One Hundred Years of Marriage (5 page)

“How’s your mom?”

“Fine, thanks.”

“That’s great. Do you think she’d let me take you to a movie?”

“I’m kind of busy.” I shouldn’t have looked up at his sad face.

“Are you sorry we talked about your family? ‘Cause surely that was long overdue.”

I didn’t say anything, just tried to look impatient, so he’d go before Ernest and Olivia and The General gathered around.

“I moved too slow, didn’t I,” he said. “Shoulda bought a ring.”

A ring? I didn’t deserve a ring.

“Now you’re letting’ some other guy tell you jokes.”

“No, Tom. Nobody tells jokes like you.”

* * *

Early one morning in the middle of August, the grass in the backyard still wet, the canoe came out of the storage room. Mother, wearing moss green pedal pushers and her best Ship ‘n Shore blouse, sat in a lawn chair in the dappled shade of a peach tree. Tonight we would all sleep deeply as the breeze swooshed through our open windows, sucked in by the giant fan that would be installed into this big hole under the eave. Daddy stood back in the storage room at the far end of the canoe, and we stood in the yard, watching while he slowly angled the huge canoe downward through the cut out toward Ernest’s reaching hands. My brother’s skinny legs swerved as he accepted the growing weight. Daddy held onto the top and walked toward the edge as Ernest staggered backward. He looked over his shoulder, and Olivia and I rushed forward to grab hold of the gunnels on either side, so that Daddy, now squatting in the eave, could let go. Amazing, that a twelve-year-old could build anything this heavy.

Ernest had set up sawhorses in the carport, and we laid the upturned canoe across them ready to be fitted with its canvas skin. Daddy and Ernest kept glancing timidly at each other, both grinning. Mother joined us beside the canoe, her arm around Ernest. She was the only one who knew how to stretch the canvas on the bias so it would hug the surface, and it seemed a miracle that she was standing here, ready and able.

* * *

“If I went to see a psychiatrist, would he make me tell him everything?” Mother asked me the next morning at the breakfast table as The General pulled out of the driveway.

“I don’t know,” I said. “But I think this is the thing to do.”

“Not one of those at the University. Everyone says they’re insane.” She pressed her hands to her cheeks. “And not anyone out at the state hospital.”

“Of course not.” The state hospital had been a forbidden subject. Years ago she reported having watched a family try to keep an insane person at home. “It made no sense,” she had said, and went on to emphasize that she certainly hoped her own family would plop her right into the state hospital if the need arose. But this summer she had remembered saying this and had reached up from her bed to take both my hands and beg me not to take her there.

This morning she tightened her lips and stared at the linoleum. “My grandmother was once in a mental hospital,” she said.

“What grandmother?”

“Olivia Jane,” she murmured. “They said it was terrible for her.”

My
great grandmother Olivia Jane?

* * *

A week later Mother and I sat in the car and stared at Dr. David Mendler’s clinic—six windowless walls joined at oblique angles, an acorn cap roof. Hovering atop a hill, like a flying saucer on one of the few promontories north of Oklahoma City, this place didn’t look like a doctor’s office.

“Do you want me to go in with you?”

“No, I should go alone.” She looked around to see if anyone was watching, then pulled on the car door handle and struggled out into the wind. One hand holding her hair and the hard shell of her plastic summer purse banging from her elbow, she walked toward the entrance. She needed both her hands to pull open the massive door and squeeze inside.

Dust swept up from new flowerbeds and swirled around the foundation of the building. I hoped from the bottom of my heart that she would pour out everything. She could begin by telling how family happiness collapsed the day Daddy’s letter came.

* * *

I was five years old when Daddy’s letter told us he was finished occupying Japan and would be coming home. Mama laid down the letter and started cleaning up. She pulled all the leaves from around the rose bushes and loosened the dirt. I remembered, her curved spade made little scalloped edges next to the grass. Then she mowed the lawn and bought new garbage cans. Uncle Harold came home. My aunt and cousins packed up and moved. It was over.

Mama came down with a case of hives right after Daddy arrived. “Swelled up like a toad,” he said. The doctor gave her some large blue pills, and she slept. Suddenly Daddy was in charge of me and Olivia.

First he inspected the house, not just our rooms, but under the beds and inside drawers and chests. A drawer that wasn’t neat was dumped onto the bed. None of the closets passed inspection. Then he went outside to inspect the yard and the garage. He said he would organize the garage while Olivia and I shaped up our chest of drawers.

I got my collection of crepe paper streamers rolled up and nearly all my feathers back into the cigar box. But our costumes—feather hats and beads, old slips, the hoop skirt, and the cat outfit with the huge stripped tail Mama had sewn a wire in—just wouldn’t go back in the drawer. I had to hide some stuff in the hamper and the washing machine before he came back to re-inspect.

Next Daddy crawled under the house—a space between the floor and the dirt hardly high enough for a dog to stand in. When he came out, he told Mother the house her grandfather had built wasn’t level.

“How level does it have to be?” she asked sleepily.

“Level,” he said. The next day he brought home some huge iron screws he called house jacks and crawled back under the house dragging these heavy things behind him into the little opening in the foundation.

When he crawled out to have a cigarette, cobwebs and fuzzy dirt hung from his curls, his army-colored undershirt was wet and stuck to the dark hair on his chest, and his shoulders were scraped and splintered. He looked so scary I ran inside.

One of the many beautiful things he brought back from Japan was a cigarette set: a silver lidded box and a smaller one for the matches sitting on a silver-rimmed ebony tray. “Farewell gift from my little Japanese house girl,” he said to me. Mother looked right at me like
I’d
done something wrong.

As soon as her swelling from the hives had gone down, Mother repainted the kitchen woodwork white, but the roses stayed because the wallpaper was too expensive to rip off. She threw up everyday and said it was the paint. I made sure not to mention the house girl to Mother, but we didn’t talk much anyway like we had when Daddy was in the war, and she never asked my opinion anymore.

At night I lay awake, noticing how our house sounded. The clicking of Fluffy’s toe nails on the linoleum was gone, of course, but now the house itself made a kind of wheeze every once in a while like it was remembering the time before it was level. In her little bed Livvie cried out from bad dreams. I loved my little Livvie like part of my own body, and I wondered why Mama didn’t come to her. Daddy liked to be the one to check on Livvie, to settle her down and shush her. He liked Livvie better than me. He never shushed me. Sometimes I stood by my parent’s door and listened, but they never joked around like Mother and I used to at bedtime, and I knew she was lonely for me.

One Saturday afternoon Mama invited me to go on a walk with her on the campus. We sat down in the sunken garden beside a bed of marigolds and big red cannas. “Our family’s been having a little trouble getting used to each other, haven’t we?” she said.

I didn’t know what she meant because our family was doing fine until Daddy butted in. “I just wish Aunt Fel and Harold and Sukie would come back.”

“Sometimes Daddy—” she started, but she looked off into the marigolds. “We have to understand,” she said, “that he was living in a conquered foreign land where an American army officer was like—. Well I don’t know what they were like, but everyone did what they said. I guess,” she went on, “it’s best just to bury things and go on. Don’t you think?” She looked right at me. I hadn’t been ready for a question, but I nodded.

“You see, I have some wonderful news,” Mama said. “It’s going to make you more important than ever to me.”

My heart fluttered. “You’re going to have more responsibilities,” she continued and picked up both my hands, “because God is sending us a new baby next March. I’m going to be counting on you.”

In the morning before anyone else got up, I tiptoed out to the backyard in my pajamas, carrying the cigarette set. The sky was heavy purple and the grass was wet. I set down the black tray and crawled around in the sandpile until I found my shovel. Then I went over to the loose dirt Mama had dug up around the rose bushes and made a little hole and buried the match holder. I dragged my bare foot across the dirt to hide the spot. That was easy. I had to make a much bigger hole for the cigarette box, but I kept running into roots and catching my knuckles on the thorns. I gave up on a couple of spots before I got a big enough hole for the box. I squeezed it in and pressed my heel to force it down so I could cover it up.

“What do you think you’re doin’?” It was Daddy in his army underwear. He grabbed me by the shoulder and yanked me away from my work. A little corner of the silver box showed, and the tray sat there on the grass. “That was given to
me!”
he yelled, and on his knees he dug in the dirt, hard and fast, like the boxes would smother.

I ran from his swinging hand, round and round, but he held my wrist up high, so he never missed. Then he went in and spread the cigarette set out on the kitchen table, still caked with dirt, and woke Mother up to come see what I had done. She cried and said she was sure I hadn’t meant any disrespect. He made me stay at the table while he carefully cleaned the cigarette set with wads of cotton. “There are marks here,” he said, “that will never go away.” Then he got out the silver cream and polished ‘til it hurt my eyes to look.

* * *

Mama seemed to have a tiny bit more strength when she returned to the car from meeting with Dr. Mendler. I asked nothing, just gently backed the Buick out and guided it down the hill to head back to Chisolm.

Finally, when we’d gone a mile or two, I asked, “What was it like?”

“Oh!” Her hands rose and fell into her lap, exhausted with the very thought. “This huge orange chair kept sliding me backward. I got so weary, my back hurts from leaning forward just to stay upright and keep my knees covered.”

“I mean the doctor. What’d he say?”

“He said I wasn’t crazy.”

“That sounds helpful. When’s your next appointment?”

“Friday at 2:00.”

Yes! I told myself as I drove us back to Chisolm, now that I’ve helped Mama onto the path to recovery, maybe it’s okay if I get Tom back!

* * *

The first time I called Tom’s old boarding house I got a guy who was moving out after the summer session had closed. “This is Patricia Brady. I just wanted to ask if anyone there had heard from Tom Delaney.”

“I heard he’s gone out West—Spokane maybe or Portland. There’s nobody else here right now.” The next time I called a guy’s voice said he’d never heard of Tom Delaney. I leaned on the kitchen table, my whole body cold. What if I’d lost him?

In a panic I ran to my bedroom and pulled Tom’s notes from between the books on the shelf in my headboard. Why, why, why hadn’t I read these when they came? I slit the envelopes and lay the notes on my bed. There was no return address. I really had believed that when he wasn’t around for a while, my desire would fade, and I’d be quiet again about boys the way I had been before I met him. But he’d planted something in me as undeniable as a baby, and now I had to have him back.

“There isn’t a thing in this world that happened between us or ever will happen that you and I can’t handle if you will just let us talk it out. Don’t punish me. Don’t punish yourself, Patticake.”

The first three notes repeated similar thoughts, but the next four sounded more urgent:

“Please take the phone when I call. Call me back. Call me. I’m a man on a desert, sweetheart. Hurry!”

The last one, signed, Love Tom, like all the others, shook in my hand as I read and reread it.

“Have I overestimated your iron resolve? Are you on the verge of returning to me? Should I stop the daily attempts to flog to death my love for you?”

I dressed carefully in a navy straight skirt and round collared blouse and worked on my courage to face Mrs. Runyon, the landlady Tom and I had started fooling in early spring.

Her living room was dim and crowded with ancient overstuffed furniture. I sat primly on the edge of a horsehair chair and pressed my knees together.

“Of course, Patricia Brady!” She said she recognized me from church, but I was pretty sure she was a Baptist. I told her I’d misplaced Tom’s address.

“That Tom, such a wonderful young man, a real Christian gentleman.” Mrs. Runyon’s drapey flesh quivered around her chin. “Gone out West, that dickens.”

I nodded. “Are you forwarding his mail?” I asked.

“With a situation like that, of course, he didn’t know his address yet.”

I nodded as though I knew exactly what she meant.

“I hope he gets the job, but I sure am gonna miss him. Mohammed might know something. Would you like me to ask?”

“Yes, please.”

She pushed herself up from the couch and went into the hallway. She was nice, trusting. Here I was, posing as a good, church-going girl whereas even at this moment, smelling the familiar musty odor of this house, I wanted to be upstairs in the dark, moving on the patchwork quilt, sealed with sweat to Tom.

Mohammed stood in the hallway door. Mrs. Runyon was still working her way down the creaking stairs.

“Patricia,” he said. He had on a dazzlingly white shirt, the creases showing from the package. Dark circles around his handsome eyes made him look like Omar Sharif. A slight Libyan, maybe thirty years old, he looked tenderly at me. There were hundred of Arabs on campus, but Mohammed was the only one I’d ever talked to.