[2016] The Practice House

by Laura McNeal

  “I don’t know. They brought the cable out once before,” he said, holding the paper up, “but no one was here.”

  She swallowed and took this in. “Why did they come back?”

  “Someone mentioned seeing a light on.”

  They were both quiet. When the car had approached, she’d forgotten her swollen feet, but they were again making themselves felt. She needed to sit down, and she walked to the bed. She was aware again that she was cold and hungry, or cold and dizzy, she wasn’t sure which. She sat on the smooth edge of the bed and made herself say it. “Will you go back now?”

  Ansel shook his head. Ellie hadn’t asked him to come back. Her telegram just said horrible accident and broken leg nailed together. But she would expect him to come back, he thought. That’s why she sent the news.

  “I’m in the middle of something in the barn,” he said. “We can talk about it later.”

  She nodded. After he left the house, she went to the window and looked beyond the cottonwood to the barn, and beyond the barn to the field, and beyond the field to the thin brown line of road, a road on which she could see the black shape of a passing car, one in which the driver and passenger might turn their faces to look, to take note, to carry word.

  90

  The nearness of the wedding put Charlotte in a jangly mood. She was barely able to read the message Clare wrote back to Lavinia, the one he’d printed so elegantly in Lavinia’s Latin notebook, the one she was supposed to return to his little Florence Nightingale. “So what’s it mean?” she asked Lavinia on the front steps of the school.

  Lavinia gave her a baffled look.

  “Quantum mutatus ab illo,” Charlotte said, giving the words a flat, twangy sound to make it seem like she wasn’t even trying for authentic pronunciation.

  “How changed from what he once was,” Lavinia translated. “Why?”

  “Check your Latin notes,” Charlotte said, handing over the book. “Clare’s written you a little Roman apology. I think he’s waiting for a High Latin reply.”

  If Lavinia had been smitten before by Clare’s face and body, she now felt a torturous kinship, an almost fanatical desire to win him by irony and wit. She had his words in her book. His Latin words. She spent her lunch hour searching through her reader for something not too preachy or inspirational. At last, she decided on semper eadem—“always the same.” She wrote it carefully in her most feminine cursive, swirling the last stroke of the m as if answering one of those riddles in a Greek play where you won a kingdom for the right answer. Then she carried the notebook back to Miss Price, who was cutting out what had to be her wedding dress on one of the long homemaking tables. “Here’s today’s work,” Lavinia said shyly, wondering if Miss Price would read it. Probably she would. Of course she would!

  Charlotte nodded without looking up from the creamy expanse of satin. The more she tried to weigh the fabric down and line it up for cutting, the more it slipped away from her like yards of milk. “I’ll give your missive to the invalid.”

  “That’s pretty fabric,” Lavinia said. Sunlight poured into the home arts building and she could see a hawk circling in the blue sky framed by the window. A crow passed in the same arc, the two arguing in midair, as crows and hawks always argued, she never knew why, though it made her wonder. Wasn’t one a scavenger and the other a predator? And wasn’t there sky enough, and trees enough, and food enough for both of them?

  “It’s charmeuse,” Charlotte said, her body tense with the effort of holding the fabric in place.

  “You should come visit Clare again,” she said. “He’s going bats staying in bed all the time.”

  “I don’t know,” Lavinia said, fingering the chrome edge of the table. “Maybe he just wants the notes.”

  “Maybe,” Charlotte said, “but maybe not.” She pretended to study the grain line she was measuring until Lavinia had turned away and walked almost to the door. “He thinks you’re clever,” Charlotte said. “He told me.” She smiled her warmest smile. What Clare had actually said was that Lavinia was a little too clever, but that was just the usual fear the male species had of being shown up in the Brain Department.

  The door closed behind Lavinia, and Charlotte sighed. The charmeuse had half cascaded over the edge of the table, and she felt cranky and incompetent. What kind of bride—and domestic arts teacher!—was still sewing her dress four days before the vows? Last July she had described her curriculum as “vocational homemaking and related courses planned to help the girl of today not only to live as a member of her family group, but to live well.”

  Not only to live, but to live well. She had to laugh. What a stuffed goose she could be.

  Charlotte was straightening the charmeuse when the door opened again and Mister stepped quietly in, a surprise because she didn’t usually see him during the school day. It was awkward, his being both on the school board and her fiancé, but she gave him one of her lavish smiles as he approached, and he removed his hat. There was something apologetic about the way he walked toward her—something about the way he only half smiled—that made her wonder if something was wrong.

  “How’s my goddess of the hearth?” he said.

  “Snipping this expensive cloth to ribbons,” she said, giving it a rueful glance. “Should’ve used poplin, I guess.”

  He made a murmuring sound. “Well, maybe if you stop feeling the pressure of getting it done by Friday.”

  This immediately set off alarms. “What do you mean?” she asked.

  His gaze moved from her to the window, then down to the hat he held in his hands. Something was going on—she could feel it. He usually eased close and leaned into her, letting hands slide where they could—those were his goatish ways—but today he sat there fiddling with his hat.

  “I’ve been talking to Ida,” he said slowly, as if reading the words from the inside brim of his hat, “and she thinks—we think—it would be better to put off the date. You shouldn’t get married without your father here, and I feel a little selfish taking your whole family over to the church while Clare is an invalid.”

  “I don’t want to put it off,” Charlotte said at once, surprised at her own vehemence.

  “I don’t either,” he said in a low voice. He tried now to lean against the table and bring her to him, but she stood fast and cold. “I don’t want to wait,” he whispered, running one hand down her arm and onto her backside, which stiffened her and made her glance at the doors and windows, afraid to see Candy or Myrtis looking in.

  She eased free of him and said, “My uncle can give me away.”

  “He can, but I’m sure your father’s trying to wrap up his business in Kansas and get back here for this. How will it look if we go ahead without him? I’m going to be in your family from now on, and I don’t want to start by burning bridges.”

  “You don’t know my father,” Charlotte said, and at once wished she hadn’t. What did she want? For her fiancé to think her father was off committing adultery? “I mean that he’s not one to take offense. He’s practical about things, and he’d want us to be practical, too.”

  He was quiet for a time; then he said quietly, “I just have a bad feeling about going ahead without him. Ida does, too.”

  Ida. Why doesn’t Ida just go peddle her fish? Charlotte lifted the small metal disk she used to secure the fabric, and as she expected, the cut wedge of charmeuse poured off the table like a white waterfall. She didn’t reach to pick it up but instead pressed the cold steel into her palm. Marrying McNamara would transform her. She would be a California society woman. She would have her dog again. She would have curtains that matched the sofa and she would have a whole wall full of books, more books than she had ever seen in one place at one time. With McNamara, she wasn’t clumsy and catty but clever and desirable. She became what he saw, and what he saw was the person she’d always wanted to be. He did that to her, made true the mirror that all her life had been distorted.

  She dropped her eyes. “You’re not sure anymore,”
she murmured. “It’s just an excuse.”

  He drew up the long triangle of silk and laid it back on the table. He shook his head slowly and tried to pull her into the long-limbed net of himself. She twisted away but he held on until she stopped, and pulled her to him, and this time she let her hips rest against his inner thighs, her chest against his chest, and it gave her a certain kind of reassuring pleasure to note the immediate effect she had on him. She looked over his shoulders and, strangely, without alarm, saw Lavinia Gulden staring through the window at them. Charlotte did something that surprised her: she gave the girl a wink and a small, knowing smile before pushing McNamara away from her.

  When she glanced again at the window, Lavinia was gone.

  “How about December ninth?” he said, his voice low and husky now. “It’s just two more weeks. Believe me, it’s harder for me to wait than you.”

  “And what if he doesn’t come back? Would we postpone again?”

  “Why wouldn’t he?”

  The smell that lingered from their embrace was from the Wrigley’s fruit gum he carried in his pockets. “He didn’t like giving up and coming here,” Charlotte said. “He would have stuck it out if Neva hadn’t been sick. Probably until we were all half starved.”

  “But he didn’t say what he was doing?”

  “He’s checking the farm and he had something official to do with the bank.” She let her eyes settle deeply on his. “I just think that it’s going to be hard for him not to extend his visit, and he’s not like a lot of people—he doesn’t like big parties and big social events.” This wasn’t 100 percent true, so she added something that was. “When he married my mother, he said the wedding party could be as large as she wanted as long as it wasn’t more than he could count on his toes.”

  “Well,” he said, “where your parents live doesn’t affect whether I’m going to marry you.”

  She noticed that he’d said “parents,” that he assumed, as anyone would, that two parents would live in the same place.

  There were footsteps outside, and the sound of scraping. “I’d better go,” he said.

  “But if he doesn’t return, we won’t postpone again?”

  “No,” he said. “We won’t.”

  “Honor bright?”

  He made a small laugh. “Honor bright.”

  As he neared the door, something occurred to her. “How am I going to tell the girls?” she asked. This, the smallest problem, now seemed the most galling.

  “What girls?”

  “The girls in my class. The ones who are making the centerpieces and all.”

  “Can’t we just save them?”

  “They’re autumn-colored. Autumn and Christmas aren’t the same color.”

  “They are in California,” he said, and pushed through the heavy steel door with a dapper doff of his hat to the cluster of girls waiting to come in.

  “He looked happy, Miss Price,” one of them called out to Charlotte.

  “He should,” she laughed. “I just granted him a two-week reprieve.”

  They groaned as one. It was endearing, really, the way they took her wedding planning on as their own. “So my father can have time to get back,” Charlotte said, then, glancing at the sprawling cloth, “and to give me time to finish this vexsome dress.”

  She laughed, and the girls did, too.

  Later on, she did the job her mother gave her, and she wrote:

  Dear Dad,

  Jim thinks it would be better if you were here for the wedding and Clare, too. We’re going to have it on December 9th instead so please hurry back. Clare’s using his leg to get all kinds of attention. Poor kid is pretty bad off, though.

  She wondered what would happen if she said Dr. Quigley sure seemed to be spending a lot of time at the lunch counter, but instead she just said,

  We all wish you’d hurry back, and me especially.

  Love always,

  Charlotte

  91

  There was a Bitler Feed Store calendar on the kitchen wall, but no clocks. One freezing night Ansel stood in front of the calendar and figured out, more or less, what day it was. He did it while Aldine was asleep because they tried not to talk about Clare, Charlotte’s wedding, Ellie, or Neva. They tried not to talk about anything outside the little cocoonish world they’d made for themselves. Since the telegram delivery he’d listened so keenly for cars that even in his sleep he would think he was hearing the popping whir of tires and would bolt up in bed, listening until Aldine would stir and say, “What?” and he would say, “Nothing. Nothing at all.”

  Night was also when he walked to the end of the drive and pulled on the stiff metal lip of the mailbox, feeling around in the hollow box for letters. He’d done it four times and his hand had found nothing.

  Counting up as best he could, he came to Thursday, November 23. He’d left Fallbrook on the fourth, so he and Aldine had been together a little over two weeks and no one had come to accuse them of stealing the car. Perhaps the baby would come that night or in the morning and he could take the doctor’s car back to Emporia and explain. This was the concern above all others, the fear of being arrested and branded a thief. The other problems were there, though. They waited in the corner like Ellie’s radio.

  If today was Thanksgiving, Ellie’s birthday was two days ago and Charlotte’s wedding was tomorrow. He ran his finger along the tacky edge of the counter, and then let go. He was tired now, more tired than he let Aldine see. Sometimes when she thought he was working in the barn he lay down to sleep, hoping that sleep would make him stronger. He would have been glad to lie down in the house instead, to pull her close beside him and listen to her talk if she felt like talking, to let the elliptical vowels and tongue-licked r’s lull him into believing he could live in the mere sound of her.

  One afternoon he had come indoors and suggested a nap, but then, when they were lying down, he said, “Maybe you would tell me one of your stories.”

  She told him how their family had gone on holiday to the Isle of Skye because their father was to play music there, and while their mother was in the village shopping, their father took them down to the firth to look around. The tide was low, which meant you could see the hairy underparts of the sea and the wreckage that people threw away but never really got rid of: a rusted iron chain with links the size of her own head, a safe, the gears of an old clock. Aldine loved the outing, she said, but her sister said it all smelled of death, and she kept complaining that the salt water would spoil her shoes. She wanted to be off to the shops, but that was when Aldine found the little egg case sticking to a rock.

  Aldine gave out a small pleasant laugh that wrapped around Ansel like a flannel blanket. His eyes had fallen closed and he kept them so.

  “I said, ‘Come see! I found a mermaid’s purse!’ but Leenie thought I’d found some ugly old pocketbook that I was pretending was a mermaid’s.”

  She fell silent and after a few moments, he opened his eyes.

  “Thought I’d bored you to death,” she said. “You came in to nap after all.”

  But he liked all the stories of her childhood, which she lingered over and made seem magical as fairy tales, so he coaxed her on. She told him how their father strode over to the rock, peered down, and began carrying on as if Aldine had found a giant pearl. “It was a shark’s egg,” she said, and because Ansel had never seen one she told him what it looked like: a flat hourglass ridged like a fingernail but translucent enough to reveal the tiny creature in its embryonic water. It was so small and helpless, Aldine said, as delicate as a human baby in the womb and yet there it was lying outside, stuck to a rock, with nobody to watch over it, amidst all the broken things people had thrown away.

  “Then what?” he asked.

  “Nothing. We went back to the town. We couldn’t help it at all, my father said.”

  She fell silent again.

  “I wanted to take it with me and put it in a jar so nothing would hurt it but Father wouldn’t allow it. Said we shouldn’t d
eny the living thing its sliver’s chance to live.” A moment passed and then Aldine said, “I never saw another one. I always looked after that, when I was near a firth.”

  Ansel listened with his eyes closed.

  “A photograph would’ve been splendid,” she said. “But we hadn’t a camera.”

  Ansel said nothing.

  “I don’t have a photograph of you, you know.”

  “You don’t need one. I’m here. I’ll always be here.”

  He’d turned in the bed then so that she could snug close to his back, and soon they had fallen to sleep.

  It was later that night that the wind started blowing again and what he thought had receded roared up in his head and ran its sharp fingers along his lungs, leaving behind a hardness that made him catch his breath, his whole chest percolating with what felt like chunks of swallowed fire, and it was the day after that, when he thought Charlotte’s wedding had occurred without him, that he felt inside the darkened mailbox and found the letter that said they were still waiting for him.

  He burned it so Aldine wouldn’t know.

  92

  Leenie Cooper had been holding Henrietta by the kitchen sink, staring up at the whiteness of the mountain peaks and trying to decide if she should hang the diapers out on the clothesline first, while Henrietta toddled around in the wet but not frozen grass, or if she should nurse Henrietta and put her down for her nap and then hang out the diapers, which would use up precious minutes of the free-handed nap period but would save her the trouble of dressing Henrietta in a bunch of clothes she didn’t like at just the time of day when she was likely to scream her foolish little head off about it.

  Leenie turned away from these thoughts when she heard mail plop through the front door a full two hours before the usual time. She said to Henrietta, “Let’s go read the mail then, shall we?”

  She had been offended—outraged, really—when her three deeply felt letters to Aldine about this new stage of her life (including a darling picture of Henrietta in her pink bonnet) had not produced a reply of any sort, so when she looked down and saw the faint but legible Kansas postmark on the blue envelope lying there on the sunlit stripes of wood, she might have had a begrudging moment, but she did not. She thought at once, and glowingly, of Aldine.