Two Rivers

by T. Greenwood

  Betsy must have known I would be back. She was sitting on her front porch when I pulled up. And without saying a word she forgave me, holding me until I finally stopped crying.

  Ticket

  I carried the train ticket in my pocket all weekend, and all day at work on Monday I thought about how I might go about offering it to Maggie that evening. I’d arranged for her to catch the Montrealer back down to Washington, D.C., and then transfer to the Crescent, which would deposit her in Tuscaloosa. Of course, it was up to her. There were dozens of stops along the way. A dozen other places she could debark. I would give her some money, enough to get by for a little while. The rest was her decision. I assumed she would accept the ticket, and tried not to think about what would happen if she refused. By early afternoon, I felt a sense of calm resolve. Even Lenny’s idiocy couldn’t dampen my spirit.

  “You catch SNL this weekend?” he asked, standing in the doorway of my office, picking his teeth. He smelled vaguely of whatever he’d had for lunch. Something with garlic. There were traces of whatever it was on his tie, which hung crookedly down his barrel chest.

  I shook my head.

  “That Belushi’s a fucking riot,” he said. He flicked his toothpick into my trash and picked up a ruler off my desk. He started flailing his arms about, swinging the ruler wildly, just missing my head. “Hi—ahhhhh.” He squinted his eyes. “That samurai shit’s a fucking riot.”

  “Is there a reason you’re here?” I asked.

  Lenny stopped his routine. “You mean here , on earth ?”

  “Yes,” I said, and couldn’t help but smile. “That’s exactly what I meant.”

  I rode my bike home leisurely that night, stopping to pick up some apples that had fallen to the ground. The first ones I found were just crab apples, hard and sour, but not much further down the road I knew there was a Macintosh grove. I kept one for the ride, and filled the leather bag strapped to the back of my bicycle seat with the rest. The apple was hard and tart. Perfect.

  At home I spilled the bag of apples into a colander and offered one to Maggie. She eyed it suspiciously. “This like Snow White?”

  “Hmm?”

  “The poison apple? Evil witch? Glass coffin? Damn, you raisin’ a little girl and you don’t know about Snow White?”

  “I just…” I said, my good mood instantly deflated.

  She picked up one of the biggest apples in the pile and took a bite. “You got some lemon and cinnamon, I’ll make us a pie.”

  Maggie made tuna casserole for dinner. String beans. Apple pie. Shelly was especially talkative, chattering away about school.

  “And then Mrs. LaCroix makes Jason Stimpson stand in the corner with gum on his nose! But the funniest thing was…” Shelly was shoveling the pie in, talking with her mouth full.

  “Close your mouth when you chew, honey,” I said.

  She closed her mouth and chewed, rolling her eyes impatiently as she labored to swallow. “The funniest thing was …his fly was unzipped! You know, XYZPDQ?”

  “Did you hand in your report?” I asked.

  “Uh-huh,” Shelly said. She and I had spent most of Sunday rewriting the Lincoln report. Maggie just kept bringing food and drink to the table where we were working, and after only a few hours Shelly seemed to have grasped the concept of the five-paragraph essay. I had piled up carrot sticks, balancing saltines on top to demonstrate the idea of supporting sentences.

  “So, he’s got gum on his nose, and the barn door’s open…”

  “Shelly.”

  “Something’s wrong,” Maggie said, setting her knife and fork down.

  “What?” I asked. “Are the apples bad?”

  “With the baby. Something’s wrong with the baby.”

  “What’s the matter?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” Maggie said. She pushed away from the table and hung her head down. When she looked up again, she was bent over, clutching her stomach. “My belly ain’t never felt like this before. It feels like, it feels…oh lordy, it’s like cramps. Like my monthlies are comin’.” She stood up, still holding her stomach as if it were something about to fall.

  Embarrassed for her and for myself, I stood up. But once standing I wasn’t sure what to do. I started clearing away the dishes from the table to keep my hands busy.

  “I think I need to use the restroom,” she said, and ran down the hall.

  After the bathroom door slammed shut, Shelly said, “She needs a doctor. A baby doctor.”

  She reached for the phone book in a stack of junk on the kitchen counter and started thumbing through the yellow pages: a ridiculous task since there was exactly one baby doctor in all of Two Rivers: Dr. Owens, who had delivered both me and Shelly (as well as almost everyone else in Two Rivers). The only babies he hadn’t delivered were the ones born in the backseats of cars on the way to the hospital.

  “Wait a minute,” I said. “Let’s just see what Maggie wants to do.”

  When Maggie didn’t come out of the bathroom, I thought about asking Shelly to go in after her, but Shelly (as far as I knew) hadn’t even started her period yet, and I didn’t want to scare her. However, the prospect of checking on Maggie myself seemed both inappropriate and terrifying. And so I gave her a few more minutes and then I went down the hall to the bathroom door and knocked softly.

  “You okay?” I asked. It was dark in the hallway, only a sliver of light under the bathroom door. I could hear her shuffling across the bathroom floor. The sound of the faucet running.

  “Just a minute,” she said. She sounded breathless.

  I was about to knock again when she opened the door. Her face was twisted, the whites of her eyes shot red. “I’m bleedin’,” she said, quiet and scared. “I got to get to a hospital. Quick.”

  “Last time I tried to start it up, it wouldn’t turn over,” Mrs. Marigold said, digging through a basket full of junk for the keys to my Bug. I had given them to her when she started watching Shelly. She looked at me suspiciously, maybe still a little mad that she had been usurped by a fifteen-year-old.

  “Thank you,” I said. “It’s sort of an emergency.”

  “Shelly okay?” she asked, worried.

  “Yes, she’s fine.”

  “Is it that colored girl?”

  I nodded.

  “What’s the matter with her? Something with the baby?”

  And because I didn’t know how I was going to explain anything to anyone, because panic was growing like an electrical storm, buzzing in my head and shoulders, I said, “She’s bleeding.”

  “How far along is she?”

  “I don’t know, maybe four, five months?”

  “Bring her over here,” she said. “I’ll take a peek at her. You may still have to take her to the hospital, but I’ll be able to tell if it’s something to worry about or not.” She paused then. “Save you a trip to the doctor.”

  I sent Maggie over to Mrs. Marigold’s and returned to my apartment, where Shelly was pacing back and forth in the kitchen. The whole kitchen smelled like apple pie. Vanilla ice cream was melting on all th
ree of our abandoned plates.

  “Will the baby be okay?” Shelly asked.

  “I’m sure everything’s going to be fine,” I said, though I truly had no idea.

  “What if Maggie dies ?” she asked, her voice breaking.

  “Shelly, honey,” I said. “Come here.” I motioned for her to come to me. She leaned into me, and my arms closed around her. I could feel her chest heaving against mine, her heart beating against mine. “I won’t let anything happen to Maggie.”

  After about twenty minutes, Mrs. Marigold knocked on the door. She was alone.

  “Can I talk to you?” she asked.

  “Sure, come on in. Shell, hon, can you give me a few minutes to talk to Mrs. Marigold alone?” I asked. She was sitting at the table, pushing the soggy pie around her plate.

  “Why? She’s okay, isn’t she? Is the baby okay?” Shelly looked panicked.

  “She’s fine, honey. She’s just getting some rest,” Mrs. Marigold said. “Promise.”

  Shelly reluctantly left us and went to her room. I waited until I heard the door close before I spoke. “Does she need to see a doctor?”

  Mrs. Marigold shook her head. “She’s fine. The bleeding was just hemorrhoids. Real common. I gave her some witch hazel. That should help. And the cramping is just Braxton Hicks contractions.”

  “Contractions?”

  “Just practice ones. Also real, real common.”

  I sighed, louder than I had intended. The relief more intense than I expected.

  “Then she’s okay?”

  “She’s fine. But listen, there’s something you should probably know. She’s a bit further along than you thought.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Mr. Montgomery, she’s about seven months along already. She’s only got a couple of months to go. And I don’t mean no offense, but it hardly looks like you’re ready.” She gestured vaguely toward the living room. “If I’ve done my math right, we’re looking at a Christmas baby here.”

  Official Hair Styles for Boys and Men

  C hristmas in Boston was not the same. In the little two-bedroom house my parents had bought in Cambridge, I was given the sofa to sleep on. (The second bedroom was devoted to the operations of the Freedom Press .) My family tried to carry on its few traditions despite the change of venue, but nothing about it felt quite right. And trying to sleep on an old burlap couch, one my father had saved from certain euthanasia at a local thrift store, I felt displaced.

  Usually on the night before Christmas, my father would cook a pot of oyster stew. As a kid, I was more fond of the salty hexagon-shaped crackers served with it than I was of the stew (which always tasted a little too fishy and gritty with sand to me). As I got older, I acquired an affection, if not a taste for it, and insisted that my father make it every year for the holiday. We were the only people on our street, and quite possibly in all of Two Rivers, to wait until Christmas Eve to set up our tree, but what was probably just the product of my mother’s procrastination became a beloved tradition in our household. As my father cussed and struggled to get lights strung, my mother and I would drink eggnog. Then we would hang our assortment of mismatched ornaments to Handel’s Messiah as our neighbors went off to midnight Mass.

  In Boston, my parents had already put up a small aluminum tree, barely bigger than a potted plant. We ordered Chinese take-out on Christmas Eve and sat in front of the TV eating Lo Mein as we discussed school and my future plans.

  “Have you been going to the Friends meetings?” my mother asked, waving her chopsticks at me in a way I considered to be vaguely threatening.

  “A few,” I said. I had, indeed, returned to the Unitarian Universalist Church where the Friends meetings were held on a couple of occasions that fall, but I was actually more engrossed by the UU literature I found in the church vestibule than I was by the discussions of war. I even attended one sermon given by a diminutive Buddhist monk entitled “Without Autumn: Transience and Impermanence.” He wore an iridescent orange robe and could barely see over the podium, as he discussed the notion that acceptance of change is an integral step in achieving enlightenment. When the service was over, he moved slowly through the congregation to the back of the church, his robe billowing behind him dramatically like a falling leaf. When I walked out of the church that crisp afternoon I felt relaxed for the first time in ages. Back at school, I walked for hours in the woods, listening to the leaves under my feet. Maybe this is God, I thought. Just the crush of leaves.

  What I didn’t know was that while I was wandering in the woods that day, contemplating the impermanence of things, Betsy was in the hippie couple’s VW bus on her way back from Washington, D.C., where she’d nearly been arrested during the March on the Pentagon after spitting on a U.S. Marshal’s shoes. Instead of hauling her off to jail, he’d simply hit her legs with his club over and over again until she collapsed and her friend was able to carry her away. He also took her camera and smashed it to pieces. Betsy called me late on Sunday night, weeping.

  “God, Betsy, why didn’t you tell me you were going?”

  “I didn’t want you to worry,” she said. “I knew you wouldn’t want me to go.”

  “Jesus, Betsy. I don’t get this. Look what happened to my mother. I couldn’t stand it if anything happened to you. If I lost you.”

  Betsy’s voice changed. “It’s not always just about you , Harper. God, can’t you for once look past your own nose? I care about this. This war is wrong. We shouldn’t be there. I went to D.C. because of all the other mothers. The Vietnamese mothers whose babies are being slaughtered. The soldiers’ mothers whose sons are being murdered.”

  I didn’t know what to say, and so I didn’t say anything.

  After several awful moments of silence, Betsy softened. “I’m sorry. I know I should have told you.”

  I did understand her need to protect me, though; I was protecting her as well. I’d been keeping a secret too, a secret I knew would worry her, anger her. What I didn’t tell Betsy, or my parents for that matter, was that after graduation I planned to join the Reserves. I knew it was a terrible compromise. Cowardly. But I also knew that if I wasn’t willing to exile myself from everything I knew and loved, from Betsy, I had only a few options. She was right. I couldn’t see beyond the tip of my own nose. But the truth was, it was just a matter of time before I had to make a choice. Some friends of mine in the class ahead of me at Middlebury had received their draft notices within days after graduation ceremonies. I might have been shortsighted, but I wasn’t deluded. I had found out exactly what I would need to do to join the Reserves, and what that would really mean for me. For us. Of all the options, it seemed the most reasonable. The most rational.

  And, in the meanwhile, I tried to accept the impermanence of things. I even thought I’d been doing pretty well (with my parents’ move, with the resignation of my favorite professor at Middlebury, even with the Lo Mein) until my father yawned and said he was going to hit the sack early.

  On Christmas Eve we always stayed up until midnight. And just as my mother’s Windsor chimes rang out, my father would make a big show of going to get the Yule log (which was actually nothing special, just the biggest piece of wood on the wood pile), and my mother would ceremonially disappear into their bedroom. A few mi
nutes later, she would come out with a handful of splinters from the previous year’s log, which she kept in a shoe box under her bed. Then she would light the fire, using the splinters as kindling. This tradition, one my mother pilfered from her distant European ancestors, was meant to keep the home safe from fire and other demons. I hadn’t thought about the irony of this, one of my mother’s few but beloved customs, until this moment. I felt suddenly wrecked with nostalgia.

  “Good night,” she said, reaching for my father. He went to where she was sitting with her knees curled under her in an overstuffed armchair. They looked at each other in a way that made me blush and then kissed each other in a way that made me squirm with embarrassment. Boston seemed to have rekindled something in my parents—something I thought had been extinguished with my birth.

  “Good night,” he said to her, winking (winking!), and then to me, “night.”

  “What about the log ?” I asked, sounding like a whiny child but unable to stop.

  “We don’t have a fireplace,” my father said, removing his glasses and rubbing his eyes.

  “Oh.” I glanced around the room as if a chimney and mantel could appear at will.

  “Were you warm enough last night?” my mother asked, concerned. “We can turn the thermostat up. Your father keeps it at sixty-five. I’ve told him that’s too cold.”

  “I’m fine,” I said. How could I have not noticed that this house did not have a hearth? Its absence seemed ludicrous.

  I spent the rest of the night tossing and turning on the thrift store couch. I got up to get myself some water and cracked my toe against the coffee table. I grabbed my foot, silently cussing, afraid to wake my parents, whose bedroom was also on the first floor. Instead of making a second attempt, I lay down again, defeated, and let my heart beat in painful rhythms from my head down to my toe.