by Bill Clegg
Philip, she asks calmly, as if nothing strange and erratic has just occurred between them, what do you expect me to write with?
Jackie
The car purrs outside the window. The engine’s sound is simple, unmodulated, easily erased by the rush of wind over the house and through the branches of the elm tree in the front lawn. As Jackie listens to the new leaves stir, she is grateful to be reminded that there are forces greater than the one that sits in the car outside.
It was the tree that first drew Jackie to the house when she and Floyd were looking for a place to rent the October after she graduated from high school. She was pregnant with Amy and her parents were hurrying the wedding before she began to show. She didn’t mind. She was getting what she wanted: Floyd, a baby, and a house in town, away from the remote dead-end road where she’d grown up.
She remembers the first time she saw the white, one-story ranch built into the small hill at the end of the short driveway. The elm in front looked like a giant’s bonfire, blazing with yellow and orange foliage. Floyd’s Aunt Lois owned the place and explained that the tree was one of the few to survive the bark beetles that came with Dutch elm disease in the 1930s, which had destroyed almost all the elms in the area; not just the ones that had once lined Upper and Lower Main Streets in Wells, but all over New England. The only other elm in Wells, she’d told them, was famous, one of the oldest and largest in North America. Jackie knew the tree. It was so famous locally that the estate where it stood was called Great Elm. The tree lurched from the front lawn of the cream-colored mansion and was visible from anywhere along that stretch of South Main Street. Signs of its struggle, past and present, were clear: two of its most prominent limbs had been removed, leaving black tar stains where they’d been amputated, and in season the leaves grew in spotty green patches against dead gray branches across an uneven canopy. Jackie remembers comparing the weathered wreck to the elm in front of the little house and admiring how the tree that would be hers appeared as if it had never encountered blight of any kind. She felt smug already, pleased that this modest lawn held one of the last survivors of a great plague. And the survivor was thriving. It was a clear sign to her that the property was blessed, special, and therefore a safe place to raise a family.
Jackie winces at the memory of her younger self believing that closeness to something great could protect her family, magically fortify them just by being near. She pictures Dana’s house. It was not the biggest house in Wells, nor the most important. There were other houses, on South Main Street, mostly, where presidents and senators and all manner of once-upon-a-time notables had stayed or passed through. Everyone in Wells grew up on the stories of Noah Webster writing parts of the dictionary in the old Smith House and Ronald Reagan playing touch football on the front lawn of Great Elm. But for Jackie, even though there were no famous stories attached to it, Edgeweather had been grander than all of them. As a girl, she was mesmerized by its white columns and brick walls swarming with ivy. But what she’d loved most about the house was that it was a secret. It stood, as her own parents’ tidy three-bedroom Cape did, a far distance from the center of Wells, at its eastern edge where the Housatonic River created a border with Cornwall. On the school bus it was almost a forty-minute ride to town. Her father liked to tell the story of how Undermountain Road was one of the earliest roads in the area but was rendered obsolete when Route 7 became the main thoroughfare. Around that time, in the 1940s, Dana’s family bought a large parcel of land adjacent to their own and with it a long stretch of the road. To create more privacy, they had arranged with the town and the state to terminate the south end of Undermountain Road. Over the years, people forgot about the great house, which, as Jackie’s mother would point out, was ideal for a family with no interest in anyone from Wells who didn’t work for them.
When Jackie was a child, Edgeweather appeared to her as if it had existed forever—before the woods, before the river, even. She loved being one of the few people who knew about it, and one of an even smaller number of people who lived a short walk from its front door. When the Goss family was not around and when no one was on the grounds, she ran beyond the garage and across the oval driveway to the wide lawn that ended at the river. This was the place she’d liked best, between the house and the water, where the chimneys and columns cast shadows on the grass, and the canvas awnings huffed their soft thunder.
In the winter after she and Floyd moved into their house, two things happened: Jackie gave birth to their first child, a chubby baby girl named Amy; and the tree at Great Elm was finally cut down. The occasion was marked by a long cover story in the County Journal complete with photographs of the well-known political family who had lived there since the 1920s; the famous guests at their parties, Sylvia Plath among them. There was also a snapshot taken of the fire department in 1930, standing in front of the then-robust tree after they’d put out a fire caused by an ember that shot from an unscreened fireplace into a bookcase and nearly burned the house down. The men look sooty, like coal miners, and young. Floyd brought the paper to the maternity ward at Wells Hospital—a short walk down the hill from their house—where Jackie was recovering after Amy’s uneventful birth. She remembers looking at the old black and white photo of the volunteer fire department, scanning the caption, and noticing that the names then were, for the most part, the names now. Both Floyd’s family and her own were represented, along with a predictable majority of Moreys. In almost forty years, she thought, the biggest change in Wells was that a tree was cut down. Not only did the fact amuse her, but on the second day of being a mother in a town she had no plan on leaving, she found it deeply reassuring. It also occurred to her that with Great Elm’s tree gone, the only one left in Wells that mattered was standing directly in front of her house. She looked again at the newspaper photo of the once magnificent tree, destroyed now, its smashed branches everywhere. There was a picture of the mayor’s wife counting the rings on its stump to determine how old it had been; the caption said she’d tallied two hundred and three. Jackie can still remember the quiet triumph she felt as she snuggled into the stiff hospital bedding that morning. She recognizes that moment as the first when she felt like she’d won, that her life was enviable, one she wouldn’t trade for anyone else’s. It marked the beginning of a short, happy period when she only wanted what she had: her husband, Floyd; her beautiful baby girl; a clean, bright house; and in her front lawn what she allowed herself to believe was the last great elm tree in North America.
Lupita
More than half the people she picks up at the airport have kids. How they afford to fly to Hawaii from places as far away as New York and London, to stay for a week in hotels that cost between five hundred and a thousand dollars a night, she has no idea. But they do, and not just at Christmas and Easter, but year round. For a long time, the squabbling and whining and the incessant questioning—especially from the little boys—would get under Lupita’s skin, so much so that she did what she could to avoid them at the loading zone at the arrivals terminal; but over time they affected her less and less, and after decades of ferrying them to and from the airport, the kids now amused more than upset her.
After listening to and accidently erasing the voicemail of the woman she’d hung up on earlier, Lupita picks up a family with two daughters at the airport. Both girls have long black hair, like their mother’s, pulled back in thick ponytails. Their father has black hair, too, graying at the temples just as her own father’s had. With Garcia for a last name and luggage tags from LAX, she wonders who, if anyone—the children’s grandmother? their father?—had at some point crossed the border from Mexico into the United States to eventually make vacations like this one possible. The oldest of the two girls must be at least thirteen and she moves alongside the car slowly with long limbs and drooped shoulders and falls asleep right after she reaches the far end of the back seat. Her sister, a talkative five or six-year-old, climbs in next to her. Once they are on the road, Lupita can see only the tops of their
dark, shiny heads in the rearview mirror.
* * *
In her class of fourteen children at Wells Center School Lupita was the only one with black hair. The rest were mostly shades of blonde and brown and there was one redheaded boy. She was also the only kid with a z at the end of her last name; the only one who knew how to speak Spanish or any other language besides English; and the only one who lived above a garage with her father.
The morning bus ride took forty minutes. The first fifteen were the worst. Wanda and Kit boarded before anyone else. Both tucked their light brown hair neatly under cloth-covered headbands, and had blue eyes, and pale, freckled skin. They lived three houses down the road from each other in the only section of Wells further away from town than where Lupita lived, so when Lupita and Jackie got on the bus in the morning they were already sitting in the back seats, one on either side of the aisle, waiting. Lupita always sat two seats behind the driver. Jackie, who rarely said more than a drowsy hi at the bus stop, disappeared somewhere in the middle of the bus, tucked her legs against the back of the seat in front of her, and slept most of the way to school. Lupita had a hunch Jackie’s morning naps were a convenient way to avoid Wanda and Kit who wasted no time registering Lupita’s arrival. Usually it began with What’s that smell? They’d continue once Mr. Prindle closed the bus doors and slowly pulled away from the old wood post painted white with the words Undermountain Road stenciled in black letters that served as the unofficial bus stop. In bright voices, with mock bewilderment, they explored the possibilities. Lupita heard every word:
Bad breath?
Maaaybe…
Rotten eggs?
Hard to say…
Oh! There it is again. Gross!
Oh, hey, Lupita… Do you know?
A quiet boy named Peter would board the bus next and sit three or four rows behind Lupita. He never said hello, never spoke to anyone. Given how empty the bus was, and how loud Kit and Wanda were, Lupita knew it was not possible for Peter and Jackie and Mr. Prindle not to hear the taunting. After a while, it felt like the voices calling out to her were theirs, too.
After Peter, Mary Anderson got on with her two older brothers. Mary was broad shouldered and thick, with long blonde hair that was almost yellow. She would board ahead of her brothers and shoot straight to the back to sit with Kit or Wanda. From the very first time she rode the bus, Lupita recognized by the way Kit and Wanda both moved to the window-end of their seats and waited as she made her way down the aisle that Mary was their unchallenged leader. When she landed in either girl’s seat they would, in unison, ask her if she smelled something disgusting. You mean the bag of garbage disguised as a third grader?, she would answer and the three girls would detonate with self-congratulatory laughter. As the bus filled, the teasing would stop, and the remaining ride to school was usually uneventful. After they arrived, Jackie disappeared into the fourth grade and if she saw Lupita in the cafeteria at lunch or on the playground at recess she’d smile, just as she did when she boarded the bus to go home at three-thirty. On the surface, her smiles seemed friendly, and were certainly warmer than her sleepy aloofness in the mornings, but like the see you tomorrows she called over her shoulder each afternoon when she headed home from the bus stop in the opposite direction, Lupita understood that these were merely obligatory gestures that excused Jackie from further contact. Still, she was grateful to be acknowledged, and in those first few years of riding the bus to and from school with Jackie, there was never a smile or a see you tomorrow that didn’t spark a longing for something more.
Mary had a long purple cloth coat with yellow plastic buttons that hung below her knees to the top of her pink rubber boots. It had a cinched hood with green cords that dangled on both sides with blue toggles. It was an unusually colorful piece of clothing which Mary wore from early fall to late spring. In it, Lupita thought she looked like a walking Easter egg, a version of which she drew in her notebook. She used purple crayon for the egg and covered it with large yellow dots down the front and green zigzags and pink stars everywhere else. On the top she scribbled bright yellow blonde hair and on the bottom pink boots, just like Mary’s.
Lupita never told a soul what she thought Mary looked like in that coat, nor did she show anyone the drawing, but at lunch, not long after she’d made it, Kit crept up to Lupita’s table from behind and stole her notebook. Frozen, Lupita watched her flip the pages, humming “La Cucaracha,” which the three girls had recently discovered and sang whenever in her presence. Lupita knew they couldn’t have understood the word’s meaning in Spanish, otherwise by now they would have been calling her cockroach.
Kit stopped flipping the notebook when she reached the page where the drawing was. As she inspected what was there, her face lit with understanding. Slowly, she held the Easter egg drawing up so that Lupita could see it clearly. Kit relaxed her shoulders, squinted her eyes, and calmly reported what they both now knew to be true: You’re dead. She’s going to kill you. In that moment Lupita believed she’d never again see her mother, her sister, Ada, or her father. Kit stared at her as she squirmed. And then, propelled by a surge of unexpected adrenalin, Lupita lurched across the short distance between them, snatched the notebook from Kit’s hands, and ran for the cafeteria doors. Barely a few yards into her escape, she slammed into a chair which, as she fell, made a spectacular scraping sound. Without dropping the notebook she quickly stood and shot past the other kids eating their lunch, past the row of garbage cans lined up along the floor-to-ceiling cafeteria windows, and out through the double doors. She ran across the asphalt playground, beyond the swing-sets and seesaws and onto the athletic field that fronted the school. It was February and the ground was frozen; small ridges of melted snow still streaked the brown and yellow grass. As she ran she imagined Kit behind her, legs pumping, her face a death mask, Mary and Wanda on either side.
When Lupita reached Upper Main Street, she remembered her coat on the back of the cafeteria chair. Still running, she half-turned and looked back to see how close behind her pursuers were only to see a long stretch of empty sidewalk. Kit had not rallied Mary and Wanda to destroy her. And if she had, they’d already given up. Lupita slowed her steps, the notebook still clutched to her chest. As her breathing steadied, she could feel the cold begin to seep through her thin brown wool sweater and white cotton blouse. Snot began to drip from her nose. She was now at the center of town, on Upper Main Street between the library and the Town Hall. She’d never been here on her own before, not in the summer or on a weekend, and certainly not on a school day. Instead of feeling unsure or more frightened, she felt restless, excited. This was the first time she was fully outside the bounds of other people’s rules. Her father was strict about finishing meals, doing dishes, completing homework, and saying prayers before bedtime. At school every moment was spoken for and scheduled; on the bus, she barely moved in her seat behind the driver for fear of inciting further taunting. And here she was, walking in town, alone and without a single person in the world watching or knowing where she was.
She crossed the town green to Lower Main Street, squeezing her notebook and remembering the moment she grabbed it from Kit. She was sure it was the only brave thing she’d ever done. It was so far outside the bounds of how she’d interacted with those girls, she could hardly believe it had actually happened. It excited and frightened her to replay each moment. She quickened her step and decided to rip the drawing from the notebook and destroy it. Mary could never see it. Even knowing it existed, for Kit had no doubt already told her, might be reason enough for Mary to come after her.
As Lupita crossed lower Main Street and turned onto Hospital Hill Road toward the Catholic church, she tried to imagine the worst that Mary would do. Despite countless taunts and cruelties, she could not remember a single moment of violence that Mary or any of the other girls had ever inflicted—upon her, or anyone else. It was their words and their songs and their hostile glares, never more and never worse. Her father was the only person who hit her.
Usually just a smack across the face or a pinched arm if she’d broken a plate or cup while doing dishes after supper, but occasionally, if he was especially upset, he used his fists. He hadn’t hit her in months but his stern quiet let her know that it was always a possibility. Lupita had never thought to compare her father to her tormentors at school before now. Yes, their words felt terrible. Really terrible. And yes, she lived in fear of seeing them in the morning on the bus and at school. But compared to her father they were harmless and she’d managed to live alongside him most of her life. For the first time the girls on the bus seemed less frightening, even physically smaller, than before. Her blood quickened and without intending to she started to skip as she walked further away from school.
The wind kicked up as Lupita crossed the road to the church. Instinctively she avoided the chapel entrance and walked down the side driveway to the door to the kitchen where the women—her mother and Ada among them—made coffee and arranged Ritz crackers and hard white cheese on clear plastic trays every Sunday. Thankfully, the door was unlocked, and for the first time she did what she’d seen her mother do a million times: she made the sign of the cross with her right hand and at the end kissed her fingers.
The door opened into a small foyer, to the left was the kitchen. Directly in front was a set of stairs that at the top led through a hall to the back entrance of the chapel, the one Father Tesoro came through at mass. Instead of going into the kitchen or up to the chapel, Lupita sat on the third step and set the notebook beside her. She hugged herself as tightly as she could to get warm. The temperature inside was a world warmer than the outside she’d just left, but she felt colder than before. Her whole body shook and her teeth began to chatter.
