All the Roads That Lead From Home (13 page)

He sipped
his coffee, and stared at it oddly. My mother came down the stairs slowly,
holding hard onto the hand rail. She looked sick, as if she had the flu or
something.

“What the
hell are you drinking?” she asked Harv.

“Coffee.”

She took
his cup, and examined it. “Oh, darling, you’ll have to do better than that if
I’m coming on board.” She ruffled his hair, and lowered herself carefully into
the chair next to his, and had a sip of the coffee. “Heavens! This
is
dreadful.”
She put the cup down. “Amelia, would you mind awfully? There’s got to be
something potable with my name on it.”

“Well,
Mary and I were about to go—”

“Christ.
Mary! I forgot all about Mary,” my mother said. Harv threw his thick arm around
her shoulder and pressed his chin to her forehead.

Then she
turned to me. Her eyes were bright and hard to look at.

“Sit down,
darling. There’s something I want to tell you,” she said.

My hands
gripped the back of the chair. “I’m busy right now.”

“This
won’t take long.” She sat up taller, and pulled her robe tight about her neck.
“Harv and I are going to spend a little time together. In California. That’s
what he came back to ask me, right? Isn’t that right, Harv?”

“Sure is,
sweetheart.”

She drank
again from his cup of coffee. There was something furtive about her then, like
a mouse cornered by a cat.

“And until
I get settled, you’ll live with your father,” she said.

“Are you
nuts?
”
Shouting felt good, it felt strong.

“It’s all
arranged. I’ve already spoken to him. This morning, in fact. He’s delighted to
have you.”

“I won’t
do it!”

My
mother’s face went still and flat, like when my father walked out the door with
his suitcase.

“Mary will
go back to her family, you’ll spend time with your father, and that’s that,”
she said.

Mary had
seen this coming. That’s why she’d been so weird with Harv. And then there she
was, right beside me, drawn out by my shouts. She fixed my mother with such a
firm stare that my mother looked away.

“She can’t
go back there,” I said. “And you’re
not
going to make her. You hear?”

“Hey, now,
take it easy. No need to get all bent out of shape,” said Harv.

“Shut up!”

“Amelia.
You apologize to Harv this instant.”

“The hell
I will!”

Harv
watched me. He started to look mean. Then my mother slumped, and massaged her
forehead with her thumb.

“What’s
the matter, baby, you got a headache?” he asked her.

“Terrible.”

“Aw,
babe.” He pulled her close. “You girls think you can bring this nice lady an
aspirin or something?”

Mary stood
still, her hands on her hips, and then she grabbed Harv’s keys and was out the
door. I was right behind her.

“Fuck
that,” she said.

“Totally
fuck that.”

She
already had the engine on by the time I got in. The van was a trash heap. I tossed
an old bag of French fries out the window, then wondered if maybe I shouldn’t
have, since we hadn’t had any breakfast. We veered down the driveway and
sideswiped my mother’s peony bush.

“You ever
drive before?” I asked.

“Not for a
while. I just need to get the hang of it again, is all.”

She
gripped the wheel like an old woman and peered through the filthy windshield.
When we reached the main road, she went so slowly that cars piled up behind and
honked.

She sped
up. We went around a wide bend, and when she didn’t slow down enough for it,
the tires squealed.

“Jesus!” I
said.

“I’m okay.
I got it now.” We went on, into the gray-black sky. At the edge of town she
went north, away from the lake and the willow-lined shore where we’d be spotted
in no time. We didn’t talk, because we were too busy trying not to think about
what we were doing.

Then the
rain broke loose. It splashed through the open windows, soaking us in no time.
I leaned my head out the window and let it pelt my face. Mary turned onto a
narrow country road, bordered by fields of grass. In the distance was an old
barn, leaning badly, its roof in a sag. I imagined a snug, cozy house where you
could live and not be bothered. When the rain stopped, the air shimmered, and
the drops that held on the blades of grass were so lovely I didn’t worry
anymore.

Ted and Nina lie in bed
and watch the moon rise over the desert like a single brilliant thought. He
says she’d understand if she’d only try, and she puts her finger to his lips because
in the world they have left behind—the rolling farmland of upstate New York—that same moon is shining on Lake Dunston and she’s restless, in a mood to
reminisce.

So she
tells him a story.

About a
Sunday afternoon in the late Sixties when she and her sister Ruth got stuck
waiting outside a cocktail lounge at Newark Airport. Inside the lounge were her
father and her Aunt Bip, drinking martinis. Bip was on her way back to Florida, and her flight was delayed. Ruth was sixteen, Nina was twelve.

Bip and Nina’s
father were talking about Ruth. Ruth was getting worse and plans had to be
made. She couldn’t return to the same school because she tried to seduce one of
her teachers and then pulled the fire alarm when he turned down her invitation,
and Bip knew of a place in Vermont that catered to “sensitive students.”

“Bip?”
says Ted.

“Short for
Barbara Penelope.”

“I’d have
changed my name.”

“To what?”

“An
alias.”

“A lie.”

Ted shakes
his head. “Always the straight shooter. Always the hard line.” In the glow of the
moon his face is so handsome. She runs her finger over the hard muscles of his
arms. Her kisses are quick, then slow.

“Show me,”
she says.

“What?”

“The hard
line.”

He holds
her close. After a minute he says, “You know I can’t.”

Nina turns
away. “Then stop taking them, for Christ’s sake!”

“We’ve
talked about this.”

“Maybe
just go off them long enough for me to get laid.”

“You’ll
get laid.”

“When?”

“He told
us. After a couple of months.”
Loss of sexual interest is the most commonly
cited side effect of anti-depressants
. Nina remembers little else of that
visit except the doctor’s white coat and the pattern in the yellow wallpaper
behind him—some sort of abstract petals that looked like fingers or tongues.

“What if I
quit you before then?” she asks.

“Then you
won’t get laid.”

“Not by
you.” She looks at the wall.

“Hey, come
on. Finish your story,” he says.

“No.”

“Come on.
I want you to.” The moonlight washes over them like an uneasy dream.

“Oh, all
right.”

Suddenly
Ruth clutched Nina’s arm. Three black men stood a few feet off, looking tired
and dazed, wearing afros and dashikis, with three guitar cases on the floor.
The
one on the end,
Ruth hissed.
That’s Jimi Hendrix!

Nina
didn’t believe her at first, but Ruth said no, she was sure because she’d just
seen a picture of him in a magazine. She rushed up and asked Jimi for his
autograph, and he dropped the pack of cigarettes he was holding, he was so
surprised. He picked it up and stared down at them until Ruth asked him again.
He found a piece of paper in one pocket, and a pen in another, and wrote
To
Ruth, all my love forever, Jimi.

“Do you
still have it?” Ted asks.

“Oh, no.
It got stolen. It was in her wallet, and someone lifted her purse.”

“Bummer!
What a story it would have made—Ruth the groupie, Ruth the underage lover, and
with him dead and that piece of paper, who could prove you wrong?”

Nina
leaves the bed and goes to the window, where the saguaro lift their arms to the
silver sky.

“Nina,
look, I—”

“It’s
okay.”

“Come back
to bed.”

“In a
minute.”

Soon his
breathing says he is asleep, and Nina remains by the window, remembering. Ruth
wears a feather boa and races across their lawn. She sings an aria on the roof
and her mother says,
Oh, for Heaven’s sake, Nina, stop it! She’s not crazy,
she’s just high-spirited.
Then Ruth calls from Vermont, where the snow
falls even deeper than in Dunston, and whispers,
it’s like being trapped,
sometimes I dream I’m stuck in one and can’t claw my way out.
Nina doesn’t
believe in ghosts, yet for a moment she is certain that Ruth is out there in
the desert, trying to find her way home.

***

Two years before the
desert, while the low September light drops into lake, Nina stops by the
Dunston Market. In the produce section, a tall, attractive man in a tweed
jacket stands with an orange in his hand. He considers it as if hoping it were
something better, maybe a peach or an apple. He even lifts it up for a better
look.

“Orange
you going to buy it?” she asks. At thiry-four, her affairs have become routine,
shabby episodes that end within a few months, and she sees nothing to lose.

Ted
considers her blue cotton dress from the hem up before his eyes finds her face.

“Nothing
rhymes with orange, you know,” he says.

“I know.”

“Smart
girl.”

“Orange
thief.” He’s put the orange in his pocket by then, making a lopsided bulge.

“You like
looking at a man below the belt, don’t you?” he says, and she blushes the way
she hasn’t since grade school.

They go
for drinks and talk. He’s in the history department at the university, a junior
colleague of her father’s though he hasn’t made the connection yet. She knew
him right away. He had the attention of the whole room at the last cocktail
party she went to with her father, a duty she performs to keep her father’s
social life alive since her mother seldom leaves home. Ted arranged the host’s
marble chess pieces to recreate the battle of Little Round Top during the Civil
War, which he does again there in the bar restaurant using salted peanuts. The
more he talks the more animated he becomes. His eyes shine, his finger tremble.

“And the
officer in charge, Joshua Chamberlain, used an esoteric maneuver, sending his
men down the mountain from the side, like a gate swinging closed, making the
Confederates think they were outnumbered,” he says. He stubs out his cigarette.
“He was a college professor, thrust into a brand new life. A much more exciting
one, I’d think.”

“You sound
jealous.”

“Who
wouldn’t be? To escape one’s life and the drudge of making a living.”

“In
exchange for getting shot at?” She’s aware that she’s smiling, her head
slightly cocked.

Ted
regards her. “You’ve heard this before, haven’t you?” he asks.

“Yes,
actually.”

“You’re a
former student, making me look silly for not remembering you.”

“I am a
former student, you’re right.” Though his embarrassment is charming she lacks
the heart to prolong it. “But not of yours, so don’t worry.” As she names her
father, his damaged reputation shows in the lift of Ted’s eyebrows—his heavy
drinking, a severely depressed wife, the one daughter’s possible suicide.

“He’s a
first-rate scholar,” says Ted. That’s true. Whatever else her father suffers,
his research skills have not.

Ted offers
her a cigarette. She declines. She tells a story of smoking as a teenager and
setting her bedroom trash can on fire by mistake. She is home alone at the time
and smothers the flames with a quilt her grandmother made years before. The
quilt is burned through its center and to hide the flaw, Nina keeps it folded
neatly on the end of her bed, with its good side always up. Later Ted says
she’s like that quilt, folded up tight, hiding her flaw and always showing her
good side.

He makes
it hard to. During their first year together he is often moody or sullen. She
keeps him going with good cheer, passionate love, steady support. He can’t get
promoted, can’t publish a good paper, can’t stand teaching to students who live
completely in the present.
Don’t just memorize facts! Imagine what it was
really like!
Then he embarks on a project he says will move him up the
ladder. He works in his study until late at night, pen to paper, the computer
unused. After weeks of being curious, asking what he’s doing, Nina enters the
study when he’s not there. She finds a photo of a Confederate soldier bought
for a dollar at an out-of-town flea market on their second date. And she finds
something else, a leather journal full of Ted’s handwriting. The first page
says,
Private Diary of Joshua Himes
,
25
^th
Virginia
Infantry.
The entries are dated during May and June, 1862. Joshua Himes is
feisty, given to wild desires, inventive—there are several passages detailing
an elaborate practical joke Himes plays on another soldier in camp, stealing
personal articles like his straight razor and his pipe, then returning them by
stealth until the soldier wonders about his own sanity. Himes talks about his
superior officers, complains about pain in his teeth and right foot, describes
the hard biscuits and tight jackets he must endure.