April Love Story (7 page)

We arrived at the school, which had a hot, blank look, the look of all schools closed up for August. Valley Consolidated High School. It didn’t look promising, but it would undoubtedly beat subsistence farming.

“Next week,” said Lucas. He sighed.

Seven more days, I thought. “Do you think it’ll be any good?”

“If you can believe it from a bookworm, Marnie, I don’t even care. I’m just so eager to get away from the manure piles, the orchards, and the wood that needs splitting, it can be the lousiest school in the U.S.A. and I’ll love it.”

I laughed. It wasn’t a sound I’d made much that summer. “I used to think of school as a place where I had to work, work, work all the time. Now I’m looking forward to school as a place to escape work, work, work.”

Lucas laughed, too. It was a nice sound.

We walked back to the VW and things didn’t seem quite so awful. School was beginning and we still knew how to laugh.

I wondered if there were any decent boys in the junior class. If they’d like me. If there would be a girlfriend or two for me—a girl who wouldn’t laugh when I told her about homesickness, a girl who cared about clothes, and would let me use her makeup, and read her magazines, and invite me home to watch her TV.

Seven days, I told myself. And then school.

O
UR STOP WAS THE
sixth of nineteen that the bus made, so there were plenty of empty seats when Lucas and I got on for the first time. Inquisitive faces stared at us. My insides knotted up and I had a moment of absolute panic. Where to sit? Cling to Lucas? Force myself on one of these kids? They were all ages, kindergarten to senior high. I tried to see if the older kids sat in the back, or if there was some sort of seating arrangement that people would expect me to know, but my eyes felt blurry and I couldn’t tell what to do.

“Hey,” said a freckled girl in the very back of the bus. (“Hey” had turned out to be Southern for “hello.”) “Come sit with me. A bunch of rotten boys will be getting on at the next stop and I need a girl to fill up my seat.”

I sat with her gratefully and we introduced ourselves. “I’m Connie,” she said, “and I’m a junior, too. You don’t know how glad I am to have another junior girl on the bus. All last year I rode with a sixth grader.”

I was so glad to be talking with her! I felt like a puppy wagging my tail.

“Who is that handsome hunk?” she said.

I looked around, eager to see a handsome young man.

Connie giggled. “Silly. The guy who got on with you.”

Lucas?
Lucas was this handsome hunk? I stared at him.

Well, his complexion had cleared and tanned in the sun, and he had gotten pretty fit and muscular working at heavy jobs for five months. But if there was one thing I didn’t want to talk about, it was Lucas, who meant nothing more to me right now than the other half of a farm chore. “Oh, he’s the kid of the other family farming with us,” I said.

“You’re the city people who moved down the lane from the Shields, then,” said Connie. “How I’d love to be from the city. The day I graduate from high school I’m headed for Atlanta. Or maybe Nashville. I want to work for an airline or a bank.”

“There’s quite a difference.”

“I’ve got two years to make up my mind. So how do you like it here?”

I didn’t want to risk offending anybody who was a native, even a native who yearned for a city. “The mountains are beautiful,” I said, which was certainly true. “But I get homesick sometimes.”

“Me, too. My parents divorced and when mother remarried we moved here. Two and a half years ago now. This is my stepfather’s hometown. I like Valley High, but sometimes I’m so homesick for Tennessee I could cry.”

“I
do
cry,” I said.

That was all it took: five minutes conversation between bus stops and Connie and I were friends.

It was an incredible relief to have a friend. In the next several weeks nothing meant more to me than sitting with Connie on the bus, during class, at lunch.

Connie could understand so much that I couldn’t say to my parents. My parents just confused me with all their joy and exuberance. And I couldn’t tell them what my feelings were without hurting theirs. As for Lucas, with whom Connie felt I should be discussing all this, since we shared it, well, he was certainly no longer an enemy (you can’t be an active enemy of the person who’s holding the chain saw when you’re holding the log), but he wasn’t exactly a friend either.

Connie showed me around, introduced me, got me started with lots of other girls, and all in all, being a newcomer in school turned out to be something of an asset. There were hardly any rough moments, and no lonely ones.

The homesickness didn’t go away, though. It moved to the back of my body, sort of, coming out when I least expected it, like indigestion.

The boys in the junior class were polite and nice. Everybody said sir or ma’am to the teachers, and held doors for the girls, and complimented me on my pretty blouses. But nobody even hinted at wanting to ask me for a date. And since we had no telephone, nobody could have a sudden whim to call me to chat, or ask about homework, or invite me anywhere.

I wanted so much to be part of a group. Any group. Gathering after school for hamburgers, or rehearsing for a play, or practicing for a ballgame. But after class, I had to catch the bus and go home to do chores.

Sometimes when I thought about the dating ladder I’d be on if I were back home I’d have to choke back tears,, and I’d feel dowdy and plain and boring. I had to train myself not to think of home when I was in school.

Lucas seemed to walk into the senior class and take over as Big Man On Campus. I wondered once if it surprised him as much as it surprised me.

But he never went anywhere, either. He had as many chores waiting at the farm as I did.

Connie was often sick with severe allergy problems, so at least one day a week I’d get on the bus and there’d be no Connie. I couldn’t even phone to say I hoped she’d be better, because we had no phone. I’d sit on the bus with a little fourth grader named Eloise, who always wanted me to check her math homework.

In October, Susannah wrote to say she’d been to a dance at a nightclub and was going up to a fraternity party at Syracuse with a boy she’d met who was a really good-looking number and so suave, and she was trying for early acceptance to college.

I knew only nine people at Valley who wanted to go to college, and two of them were Lucas and me.

Lucas and I hopped off the bus one day to hike up the lane for home when he said, “Marnie, they’ve asked me to be on the basketball team.”

Nobody had asked me to be on anything. “You aren’t athletic,” I said. “It’s all you can do to walk on the bottoms of your feet.”

“Very funny, Marnie.”

“They didn’t really ask you,. Lucas. They had a class assignment in sarcasm.”

“Of which I suppose you’re the teacher,” he said.

I knew I was being ugly and unfair to him. I knew I should congratulate him and tell him how much he’d changed for the better. But I couldn’t. Just thinking of teams made me think of cheerleading back home and how that was closed to me forever. “Don’t get excited about it,” I said to Lucas. “They only want you because you’re tall, and Valley men tend to be short.”

“I can always count on you for an encouraging word, can’t I?” He walked on ahead, his long legs covering the ground half again as fast as mine.

Lucas has changed for the better, I thought. I’ve gotten worse.

At dinner Lucas brought up the basketball team, but our parents merely looked confused and annoyed. “You can’t be on a team,” they said. “There’s practice time, evening games, all sorts of precious time wasted by that sort of thing. We need you for the apples.”

If it had been me I’d have had a tantrum.

Lucas merely accepted it without arguing. I guess he knew that they really did need him for the orchard and that the way we’d chosen to live—or they’d chosen—didn’t leave space for basketball teams.

Instead, after school, we’d throw down our books, change into our oldest jeans and jackets, and head for the orchards. Endlessly we plucked apples, using little basketlike prongs on a long stick, filling bushels, loading the bushels on the tractor-drawn trailer, arguing about who got to stop picking apples for fifteen minutes and take the bushels back to the barn.

In school my favorite class was study hall. I never studied. I just sat there and let my eyes glaze over, sleeping awake, more or less.

We sold our apples to a man who had a huge refrigerated storage barn and we made enough to break even and cover the beginning costs of running the orchard for the next year, but we didn’t make enough to live on over the winter.

So from the middle of November until spring, Mother, Aunt Ellen, and I baked bread, pies, and cakes for the mountain resort on the far side of the village. You have to bake an awful lot to earn anything resembling money. I wanted new school clothes so much, and my clothes from sophomore year were not only tight and short, but out of style—at Valley, girls wore much more conservative styles: a lot of pullover sweaters over oxford shirts. “I need new everything,” I said, “most of all shoes.”

Mother sewed a few things for me, but as for the rest, “You want them, you earn them,” she told me flatly. So I made specialties of sweet potato pie, apple turnovers, and apple crisps. It took me till January to earn a shopping spree. Lucas drove me into the county seat, a town about twenty miles away, where they featured a sixteen-shop mall arranged around an indoor fountain. We both nearly died at the prices. “It was a lot more fun when I had a clothing allowance and went to Bloomingdale’s,” I said.

Lucas looked longingly at a pair of sneakers (thirty-four dollars) and I wanted the makeup kit in the tortoise shell case for thirty-six. We bought sneakers at the dime store for a dollar eighty-nine and I took lipstick from a brand x rack for fifty-nine cents. “I don’t see what’s so neat about being poor,” I said. “Why do our parents want to live like this?”

“They had money, Marnie. It didn’t make them happy. Working on the farm does. They love it, every minute of it. They really don’t much care that they’re broke.” There was a sadness in Lucas’ voice that stopped me short. I was peevish, I complained a lot, sometimes I was really miserable, but whatever Lucas’ emotion was, it was much deeper than mine. It made me feel like a little girl, as if Lucas understood things I never would, and anger boiled up in me at all the things I was missing, and I stomped back to the car.

That winter we warmed our house with wood Lucas and I had cut and split. We popped popcorn that I grew, harvested, dried, and stored. The flowers on the table my mother had grown and dried hanging from the kitchen rafters. With her new loom, Aunt Ellen wove a beautiful tablecloth.

Our first Christmas on the farm we had roast duck (our own), sweet and white potatoes, beans, beets, stewed tomatoes (our canning), three kinds of bread, homemade cheese, and three kinds of pie. Everything from our own gardens and hands. Mother gave me a beautiful pantsuit she’d sewn during her spare time (I’d never noticed any spare time lying around!). It was a dark yellow denim, with a tiny bit of embroidery on the lapel. Lucas got the magazine subscriptions he’d been pining for. My parents bought each other things like butter presses and extra kerosene lanterns, and spent the whole day laughing delightedly.

The barn cat sneaked into the kitchen to have kittens under the sink and by evening the first snow was falling.

Even I had to admit there had never been such a beautiful Christmas.

“I’m going to build a solar greenhouse,” said Lucas, brandishing a library book with blueprints and instructions. “Raise tomatoes so we can have fresh ones for salad in the dead of winter.”

“Lucas, I canned at least forty million tomatoes. Have mercy. There’s nothing I want less than more tomatoes. Raise flowers.”

Aunt Ellen began teaching me to use the loom and I wove a slightly crooked placement.

Our goat had kids and we bought another couple of goats, too, because we’d found a health food store that would buy everything made of goats’ milk that we could sell them.

“Marnie,” said Connie. “If I tell you a secret, will you promise not to tell anybody?”

“Sure.”

“Julie Fitzhugh has a crush on Lucas.”

“On
Lucas
?”

“Oh, Marnie, just because you never notice him! He’s the handsomest thing in this school. He’s so tall and strong and he knows about absolutely anything you can think of. From French literature to how to build hen coops. From Phoenician civilization to fixing tractors. And he’s always so courteous and calm and nice, and he has that marvelous smile.”

I actually turned around in the school bus to have another look at Lucas.

“Does he date anyone, Marnie?” Connie wanted to know.

“No. He’s never had time, I guess. Or the money.” I thought of Susannah’s dating ladder. I’d fallen off it, but Lucas never even had a chance to get on. He hadn’t been dating back home and here he couldn’t get started, although obviously he was very popular.

“Julie wanted to know if you’ve ever held hands with Lucas.”

“Once. When we were both reaching for the same chicken egg.”

“Ah. Romance,” said Connie.

It was twenty-six degrees out and snowing and the wind was blowing off the mountains as if it wanted to strip our hill of its apple trees. And I had to walk outside to use the bathroom. Halfway between the house and my destination, I looked up into the falling snow and yelled at the whistling wind, “I hate this damn outhouse! Someday I’m going home! To a city, where people know how to live. Where you date. And walk on sidewalks. And the milk comes in cartons. And the bathrooms are inside!”

The snow kept falling and the outhouse was colder than ever.

One blustery January day when the school bus was late, and I’d stepped in an icy puddle and discovered a hole in my boots (the boots we couldn’t afford to replace), and Lucas had lost a glove and had one hand balled up in his pocket, taking it out now and then to huff on it, he said suddenly, “Marnie, let’s run away.”