News From Heaven

by Jennifer Haigh

  “They’re beautiful,” I said. “Thank you.”

  My mother glanced at the earrings. She didn’t care about jewelry but feigned interest to be polite. “Very nice,” she said. “But Melanie, you shouldn’t have.”

  She greeted all presents this way—you shouldn’t have—no matter how worthy the occasion or how trifling the gift. It was a habit born of embarrassment. No gift—even one she’d always wished for—was worth drawing attention to herself.

  Melanie seemed not to have this problem. On the ride home, she talked nonstop: the difference in weather from Florida to Pennsylvania, the assortment of characters she and Tilly had met along the way. She imitated the bayou accent of the bus driver, so thick that the names of cities where they’d stopped—Savannah, Georgia; Raleigh, North Carolina—were completely unintelligible. My father chuckled appreciatively. My mother giggled like a schoolgirl, covering her mouth with her hand.

  Melanie had been gone for twelve years, the only one of my relatives who lived away. Away, in my family, meant anywhere outside rural Pennsylvania, the quiet stretch of country, bordered by highways and Amish, where we’d farmed for four generations. Philadelphia was away. Pittsburgh, a grimy city of immigrants and steel mills, was—emphatically—away.

  Melanie had left after graduating high school. She attended secretarial school in Washington, D.C., and worked as a typist at the Department of the Interior before marrying Uncle Dan and moving to a naval base down south. I knew her face only from photographs, the half dozen that decorated my grandmother’s parlor. One in particular impressed me, her high school graduation portrait: Melanie in an off-shoulder blouse of glamorous black, a color nobody much wore in those days, certainly not young girls. “It’s a drape,” my mother explained. “They made all the girls wear it. Don’t ask me why.” She said it in the impatient tone I recognized, the one that meant I was interested in the wrong things.

  I never mentioned the drape again, but I thought about it a great deal, Melanie being draped by someone, a photographer presumably. It seemed a reverent gesture, exquisitely romantic. In the photo Melanie’s dark hair was spread across her shoulders, her chin tipped at the unnatural angle favored by school photographers. The whole presentation was theatrical, and Melanie smiled as though she knew it but was simply playing along. Her attitude, though I didn’t yet know the word for it, was ironic, and it was this quality that delighted me.

  Now, in person, Melanie looked much the same as she had in the photo, though she had just turned thirty-one, an age I did not consider young. By thirty, my female cousins were stout matrons: large bosoms firmly corseted, hair cut and permed into helmets of tight curls. Melanie’s hair hung nearly to her waist, and she wore the kind of wide-bottomed blue jeans I saw in magazines but didn’t own, since they were impractical for farm chores. She looked the way girls my age were supposed to look, while I—in my sleeveless blouse and homemade skirt, the flowered pattern not quite matching at the seams—looked like a younger version of my mother.

  Night was falling as we left the bus station, an amenity that, until then, I hadn’t known the town possessed. I went to high school in town—this involved a half-hour ride on a rickety school bus—but apart from the main streets, I’d spent little time there. The bus station was located on a side street next to the pool hall. My father had escorted us at my mother’s insistence, though he grumbled that it was unnecessary. The neighborhood was perfectly safe.

  I was beginning to notice how often they had such conversations: my mother asking for protection, my father reluctant to provide it. At home she was a model of efficiency, a take-charge housekeeper who structured my free time around endless daily chores, but in the outside world she was timid. My father had taught her to drive early in their marriage, but she refused to go any farther than the grocery store. She drove slowly, nervously, and only on the back roads. The Pennsylvania Turnpike, with its three lanes in either direction, scared her witless.

  Back at the house, my father carried Melanie’s suitcase upstairs to the sewing room, where the couch opened into a bed. Tilly would sleep in my room. “Give your cousin the bottom bunk,” I was instructed, though Tilly wasn’t really my cousin, being Uncle Dan’s from a previous marriage. This was how my mother said it: “from a previous marriage,” as though there’d been more than one.

  I helped Tilly unpack her shorts and T-shirts. She was a skinny little thing, red-haired, with a sharp chin and a dark band of freckles across the bridge of her nose, so that from a distance she seemed to be wearing a Band-Aid. “Why do you have bunk beds?” she asked.

  “For sleepovers,” I said, though technically that had never happened. In the third grade, I’d been allowed to invite Barbara Vance to spend the night. Homesick, she had cried all evening, until my father drove her the fifteen miles back to town. After that, no more sleepovers.

  Tilly considered. “Maybe,” she said judiciously. “Or maybe they wanted to have more kids.”

  “Nah,” I said, as though the idea had been discussed and dismissed. In fact, the possibility had never occurred to me.

  “Anyway, it doesn’t matter,” she said, climbing into bed. “They’re too old now.”

  I turned off the light, and in a few minutes I heard Tilly snoring in the bunk below. I lay awake a long time thinking about what she had said. I couldn’t imagine my mother pregnant, let alone doing what was necessary to get that way. Like any farm girl, I understood the mechanics of reproduction. I’d once sneaked into my uncle Wilmer’s barn while Lassie, a beautiful little mare, was being bred, a polite term that doesn’t convey the brutality of the operation. I was squeamish about applying that model to any human couple, let alone my parents. At that age I was more interested in the runway leading up to such intimacies, the kissing and ardent glances, none of which I had experienced myself.

  Drifting off to sleep, I found myself thinking of Melanie and Uncle Dan, who had met on the beach at Ocean City, Maryland. I’d been to the shore only once, on a rare family vacation, but I still dreamed of it. Not the ocean itself, but the human tableau running alongside it, the hundreds of strange, bare bodies on display, decorated with bright bathing suits. It was easy to place Melanie on that beach. I’d never seen Uncle Dan, not even a picture; but I imagined him tall and dark, with a hairy chest, like Burt Reynolds.

  I was nearly asleep when I heard Tilly sniffling.

  “What’s the matter?” I whispered. “Did you have a bad dream?”

  “I miss my dad,” she wailed.

  This surprised me, because Tilly seemed older than her years. In fact, she was the same age Barbara Vance had been at the time of our sleepover, and much farther from home.

  “It’s just temporary. You’ll see him soon enough.”

  “No, I won’t.” Tilly inhaled wetly. “We’re never going back.”

  “Don’t be silly,” I said, because that was what my mother would’ve said.

  For a long time Tilly didn’t speak.

  “Why would you think that?” I whispered. “Did Melanie say that?”

  “No,” Tilly said. “I just know.”

  I kept quiet about what Tilly had said. It was easy to do, since I rarely saw my parents during the day. August is busy on a farm, and we were all occupied with separate chores. I would see my mother at suppertime but not my father even then; most nights he had meetings at the Grange Hall, to prepare for the county fair. That year he was a judge in two categories, Swine and Youth Dairy Cattle. He felt out of his depth with the swine—we hadn’t raised piglets in years—but with the calves, he was more than confident. I’d heard it said my whole life, by neighbors and uncles and men from church, their grave inflection giving it the weight of a proverb: Bert Yahner knows cattle.

  The fair had been a fixture of my childhood, as thrilling as Christmas, as anticipated and beloved. For six days each September there would be crowds and commotion, the Ferris wheel, the sweet greasy aroma of frying potatoes and funnel cakes. As a little girl, I’d walked the
midway flanked by my parents. Holding their hands, I kept up a steady chatter, enjoying their nearness, their protection from the unaccustomed crowd. When I got older, I entered animals in the youth competitions. I showed rabbits three years in a row and, at twelve, a Jersey calf named Buttercup, who took second place in her class.

  Three years later, my father still pestered me to raise another calf. “Someday,” I told him. The truth was, I had no intention of doing it; given the choice, I would skip the fair altogether. I was embarrassed now by the cowboy music, the livestock smell, the farm boys in their stiff new dungarees, hair slicked back as if for church. Last year I’d stayed close to the booth where I sold raffle tickets to raise money for the 4-H Club, keeping a nervous lookout for my schoolmates, the town girls in their sundresses and pretty sandals. How I coveted those sandals! I loved them precisely because they were so impractical, bound to get ruined in the gravel and muck. The girls came in groups of three or four, whispering and sometimes breaking out in loud laughter. They might have been laughing at anything, but I felt with a deep certainty that they were mocking people like my parents. My mother in her housedress and dark lipstick, flushed with excitement, clinging to my father’s arm.

  “It’s about that time, isn’t it?” Melanie asked at supper. “The fair. God, I used to love the fair.”

  “It’s a lot of aggravation, if you ask me,” my mother said, passing a platter of fried chicken. “Bert will be relieved when it’s over.”

  “I think he likes it,” I said.

  “It’s too much for him. Since his heart attack.”

  “What about you, Gina?” Melanie had taken to shortening my name, which delighted me. I’d never had a nickname before.

  “I probably won’t go,” I said, avoiding my mother’s eyes. “I’ll have homework then. It’s the first week of school.”

  “You’ve got to be kidding.” Melanie took the platter. “Won’t all your friends be there?”

  My mother stared at me in bewilderment. “I don’t know what’s come over you.”

  “Don’t listen to her, Peg.” Melanie heaped her plate with potato salad. For a small person, she had a huge appetite. “She’s going to the fair.”

  Melanie was a late riser. It was ten, ten-thirty by the time she wandered into the kitchen in her nightgown. Even Tilly slept until nine. My mother tolerated this for two days. The third morning she enlisted them to work in the kitchen, putting up bread-and-butter pickles. She and Tilly picked the cucumbers, brought them in from the garden, and scrubbed them at the sink. Melanie had the best job, slicing them into thin rounds, and I had the worst, sterilizing the Ball jars. Using metal tongs, I placed them four at a time in a huge cauldron of boiling water, a steamy, miserable operation that kept me in front of the blazing stove in the August heat.

  “Your mother runs a tight ship, Gina.” Melanie sat perched on a high stool in front of a breezy window. “Jesus, you’ll be glad to go back to school.”

  “Ten more days,” I said, grinning. I’d forgotten—it was easy to forget—that Melanie had been a farm kid, too.

  “Do they still make you write that essay? ‘What I Did on Summer Vacation’?”

  “Some vacation,” I said, mopping my forehead with a towel.

  “My vacation was just super,” Melanie said in a simpering voice. “I watered two hundred head of dairy cattle.”

  “I hauled manure a quarter mile to the garden,” I added.

  “I sat by the highway all day in the blazing sun,” said Melanie, “and I sold six ears of corn.”

  I laughed so hard no sound came out, a feeling both delicious and frightening. Through the open window, I saw my mother come up the garden path with another bushel of cucumbers.

  “I put up a million quarts of bread-and-butter pickles,” Melanie continued. “For God’s sake! Does anybody like bread-and-butter pickles?” Then she noticed my expression. “Gina? What’s the matter?”

  My mother stood in the doorway, her cheeks flaming. The screen door spanked shut behind her. She glanced around the kitchen: the steam rising from the stove, the counters, covered with old towels, where I’d set the jars to dry. “You don’t have to help if you don’t want to,” she said, an odd tremor in her voice.

  “Peg,” said Melanie, turning to face her. “We were just having fun.”

  My mother set her basket on the table. “Don’t bother with these. I guess we have enough.”

  “How long is Melanie going to stay?” I asked my mother.

  We were preparing Sunday dinner—roast beef, potatoes and carrots, a relish plate of pickled beets and my mother’s vinegar cabbage, which we called chowchow. It was the standard menu for when the relatives came to dinner. For summer visits like this one, a platter of cut vegetables was added, whatever was ripening in the garden, but otherwise my mother made no concession to the season. Even today, maybe the hottest of the year, she didn’t consider a barbecue or cold supper, to avoid firing the oven all afternoon.

  “You never know with Melanie. You can’t pin her down.” She opened the oven door. A wave of heat smacked my bare legs.

  “But doesn’t Tilly have school?” My own classes would begin in a week, an event I looked forward to with a mix of excitement and dread.

  “Not for another month. The Florida schools start later. The heat, I suppose.”

  The screen door slammed and my father appeared, still dressed in his church clothes. His sleeves were rolled above his elbows. Sweat rings showed under the arms of his white shirt.

  “Makes sense, if you ask me.” He turned on the faucet and scrubbed his hands and forearms, streaked with farm dirt. My mother frowned but said nothing, just watched the filthy water pool in the sink.

  I persisted. “A month, then?”

  “Goodness, no. I’m sure Dan will want her back before then. A week at the most.”

  My father raised his eyebrows. “A week is a long time.”

  “Don’t be silly. She’s my baby sister. Who knows when we’ll see her again?” My mother arranged tomato slices on a plate. “It won’t kill Regina to share her room for a week. When I was a girl, we slept three to a bed, except for Carl.”

  This was not new information. I’d heard my whole life that I’d been spoiled by having my own room. (My uncle Carl, the one boy in his family, had been similarly pampered, a privilege he’d apparently paid for by being killed in the war, long before I was born.) I was often treated to sermons on the value of sharing, wearing hand-me-downs, and waiting in line for the bathroom—lessons I, the first only child on either the Yahner or Schultheis sides of my family, had failed to learn. I didn’t have the nerve to protest that I hadn’t chosen to be an only, that my parents, who’d married late, were to blame. An eldest son, my father had spent his younger years running the Yahner farm, supporting his siblings and widowed mother. Even if he’d wanted to marry, my mother often said, where would he have found the time? Her own reasons for waiting were less clear and more delicate. Plain and awkward, she had always been a homebody. Because of her shyness, school had been torture; when she dropped out of the twelfth grade, her sisters were amazed that she’d lasted so long. My aunts agreed on this point: Peg was lucky to have found a husband, even one twenty years older. That was repeated throughout my childhood, so often that it never struck me as cruel: Peg is lucky to have a husband at all.

  My aunts—Rosemary, Velva, and Fern—were brisk, no-nonsense women who’d married in their teens and raised large families. Their children were grown now, with babies of their own. These grandchildren were the subject of much discussion. Two and a half and still in diapers. Marcia lets him sleep in bed with her and Davis. I can’t see why he puts up with it. Occasionally one of the aunts would notice that I was listening as I stirred the gravy or fetched bottles of root beer for the men. Remember this when you have babies, Regina. Before you know it, you’ll be toilet-training your own. These comments thrilled and perplexed me. To my knowledge, no boy had ever looked at me twice. What made my aunt
s so certain that, before I knew it, one would want to marry me? Explain this, I wanted to say. Explain how it happens.

  It seemed to me then, and still does, that my aunts were made by marriage, that every defining feature of their lives—the children and grandchildren, the canning and cooking and crafting skills each possessed—was intimately connected to that long-ago moment of being chosen. My uncles Wilmer, Dick, and Bill were like all the men I knew then, soybean and dairy farmers who spoke rarely and then mainly about the weather. Yet unlikely as it seemed, I accepted that these men had the power to transform. My aunts had been pretty, lively girls—one stubborn, one mischievous, one coquettish, according to my mother — though somehow all three had matured into exactly the same woman: plump, cheerful, adept at pie making and counted cross-stitch, smelling of vanilla and Rose Milk hand lotion. That I would someday become that same woman terrified me. My only greater fear was that nobody would choose me, and I would become nothing.

  The aunts and uncles arrived promptly at two, a strange time to eat a large meal—too late for lunch, too early for supper—but this was a Schultheis Sunday tradition. After spending all morning in church, the hostess needed a few hours to get the cooking under way.

  “Hi, stranger,” said Aunt Velva, giving Melanie a squeeze. “Didn’t you look pretty this morning? I just love that white dress.”

  “Thank you.” Melanie winked at me over Velva’s shoulder. She had borrowed the dress from my closet, after coming to the breakfast table in a printed sundress that tied behind her neck like a halter top, leaving her back and shoulders bare.

  “Melanie, you can’t,” my mother had protested.

  Melanie shrugged. “It’s this or blue jeans. It’s the only dress I brought.”

  “Wear something of mine,” my mother suggested, though nothing in her closet was likely to fit. She wasn’t fat but tall and large-boned, with broad hips and shoulders. “Or Regina’s.”