by Larry Watson
She shut off the water and turned to him, wiping her hands on her apron. “Would you like to make a contract between us?” she asked. “We would sign this and then we would be agreed: We will sleep in the same bed, eat under the same roof ”—she looked up as if to verify that the roof had not blown off since she began her speech—“but we will not put our hands on each other. Then you won’t have to pretend to be asleep when we lie together.”
Strange that she should mention sleep just at the moment when Henry felt he would rather put his head down on the table and try to sleep than have this conversation.
“People who love each other,” he said, “don’t draw up contracts like that.”
“People who love each other don’t need them.”
“Sonja, look—I just need a little time. It’s too soon after—”
“Too soon? Are you sure it’s not too late?”
“You’re angry,” he said. “What’s the point of anger? Do you think you can scold a man into . . . That’s not how a man works.”
“You want to talk to me about how a man works? A man does not even need love.”
Patches of color—raspberry interrupted with white—crept up her throat and settled in her cheeks. The irregular shape of those blotches reminded Henry of countries on a map; at moments like these she seemed so much a creature of a foreign land that he despaired of finding the means by which he could make himself understood to her.
“The time will come,” he said. “But right now I can’t.”
“You won’t.”
“No, I can’t.”
“You think I am asking something more of you. I want your touch. Nothing more.”
Henry stabbed out his cigarette, and the tin ashtray wobbled and spun on the tabletop. “I told you. Not just yet.”
Sonja crossed the room and stood next to Henry’s chair. While he watched, she unbuttoned two of the buttons on her housedress and pulled the dress and the strap of her brassiere off one shoulder, leaving the flesh bare and unmarked but for the narrow pink notch that the strap had made. She did this with such deliberation she could have been exposing her shoulder for a doctor who had asked to see the site of her pain.
She bent closer to him. “There,” she said. “I’ve done almost everything for you. All you have to do is lift your hand. Touch me and no more.”
Henry had to slide off his chair on the side away from Sonja; otherwise, he would have bumped into her when he stood and walked from the house.
Buck had not been ridden for days, but he was not eager for exercise. Instead, when Henry saddled him the horse acted as though he were being unduly put upon. He kept looking back at Henry in inquiry: It’s late in the day—are you sure you want to do this? When the bridle came over his head he sniffed hard for air. He worked his jaw as though he had never had a bit between his teeth, and when Henry tightened the cinch, Buck whoofed in protest. Nevertheless, once Henry took up the reins and swung into the saddle, Buck stepped smartly out of the barn.
For the next few hours, Henry rode through his family’s three orchards, starting with the one adjoining his place—he thought, each time he turned Buck down a new lane, that he might see Sonja walking out through the tall grass to meet him—and then moving on until at dusk he was among the apple trees farthest from his home. He patrolled the aisles listlessly. The only real job to be done at this time of year was thinning fruit, and Henry had performed that task until his fingers and heart cramped from the effort.
So there he was, astride the horse that might have killed his son, at the hour when the day was useless save for demonstrating the dark blue and emerald beauty with which a summer evening can softly descend. Henry clicked his tongue and wheeled Buck into a trot toward the lake, where the day’s light would linger longest.
Neither horse nor rider had a destination in mind, yet they eventually found themselves on the narrow beach in front of Henry’s sister’s home. Henry was concentrating on helping Buck pick his way through the rocks when someone shouted Henry’s name.
The voice belonged to Russell Kaye, Henry’s brother-in-law, and he called out from the back porch overlooking the lake. “Henry? Is that you?”
Henry waved in acknowledgment.
“Henry? Where?” He heard his sister’s question, but before he could answer, a screen door slammed and then Phyllis was jogging across the lawn toward him.
“What are you doing out here?” Phyllis asked.
“Just out for a ride. Watching the sunset.”
She ducked under Buck’s head to look at the western sky. “You didn’t see much of one, did you?” A bank of thunderheads had slid in from the southwest and then stalled, obscuring the horizon precisely at the hour when it would have been most brilliant.
Henry shrugged. “It was enough.”
“Come on up to the house. Have a beer. Russell’s folks are here.”
“I should keep moving.”
“Oh, come on. Were you trying to sneak past us? It’s hard to miss a horse going by, you know.” Phyllis stroked Buck’s forehead, and he pushed his head in her direction in order to receive as much affection as she was willing to give.
“Sonja doesn’t know I’m here.”
“You can call her.”
Henry said nothing, and Phyllis quickly added, “I’ll call and tell her you’re here.”
Before he could offer further argument, Phyllis grabbed the reins and began to walk toward the house. Buck went along so willingly it seemed as though Henry’s horse and his sister had previously formed an alliance and a plan that was only now taking effect.
This tanned, slender woman leading him looked as though she might have been golfing that afternoon at the private country club to which she and Russell belonged. Indeed, the club could have used Henry’s sister’s smiling, stylish image on the cover of its brochure advertising the pleasures of membership. The country club, convertible, sailboat, and extravagant home on the lake all came Phyllis’s way through her marriage to Russell, and Russell’s wealth had showered down on him from that cloud of cigar smoke on the porch. Russell’s father, Bernard Kaye, owned a chain of Midwest grocery stores (O-Kaye Foods).
Phyllis led Henry and Buck behind the garage, and once Henry had dismounted, she quietly asked, “How are you?”
He knew what her question meant: Has grief loosened its grip at all? “I’m all right.”
“Why don’t you join the others?” Phyllis said. “I’ll call Sonja.”
Henry nodded and looped the reins around a drainpipe, even though he knew Buck would never wander off.
When Henry stepped onto the open porch, Bernard Kaye didn’t rise—his massive girth made that too difficult—but he tilted forward in his Adirondack chair, removed his cigar from his mouth, and patted the vacant chair next to him. “Henry. Sit yourself down, son.”
Henry sat and said hello to Mrs. Kaye, seated primly at her husband’s side.
In front of Bernard Kaye rested a galvanized tub packed with ice and bristling with bottles of Pabst Blue Ribbon. He pulled a beer from the tub, wiped off the chips of ice clinging to the brown glass, and handed it to Henry. Then Bernard asked the question he asked every time he and Henry met. “How are those apples doing?”
Mr. Kaye did not carry apples from the House family’s orchards in the produce bins of any of the Kaye groceries, but he stocked House cider, and in the fall, Russell allowed Henry and Sonja to sell bushels of apples in the parking lot of Door County’s O-Kaye Foods.
“I expect we’ll have a decent crop,” Henry said.
“This heat don’t make trouble for you?”
“My father knew about the weather extremes we could have up here. He made sure we planted only the hardiest varieties.”
“He was a wise man.” Bernard raised his beer bottle to the memory of Henry’s father.
Phyllis returned, and when she walked past Henry she touched him lightly on the arm and said softly, “She knows you’re here.”
Henry guessed
he was in Phyllis’s chair, but he made no move to rise. He was tired, and tired especially of being a husband and a father, those roles that had brought him so much confusion and heartache. He wished he could be a boy again, and perhaps in the bargain, the son of a man like Bernard Kaye whose fortune and influence made it possible for him to ease the lives of those close to him.
Phyllis leaned back against the porch rail. “How’s the apple thinning going?” she asked Henry.
“Done.”
“Why didn’t you say something? You know Russ and I would have helped.”
Henry waved away her offer. “You’ve got the store to mind.”
“Well, come fall,” Russell said, “you know we’ll be there with our baskets strapped on.”
Now it was Henry’s turn to raise his bottle in salute. “I thank you. But I’m thinking this fall I might hire that crew of Indians who pick over in Fairchild’s cherry orchards.”
Talk soon turned to the familiar and tired topic of the county’s need for tourists, yet its worry that too many outsiders would alter the beauty and character of the peninsula. Even carpetbaggers like Bernard Kaye could feel possessive and protective toward Door County. Henry had heard it all before, and he let his mind wander from the conversation.
A desultory rain began to fall, drops so widely spaced and random that no one felt the need to pull a chair back to shelter. It was in just such a rain that Henry had first seen Sonja. . . .
He and a group of his friends, newly reunited after the war, left the Three Arrows Bar late one evening. Drunk, they decided they wanted something to eat before calling it a night. They walked down the hill to Axel’s Norske Inn, only to find it closed. Under a streetlamp in front of the restaurant stood a tall young woman wearing the dirndl that Axel made all his female employees wear. By the way she kept glancing down the road, Henry guessed she was waiting for a ride. Henry’s friends moved on in their search for food, but Henry lingered, trying to think of a way to engage this woman in conversation.
Just then a few drops of rain began to fall, and she lifted her face to the night sky. Henry was standing close enough to see her flinch when a drop hit her upturned cheek. She looked away, blinking as if she were puzzled by what was happening.
Henry said, “What’s the matter—don’t they have rain where you come from?”
She turned to Henry as if he were as bewildering as the rain, and Henry, who seldom had trouble coming up with words to fling in the direction of an attractive woman, suddenly could think of nothing else to say. In fact, he found himself backing away, and he wasn’t sure why. Perhaps her foreignness made communication seem impossibly complicated to someone in his drunken state. Perhaps her rain-spattered beauty intimidated him.
That memory of Sonja standing in the rain revived his desire, but of course she was not there, at his side, and no matter how swiftly Henry might gallop back to her, he knew his passion would subside as soon as he led Buck into his stall. Henry wondered if he would ever again have an erection strong enough to survive the walk from the barn to the house.
He reached for another beer, pulling the bottle from the ice with his thumb and two fingers. Like this. Like this. Like this.
Sometime in the weeks and months after her brother’s death, June House realized she had a new job: She had to watch her father and mother to make sure they didn’t drift in the direction of the far-off look in their eyes and become lost forever. And almost as soon as she knew this was a job she alone could perform, she realized she had already failed at half of it— her dad was away from home as much as he was there, and every night June fell asleep to the worry that the next morning he would be gone for good.
But June could not keep watch every moment, and when she decided to attend the St. Adalbert’s Carnival with the Engerson family, she became more and more nervous the longer she was away. Yes, she had fun, but then she felt guilty because she had forgotten for a few hours that sorrow had taken up residence in her home, and from then on she couldn’t wait to return. It was close to midnight when the Engersons pulled up in front of her house, and June was so eager to get out of the station wagon the she forgot to hold on to the string of her helium balloon.
The balloon, as if it had a mind that understood the meaning of escape, flew from the car and into the night sky. June’s step faltered, but only for an instant. Almost immediately, she became reconciled to her loss and continued running toward the house.
When she woke the next morning, she discovered that her balloon was not gone, not entirely. Its string had tangled in the high branches of the maple, and there the balloon was caught, bobbling in the wind and bumping against the scarlet leaves. June knew the balloon would not hold its air, nor could it be retrieved from that height, yet in a way she still possessed it. After all, the balloon was still on the property, even though it was available only to sight. She felt the same way when she saw her father’s jacket by the back door or smelled the smoke from his cigarette or heard the thunk of his boots on the stairs—any sign that he still lived in their home. Her relief, however, lasted only until the next time he walked out the door.
But even if June could not keep her father there, she could still be a maple branch for her mother, snagging her when she started to go away. June knew the signs. In the midst of an activity—chopping vegetables, sewing a button, drying a glass—her mother’s hands would suddenly stop, the knife poised over the celery stalk, the towel stuck in the glass. Her eyes would lose their focus, and she seemed to be listening to a sound only she could hear. June developed special tricks to keep her mother there, in the moment. June would turn up the volume on the radio. “This song, Mama, do you like this song?” And then for a few minutes they would listen to Nat King Cole sing “Pretend” or Eddie Fisher “O Mein Papa.” June drew and colored picture after picture for her mother, scenes of forests and lakes, sunsets and lightning storms. But June found the very best way to bring her mother back to the present was by way of the past.
“Mama!” June called. “What’s the Norwegian word for ‘school’?”
After a moment, Sonja answered, “Skole. But the school you attend is grunnskole. Elementary school.”
“What about ‘doll’? How do you say ‘doll’ in Norwegian?”
“Dukke.”
“And did you have one—a doll? Did you have a doll when you were a little girl in the old country?”
“I had a little boy doll that was almost flat because I took him to bed with me, and I slept on him.”
“Did you give your doll a name?”
Sonja laughed, and June knew she had done what she set out to do. “Oskar,” Sonja said. “I named him Oskar, after a boy who lived up the road.”
Then June might wince—how could she have been so stupid as to ask a question that wound around to the subject of a little boy!—and she would rush to move her mother in another direction: “Did you have to leave your doll behind when you got on the boat to come to America?”
Had June blundered again—leading her mother to the topic of abandonment—and didn’t her mother feel, didn’t they all feel, that they had abandoned John, left him alone in the land of the dead? Oh, on some days every trail seemed to end at her brother’s grave!
But June needn’t have worried. Her mother smiled that smile that said she was wholly there, there in the kitchen with June at that late-afternoon hour when the sun finally harried the shadows from the room’s far corner.
At the MFA exhibit of June House-Chen’s oils and acrylics, the large painting of a balloon caught in the branches of a tree drew the most comment. The balloon, its slack, creased surface rendered so it resembled human skin, commanded not only the viewer’s eye but seemed the element in the picture that had the greatest force, as if it were the trees that were mostly air and required balloons to anchor them, tether them, pull their trunks straight, and unfurl their foliage.
Certainly the painting—a canvas the size and dimension of a door— belonged to the surrealist tradition
, yet because of the way the tree and balloon were centered on the panel, the painting looked as if it might be a family’s crest or coat of arms, its motto Nihil est quid videtur, “Nothing is what it seems.”
Henry walked through the back door just after dark. He had missed another meal, and he had not called to explain why, where he was, or when he might come home, but this was behavior Sonja had grown accustomed to. More and more frequently he came home late or else he rose from the table immediately after eating and went out to the barn. He saddled Buck and rode for hours—or so he said—through the orchards. Whether she was in bed when he came home or, as now, standing over the sink shelling peas, she often smelled beer on his breath.
This time he didn’t say anything to her when he came in. He simply walked up behind her, put his hands on her hips, and buried his face in her neck as if he meant to inhale her whole.
She lifted her shoulder to push his face away. Since that night when Henry refused her, she had begun to think he might be right: In the aftermath of a child’s death, it was best to deny oneself any pleasure.
But now Henry would not be deterred. He simply abandoned the side of her neck for her back. He lifted her hair and began to kiss the top vertebra, reasoning, perhaps, if he could win over that one spot then the rest of her spine would relax and she would relent.
Sonja slid away from him and shook her head to make sure her hair covered her neck once again. Why now? The supper dishes were not dry. There was still light in the western sky. June was playing in the living room. Why now? She would have asked this aloud, but she could not entirely trust her voice to keep a moan out of the question.
Henry persisted. He followed her along the kitchen counter, and when Sonja turned to face him—ostensibly to tell him this was neither the time nor the place—he simply took that as an invitation to help himself to another part of her. His hands came up to her breasts, and he pressed his kisses so hard against her collarbone she felt his teeth.
She asked him to stop, but he did not, perhaps because she whispered her plea into his deaf ear, and perhaps because her body gave lie to her request. She leaned back against the cupboard, leaving herself open to his urgent caresses.
