by Joan Chase
During the war Uncle Dan had been a Marine. Although he’d lived on a ship, he had never left the port of San Francisco. He sent for his wife and two small children across all that distance from Ohio, causing them to sit on suitcases in the aisles of packed train cars and Aunt Libby to have adventures—too many, she said, her smooth face registering the folly of camp following. Once she’d had to assist at the birth of a baby during one of the endless waits at some nameless siding, so no one was able to decide which state the baby had been born in. They had pictures from that time, of themselves swimming in the Pacific in brilliant winter sunlight, Uncle Dan in his sailor hat, Aunt Libby, dark-tanned, her fine hair windblown, sweet-smiling in a one-piece swimming suit. When they were free to return to Ohio, Uncle Dan joined his father at the store, just until he’d got his feet on the ground, his same reason for moving his family into the big house with Gram and the various members of the family who regularly came and went. But both places yielded their convenience and they stayed on—Uncle Dan counting the years, planning that one day he would take another job, would move, that his life would begin.
Uncle Dan would talk to us about this sometimes while he was feeding his lustrous Irish setter, which lived a high-strung life of his own tied to the doghouse at the edge of the lawn. Uncle Dan always said it was a mystery to him how a man with a redheaded daughter could end up with a red-haired nervous wreck of a dog. He fed “the beast” when he got home at night, serving him a broth-warmed mash in a tin pan, assuring us as he mixed and brewed that the dog ate better than the rest of us, though at first sniff he’d turned up his nose, and Uncle Dan had confessed that it was probably not exactly what the dog had had in mind. He spoke as though he knew his dog inside and out. But gradually the setter would eat faster, going into the pan with increasingly desperate gulps. When he’d finished, Uncle Dan let him free for a time, his long red streamered plumes racing over the shine of evening grass in spumes of flight, circling, leaping. Until with murmured affection and resignation, Uncle Dan secured him again with the links of steel chain that seemed strong enough to hold a gorilla.
But when Uncle Dan talked to us about his job, his life, as though he too were secured with a chain, which, though invisible, bound as securely, we never worried: he was forever joking, complaining—“thrashing at the bit,” he called it. Nevertheless, when he was at home we would hear him whistling up from the cellar, where he worked on his projects, and over the years he turned out an assortment of goods, one enthusiasm finding its way into another—cowhide wallets succeeded by chair caning, hand-crafted furniture, poured candles, eventually oil painting. And he knew the meat-cutting business through and through. We could see that in the patient way he could slice off chops or hook up a side of beef—as though it were all as natural and disheartening as his brown hairs sliding off on the comb.
We went into the alley behind the market to wait for Aunt Libby to come for us and we felt these lonesome things about Uncle Dan. Finally the car would come easing through the shaft, taking up nearly the entire path against the garbage cans, Aunt Libby with one bare arm resting on the open window, already, even in early summer, darkly tanned, her other arm back over the seat. Only a slight drift of a smile would acknowledge us waiting there. With the motor left running she’d seem just to pause, idly, her glance fixed off to where the sunlight chinked through at odd intervals between the brick buildings. We might scatter for a moment then, to get candy at the newsstand or look at the magazines. And Uncle Dan might slip out for a quick second to lean on the car door with his arms folded, flirting with her every chance he got. His nudges for her attention seemed to distract her only fractionally from the dark and dappled path of the alley. Then abruptly she would decide she had had enough, it was time to leave, and she would blow the horn with a sharp fret of irritation, the way Gram always did, and we’d dive out of the newsstand and jump in the car just as she started to move off. Behind us Uncle Dan would vanish as we turned into the square and then onto Main Street, one of the two parallel roads going north, the ruddy road underneath us seeming to spread out before us like a royal carpet; one which was rolled up as quickly from behind, so that we were the only ones who knew about it—another secret part of our knowing that where we were going no others could follow.
All the car windows were down, the sweetness of mowed grass and flowering lawn beds blowing through while we were in the town, and then richer meadow clovers and the cool wooded hummocks scented with needles and vine, an interval of two miles or so that separated us from the business district of the town, a distance never calculated exactly, because it wasn’t a matter of space or time but one of difference. A lane of white oaks bordered our lawn. Those oaks, perhaps fifteen of them, standing out against the open fields as far as we could see on either side, fixed for us the entrance to our farm, and even after there was a gas station built on the north corner and a restaurant beyond the hedge, those trees still loomed like a massive gate.
When almost into the house, Aunt Libby would often stop short and look at us, baffled and almost accusing. “Damn it, girls. Do you know? I was right there and forgot entirely about supper. And I suppose we do have to eat”—spoken as though it mystified her, this matter of appetite. “Well, Dan will just have to bring something home with him.”
Gram, it seemed to us, watched out for Uncle Dan more than Aunt Libby did. She made us pipe down when he was home, spoke up for the privileges of a man after a day’s work. We watched her sideways, suspecting her motives, her sincerity. What did she know? There were times when Uncle Dan was the only male in a household of ten or more. It was Gram’s house, had been so even when Grandad was alive, for she had bought it with her own money, as we had often enough heard her say. And any of her five children was welcome to move in with her at any time, displacing one another, squeezing in as best they could, using any of the three floors and the fourteen rooms. At different times one or the other or all of her five daughters might choose to come back home: some had married and came with children, some had had husbands but lost them; Aunt Elinor married late. So, often it was one or another assortment of us females living there, and Uncle Dan when he came home from the market.
His arrival was around six-thirty in the evening. Those years two of us, Uncle Dan’s nieces, daughters of Gram’s dead daughter, Grace, ate an early dinner with Gram, who would be already bathed and dressed to go off for her evening’s entertainment: bingo parties, horse racing, roulette at a private club—anything exciting. She cooked us a dinner before she left, something that she didn’t have to think about, something she had fixed for sixty years or more. She only did it, she said, for our mother who had died, for she herself was plain fed up with cooking. She told us that nearly every day. Fed up with cooking, with work—had worked for sixty years, cooking for more damn unappreciative men, thrashers, hired hands, in addition to squalling brats, starting from age eleven, when she had been sent across two miles of meadow to help a neighbor woman with her nine children. So now she just put food out on the table: fried-down salt pork, chops or ground meat, boiled potatoes and cabbage. She ate scarcely any of it herself, preferring to have a slab of her Dutch bakery bread, dipped into coffee blanched pale with cream. She didn’t care if we wanted what she’d fixed or even if we ate it; it was just put on the table at five o’clock.
Uncle Dan’s two daughters, Celia and Jenny, waited for him to come home and when they were all at the table they made a romantic picture of a family, the three of them around the big farm kitchen table with a surviving male figure. We weren’t supposed to interrupt them since it was Uncle Dan who put meat on the table, their table, and Gram thought he deserved that much real family life. We liked to sit there in the dark stairwell while they ate, our own mouths dark, running as if with a juice, as we watched them cut into the thick soft sirloin and lift pieces of it on the red-handled forks. Uncle Dan brought home the best cuts and gave himself up to a wholehearted appreciation of his appetite, belching out loud whenever he
felt like it, talking with his mouth full, stabbing his fork across the table for extras. After they were finished we went in to help our cousins clear the table and we would pop yellow scraps of fat into our mouths, spitting it out only if it had gone cold and lardy.
During the evening Uncle Dan sat in his recliner and made his remarks over the paper—he was famous for that. Often it seemed to us that we talked or perhaps lived to inspire his comments—repetitive yet always new, his tone conveying a total although good-natured abdication, a comical weariness.
Aunt Libby would ask what they might have for supper the next evening. Feeding other people was for Aunt Libby a constant preoccupation, though, like Gram, she had little interest in food for herself. Uncle Dan would consider aloud the little difference the menu would make, since one thing burned or neglected tasted pretty nearly as bad as another.
“I’ve had my disappointments,” he would say with a pointed melancholy, so that we would all know he was thinking again of Hedy Lamarr and her falsies. And the house brimful of females —he had really hoped for sons when Celia and then Jenny were born. And Aunt Libby did have a boy later, and another, but they were stillborn and after that she couldn’t have another child, something Uncle Dan never mentioned. Every evening he entertained us, making it like a party, because later he would go out to the kitchen and make popcorn and serve Cokes to all of us, or some special concoction he was promoting at the market—for a while we had homemade root beer made from a syrup and a seltzer bottle. Then he would go off to bed, hours before the rest of us, since he had to leave at six in the morning to open up the store.
But sometimes he would bring out his trombone, the one thing left from his year at the local college, when he’d played in a jazz combo. He would get Celia to play the piano and they would try for a while to bring their two instruments and interpretations into harmony, finally breaking down into solos, each one playing for the other. Uncle Dan listened to Celia attentively, helped her with the dotted notes and syncopation. “You should have kept up your lessons,” he lamented, and played for her what he still recalled of “Lady Be Good.” While they worked over the music he had that same intense absorption he had when he played his Peggy Lee records. He said she was the very best. “You’ve got it in you to be good,” we’d hear him say to Celia when they’d finished and she’d folded down the cover on the piano and spread out her polished nails to admire against the dark mahogany. She’d smile and lithely dip her head, pleased and flattered. And then she would go to her room to be alone. Uncle Dan would finish the session by himself with one of Peggy Lee’s records. He would listen with his trombone laid over his knees, transfixed, his thoughts far away from us.
One early spring evening when Celia was fourteen and the rest of us girls thirteen or nearly so, Uncle Dan came home, carrying the sack of groceries Aunt Libby had ordered over the phone, and saw a troop of boys sprawled around on the porch or hanging from the railings and balustrades. He stopped and asked them if there was some problem, had their mothers forgotten something at the market. They slunk off sideways and kicked the porch steps. But when Celia walked through the front door they came alive and in a fevered sprint backed away, running and hollering, to the far road, their speeding eyes in retreat still fastened on Celia, who smiled vaguely with a certain regal privilege. For a moment Uncle Dan’s face was strange to us, unshielded by his bright mocking ironies. Then he recovered. Knew what was what. He appraised her long bare legs, asked if she had taken to going about half naked because of internal or external heat. She huffed, “Oh, Daddy! Don’t be so old-fashioned,” her face golden-lighted in the sun’s reflection off her apricot hair, and she went inside tossing that mane, her legs slightly rigid at the knee, like a leggy colt. Uncle Dan flicked his gray, dust-colored eyes over the rest of us, who were dark-haired, with sallow complexions, or altogether too high-colored; he smiled outright, also an expression rare for him, and he seemed newly primed for the changed direction life was taking.
And after that we knew too that there was something different in Celia. It wasn’t just that she was older. It was a confidence that came upon her, suddenly and entirely, so that it didn’t matter that summer after summer her hair had swung out with more sun-riffled gleam or that her body had swelled here and tightened there into a figure that was at the same time voluptuous and lissome. Effortlessly she appealed to boys, boys who ever after seemed to wander our place with the innocent milling confusion of lambs for the slaughter. That was what Aunt Libby called them, gazing out. “Those poor souls. They don’t know what’s hit them.” She shook her head and sometimes found fault with Celia as if she were too provocative. “Just look at that butt”: she’d frown out toward where Celia was talking fifty miles an hour to some boy, leaning on a car window, her body swiveling, her hair swooping in dips, her smiles tossed like fanciful flowers. We couldn’t tell for certain whether Aunt Libby was angry or proud.
Celia’s change separated her from the rest of us. She seemed indifferent, didn’t need us anymore. We fell back, a little in awe. Where she was bold we were unsure, wondering what Aunt Libby would say. Anxiously we tried for Celia’s attention, wanted fiercely to be included. But it was no use, that desire; we could not reach her, or be content without her. So we watched her life ravenously while waiting for her to make some slip.
But increasingly from afar, as though we were only strangers from the town. Outsiders. Even a horseback ride with Celia, something we’d done all our lives together, would take an unexpected turn, would become an excuse for an entirely different purpose—a forbidden rendezvous. We would find ourselves following Celia down an unknown back street of the town, where the factory people lived—where we remembered our family had once lived. Then, swarming from out of nowhere, came the dark-eyed foreign boys, drawn by the hooves clipping the brick and by some invisible vibration Celia set up in which the air quivered as if with a snare, or bridle bells. Ambling over to us from their slumped grimy houses, the boys would slouch against a post or picket in lazy wonder, lifting their gaze to Celia like an offering. Only the uneasy shifting of her horse, its prance, suggested any nerve or breaking through of impulse. We, her followers, subjects, were openly disheartened, far from home, uneasy about disobeying Uncle Dan, who had warned us to visit the blacksmith before we rode on pavement, to stick to known territory. It seemed Celia had forgotten Uncle Dan for good, had left everyone behind.
Still the day came when we had to face him. A customer at the market mentioned she’d seen his girls riding on South Belmont Street. He eyed us, angry and cold. Celia searched her nails for imperfections in the polish, then excused herself and left the table. Going under the door lintel, she appeared to be framed in the varnished oak. But the rest of us were still his little girls, the three of us stricken and despairing that all his goodness to us, the freedom we had, had been treated as nothing. After that we tried to avoid Celia—who didn’t care and always did exactly as she wished, all her energy and her allegiance straining away toward a destiny we did not share or even understand. It was as though she trained obsessively for an event, a challenge we had heard of only distantly without comprehending any of our own desire. But when we dreamed, it was as though we too, like her, had been transformed.
Everything was changed. At the swimming pool Celia no longer entered the water unless she was thrown in by some boisterous youths, and then she let them, as eagerly, assist her in getting out, their hands now lingering and gentle on her. We peered out onto the front porch, the pack of boys more distant, even as we desired them more. It was seeing the way they waited, with a patient wistfulness for any attention Celia might chance to offer, boys who before had not wanted anything from a girl, that defeated us finally: Celia, in impartial imperious command, standing among them, her hands fixed like delicate fan clasps upon her jutting hips, her mouth small and yet full and piquant, like two sections of an orange. It seemed then that we were the intruders on our front porch, that everything belonged to Celia. We went into to
wn, leaving her the porch while we sneaked into the swimming pool at night, or waited at the “Y” for the arrival of a few boys so that then we could walk the two miles home with our girl friends, shadowed by the boys, who circled round us, calling out of the dark, fresh whoops coming nearer then moving further into the dark. Sometimes when we got home we’d stand behind the parlor drapes, up against the climbing roses of the wallpaper, and peek out onto the porch to watch Celia. Then we didn’t laugh even to ourselves and there would be the run of saliva inside us, as though we were watching her eating steak.
Around us and behind us, Aunt Libby and Uncle Dan lived their married lives. There in Gram’s big old house it seemed they had no relationship between themselves that wasn’t ours as well, no function beyond their making up part of the life of the house. Uncle Dan usually came home from the market for lunch, still in his apron and hat, Aunt Libby parading around half dressed or not dressed at all, calling up through the attic stairwell— calling us girls to get up.
It was summertime and we girls talked most of every night (except Celia, who had begun to sleep alone in the room by the back stairs which had been Grandad’s before he died), and it would be very late, nearly dawn, when we fell asleep. Then we slept on and on, through the mornings into the noon hours, while the increasing heat stifled us into a further resistance to waking. Off and on Aunt Libby would rouse herself to call us. Then she would sleep again too. We felt Aunt Libby could have slept forever. And perhaps Uncle Dan suspected as much, because usually he came home with something from the store for lunch. Aunt Libby would call out sharply that this time she meant business. We were already talking even as we lay waking, the two iron-frame double beds arranged side by side in the attic room, and then we would go down and Aunt Libby would be dressing herself as though her body belonged to all of us.
