Anywhere But Here (42 page)

“We’d each like another tart,” I said. “Two more. And two more cups of your good coffee.” That brought us both back to normal. We laughed and laughed. Adele lowered her voice the way she does when she’s joking around, trying to be stern, saying, “Carol, you really shouldn’t have,” but we both wanted more. She slapped her behind. “Why not?” It was our last day of vacation. We were going home tomorrow and then Adele would leave for college. We had plenty of money, extra. We felt like rich girls. And we didn’t worry about weight or health or any of that yet either. We were young. And we were both pretty enough the way we were, we knew that. I was married already. That was the least of our worries.

He brought the coffee first in nice china, with pink morning glories painted on the cups. We poured the cream in, it was that old-fashioned heavy cream, almost brownish, and it just swirled and swirled. We watched it a long time, longer than ever needs be. But then we had the time.

For a while everything seemed to be going good with us. Hal really did seem okay, except in school. We had the trailer at Pine Mountain and we went up every weekend skiing. For once, Hal and Jimmy agreed on a sport and Hal could do it. Ted and your
mom drove up, too, and stayed in the lodge, we’d always end up there together. You got to be a good little skier, you had your white bunnyfur jacket, remember your mom bought you that? She took a lot of flack for it, believe me. Gram, everybody, thought she would spoil you.

She and Ted and Jimmy and I were all drinking in the lodge bar the night when we found out Hal broke his arm. Your mom and Ted tried to keep apart a little and have their own social group, but they really couldn’t. It was small enough so everybody knew everybody. We each sort of liked someone else. I sat on Paul Shea’s lap in that cocktail lounge. Jimmy flirted too, with Barbie Shea. That’s really as close as we ever got to anything risqué. But we were all there together, so nothing too much could ever happen.

And one of those nights in the bar, they came and told us Hal broke his arm. Safety patrol was up bandaging him on the slope and they’d have to take him to the hospital for a cast. It was that night skiing—I never liked it. It wasn’t safe.

So Hal couldn’t ski that whole winter he had the cast. We still drove up every weekend, we had a whole social life there by then, and Hal moped around in the trailer. You were a little wizard. You were a real good skier, jumping down those moguls. Well, Ted was good, and he’d taught you. Benny really couldn’t keep up and he was always naturally so good at any sport. But I remember him maneuvering his snowplow. You used to dare him onto the tough slopes with you.

One night we were in the lounge and you came in to find your mother because you’d hurt your nose. You kids had been playing on those metal bars for the lines in front of the lift pass windows. You used to twirl on them like monkey bars and I guess you were turning and you just smacked your nose, hard. You had your hand over your face when you ran in.

Of course, your mom got hysterical. “Oh, no, what did you do to yourself? You’ve ruined your nose.”

She held your face to the side and cried, it was ridiculous, we hadn’t been near so upset with Hal’s broken arm. She was sure your nose was broken and your whole life was down the drain
because now you wouldn’t grow up to be pretty and no one would want to marry you.

“I TOLD you not to play on those bars,” she kept saying.

“You did not.” By that time she had you crying, too, she’d convinced you that you’d ruined your chances for a decent life.

Ted and Paul Shea inspected you. They thought it wasn’t broken. Ted ordered your mom another drink. She wanted to call an ambulance and take you twenty miles to a hospital. Paul said they didn’t do anything for broken noses, anyway, they just had to heal. It’s a good thing Ted was there or God knows what she would have done. I told her, too, it probably wasn’t anything but a bump, but she didn’t listen to me. With your mom, you really had to be a man for her to listen.

She still thinks you broke your nose that night and that’s why she wants to get you a nose job. She blames us for not letting her call the ambulance. She begged me, Carol, tell her, tell her
you
did it and tell her how crooked her nose is. She doesn’t believe me. Well, it doesn’t seem crooked to me. I told her that and she just sighed, ogh, you know, like everyone’s against her.

We skied three winters and the year Hal broke his arm was the last time. That March, towards the end of the snow, when we thought there’d be one or, at the most, two more weekends, Hal skied. He knew he wasn’t supposed to. The doctor had told him time and time again. He still had the half cast and a sling on that arm. But he had to ski, he had to show he could do it with one arm.

We all saw him at about the same time. Your mom and I were in a chair lift together going down. We went on the high slope where I was scared to ski, but there was a lodge at the top and I’d wanted to go and have hot chocolate. So your mom had talked the lift man into letting us take it up and back again. We were the only ones on the whole lift going down, all the rest were empty chairs. That’s one thing your mom is great at, if you ever want to do something that’s not allowed, she can talk the person into it. She gets a kick out of it. Behind us, going up, Jimmy sat in another chair with Barbie Shea. Ted was giving a lesson at the top of the mountain, demonstrating the pole. He punched both poles
hard into the snow. Across from him a row of skiers copied. First we saw you and Benny, standing where the moguls were way too high for you. They were just a little smaller than you were.

“Oh, my God, look where they are, Carol,” your mother said, grabbing my arm. She leaned so far over the chair tilted and swung and we practically fell out.

You seemed to know you were over your heads. You both moved real slow, snowplowing around the moguls, leaning in so your skis were almost horizontal. You looked like you were afraid to look down. You were going first and Benny followed behind you.

“Now, don’t yell. Or they’ll get scared and then something
will
happen.”

“They should take their skis off and walk down. I’m going to tell them to do it. Ann,” she shouted. “Ann. Benny.”

The chair lift moved pretty quick though. You looked like you heard us but didn’t see where we were. All of a sudden, you were staring somewhere else and then we stared too.

There was Hal on an orange stretcher, with his cast on his chest and the other arm out in the snow. Three Red Cross Safety Patrol boys knelt bandaging his leg. We had to keep riding down the chair lift, we couldn’t get out. Ted was skiing down to him, neat smooth slalom jumps. He’d left his class, with their poles stuck in the snow, at the top of the mountain. You and Benny looked down and tried to steer towards him, but you could barely move as it was. Then I looked over my shoulder and I saw Jimmy. He was the only one who didn’t know. I saw his hat and the back of his head. He was getting ready to jump off the chair lift.

So then Hal had a broken arm and a broken leg and we didn’t ski anymore. He really had a hard time of it. That leg was in a cast eight months. He stayed out of school all that spring and I stayed home from the store, too. He mostly read and I’d watch television in the breezeway, but we would eat together. I liked having him home again. Sometimes Gram would walk over and have a cup of coffee with us. She’d bake a cinnamon ring or a blueberry buckle and carry it over warm, covered with a dish towel.

Then when Hal went back to high school, they took his
crutches away and kicked him down, those big boys. They could really be mean. And I don’t think he ever caught up after the time he missed for the leg. Then when he finally had the cast taken off, he got in with a bad crowd.

When Hal was a freshman he stopped writing his name. At first it just seemed like some stunt a teenager would pull—but he kept to it so darn long. Then pretty soon he didn’t write at all—even those tests with the little blue circles you fill in with a pencil, he turned them all back empty.

So they called us, they said specifically that both parents were supposed to come, so Jimmy and I went, one morning, and talked to the principal. They said Hal should see a psychiatrist and they wanted us to both go, too, the psychiatrist wanted the whole family. Now you read about that a lot, but I’d never heard of it then. Well, that was just too much for Jimmy. He banged his fist on the table and said, “No son of mine is going to any psychiatrist. There’s nothing the matter with him. The only thing wrong with him is he’s stubborn. And he’s lazy.” Jimmy took the truck and drove back to the water softener store. I apologized for him, but it didn’t really do any good. I walked down those halls and the sound of my heels echoed so. But Jimmy’s mind was made up. And when he gets like that, it’s no use trying to talk to him. What I remember now about that day are those stone hallways and that I was wearing a hat with a feather on it.

He started up with that Merry. We weren’t happy, no family would have been, really, I don’t think, if it was their son. It wasn’t just that she was poor, that wasn’t it. But she was dirty. That was really the thing. When Ben went out with Susie, it was a completely different story. We wouldn’t have said a thing if he’d decided to marry her. We would have been glad. And her parents weren’t rich either. They both worked. But they were nice people. Clean.

But with Merry’s family, it really wasn’t so good. You know, you hear things. Her mother was gone somewhere, I don’t know where, but she wasn’t dead. She lived somewhere up north, Escanaba maybe, working as a waitress. And the father drank. I
drove by the house once or twice on the way to the cemetery. They lived on Spring Street and their house was one of the worst. It was an old, gray house and all the basement windows were cracked. We heard that Merry had a sister who was sixteen or seventeen that the father had kicked out. She was living on her own, in an apartment above a store, and still going to the high school. Some at church said she was pregnant. So it wasn’t all the nicest.

We probably shouldn’t have said a thing. Adele used to call us and yell, DON’T tell him not to go out with her, that’ll just make him REBEL. Say, Hey, she’s a great girl. Have fun!

And then when he graduated, we thought at least he’d go to college and meet other people. You were still here, when Hal finished high school. We were all at the graduation in the gym, when he was number 563 in his class. Merry wasn’t going to college. She was
going
to stay at home and work in a shop. I think she ended up at McDonald’s. Whitewater wasn’t much of a school, but we thought he could at least get on his feet there. If he applied himself for a year he could transfer to the University of Wisconsin. But he drove back home almost every weekend and partied with the kids from high school. And that was all during Vietnam. So lots of them were signing up. Their parents couldn’t pay for college, so they went in and then when they came back, they had the GI Bill. Griling’s boy and all those Brozeks went into the service right after high school. Most all the kids around here signed up—the kids you and Benny played with, too. But see by then there wasn’t a war.

Well, in April or May, Hal came home and said he wanted to drop out. After Gram’s already paid for the whole semester. We tried to talk him out of it, we all did, Adele came over and talked to him for hours about college education, college education.

“So where did a college education get you?” he said. “It got you married to a college professor who left you with a kid to raise by yourself.”

Now God forbid if I said that, but when he did, she laughed.

We found out then, too, that he was flunking—Adele got that out of him, he didn’t say that to us, so that pretty much had to be the end of it. So we thought, he could come home and work for a
year or two and when he’d
grown
up a little he’d miss the fun of school and then he could go again and maybe apply himself more.

Then he let out the real bombshell. He wanted to get married to Merry. They were in a hurry. Well, that was almost worse than dropping out. That was permanent. Oh, did we fight. We did everything we could to talk them out of it. And for once we all agreed—your mom and I and Jimmy all thought it would be just dumb for him to marry her so young.

Gram didn’t like her either, but she wouldn’t say anything. She said he was hearing enough bad from all of us, she could just keep her mouth shut. But she hoped too that we could talk him out of it. “At least wait,” she used to say when I’d complain to her. I went over lots during that time and had coffee with her in the middle of the day. Hal was at the store, helping Jimmy. Jimmy thought if he wasn’t going to be in school and if he wanted to get married too yet, he’d better learn to earn his keep. And I think Jimmy worked him hard. Every morning, they were yelling and fighting before they even left the house. Oh, it wasn’t nice. It was really awful. Benny got real quiet. I suppose he didn’t know what to do, he liked his brother and he liked his dad, so he’d get up real early and I’d fix him breakfast before they were dressed. He sort of snuck around, he was afraid to get caught in someone’s way.

So I tried to be extra nice to Ben. I’d be up early, anyway. I really couldn’t sleep, so I’d get myself up and make a cup of coffee and pretty soon Benny’d come down to the kitchen, all dressed with his books ready. I’d fix him cinnamon toast or an egg and he’d eat it real fast and gulp his milk and then he walked over to Gram’s. And Gram would feed him a second breakfast. He had such an appetite and he always stayed thin. It would just be a boy to have those long legs.

We all went over there to her house when it got rough. I’d go in the middle of the morning to have some peace. Jimmy and Hal called me to complain about the other one during the day. Jimmy called from his office and Hal called from a pay phone, but if I didn’t answer, they hung up. They wouldn’t call me at Gram’s. And Gram would fix a pot of coffee and we’d eat a little some
thing. She had her house so nice, she had the two bird feeders hanging, one outside each of the kitchen windows. And every once in a while when we were talking a bird would come. We’d stop and watch.