymore. She was now nine, still skinny, freckled, and somewhat clumsy, although Jane Louise could see that she would develop into a great beauty. Her deep hazel eyes were framed by very dark lashes. Her mouth, for such a young child, was soulful. Her years of struggle were written all over her. She had finally learned to read, slowly and painfully. She loved Jane Louise because Jane Louise so openly adored her, and because Jane Louise seemed genuinely not to care whether she read or not. When Miranda was asleep in the shade, covered with a little net tent Teddy had rigged up, Jane Louise and Harriet sat side by side at the picnic table sketching.

At ten o'clock three mornings a week, Harriet was delivered to Jane Louise. Beth and Peter's enormous van drove up, and out jumped Beth, who even in the morning looked pulled together, cheerful, and eager to meet the day. Laura and Geneva, in white shorts and blue shirts, their brilliant hair pulled back by black headbands, jumped out with her. They were pink and gold, blooming, with rosy cheeks and bright brown eyes. Jane Louise, who never slept through the night even if Miranda didn't wake up, felt old, wrecked, exhausted.

Last of all was Harriet, still called Birdie by her mother, who was constantly saying: “I'm sorry, Harriet, I forgot.”

Harriet was a bit disheveled and barefoot. Her eyes were cast down, and her sisters appeared to be glad to off-load her. They were going to Heathfield to buy shoes and to go to the library.

Jane Louise's heart opened like a flower. Going to the library had always filled Harriet's heart with dread. Even her little sister had been able to read when she could not. She had been surpassed on every side. Jane Louise knew that feeling of exclusion, of being weird and odd, of never quite fitting in. When she saw it in Harriet, it brought out a fierce, protective streak—the same fierce love she felt for Teddy and Miranda. She wanted to hurt anyone who had hurt them, and when she saw Beth, Laura, and Geneva, so effortless, so fitting, she wanted to take bony, beloved Harriet into her arms and cover her with kisses. She put her arms around her husband's goddaughter.

“You two look alike,” said Laura, who was twelve. “Don't they, Mom?”

“Our Birdie is a little changeling,” Beth said with a tender smile.

It never ceased to amaze Jane Louise what people said out loud.

“I think she looks like her daddy,” Jane Louise said, pulling her close. “She has those beautiful hazel eyes.”

Laura peered at her sister, whose eye color had never been of much concern to her. Harriet was not much fun for Laura, who had a red-blooded competitive spirit and found Harriet useless to compete with. Instead she fought with Geneva, who was very advanced for six.

They drove off, leaving Jane Louise alone with Harriet and Miranda. The day was hers. She breathed in the clean air. In front of her was a long stretch of almost peaceful time, even if the house she was living in had never been hers, and this countryside was hers on loan. She could actually say: “This is my daughter and my goddaughter.”

She would lend Harriet her straw hat, and Miranda would wear her tiny piqué sun hat. Together they would go down to the beach. With Miranda in her arms and Harriet by her side, Jane Louise might even feel—if just for a second—that she was here by some sort of right.

On the Fourth of July, Edie and Mokie served a big celebratory lunch on the unstable, wrecked, splinter-strewn porch of Paul and Helene Schreck's house. Edie's brother Fred, his wife Stephanie, and their two perfect boys had threatened to come up and then changed their minds. Jane Louise could never figure out why Edie still never got to stay at her parents' house: Fred and Sam had first dibs. Even though Edie was far better off renting, it made Jane Louise angry that Edie so easily submitted to putting up with being just a girl, but that was Edie's style, and the form her rebellion took was never to ask for a thing.

Fred was tall and bony, with a big political agenda. He had been in the district attorney's office and had then run successfully for Congress. It seemed to Jane Louise that the entire family had run for Congress. Even the small Steinhaus children seemed preternaturally well behaved.

It was Mokie's opinion that these children, too, had had speechwriters hired for them. He particularly detested Fred, whom he considered an unreconstructed racist. Nevertheless, he
forbore him and tried in the gentlest possible way to make him very uncomfortable. He had found that any allusions to himself and Edie sharing the same bed caused Fred to squirm and his flesh to creep.

As for Edie, her present preoccupation was the unabated dire state of the Schrecks' housekeeping. Their kitchen was most unsanitary. She had found moidering vegetables in the refrigerator and fetid potholders that had been torn to shreds by mice. It was clear that only the most cursory cleaning job had been done before they arrived. Helene Schreck had told Edie more than a dozen times how wonderful it was that Paul would, at great peril to his back, bring down the crib for them. Naturally, when they arrived, the crib was in the attic, and a note had been left saying that Paul's back had gone out at the last minute.

No complaints could be lodged against the Schrecks, however, since their son was Fred's congressional assistant. As for Beth and Peter Peering, they had only a bare idea who the Schrecks were: The Schrecks belonged to that segment of Marshallsville life that had no interaction whatsoever with the locals, but lived in a kind of bucolic, hermetic jar in which they saw and socialized with other weekenders and only knew the locals as tradespeople.

After lunch the babies took their naps at the lake, and the adults went swimming. It was the perfect Fourth of July: hot, breezy, and clear. The sky was a deep, deep azure.

At six o'clock everyone collected on the town green for a chicken barbecue, and then began the exodus to Ford Bridge Racetrack for the annual fireworks. Jane Louise and Edie had packed cupcakes and a thermos of iced tea. Mokie brought a six-pack of beer, and Teddy toted several enormous bags of potato chips.

They spread their blankets on a hill overlooking the racecourse.
From where she sat Jane Louise could easily see a dozen people she knew. Teddy probably could identify everyone from Marshallsville. He explained that even the seating was traditional. The Marshallsville contingent usually occupied the hill and slope. The people from Heath seemed to prefer the meadow near the track. The Avesbury crowd sat on the plain opposite the hill, and the rowdy teenage boys from Gloucester milled around on the racetrack itself, setting off squibs and roman candles. Slowly, slowly the light began to fade.

Teddy sat with one arm around Harriet and the other around Jane Louise, who held their drowsing baby in her arms. Next to her sat Edie with Tallie in her lap, then Mokie. The Peerings sat behind them.

“I hope the noise won't wake them up,” Edie said.

“These babies would sleep through a hydrogen bomb attack,” Teddy said. “It's the little things that wake them up, like telephones ringing, and sneezing.”

It seemed that it would never be dark enough—the light failed so slowly.

“If it doesn't start soon, I'm going to pass out,” Edie said.

“I think it's nice just to sit here,” said Jane Louise.

“You're transparent,” Edie said. “I can read your mind. You're sitting here thinking how steady it all is, and that you really don't belong here.”

“I married in,” Jane Louise said. “I'm just a poor wayfaring stranger.”

“Oh,
please,
” Edie said.

“It's easy for you to say,” Jane Louise said. “You grew up here.”

“I was a weekender, honey doll. A summer person. A snappy New Yorker from a private school.”

“Don't I wish,” Jane Louise said.

“No, you don't,” Edie said. “You just be happy being your own moved-around, anxious self. The world isn't going to fly apart.”

“Really?” Jane Louise said.

“What are you two muttering about?” Mokie said.

“Anxiety,” Edie said.

“Oh,
that,
” said Teddy. “Look alive! It's about to start.”

A great boom echoed over the hill, and a point of light burst into a shower of green sparkles, which then burst into tiny silver stars. Jane Louise held her breath. These things never lost their charm for her. She gasped.

Fireworks, in Sven's opinion, were exactly like sex. “First there's the waiting, right?” he had said. “Lead-up, tension, a brilliant release. Just like the act itself.”

As she sat next to Teddy, her leg pressed close to his and their baby breathing softly on her lap, on the same hill from which Teddy had seen these fireworks almost every year of his life, Jane Louise contemplated this.

Around her the dark sky hung like a curtain. In back of her Lynn Hellman's children were making rude noises. Under the tree, the Paulings, a couple in their late seventies, sat peacefully, holding hands. They were Marshallsville's great love story: married to others, madly in love for years and years, they had been widowed around the same time and had finally married in the Congregational Church and were now never seen apart. They seemed perfectly happy; everyone said how patiently they had waited for each other. He was tall, gray haired, and smoked a pipe. She was willowy, gray haired, and languid. For years he had been the headmaster of the Heath School. It was not hard to imagine them as lovers.

Jane Louise leaned her head against Teddy's shoulder. She had heard about the Paulings for years. She did not find this story
sweet. She thought about the years and years in which the Paulings were not married to each other but suffered in secret. How fraught their lives must have been, but now the world had settled down and made for them—for an instant—a kind of peaceful sense.

She watched the sky light up and flash. She watched the sparkling drops that burst into brilliant sprinkles and disappeared into the velvety sky. It was magical: that deep, echoing noise, that glowing tension, that unexpected, magnificent, beautiful release, like the unexpected joy that swept you away, like life itself.