by Lisa Tuttle
No matter how she tried to remain unaware she knew she was the cause of her parents' argument.
Thirteen was old enough, according to her mother, to be trusted to look after herself alone during the day. When the twins were thirteen they'd been left to look after their younger sister, and she was no less mature now than they'd been then.
She was a good girl, and bright, and if there were any problems Jane-Ann was just down the road.
According to her father the point was not whether she was old enough to look after herself, but whether it was fair to make her. For a day or two, fine, but not for two weeks. It wasn't possible to get around Houston without a car. If Mary was gone, with Mike at work all day, poor Agnes would be confined to the house. With Leslie away at camp it wasn't fair to ask Jane-Ann to ferry her back and forth from the country club, let alone the library. What was the poor kid supposed to do all day?
“I don't know why Agnes couldn't go to camp, too,” said her mother. “I'm sure she'd be happier there, with other girls her own age, with plenty to do, than sitting indoors reading all the time. And then we wouldn't have this problem.”
“We wouldn't have this problem if you just stayed home,” said her father. His tone made Agnes feel chilly, although Mary didn't seem to notice how much less patience he had with her lately.
She overheard her mother on the phone that evening pleading with the twins to leave Austin and come home for just a couple of weeks, but it was a losing battle. Clarissa had already enrolled for both summer semesters and Roz had a job and a boyfriend she had no intention of being separated from. When the twins had been home at Christmas their father had baited them both about their taste in clothes and music and had been particularly merciless in his sarcastic attacks on Rozzy's long-haired “liberal” boyfriend. They didn't have to take it, and they didn't. Agnes envied them their extra years. When she was old enough to get away, she wouldn't come back either.
Her parents didn't ask Agnes what she wanted to do, and she didn't ask her mother where she wanted to go. She didn't want to hear another story about a bit part in a film which would end on the cutting-room floor. More than a year had passed since Mary Grey's last “trip to Hollywood.” The twins had been living at home then, seniors in high school, willing to look after their younger sister and test their cooking skills, especially since their housekeeping duties included unquestioned right of access to their mother's car. She remembered that time, those two weeks, vividly because they had been so happy. Instead of working late and spending his weekends down at the bay, working on his boat as he did now, their father had started coming home earlier in the evenings, to take them out to dinner or, after a meal at home, out to a movie or to play miniature golf. One Sunday they all went sailing, and on the Saturdays, when her sisters were busy with their friends, he had taken Agnes to see the battleship Texas and the San Jacinto Monument. He'd talked to her—mostly about Texas history, as she recalled, but the subject mattered less than the fact of his interested presence. She had wished it could always be like that with the four of them.
But Mary Grey came back from wherever she had been, the twins graduated and moved up to Austin, and Mike spent less and less time at home. The house which had once been so full of voices was now too quiet.
Things were getting worse, the way they always did before Mary went away. The long, tense silences between her parents would be punctuated by short, quiet arguments. There were many days when Agnes saw her father only for a few minutes in the morning in the kitchen before he left for work, and her mother only for a few minutes in the evening, in her darkened bedroom where she'd spent the day with one of her bad headaches.
Something had to happen; she couldn't understand why her father was being so difficult. He'd always let his wife go before, and things had always been better, at least for a while, afterward. But now he was using her as an excuse to keep her mother home, and she couldn't even say anything because she wasn't supposed to know they were arguing.
It came as a complete surprise when her mother asked if she'd mind spending a couple of weeks with her Aunt Marjorie.
The name lifted her spirits like a promise of magic.
“Marjorie's coming to stay here?”
“No. You'd be going to stay with her, in East Texas. Where we grew up. Would that be all right with you? It might be kind of boring, I remember when I was a teenager I couldn't stand being stuck out in the woods like that, but you could take a suitcase full of books with you, and there's a pond where we used to swim, and . . .”
She had seen her aunt only three times in the last three years, but she often dreamed about her, and held imaginary conversations with her. To have her all to herself for two whole weeks was a dream come true. She threw her arms around her mother. “Oh, thank you!”
With a short, embarrassed laugh her mother pushed her away. “Oh, don't thank me. Thank Marjorie. And please remember, she's not used to having children around, and she'll have things she'll want to do, so . . . be as grown up as you can. Don't make too many demands. Don't expect too much from her.”
Agnes wasn't listening. She was already deep in imagining her perfect vacation with Marjorie.
Mary Grey left in a taxi on Friday afternoon. Agnes was to spend the weekend with her father before taking a Trailways bus to East Texas on Monday morning. She had been looking forward to that, imagining conversations and adventures, but her father was remote and uncommunicative. He avoided her—even when they were together he would not meet her eyes. When she asked him what he was thinking about he said “nothing” or “business.” When she tried to share her pleasure at going to visit Marjorie he grew colder. He wouldn't even pronounce Marjorie's name, and his refusal acted like a spell that locked her tongue. She tried to draw him out, and felt like a fake and a fool, asking him questions about Texas history, as if she cared. Halfway through Saturday she gave up and escaped as usual into her books. But when the bus carried her away on Monday morning and, craning back, she discovered that her father was already lost to sight, her eyes filled with tears. She should have tried harder. She shouldn't have given up so easily. She ached with loss, feeling as if she was leaving her father for very much longer than two weeks.
She blew her nose and got her transistor radio out of her bag, settling the earplug in her ear to listen to her favorite DJ and her favorite Top 40 station. She heard songs by all the best groups, The Lovin' Spoonful, Buffalo Springfield, The Turtles, The Beatles, The Young Rascals, and her mood improved with each hit. But then The Doors' “Light My Fire” began to fade out, and the Hollies singing “Carrie Ann” were even more wracked by static. The bus had carried her beyond the reach of the Houston station. For a time she station-hopped as best she could, but by the time she reached Camptown she wasn't receiving anything but country-western, and those twanging, nasal voices could not uplift her but only annoy.
Camptown was a settlement in the middle of the piney woods of East Texas, about a hundred and sixty miles northeast of Houston. There wasn't much to it: gazing out the window she saw a few houses, two churches, a short strip of storefronts and a filling station which served as the bus stop. Most of the people who lived there probably worked for the big sawmill whose whistle split the air twice a day. She was the only person who got off the bus, and there was only one person there to meet it. As always, the sight of her aunt gave her the strange frisson of seeing someone so much like yet unlike her mother. Mary would never have been seen in public unflatteringly dressed or without makeup; Marjorie, with her bare, lined face, frowzy hair, long cotton skirt and tie-dyed T-shirt, looked like a fading flower child. In the past, she had seemed glamorous in her own arty, offbeat way; a beatnik. But beatniks had been replaced in the public eye by hippies, and this woman, she thought with a swirl of hot, disowning embarrassment, was too old to be a hippie.
Her aunt stepped forward and hugged her briefly and awkwardly. Agnes inhaled the mingled smells of stale cigarettes, sweat, and patchouli oil, and Marjorie with
drew.
“How was your journey?”
“Fine, thank you.”
“Both of these bags yours?”
“I brought a lot of books. Mother said I should, in case . . .”
“That's right, you'll need them. I don't have television, and I won't have time to entertain you. You'll have lots of time for reading. Put them in there.” She gestured at a little red wagon.
Agnes hesitated. “Where's your car?”
“That's it, princess. The baggage car.”
“You don't have a car?” The idea was shocking. Until now, she had not met a single grown-up person without a car. “How do you—”
“I walk,” said Marjorie shortly. “And so do you, unless you want to spend the night at the Camptown filling station.” She grabbed the wagon handle and marched away, pulling it behind her.
Agnes didn't move. She had a sudden vision of her mother on the telephone pleading, wheedling, blackmailing, and of Marjorie, unhappily, grudgingly, giving in.
It was hot and quiet and still, the air buzzing slightly with an insect noise, and no cars in sight. When she turned her head she could see the grimy windows of the service station office and, inside, a man in overalls sitting on a chair, his feet up on the desk, gazing at her with a bored lack of curiosity. Marjorie's figure grew smaller in the distance, walking back down the empty highway in the direction from which the bus had come, pulling the wagon with Agnes' luggage behind her. The sound of the wheels on the road grew fainter. She did not pause or look back. If she didn't move, nothing would change, nothing would get better, no one would come for her. At last she started to walk. Then, fearful of getting lost, she began to run.
She caught up as her aunt was leaving the highway for an unpaved road that wound into the forest. The air was still hot, despite the shade, and smelled of pine needles, resin and dust.
“Why don't you have a car?”
“Can't afford one.”
“Oh.” She had known that Mary and Marjorie had grown up “dirt-poor” in the backwoods of Texas, raised by their grandmother after their feckless teenaged mother took off for parts unknown. Mary had left Camptown the day after she graduated from high school and hitchhiked to Houston, where she'd found a job as an assistant salesclerk and mannequin for Battlestein's. What Marjorie had done when her sister left, Agnes didn't know. She had assumed they'd left together, left their unhappy past behind forever, but here was her aunt, still poor, still living in the woods.
“Actually,” said Marjorie. “That is not, strictly speaking, true.”
“What?”
“Why I don't have a car. If I lived here all the time, I would. But I'd rather save my money for traveling, and in the cities where I like to be, New York or London or Paris, a car is a burden, not a necessity. When I'm out of the cities, when I come back here, I come to work, not to gad about. Being here is a sort of retreat, and I have to be very frugal. When the money runs out, back I go to the city to get a job.”
“What work are you doing here?”
“I'm writing my autobiography. Here, we take the right fork, remember that and you won't get lost when you come by yourself. The left fork takes you to the pond.”
“A pond? Can I go swimming?”
“Not by yourself.”
“Will you take me?”
“I'll try to make time.”
She had expected a Marjorie who was glad to see her, but this woman seemed as impatient and unforthcoming as her mother at her worst. In desperation she asked, “Are there any kids who live around here? Kids I could play with . . . maybe go swimming with . . . I mean.”
“I'm sure there must be some children in Camptown. I haven't noticed.”
“Your neighbors don't have any?”
“These are my neighbors.” She gestured at the surrounding trees.
The forest was quiet except for the monotonous, low, locust-hum that seemed the voice of the heat. A jay screeched overhead and she could hear a fluttering in the branches. She felt tired and thirsty. “Is it much farther?”
“You're not tired already?”
She was, already terminally tired and bored. She imagined the next two weeks without company, with nothing to look forward to but the next book, and dull despair settled on her like a smothering blanket. She wished she'd never come. At home, at least, the boredom was familiar and known, and cool, unlike these dim, stifling woods.
“When we get in we can have a good old talk about what you've been up to since I last saw you.” For the first time Marjorie's voice was kind. “Are you still mad about horses?”
“Horses?”
“That was all you could talk about the last time I saw you. Did I know how to ride, had I ever had a horse, could I talk your parents into buying you a horse. . . .” She laughed warmly. “I understand completely—I went through a horse-mad phase myself, but we were so poor I never had a chance.”
The closest Agnes had been to a horse was a ride on a weary Shetland pony tethered in a ring somewhere when she was about six. All she knew about horses had come out of books, and now she remembered that the last time she'd seen Marjorie she'd been in the midst of reading a series of books about a girl learning to ride and becoming a championship show jumper. It had been a brief, literary passion, and although she had occasional fantasies about owning a horse, she hadn't pursued it. If she'd really wanted it, her parents might have agreed to riding lessons. There was a stable with a riding school not far away—she knew a girl who went there. The truth was that she found this girl, like the specialized vocabulary surrounding riding, intimidating; the truth was, she was lazy. The fantasy of riding a horse like the wind, responsive to her every touch, was like the fantasy of being a brilliant dancer—they were what she imagined while riding her bicycle, or skipping around the living room to the strains of “Swan Lake.” She had no wish to spoil the fantasy with the real, hard work of ballet classes or riding lessons.
But she didn't want to say any of that to Marjorie, who was sounding more like her usual, interested self, so she said, “Yeah, sure, I'd love to have a horse, but where would I keep it? They're expensive to stable, and the backyard isn't big enough, as my dad keeps telling me, so I don't guess I'll ever have one.”
“Agnes. You can have whatever you want—have you forgotten that already?” Marjorie had stopped walking and now turned on her the full force of her brilliant blue gaze.
Agnes shrugged uneasily and continued walking.
“Hey, where are you going? We're home.”
She had been aware of a building on their right but hadn't paid any attention to it because it was an old empty shack. Now she gave a little half-smile. “Oh, sure. Right.”
“This is where I live.”
“You're kidding!”
Marjorie frowned and shook her head. “What's the matter?” She hoisted the bags out of the wagon and said, “Well, you can stay outside if you want, but I need something to drink, myself.”
She couldn't believe her eyes. An old, unpainted, weather-beaten wooden house with a tar paper roof, it looked as if it would fall down in the next high wind. How could that be home? The high windows were screened and curtained, but there were no other signs of civilization: no neighboring houses, no driveway or paved road, not even a mailbox or a telephone pole. But Marjorie was going inside, so Agnes went up the steps after her.
Inside, though, it was different, obviously lived in. It was a real home, decently if sparsely furnished, clean and tidy, with pale painted walls and wooden floors that smelled of the polish her mother used at home. It was a square box partitioned into four rooms of roughly the same size, with no connecting passages. The living room opened onto a bedroom on one side and the kitchen on the other, and the second bedroom was entered from the kitchen.
The two bedrooms were linked by a narrow bathroom.
“I had the bathroom put in,” said Marjorie. “When your mother and I were growing up the bedrooms were slightly larger, but we had to take our baths in th
e kitchen, and the toilet was in an outhouse.”
“Gross.”
“No. It was just the way things were. We might have been living in the last century, for all we knew. It wasn't really until we were in high school, taking the bus to Livingston, and meeting kids whose parents had cars, kids who lived in houses which had not only indoor plumbing but electricity and telephones, that we realized how much we were doing without.”
“You didn't have electricity?” Her mother had never told her—her mother never talked about her childhood.
“Still don't,” said Marjorie. “Don't look so horrified! This is an opportunity for you to find out firsthand how people used to live. Aren't you interested in history?”
“What will we eat?” She spoke plaintively because she was hungry; it was past her usual lunchtime.
“People did manage to eat before the invention of electric stoves. What do they teach you at your school? Did you think that before this century people went around eating fruit off trees, chewing on raw potatoes and sucking raw eggs? Don't worry, I wouldn't let your mother down, I'll give you one cooked meal a day. I hope you won't squawk about cold cereal for breakfast and sandwiches or salads for lunch. I don't use the woodstove in the summer, it makes this place too hot. I've got a hibachi for grilling things outside, and if I want to boil water for coffee or something there's a little camping stove which uses bottled gas. Are you hungry now? A peanut butter sandwich suit you?”
She nodded.
“Tang or tea?” She gestured at the two jars on the counter.
“Tang, please. Is there any ice?”
“Afraid not. No freezer. I do have an icebox in the cellar, to keep things cool, but there's no way I can make ice for drinks.” She turned away, taking a jar of peanut butter and a loaf of bread from a cupboard.
“You have a cellar?”
There was a tension in her aunt's posture which reminded her unhappily of her mother. “There is a cellar. You're not to play in it, understand me? It's out-of-bounds. You're not to go into the cellar unless I'm with you. Understand?”
