Two Rivers

by T. Greenwood

  It had been a difficult winter. Having sex on campus was punishable by expulsion, and finding love off campus was similarly impossible. (The hotels and motels in town were complicit in the college’s aim to promote celibacy among Middlebury’s students.) Terrified of being kicked out of school, I had only allowed Freddy to help Betsy gain entrance to my room two times. He snuck her in through a first-floor window both times without incident. However, getting her back out proved to be a more difficult and risky project. After leaving my room one late afternoon in February, Betsy was caught tiptoeing down the back stairs by a junior fellow. Luckily, he didn’t know Betsy and bought the story that she’d only gotten lost, that she’d wandered into the dorm to get out of the cold. After that near-miss, I gave up, relinquishing any chance of romantic entanglement beyond our desperate groping at the movie theater in town. I couldn’t wait to be back in Two Rivers, where it didn’t seem like the entire world was trying to keep me from getting laid. Now that Betsy and I were lovers, Two Rivers became more than just our old stomping grounds. Suddenly, it was a place of tremendous romantic and sexual potential: every meadow, every wooded area, every remote and pastoral place of my childhood now a possible site for amorous rendezvous. When I thought about summer, I imagined my father busy in his workshop, my mother busy in her study, and Betsy and I free to make love wherever we pleased.

  Of course, my mother was still in Mississippi, had been there almost a year now. This was a fact that I knew to be true, but still had not quite connected with yet. Because I was away, when I thought of home, I still pictured her there. Perhaps if I had been in Two Rivers, I would have felt her absence more intensely, but as it was, I received a weekly postcard from her, which was much more frequent than any correspondence I had with my father, and it made her feel close. She never said so, but in my mind, she would be home by the time I finished up the school year. When the postcard arrived saying that she’d decided to stay on through another summer, I should have known the bottom was about to fall out. Then we got the phone call from Hanna, and it did.

  Betsy’s father had been giving Jack Miller, the high school principal, a straight razor shave before the Memorial Day parade when Principal Miller suddenly screamed out, leaping to his feet, bleeding from a six-inch gash in his cheek. At first, Mr. Parker (like Mrs. Norris at the post office) seemed to have simply fallen. However, when he did not stand up, and could not speak, he was quickly rushed to the hospital, where the doctors said that he had had a massive stroke.

  Betsy was visiting me that weekend. We were sitting in two Adirondack chairs on the grassy lawn behind Battell, reading a Fodor’s Guide to Paris, drinking ice tea when Miss Katy, the housemother, came rushing outside, her face flushed. “Betsy, honey, there’s a phone call for you. From home. It seems it’s an emergency, so you best come quick.”

  Hanna tried to explain to Betsy about what had caused the episode, as well as the doctors’ prognosis, but Betsy only shook her head, blinking hard against the tears that were filling her eyes, and handed the phone to me. Miss Katy enveloped Betsy in her arms, and rocked her back and forth until I hung up.

  Because the stroke affected the right side of Mr. Parker’s body, he was completely unable to use his right hand, which meant that his bowling days, as well as his barbering days, were over. He wanted to keep the shop open, however, and he asked Betsy to help him run the business that summer, just until he could find someone to take over. She agreed, and we continued to plan our trip for the fall. He would be better by September, she said, he had to.

  Orange Crush and sad eyes. This was Betsy Parker at nineteen. Every morning Betsy made her father breakfast, helped him get dressed, cleaned the house and then left him propped up in front of the TV with everything he would need for the day. Then she got on her bicycle and rode to the shop, which she opened, promptly, at 9:00 A.M . She thought at first that she might be able to get the necessary bookkeeping and other miscellaneous duties done by lunch, leaving Knight Rogers and the two other barbers to manage things until closing. But when I came to pick her up, sweaty still from mowing the nearly two-acre span of the cemetery, she was more often than not still sweeping mountains of hair up off the floor, washing out sinks, tidying the supplies—not having had even a moment to devote to the books. She worked late every night, and our romantic escapades were limited to frantic groping and making out in the alley behind the barbershop. So much for meadows and pastures.

  And though I knew better, I felt cheated out of my summer. Our summer. As each day went by that Betsy was consumed with the upkeep of her father’s barbershop and the upkeep of their home and the upkeep of her father’s health, I found myself feeling more and more bitter. It was terrible, and I’m ashamed to admit it even now, but Mr. Parker’s illness exasperated me, as if he’d gotten sick to spite me. In my darkest moments, I thought about how much easier things would have been if he hadn’t lived through the stroke. And so when Betsy showed up at the cemetery, her face red and streaked with tears, a small, awful part of me felt joyous at the prospect that I would have her back. That she would belong to me again. But Mr. Parker hadn’t died, he’d just had another stroke, a terrible one this time, one that had rendered him unable to walk.

  “He’s so sick, Harper,” Betsy said.

  “He’ll be okay,” I said. We sat down together on the grass in front of a crumbling granite tombstone. “By fall?”

  “We can’t go,” Betsy said softly. “To Europe.”

  Though Paris had been distant in my thoughts, unreal and hazy, it’s what I’d been looking forward to since our summer plans had fizzled. This felt like a blow to the stomach.

  “Harper, I don’t even think I can go back to school.”

  “What about Paul and Hanna? Can’t they take him in?” I asked.

  Betsy shook her head. Hanna had always blamed Mr. Parker for her sister’s suicide, though she never said so in so many words.

  I wanted to tell her I wouldn’t go back to school either. That I’d come help her: that I’d take care of her. That none of it mattered as long as we were together. But before I had a chance, she started crying.

  “I’ll never get out of here,” she said, her eyes wild. “I had my chance. And now it’s gone. I feel trapped , Harper. He trapped my mother, and now he’s trapped me too.” Her hand flew to her mouth as if she couldn’t believe the words that had escaped.

  “Betsy,” I said, reaching for her, but she shook her head. And then she was running, winding her way through the gravestones toward the small stone chapel at the edge of the cemetery.

  I went after her, slowly at first, unsure if I should follow her at all. When she disappeared into the chapel, I stopped. I leaned against a tree near the entrance and waited. When she didn’t come out, I knocked softly before opening the door.

  Inside, it was cool and dark. It smelled like pine. Like musty wood. Sunlight streamed through the dusty windows in narrow beams. She was sitting on a pew in the front of the building. “Betsy?”

  “I don’t feel God in here,” she said.

  I went to her and sat down next to her. “No?”

  “I thought I might, but I don’t. Do you?”

  I looked around, at the raw wooden pews, at the crucifix. I closed my eyes and listened to Betsy’s breath, which stuttered and caught like a child who has cried too long. I didn’t know what God felt like, but I figured it was something like this. “I don’t know,” I said. I studied her face, noticing for the first time some new tiny lines at the corners of her eyes. And because I loved her more than anything in the world (more than the
river, more than autumn leaves, more than fireworks on the Fourth of July), I blurted out, “I’ll finish school and then I can get a great job somewhere else. Anywhere you want. And we’ll go there. Europe. Paris. We’ll get someone to take care of your father. A nurse, somebody…”

  Betsy turned to me and looked hard at me. Then she squeezed my hand until my bones ached. “Promise me,” she said.

  And because I loved her more than endless pastures and thick woods and sunshine, because I loved her more than snow, I whispered, “Promise.”

  Autumn was agony. By September, when Betsy and I should have been on our way to Paris, Mr. Parker was so ill he could barely get out of bed. Betsy had taken on almost all of the responsibilities of the barbershop, leaving her very little time or energy to make the bus ride to Middlebury on the weekends. My course load was heavy; going home to visit was impossible, and so Betsy and I were forced to carry on our love affair via the New England Bell. There was one pay phone in my dormitory, in the hallway on the first floor. The fall of my sophomore year I was known as “Phone Man.” I was a fixture in that hallway, sitting for hours on end with my back against the wall, the phone balanced between my ear and shoulder, talking to Betsy.

  I lived for the phone calls: for those hours when Betsy and I were still apart but miraculously connected, our voices winding around each other despite the distance between us. She had a way of talking to me on the phone that she never did in person. In many ways, our conversations were more intimate than when we were face to face, as if, deprived of each other’s hands, we were forced to touch each other with our words. We talked until our throats were raw. Until there was nothing left to say, and then we simply listened to each other breathe. Sometimes I fell asleep out there on the hard floor of the hallway, the phone still cradled between my ear and my chin. I’d wake up, and her voice would come to me, “Go to bed, Harper. You were snoring.”

  But relying on her voice alone, without her eyes, without her hands, was also dangerous. It was too easy to misinterpret a sigh, a laugh. A silence that lasted too long. When Betsy called to tell me that she and Howie Burke had spent the afternoon at his grandmother’s farm picking apples, I was studying for a Statistics midterm. (In light of our new plans, I had chosen Economics as a major and English literature as a minor. The major was meant to secure lucrative employment, while the minor was intended to ensure my sanity.) And though I was already sitting, when she described the sunset that colored the whole sky orange and purple, I felt like I was falling. There was a weakness somewhere in my joints, a sort of collapsing.

  “It was incredible,” Betsy said. “Just as it was getting dark, one of the mares went into labor. Howie’s grandfather let us in near her stall, and I got to watch the foal being born. I should have taken pictures, but the camera was in the car and I didn’t want to miss anything. I’ve never seen anything like it before. Have you?”

  “Nope,” I said, gripping the edges of my textbook, feeling completely untethered.

  “Howie’s seen about a zillion babies being born—calves and kittens and puppies,” she sighed.

  “Wow.”

  “I know . Did you know that something like twenty-five percent of mares die when they foal?”

  “Twenty-five percent,” I said, staring hard at my Statistics book.

  “Something like that.”

  “How was the apple picking?” As I asked, I pictured Betsy climbing the ladder, her golden knees bending, her long thin arms reaching for the fruit.

  “Nice,” she said.

  Nice. One breathy word, and I could almost see her plucking the apple out from the depths of the tree. She might have studied it, inspecting it for imperfections, or she might have been less cautious, yes, she certainly would have been less cautious. She wouldn’t have looked at it at all; she would have just brought it to her parted lips and bitten. Below her, Howie Burke would have been holding the ladder steady, looking up at those amazing legs.

  “How’s your dad? Who took care of the shop?” I asked, feeling hurt and nasty, wanting only to get Betsy out of the apple orchard of my mind. Somewhere away from Howie Burke and his grandparents’ fruit trees.

  “He’s okay,” she said, and I felt my grip on the phone loosen. “Howie and I brought him a bushel of apples.” And now, because I just had to ask, Howie Burke, captain of the cross country running team, the leader of the Glee Club, Duke of the goddamn prom, was following Betsy down that long hallway to the kitchen, where Mrs. Parker used to make lemon bars and cocoa for me . I could smell the apples, feel the autumn breeze coming in through the window.

  “We made a pie,” she said softly. Apologetically, I thought.

  And now, Betsy and Howie were laughing in that kitchen: Betsy elbow-deep in flour and sugar and butter, Howie rolling the dough, sleeves pushed up to reveal the thin muscular arms of a runner, veins rising to the surface like thick rivers.

  “Great,” I said. “That’s just great.”

  “You sound mad,” Betsy said.

  “Mad?”

  “Yeah. Like I did something wrong.”

  “Hmph.”

  “Don’t ‘hmph’ me, Harper,” she said.

  “I was thinking about coming home next weekend,” I said.

  “I thought you had midterms coming up.”

  I did. It was all I’d been talking about for weeks. I gripped the phone tighter. “You and Howie have plans already? You can tell me, you know.”

  She was quiet for a long time. Too long.

  God, I hated myself. “Well, I guess I’ve got my answer,” I said.

  I knew I had to see her. If I didn’t, I would lose my mind. I must have been a fool to think that conversation alone could sustain us. I needed to see her, touch her, hold her. I was lying on my bed, trying to figure out how I could possibly manage to get to Two Rivers without flunking my midterms when Eddie Lieberman knocked on my door. “Hey, Phone Man, phone’s for you. Again ,” he said. I figured it was Betsy, and I was relieved. I could make up for being such an ass on the phone. I would tell her I was coming home.

  “Harper?” my father said. My father almost never called me at school.

  “I’m not sure how to tell you this, exactly, but your mother…she’s in the hospital.”

  “What?”

  “I don’t have a lot of the details, but apparently there was some sort of conflict at the school. The police were called, and there were some arrests. I couldn’t get much information from the hospital. I’m still waiting to hear back, but from what I can gather she’s been beaten up really badly.”

  “Beaten up?” I asked.

  “By the police,” he said. “They say she was resisting arrest.”

  “What?”

  “She’s got a broken jaw. Broken ribs. A concussion.” There was a strange tremble in his throat I’d never heard before.

  I felt like the wind had been knocked out of me. “We have to go get her,” I said.

  “We can’t,” he said. “She’s in police custody.”

  My father was in the basement when I arrived. I walked down the creaky wooden steps, lowering my head to avoid hitting it against the overhang. The first thing I noticed was the kitchen computer in the corner by the hot water heater. I have no idea how he ma
naged to get it down there by himself. Seeing it there made me feel sorry for him.

  “Hi, Dad,” I said.

  He looked up from something he was soldering. His eyes hidden behind a pair of safety goggles, which he wore over his glasses. He had on a canvas apron, like a butcher, and his hair was disheveled. He raised the goggles up on top of his head and smiled at me weakly. “Hi there.”

  “What are you making?”

  His eyes lit up. “Why don’t you come up and see?” Suddenly he was taking the stairs two at a time. We both ducked our heads as we reached the top of the stairs. I followed him down the hallway to my mother’s study. The door was wide open, something I still had not grown accustomed to. Inside, everything had been rearranged. The desk was now in the bay window. The bookshelves had been moved to the far wall. And where her desk used to be was an elaborate machine.

  “It’s a printing press,” he said. “This way she can continue with her newsletter from home. I’ve got a deal with the mill for paper. The only thing we need to worry about is the ink and the distribution.” In the light, I could see that my father’s hands were stained blue. His face was also smudged with indigo.

  “This is amazing, Dad,” I said. “This is the best yet.”

  That night I spoke on the phone to my mother for the first time in months. She was at the hospital, where she was going to be held until the following Monday morning when she would be arraigned. Because her jaw was broken, she could say little more than a warbled, “I’m okay.” From her coworker who had been at the school when the “conflict” took place, I learned that the SNCC (“Snick”) had a volunteer lawyer who had managed to get the others who were arrested out of jail. But the charge against my mother was battery. He hoped to be able to plea down to a lesser charge.