by test
"No, dear, this is between Henry and me. It's not about you at all. You're thirty-two years old, you have a right to your own life. Sometimes I'm just sorry that we let you, well, use so much up on us." Berta smiled at her daughter, as if asking forgiveness. "Henry and mewell, we let it go, we just let it run out. That's all. It's better this way. You know, I think he might even be happierhe tells me he goes out sometimes, he's meeting new people."
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Marsha cringed, the thought of Henry picking up a strange woman at her house, putting her coat around her shoulders for her, the two of them having a drink someplaceit made her dizzy. She imagined this is how it would be if Bob came to take her out; suddenly even putting on a jacket would become unbearable. She knew it had been a long time since looks had passed between her parents in the mornings, a glance that shut her out, speaking of parts of their lives separated off from hers, making her nervous. She hadn't really missed those exchanges; in fact, she enjoyed breakfast with the two of them more when they held themselves apart from one another. She wondered if Bob's airplane had seat belts.
''Maybe I'll come over sometime. We're doing okay, in case you're interested." Marsha couldn't help sounding angry. She wished she could keep her voice as calm as her mother's.
Henry had picked up his own clean laundry the next day, and since then has washed all his own clothes, twice a week, on Sundays and Wednesdays. He had even gone so far as to say that she should do hers separately, that Berta told him his clothes were too dirty to mix in with finer washables. Marsha tried not to laugh when she heard her father use this phrase he must have borrowed from a Woolite commercial, and it came out like a smirk on her face. Henry read it as a smile, and opened his own mouth back in response.
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A honking car prods Marsha around the block again. Circling and circling, until she feels the car is bound to be tied up in a knot, she wants to break out, to spin out fast and speed along a straight stretch right into the middle of the West End. She could control the flight path, swerving to avoid unapproved craft zoning in, meeting head-on the one-way traffic. The car feels anxious to test its power. She turns into the parking lot behind the laundromat.
The alleyway is dark, and a large dog sniffs her as she scurries back out toward the lighted street. Inside, it is warm and Berta is there, folding sheets into four straight corners, folding herself in with each tug and shake. "Hello there," she says to Marsha. Berta's hair is longer, and it curls from the dampness.
"There's mildew in the shower," Marsha says. "I used the Tilex in the front cupboard. I think that I got it all." She cannot imagine washing other people's dirty clothes, even for money. She imagines Bob Gianelli's bush shirts, sweaty and rough, in a pile on a floor. Maybe he even drops off his laundry here, on his way out to the airport. In the machines underwear spins in the rinse cycle, faded jeans beat against the dryer windows.
"It smells like snow today," Berta says. She talks while she works, and smiles when a man in a camel-colored overcoat approaches her, calls her by name. He is taller than Henry, but not as big as Bob.
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"Got your things right here, Mr. Bell," Berta says, picking up a basket from behind her. "I didn't bleach those good white shirtsit'd turn them yellow." The man smiles, says he'll see her next week. His hair is gray, neatly trimmed.
"You have a nice evening," Berta adds as he leaves, and he bobs his head at her. Marsha wonders if perhaps her mother means something to this stranger, returning regularly with soiled clothes, allowing Berta to clean them with intimacy.
"I just wanted to tell you," Marsha says, "that The Sound of Music is on tonight."
Berta nods. "I saw that in the TV Guide. I'm off in fifteen minutes. Would you like to come to my place and watch it?" She pours fabric softener in a washer whose rinse cycle light shines on.
"You have a TV?" Marsha asks, surprised. She thinks of the VCR she had picked out for this Christmas, with up to three weeks' advance programming and freeze-frame precision fast-forwarding.
"Oh, I'm all set up. You should see the place. It's not much, just an apartment over a shoe store. It's only about a mile from here, and I take the bus when it rains or snows. I can see the river from my bathroom window, and I've bought some area rugs, and a nice secondhand rocking chair. I painted it red. The cable is included in my rent. I have a radio too." Berta's skin is smooth and shiny under the fluorescent lighting. "I feel like my heart isn't so tacked down, Marsha," she says softly. Then: "Will you come?"
"A man has asked me out," Marsha replies. "Bob. He's tall, and has an airplane of his own. He takes people up into the bush, Americans who go fishing and hunting." As one fear recedes, another moves in to take its place. When she was little, whenever it ached liked this Berta would rub butter on her belly, letting the cat lick it off her to tickle her. Is it the thought of Bob's large dark forearms, the hair tufting out of his open shirt collar, that shrinks her stomach up inside?
Berta glances down at Marsha's wrist, and nods. "There are a couple of things left at the house that I'd like. I already spoke to Henry, and he said it was all right with him if it was all right with you." She folds creases into a couple of pairs of denim jeans. "The water tastes different at my apartment," she says. "Maybe living so close to the river. I'm not sure. But I'm growing used to it." The lights flick off, then on again, signaling the approach of closing time. Berta wipes soap powder off of the counter
Marsha wonders about bringing Bob here to meet her mother. She has barely formulated even to herself a story to put forward to this stranger, the story of her life, which keeps shifting. She thinks about her mother's heart, about what Berta meant. And wonders if she could learn how to dance, shuffling her feet in an unfettered soft shoe of her own.
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Berta steps out from behind her counter, coat in hand. Marsha knows there is no need to say she'll come, that that much at least is understood. Her mother hums as they walk out the door, "I am sixteen, going on seventeen." Berta turns toward the parking lot; she must have seen Marsha driving, crazy, by the store. "Your father never could understand why we liked this movie," she says.
Marsha nods. It's better that they see it without him.
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Wau-Ban-See
by Ashley L. Gibson
The Comanches named this place Wau-Ban-See. Mirrored waters. In the flat under the limestone ridge that cuts across the ranch, pecan trees grow thick and hang low over the shallow San Saba. Evenings, the water comes alive, the greenblack leaves reflected on its surface blowing in a wind the trees above do not feel. The Texas Rangers built this place. Each rock of each building pulled out of the hard earth with the end of a pickax and calloused hands. More than twelve miles of five-foot-high dry-stacked rock fences wind around this land, sectioning it off, claiming it. This place and its stories came to me whole and I have changed nothing, named no streams, invented no characters, added no buildings that will bear out my presence after I am gone.
Today is the first day of summer, marked in large block letters under the Thursday column on the Hargrove Feed and Seed calendar that hangs next to the kitchen sink. I am alone. The picture above the calendar grid is a grainy watercolor of three bare-chested boys standing on a boulder some ten feet above the Llano River. They all look out over the water. Two of their faces are in profile and a bit out of focus, but the expression on the third boy's face, eyes wide and unfocused, mouth slightly open, speaks for all of them. They are not thinking about what's under the dark summer water but about the few seconds' plunge through the air. There will be no boys playing in my creek, jumping in my pool, today. The visits by family hunters and holiday guests have stopped. No one wants to brave the heat of the unairconditioned Ranger's house or the boneaching cold of the spring-fed pool, its waters spilling over the dam and running down into the San Saba. They have houses where they can wear sweatshirts at noon and curl up under down comforters at night. They have temperaturecontrolled poo
ls in their own backyards with water so clear they can count the grains of sand that stray to the level bottom. They leave me with the place to myself. Five hundred acres, twenty head of cattle not including calves, seven peacocks, countless barn cats, no human contact for a mile and a half.
I have gotten used to drinking my coffee standing up in the early morning light, the kitchen floor boards creaking underneath me. I don't feel so alone that way, almost like I expect someone to come in at any minute or like I am about to rush out to go somewhere. But I don't. I don't drive the two hours to Austin
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anymore, don't visit friends or have a nice meal or buy a new skirt. I am tired of what they have to say about me, about my husband, about his accident. I am tired of repeating my own story. I want to throw my wine glass or my hymnal at them and scream in the bar or the church foyer that of course nobody expects to die that way. Nobody expects the dive platform they're standing on to collapse; nobody expects to lose their grip on the rope swing handle; nobody expects to fall forward as a result of all that and snap their neck on the black slate ledge of the pool. A man expects to die of old age, in bed, asleep, with his hand wrapped around his wife's waist, his nose in her hair. He does not expect to widow her ten days before her thirtieth birthday.
I wanted to bury my husband on the ridge next to the Methodist circuit rider who has no name above his head, only a rough cedar cross with 1934 carved on it. No one knows where he came from, but he worked the Hill Country preaching for food, a place to stay. He went through Art and Mason, Menard and Junction, worked his way back by Eden and Brady, died on this ranch from a bee sting. My husband, Wil Giddry, always felt close to the stranger buried on his land, felt they did the same work in some small way. Fresh out of med school, Wil passed up an offer from a major Dallas hospital and accepted a residency at the thirty-bed county hospital in Mason. I quit my job as a staff photographer with the Dallas Times Herald. He wanted to be a rancher. I wanted to be a mother. I would like to say herds of cattle roam our fields. I would like to say Wil left me with a life down deep inside that grew to kick my womb with long, narrow feet that now look like his, but wildflowers spring up uneaten and untrampled in most of the fields and the rooms of the Ranger's house stand empty. As a result of laws and red tape, Wil lies in the small cemetery outside the ranch gate, thirty minutes walking distance from the traveling minister, twelve feet from the bounds of the property the Giddrys have called theirs for three generations. I visit neither man, let nature take their graves.
The grids on the calendar after the one marked FIRST DAY OF SUMMER are blank. Maybe I should fill them with measures of rainfall or hours of sun like the old-timers do. Maybe I should fill them with what I do: repaired gap to south field, picked bushel peaches, drove to Bradynew brakes on truck, lost two peacock chicks to fox.
The phone rings and I ignore it until I realize it is ringing for me. One long ring followed by a short one. We are still on a party line.
"¡Diga!" I answer. I like to see how people react when I answer in foreign languages. They usually do well with the French Alo? and speak a few decibels louder, but the Spanish command makes most people sound confused.
"La Señora Giddry está allí?" an older-sounding woman asks, her Spanish slow and accented with a thick drawl.
"This is she."
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"Oh . . . well . . . this is Harriet Mauch." She pauses and when I don't respond she adds, "With the Austin Historical Guild?"
"Yes?"
"I was just calling to confirm our visit this coming Wednesday. You know we so enjoyed coming out to Wau-Ban-See five years ago. Your husband told such wonderful stories about the place and that quail salad you served was just lovely. The ladies still talk about it, you know, and are looking forward to doing it again."
I start pacing the kitchen, walking as far as the phone cord lets me. I'd completely forgotten. They'd written over Thanksgiving and my sister, Virginia, read the letter lying unanswered on the kitchen table and encouraged me to accept. She said if I insisted on staying out here I should at least have people over besides family.
"I'm sorry, Mrs. Mauch, you caught me a bit off guard. Of course I'm looking forward to seeing you and the ladies on Wednesday. You say you'll be in around eleven?" I have no idea when they were coming, but it seems a pretty good guess.
"Oh, no, dear. We'd thought more around nine-thirty so we'll have plenty of time for the tour and then have an early picnic down by that wonderful pool. Then we're off to Fredricksburg and do some antiquing while we're out that way."
"That sounds fine. I'll be expecting you."
That's the end of the conversation as far as I'm concerned, but she chimes in as the phone is halfway to its base, "Oh, your husband won't be able to join us then?"
It is silly of me to expect she knows. How could she? I can probably take the easy route, tell her he was busy at the hospital, but I know I'll let something slip when they get here. "My husband passed away two summers ago, Mrs. Mauch."
She doesn't pause in shock, doesn't miss a beat. "Oh, dear, I'm so sorry. Would it be better if we didn't come? I know how hard it must be on you still. Probably Fredricksburg will be enough to wear us all out anyway."
"No, no. I'd like to have you. I'm sure Mr. Giddry would like knowing someone else was enjoying his place." My answer almost makes me laugh. I am not used to talking about Wil like he is a benign ghost who watches over this place and over me. He loved this land, but he hated its history, its ghosts, felt all the stories I learned from his grandfather were products of an old man's mind. What Wil told the ladies on that visit were not stories of this ranch, but factual accounts of the region, population sizes, county boundaries, crops planted. He saw too many people die to think of Wau-Ban-See's ghosts as anything but insignificant tales better outgrown with childhood and forgotten. His
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death is the only one I've witnessed, and all the spectacular ones that came before help to justify it.
"Well, if you're sure."
"I'm sure. I'll see you Wednesday morning," I tell her, wanting to get off the phone and start the day. "Goodbye, Mrs. Mauch."
I like to be outside by eight-thirty. That's late compared to the schedules other inhabiters of this house have kept, but it gets me out of bed every morning. I do not take the time to write the ladies' visit on the calendar.
Outside, the temperature has already started climbing. I like this place in the summer the best. I like the heat, like to feel my skin warm and sweat at noon. I like the high hum of cicadas. I like to sit on the porch and watch the darkening hills swallow the bright ball of the sun as the cows settle in around the salt lick and small stock tank if I've moved them to the front pasture. The salt lick sits in a galvanized tub outside the fence to the main house compound and slightly behind five perfectly symmetrical cones of deep red and brown rock with loops of thick metal chain between them. The Rangers used to tie their horses there, sometimes as many as twenty, when they came in for a meeting or a meal or one of the barn dances they had on Fourth of Julys. This was never a major post and I doubt the chains ever saw much use, but they hang just as they did when the Rangers left over one hundred years ago and my nieces and nephews like to sit on them and try to swing themselves while their parents shake hands and hug between heavy foreign cars parked in the packed dirt road and try to convince me I'd be much happier back in Dallas, if they are from Wil's family, or in Austin, if they are from mine. They tell me that it's not good to be surrounded by so many bad memories, tell me that a woman as young as I am shouldn't be stuck out by herself, tell me that they have a banker friend or a lawyer friend who just bought a place not nearly as nice as this for half a million, tell me they'll be happy to put me in touch with someone who can move it quick.
I do not tell them I know nothing of hard work or bad memories. I do not tell them of the young Comanche boy who stopped around the bend up from the house to cool himself in the dark creek waters he thought
would hide him and was shot twice in the chest while he floated with his eyes closed and was left to drift downstream until his body caught on a mass of tree roots where the bank had cut away in the last flood. I do not tell them of young Joe Donnely, come to join the Rangers and fight Indians and sent to gather rocks and raise fences, who died of heat exhaustion digging the holes that hold the gateposts I drive through on my way to the hay fields. I do not tell them because, like Wil, they have heard those stories before and have chosen not to remember them. Chosen not to remember them because they can't be proven, documented, because they're merely tales passed on by old men who have nothing better to do or to remember.
