“I don’t mind,” I said. “You’re welcome to wear anything you like.”
Melanie followed me upstairs. “I forgot all about church,” she said with a conspiratorial laugh, as though this were a private joke between us. “Honestly, I haven’t been in years.”
I stared at her in wonderment. It’s hard to credit now how exotic I found this, as if I’d just discovered that Melanie could fly. “Really? Never?”
“Nope. And God hasn’t struck me dead.” She threw open my closet door and rifled through the dresses and blouses, stopping to admire a skirt I’d made that summer. “This is pretty, but I don’t think it will fit.”
“You’re skinnier than I am,” I said, though that didn’t describe it. Melanie had small breasts, a narrow waist, sharply curving hips. My body had the same features, or was beginning to, but these were recent developments. I wasn’t used to seeing myself that way.
She gave me a playful shove. “No, silly. We’re the same size. You wear your clothes too big.”
I blinked. My mother bought patterns in size fourteen when she could have worn a twelve. I’d never realized I did the same thing.
Melanie chose a simple white dress that I’d never liked, feeling exposed by its plainness. I turned my back politely as she untied her sundress. “You’ll need a slip with that,” I told her, digging through a bureau drawer. I couldn’t bring myself to say, You’ll need a bra.
Now she had changed back into blue jeans, though the rest of us were still in Sunday clothes. Even Tilly wore the dressiest outfit Melanie had packed for her, a denim skirt and blouse.
“And who is this little princess?” Aunt Fern asked, patting Tilly’s head. “Honey, we’re so happy to have you here. We’ve been hearing about you for ages.”
That was a blatant untruth. Though Melanie’s name came up often in family conversations, no one ever spoke of Uncle Dan, let alone his daughter.
Tilly blossomed under the aunts’ attention, guzzling cream soda and eating Velva’s lemon drop cookies. Watching her, I felt lonely for my childhood, when the aunts had been at the center of my small universe. I had especially adored Elsie, the oldest aunt, who, until she died of kidney failure, had spoiled me with small presents—knitting needles, beautiful buttons—prompting protests (You shouldn’t have) from my mother. Recently the aunts had become less interesting to me, their company less dear. They had always fussed over me, the youngest of the girl cousins, but it was no longer the type of attention I craved. I wanted them to notice the ways I differed from JoAnn and Prudence and Theresa and Ruth: my love of reading, my high marks in school. Of course, those differences weren’t visible, and I was too shy to speak of them. But at the time that didn’t occur to me.
The fair opened on a Monday, with a horse show and equipment expo, nothing I cared about. Tuesday would be barn games and harness racing; Wednesday, the milking contest and tractor pull. This year I begged off, complaining—in whispered tones, to my mother—of menstrual cramps. “I’ll be better by the weekend,” I told her. The most popular events would be held then—the Beef Cattle judging, the aerial show. Saturday night was the grand finale, an outdoor dance with a live band on the stage behind the Ag Hall.
We drove there in the pickup, my father, Melanie, and I. My mother had gone ahead of us, taking Tilly with her, to sell baked goods and preserves at the Church of the Brethren tent. My father left us at the main gate and we wandered into the Ag Hall, past booths showing pies and needlecrafts, macramé and ceramics, hooked rugs and intricately pieced quilts.
“Wait. Look at that,” Melanie said.
The winning quilt hung against a makeshift wall, a blue ribbon pinned to its corner. The pattern was classic, an eight-pointed star on a white background, surrounded by a jagged border. It was the border that was most difficult to execute: sixteen sharp points, folding out from the original star like a paper snowflake. The design was pieced with snippets of blue fabric—ginghams and plaids and paisleys and sprigged muslins, all in shades of blue.
“It’s beautiful,” Melanie said. She ran her hands over the quilt, admiring the delicate stitching. Only then did I notice the name on the entry tag.
“That’s Mom’s. She makes one every year. It’s an old pattern. Broken Star.” I stared at the quilt, ashamed that I hadn’t recognized it. For most of the summer, my mother had spent evenings alone in her sewing room. She’d been working on the quilt for months, and I had never bothered to take a look.
“Peggy’s amazing,” Melanie said softly. “She can do anything.”
This stunned me. I had never thought of my mother that way.
Over Melanie’s shoulder, I saw a group of boys trotting through the expo hall. “Pretend like we’re talking,” I told her.
“We are talking.” She lowered her voice to a whisper. “Why? Did you see somebody you know?”
“Those boys are in my class. Don’t look.”
“I won’t.” She leaned toward me as if whispering something in my ear. Then she laughed loud and bright, a perfect imitation of the town girls in my class.
The boys approached us. “What’s so funny?” said the tall one, Darren Wolf. For two years he’d sat in front of me in homeroom, the luck of alphabetical order. I knew all his shirts, how the rear seam followed the shape of his shoulders, how his blond hair curled over the collar. I couldn’t recall him ever looking at me or saying a word.
“None of your business,” Melanie said tartly. “Gina, don’t tell them.”
“Hi, Regina,” said the other boy, Philip Schrey. We were in the same geometry class. I was surprised he knew my name.
“Regina,” said Darren Wolf. “Is this your sister?”
“Sort of,” Melanie said.
“Do you go to Bakerton?”
“Did. I graduated.”
Darren Wolf nodded as though he’d suspected as much. “You girls going over to the dance?” he asked, though he was clearly asking Melanie.
Yes, I thought. Just say yes.
“In a minute,” she said. “We’re waiting for some people. We’ll see you over there.”
“Okay, then,” said Darren Wolf.
“See you,” said Philip Schrey.
When they were safely away, Melanie grabbed my hand. “Do you go to Bakerton?” she asked in a gruff voice.
We both shrieked with laughter.
August cooled into September. A dusting of yellow appeared on the trees. Each morning I trudged down the lane to wait for the school bus. Some nights I had long conversations with Philip Schrey, who’d asked for help with geometry homework and had begun calling me on the phone. Usually my mother answered. She handed me the receiver without comment but later peppered me with questions: Who’s that boy? The same one as before? Why does he keep calling?
It’s just homework, I said. But these phone calls—the waiting and planning, the delight when they occurred and the crushing disappointment when they didn’t—occupied all my attention. Asleep or awake, I was thinking of Philip Schrey. My dreams were full of ringing telephones.
One morning I woke to find Tilly’s bunk empty. Downstairs I found my mother at the stove, frying eggs and bacon. Fresh coffee bubbled in the percolator.
“Where’s Tilly?” I asked.
“She’s spending the day with Fern. Melanie, breakfast!” she called, scraping eggs onto a plate.
I heard loud footsteps above, the clatter of Melanie’s wooden sandals on the stairs.
“Good morning!” she said breathlessly, giving my shoulder a squeeze. To my astonishment, she was fully dressed, a poncho slung over her arm. She sat at the table and tucked in to her breakfast.
“Regina, drink your milk,” my mother said. I noticed then her high color, her cheeks flushed with agitation or excitement.
“What’s going on?” I asked.
“We’re going to Pittsburgh,” Melanie said.
“You and Mom?” To my knowledge, my mother had never been to Pittsburgh in her life.
In my half-
asleep state, I watched Melanie eat, stung by the unfairness of it all. Once, as a little girl, I was allowed to stay up until midnight on New Year’s Eve, to watch the celebration on television, but I fell asleep before eleven. I awoke hours later in my own bed, where my father had carried me. I lay awake until sunrise, fuming at the injustice, heartbroken that I had missed my chance.
“Can I come?” I finally asked.
“Regina, don’t be silly,” said my mother. “It’s a school day.”
“I don’t care.” I felt suddenly alert, shocked awake by my own bravery. “We never go anywhere.” I held my breath because there was more I could have said: Because you’re afraid of everything. I’m stuck here because of you.
Melanie took her plate to the sink. “Peg, let her come. She can go to school anytime.” My mother started to speak, but Melanie interrupted her. “Please, Peggy? I want her to be there.”
My mother studied me for a long moment. She seemed to be deciding something. Then a remarkable thing happened.
“All right, then,” she said.
Later I would understand her reasons, but at the time I was too excited to care. We set out in the station wagon, driving south and west. The air had turned cold overnight. Steam rose from the Yaegers’ bean fields on either side of the road, a ghostly haze that parted to let us pass. Melanie drove with a speed and joyful carelessness that exhilarated me: the windows open, her long hair billowing in the breeze. She sang along with the radio, an AM station crackling with static: You can’t talk to a man with a shotgun in his hand. My mother sat beside her, clutching the door handle. If my father had been driving, she would have scolded him: Bert, slow down. You’ll get us killed. To Melanie, she didn’t say a word.
We approached Pittsburgh at just before noon, which surprised me. I’d imagined it much farther away. The city itself was a revelation—the tall skyline, the Allegheny busy with boat traffic. We exited the highway and made a series of turns down busy boulevards. As we neared the city center, Melanie pulled over to look at a map.
“Let’s stop here,” I suggested, staring out the window. Across the street was a public park, crowded with people enjoying the midday sun.
“Sure,” said Melanie, cutting the engine.
“Melanie, really,” my mother said.
“There’s an ice cream stand.” Melanie pointed. “I want an ice cream.”
We got out of the car and crossed the street, my mother hugging her purse to her chest.
“Three strawberry cones,” Melanie told the man at the window. She reached into the pocket of her jeans.
“Save your money,” my mother said, opening her purse.
I spotted an empty park bench. Melanie sat in the middle, her legs tucked up under her. I did the same.
“Sit like a lady,” my mother told me. “Melanie, you’re a bad influence.”
Melanie laughed. “It’s comfortable this way.”
We sat watching people pass: men in suits, smoking cigarettes; well-dressed women toting shopping bags; black maids in uniform, pushing baby carriages. They were the sorts of people I didn’t see in everyday life. I could have sat there for hours.
“It’s getting late,” my mother said.
Melanie licked her fingers. “I could eat another one,” she said. “Gina, could you eat another one?”
“Definitely,” I said.
“We could, you know.” She laid her head on my shoulder. “We could eat ice cream all day long.”
“Melanie!” my mother said, so sharply that heads turned in our direction. Her anger startled me. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d heard her raise her voice.
“Just kidding,” Melanie said, rising. “Jesus, Peggy. It was a joke.”
We crossed the street and got into the car. Melanie drove down a narrow street and then another, barely wide enough for one car. The closeness frightened and delighted me: the houses and storefronts abutting, with no space between buildings, the pedestrians—a different crowd now, young and long-haired—crossing at random, mere feet from our car.
“Where are we going?” I asked for the first time.
Melanie didn’t answer. Finally my mother spoke. “Your aunt has an appointment.” Something in her tone, her way of referring to Melanie—your aunt—warned me. I didn’t ask again.
“Look for number one-twenty,” Melanie said. “It should be on the left.”
I was the first to spot the building, a narrow brick house with a dilapidated porch. Melanie parked and we went inside. We climbed a graceful old staircase to the second floor. The steps were covered in hexagonal tiles no bigger than quarters. The spaces between the tiles were filled in with grime.
At the end of the corridor we went into an office. A brass plate on the door read INTERNAL MEDICINE. We stepped into a dilapidated waiting room: mismatched chairs covered in green vinyl, outdated magazines—McCall’s, The Saturday Evening Post—piled on a table in the corner.
I’m not sure how long we waited after Melanie’s name was called. My mother paged through a Ladies’ Home Journal from front to back. Then she started over again, reading it back to front.
Outside, the air had turned colder, the sky darkly clouded, as if the brilliant morning were something I’d dreamed. Slowly we crossed the street to the car, Melanie leaning heavily on my mother. I followed behind. They seemed to have forgotten I was there.
I watched as Melanie lowered herself into the driver’s seat. When she turned the key in the ignition, the radio came on, a patter of muted trumpets. My mother reached to turn it off.
“No,” Melanie said. “I like that song.”
She drove us out of the city and onto the Turnpike. No one spoke. Then, suddenly, she pulled over to the side of the road.
“I’m bleeding.” Her voice sounded strange, low down in her throat. “I can feel it. Peggy, you’ll have to drive.”
My mother stared at her, wide-eyed. “Melanie, I can’t.”
“Why not?” Melanie turned to me, her eyes pleading. “Gina?”
I shook my head mutely, shamed by my uselessness. I wouldn’t be sixteen for two months. My father had promised to give me driving lessons, but so far I hadn’t so much as turned the key in the ignition.
“Peggy, please.” Melanie got out of the car, her hand low on her belly, and opened the rear door. I climbed out and took the passenger seat up front. I will never forget the look on my mother’s face as she took the wheel. She found the lever beneath the seat and slid herself forward so that her face was inches from the windshield. Then she shifted into first gear and we rolled into the right lane. A shrieking sound as the car behind us slammed its brakes. My mother gasped.
“It’s okay,” I said. “Just give it some gas. You’re doing fine.”
In the left lane, cars whizzed past. My mother didn’t answer. She kept a tight grip on the steering wheel, her eyes on the road.
“It’ll be okay, Mom,” I said. “Just keep driving.”
For a long time neither of us spoke. Once, twice, Melanie moaned softly from the backseat.
“Is she all right?” I asked.
My mother shifted into third, grinding the gears. An eighteen-wheeler screamed past us, its headlights blazing. She shielded her eyes.
“It’s hard to look,” she said. “Regina, I’m so scared. I just want to close my eyes.”
It was dark when we arrived back at the house. My father’s truck was gone. Melanie went immediately to bed, my mother to the kitchen. She filled the percolator and took carrots from the refrigerator, a couple of pork chops.
“I’m not hungry,” she said abruptly. “Are you hungry?”
“Not really,” I said.
When the coffee was ready, she poured me a cup, something she had never done. Across the kitchen table, she explained how Melanie felt trapped with Uncle Dan, who had a terrible temper and sometimes hit her. “He’s an animal,” my mother said.
I was as shocked as if she’d spoken an obscenity. I’d never heard her say an un
kind word about anybody.
“That’s no way to raise a child. Can you imagine? Seeing his father behave that way. It’s for the best,” she said softly, the last words I’d hear her say on the subject.
My father’s truck pulled into the driveway, and my mother busied herself at the stove, laying the pork chops in a pan. I poured my coffee down the sink. The smell nauseated me. I have not drunk coffee since.
When I came home from school the following day, Melanie and Tilly were gone.
It was time, my mother explained. They’d been staying at our house for nearly a month.
A change came over her after Melanie left. For two days, three, her bedroom door was closed when I came home from school. “She’s feeling poorly,” my father said when I asked. “A humdinger of a headache.” Baking and canning seemed more effort than she could muster. The last of the tomatoes rotted on the vine.
I could have lent a hand in the garden, but I didn’t. I was preoccupied with my own concerns. I went with Philip Schrey to see The Towering Inferno at the Rivoli Theater in town. We ate lunch together every day in the school cafeteria. We went to football or basketball games on Friday nights. This new dimension of my life occupied me completely. My mother’s difficulties didn’t interest me at all.
We never spoke of the trip to Pittsburgh. My mother didn’t mention Melanie for months. A card arrived at Christmas with a Florida postmark. Inside was a single handwritten line:
Thanks for everything. Love, Melanie, Dan, and Tilly.
Years passed, and I stopped thinking about that summer. Soon the slow August days were lost to me forever; it seemed, often, that I had no time to think. I went to college, worked, married a much older man, and moved to a different country, feeling always that the world moved too fast for me, that I’d been raised to live at a gentler pace. In my late thirties I looked up and noticed that my parents were gone, the farm sold. Every year I considered sending a hundred Christmas cards via airmail to the dozens of Yahner and Schultheis relatives, but I never actually did this. My reasons were laziness and lingering guilt. I had neglected to invite my aunts to my wedding, a slight that, if they’d known about it, would have hurt them. I understood this just as I understood that nothing—certainly not a secular city hall wedding—could have induced Velva or Fern to travel to New York. Thinking of them made me sad and ashamed, so I stopped thinking of them. It wasn’t hard to do. My interest in family had died with my mother. Without her, I didn’t see the point.
News From Heaven Page 6
