[2016] The Practice House

by Laura McNeal

  “Well, you better come in,” Mrs. Price said when she had stuffed the letter back into the envelope. “Come in and we’ll get this sorted out when Ansel gets back from planting.”

  “You came here from New York?” the older girl said, taking her turn with the letter, still rubbing the wriggly black-faced dog with her left hand.

  “Not New York. Scotland,” Mr. Tanner said, unbending stiffly and descending to offer his hand to Aldine. “It’s why she talks the way she does.”

  There was nothing to be done now but climb out of his wagon.

  “Scotland,” Aldine said, accepting Mr. Tanner’s hand, which was rough and rootlike. “Scotland, then New York.”

  “Can’t think why you’d leave either of those places for here!” the girl said cheerfully, taking Aldine’s suitcase for her. “But now you’re here, so come on in. My name’s Charlotte. And that’s”—she nodded at the dog—“Artemis.”

  “The Goddess of the Hunt,” Aldine said, but not very loudly, and no one seemed to hear.

  Aldine called a thank-you to Mr. Tanner but he was already maneuvering his mules and gave no acknowledgment. Inside, the house was hot like the train compartment, but its neatness was undeniable. She hadn’t been expected, yet every surface was clean, every object in perfect order. There was a front parlor with two floral-print chairs and a sofa set around a braided rug and a cathedral radio on legs (so they did have electricity), and there was a wooden telephone box on the wall as well. The man on the train said there might not be electricity or telephones or running water. Sheer curtains gave the room a yellowish color, not unpleasant, like it was already the jack-o’-lantern hour of dusk. A mahogany-framed photograph of a stiff, unfriendly man startled Aldine—what if that were Ansel Price? His clothes were old-fashioned, though, and he wore a monocle, so she hoped it was someone else.

  “You came from New York City, you said?”

  The question gave her a start, and she turned around to find Mrs. Price standing in the doorway. Aldine wondered how long she’d been standing like that. “Aye. New York City.”

  “Do you smoke cigarettes?”

  “No.” This was not quite the truth. “Well, I have naw for a long while. My sister would naw allow it.”

  Mrs. Price enunciated, “Your sister would not allow it?”

  Aldine nodded.

  Mrs. Price said, “Well we don’t, either. Not inside or outside or anywhere. Our youngest one, it closes up her passages.”

  Aldine was nodding again. “That’s fine then,” she said.

  “Also it’s vulgar for a woman.”

  “Aye,” Aldine said. She let her eyes drift away from Mrs. Price. The truth of it was that if ever she had loads of money her first purchase would be tarries and a good supply at that.

  Charlotte came out of the kitchen with a little plate of pickled beets and carrots. She was already chewing one of them. “Mom doesn’t think smoking is ladylike,” she said, offering Aldine the platter. “She thinks only city vixens smoke.”

  Mrs. Price was looking at her stiffly but Charlotte kept smiling. Her lips were somehow moist, her hair somehow buoyant. Aldine declined the pickled vegetables—she did not want to pluck them up with her fingers as was evidently the custom. Charlotte slipped two more beet slices into her mouth, then took up Aldine’s luggage and turned to her mother. “Attic room?”

  Mrs. Price nodded.

  Aldine was conscious of her heels on the hollow wood, of the plainness of the house’s sounds. A lack of carpets, she supposed.

  “Neva might be up there,” Mrs. Price said. “I don’t know why she didn’t come running to see who was here.”

  “In the barn, is my guess. She said Krazy Kat had kittens.”

  Charlotte went clomping up the stairs with Aldine’s suitcase, and Aldine followed, smelling Charlotte’s talcum powder and her own gritty sweat soaked into the armpits of her best black dress. They reached the landing with its view of a hallway and three doors, then started to climb again. “It’s a good thing you’re so small,” Charlotte said. “I barely fit in this room.”

  In fact, Aldine could only stand up in the center of the stifling hot attic, which was not papered or painted or, for that matter, clean. Dust lay on everything and in everything and formed a shifting, unsheddable skin. She could see particles on the windowsills, on the unpainted floorboards, hovering in the air by the dirty yellowed sheers that hung by the attic’s small single window. Aldine stared at an iron bed that looked as if it had been sifted all over with flour.

  “Ugh,” Charlotte said, and reached a finger to the bed. She drew a line in the dust on the coverlet. “Sweet mother of God, if the Mother saw this, she’d throw a royal fit. Tolerate no uncleanliness, and all that.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “It’s one of Benjamin Franklin’s slogans the Mother likes to tap you on the head with every chance you get. Tolerate no uncleanliness in body, clothes, or habitation. That’s the full quotation.”

  Aldine nodded and wondered whether Mr. Franklin was a Mormon. It seemed quite possible.

  “We just don’t get up here much and the truth is, it’s hard enough keeping up with the rest of the house,” Charlotte said. “The wind isn’t even supposed to blow in September. February, March, April—those are the regular blow months. That’s when you have to turn the radio up or put the covers over your head or sing yourself silly to block out the noise. And you don’t clean the dust till the wind stops, either. No point. I think it comes through glass. Through walls. But lately it’s worse than ever. It’s like you can’t even eat without swallowing the neighbor’s field. I keep hoping we’ll go to California, where my aunt lives but my dad says it’s just a couple of bad years.”

  She sighed and folded up the coverlet so the dust would remain inside it. “I’ll get you a fresh one from the cupboard, and bring wet rags for wiping it all down. Then it’ll be clean enough for a while.”

  “Thanks very much,” Aldine said. She was sick with disappointment, half smothered by regret. Beautiful Loam County, Kansas. “I’m sorry I came.”

  Charlotte opened her eyes wide. They were a muddy sort of blue but enormous, like the rest of her. Her cheeks were cherry pink, her lashes black. She and her mother didn’t look at all alike but Aldine could see what it would mean to them both to brush their hair and put them into other clothes and set them down anywhere but here. Which in turn made her wonder what Kansas would do for her own looks.

  “You’re sorry?” Charlotte asked. Her face was full of apology. “That’s my fault. I shouldn’t have said all that about the dust. It’s not so bad really. You’ll like it fine here.”

  “But to come noo,” Aldine said, unable to remember how Americans said now. “When you’re all thinking of leaving.”

  Charlotte used one of her big soft hands to wipe a strand of curly hair off her forehead. She laughed in a way that would have been nice to hear if Aldine hadn’t been so sick with regret. “Oh, don’t worry,” Charlotte said. “My dad isn’t thinking of leaving. He thinks we all ought to be proud to live on the same farm that his father got from his father that his father got from, I don’t know, Tecumseh or somebody.”

  Who Tecumseh was, Aldine couldn’t guess. She said, “Your mother didn’t seem happy. To see me, I mean.”

  “Didna,” Charlotte said. “Is that how you said it? Didna.”

  Aldine nodded, though it didn’t sound at all the same.

  “I told my dad it was silly to advertise the Stony Bank School in New York, of all places,” Charlotte went on. “He’s got this friend there from when he worked for the Harvey House—did you stop and eat at one?”

  Aldine shook her head, trying to memorize how Charlotte had said Stony Bank.

  “Well, my dad has this friend in the newspaper business named Terence Tidball who said he’d put in an ad for free—Dad is a big one for ‘contacts’—and Dad said that he was taking Terence up on his offer because by God he would bring music and culture to the prairie
or die trying. My dad would, I mean, not Terence Tidball.”

  Aldine didn’t know what to say to this. The place was not at all what she’d imagined. Where were the rivers? Where were the clouds? Where were the green pastures?

  “Are you hungry?” Charlotte asked.

  “Aye,” Aldine said, more fervently than she meant. “And clarty.”

  Charlotte gave Aldine a look of incomprehension.

  “Dirty,” Aldine said.

  “Well, I’ll go see if we have enough water for a bath. It’s washday, though. I’ll be back with a clean spread in a sec.”

  Aldine’s legs felt unsteady, and she reached out to hold one of the bed knobs.

  “Why don’t you lie down? You look kind of faint.”

  Aldine lay down on the plain white sheet and closed her eyes until Charlotte had gone clomping away. When she opened them, she stood and pulled aside the sheers of the curved window, the glass of which was faintly blue. Through the blue lens she could see a bare field, a dark chicken, a running child in a smock. That must be Neva, Aldine thought, and closed her eyes to the room.

  11

  The footsteps on the stairs to the attic were too brisk and tappity to be Charlotte’s. A round face, small and brown, peered in at Aldine from the doorway. The girl had eyes and skin the color of treacle. “I’m Geneva,” she said, stepping past the threshold. “You can call me Neva, though.” She’d caught sight of Aldine’s bracelets and had to prize her eyes from them. “Are you Allene?”

  “Aldine,” Aldine said. It occurred to her that Neva’s tiny body was perfectly proportioned to the room.

  Neva put her small hand on Aldine’s bracelets, the ones Dr. O’Malley had bought, or which had been his wife’s, Aldine had never been sure. The girl rubbed her finger over the yellow one, then the black. “Are they wood?” Neva asked.

  “No. Bakelite. Like the telephone.”

  “It’s like you came from Montgomery Wards!” Neva said. “Dad sent away for a teacher and here you are.”

  Neva’s two front teeth were gone and when she smiled the bare gums made her look like an impish vampire. “Come on!” she said, pulling on the bracelet arm, leading Aldine along, talking and talking. She said their radio came from Montgomery Wards, and that the Hintons on the next farm over had gotten their whole house from Montgomery Wards, but not the front, which Mrs. Hinton said she had to have or she wasn’t staying another minute, so her father had built the porch but hadn’t charged them because the Hintons were new and it was good to help the new people when so many others were leaving but it turned out that the Hintons left, anyway, and after only a year. She said there was bathwater downstairs and chicken pie pretty soon and that Krazy Kat had five kittens except one of them didn’t look too good and did Aldine know how to nurse kittens?

  Aldine said she didn’t, and she followed Neva’s ponytail and stream of chatter down to a tub that had been filled for her on the back porch. “You can bathe in there,” Neva said. “We won’t let Clare come in.” She raised her eyebrows and smiled the wide pink-gum smile.

  “You have another sister?” Aldine asked, as glad to see the full tub of water as she was dismayed to find herself in a place where, once again, she would not have a private bath in a scoured white bog. They didn’t even have running water. Yet how could this be?

  “No,” Neva said, and shook her head.

  “Then who’s Clare?” Aldine decided to take off her shoes.

  “Clar-ence,” Neva said. “My big brother. He’s helping Dad drill seed. They never come in till later. Our hogs died last week.”

  Aldine grimly added this information to Charlotte’s litany about the dust.

  “God sent them a sickness, Mama said. So they wouldn’t suffer in Kansas anymore. Mama says California is like heaven so I think maybe they went to California. Do you think they could have?”

  To her own surprise Aldine said, “If I could come here from Scotland, I guess a pig could go to California.”

  Neva seemed pleased with this answer.

  Aldine sat on the stool beside the water, her feet bare now, and ached to get into the water.

  “You’re nicer than our last teacher, Mr. Geoph,” Neva said, reaching out to clack the black and yellow bracelets again, running her fingers across their slippery curves. “All he did was read the German newspaper and burn buckets of coal in the stove and shout at Yauncy that he was in for a hiding.”

  Aldine asked who Yauncy was.

  “Mr. and Mrs. Tanner’s only son. Yauncy’s slow and he can’t help it. He groans in class, which everybody was used to but not Mr. Geoph.” Then she said, “Before that we had Miss Pike, who wasn’t nice at all but she got married anyway, Charlotte says she doesn’t know how.”

  Yauncy is slow. And he groaned. Which was why Mr. Tanner said that he was all done growing.

  “And Yauncy will not come to school again?”

  Neva looked at her quizzically, so Aldine repeated it more slowly.

  “Oh. No, I don’t suppose so. Mr. Tanner’s awfully nice to Yauncy even though Mrs. Tanner isn’t really. Everyone says she has a case of nerves that won’t allow it, but Mr. Tanner is gentle with him and when Mr. Geoph gave him a hiding for groaning Mr. Tanner took him away and that was that. Yauncy’s not right, but he’s strong, he can pick up bales easy as you please, so he does that now.”

  Aldine was relieved, though she wouldn’t say it. “And before that?” she asked. “Before Miss Pike who got married?”

  “Don’t know. I was too little. You’ll have to ask Clare or Charlotte.”

  Mrs. Price put her head in. “Neva,” she said. “Leave Miss McCandless to bathe in peace.” The smile she directed at Aldine was more dutiful than friendly. “When you’re finished, I have something for you to eat,” she said, and she took Neva with her when she closed the kitchen door.

  Aldine was in the washtub, naked as a frog, when she heard a slamming screen door, then the voice of a man in a room that seemed inches away. She heard Neva say, “Daddy!” and a man’s voice, low and rumbly, “Hello, girly.” Aldine pulled her knees to her breasts and let the metallic water drip down over her face, holding the cake of Joro tightly as she heard Mrs. Price saying, “Well, that plan of yours worked, Ansel. There’s a schoolteacher here from New York City by way of Scotland.”

  “She’s so pretty,” Neva said. “She’s perfect! Thank you, Daddy!”

  “She’s here?”Ansel asked.

  Aldine tightened her grip on her bare legs.

  “She’s taking a bath on the back porch,” Mrs. Price said, her voice low but still audible. “Honestly, Ansel. We can’t afford a boarder right now. When is the school board going to start her salary, and where is she going to live?”

  The voices moved farther off so that she could hear the humming but not the words. She reached over the side of the tub for a tin cup, and with the cup she poured the tepid water over her hair, her face, and her future, willing it all to become a burn that fed a river that fed an ocean that she could swim in all the way back to Ayr.

  12

  Of all the surprises in the world, none was more unimaginable to Clare Price than finding a comely young woman kneeling on the rug just before supper, helping Neva with her paper dolls. She wore a black dress printed all over with clamshells. The cloth was thin and shiny and seemed poured over her body. Her hair was black, too, and glossy where the curve of it touched her chin and caught the light. Over the crown of her head she wore a knitted cap of some kind, a flat disk with a black pom-pom. Her skin was freckled white, her arms were long and slender, and her fingers, which were busy folding and pressing a paper dress onto a paper Shirley Temple, reminded him of the naked bodies in the magazine Harry Gifford had given him before Gifford left on a freight train with two other boys who dropped out of school. He wondered how old she was. He wondered if her breasts were as white as her hands, or whiter.

  “I’m Aldine McKenna,” the girl-woman said, popping up so quickly to shake hands that
her bracelets clacked together. “You must be Clarence.”

  Clay-dance. He barely recognized his own name when she said it—that was how exotic she made it.

  “It’s Clare,” he said out of habit. “No one calls me Clarence.” From his lips the name sounded nasal and plain again. He looked down at his hands, oily from tractor work, and wished he’d done a better job of washing them.

  “Not even the teachers?” Aldine asked, and then seemed to say, “Beggars thoust will be.”

  “I’m sorry?” he said.

  She said it again, confusing him more, but Neva said, “Because that’s what she is, Clare, our new teacher!”

  “Oh,” Clare said. The young woman smiled and stayed on her feet, as if waiting for him to say more, but he couldn’t think of anything more to say. Neva kept dancing on her toes and pushing the black and yellow bangles on Aldine’s arm up and down, letting them fall and clack together until finally Aldine slipped them off and handed them to Neva, who pressed the bracelets to her eyes like spectacles and peered clownishly through them at Clare. “They’re Bakelite, Clare,” she shouted. “Like the telephone!” Then, to Aldine, she said, “Clare remembers things. He can tell you every one of Tom Mix’s injuries and recite all the presidents in order including vice presidents!”

  She smiled at him. “Well, well. Is that true now, Clarence?” she said in a voice that seemed to flow through him like a warm liquid. “And how many injuries does Mr. Tom Mix have?”

  “Twenty-six,” he murmured. “They go A to Z.”

  “Do they now?” Aldine said, and he felt somehow that the friskiness in her tone was coming at his expense. He felt his cheeks going red. He wanted to keep looking at her in the worst way, but he couldn’t. He lowered his eyes and turned away.