I have brains and a sense of humor, thought Emily, with a sudden flash of bitterness. I had straight A’s in my major, and all the right connections. Why am I not a school head? Why am I not sitting magisterially in a big office with a leather blotter, interviewing prospective parents, reading the latest books on learning deficits? Instead of driving around the middle of nowhere with my children in the back of some strange car because my husband has decided that he wants to boff his nurse-receptionist? A woman named after a fruit? Why was I the last one on my block to learn to fear chaos at midlife?
The outer office of Home had once had a double-height door, so a man, or woman, could ride into the stable on horseback, and dismount in the center of the room, there to curry and brush his horse or wash it down, if it had been a muddy day. There had been a sloping cement floor, with a drain in the middle of the room, where Merilee’s desk now stood. The door to this room was now of conventional size, and the visitor walked in to be surrounded by trophy cases, sepia class photographs, and plaques painted with the names of each succeeding class of Country School graduates, including mementos from the days of the Miss Plums. Rue especially relished a photograph of Carla and Lourdes Plum in long white skirts and middy blouses, leading a ragtag little flock of scholars in fencing practice. There was also an autographed picture of Hedy Lamar, whose children had once boarded with the Miss Plums and gone to school here.
What had been the tack room, lined with English and Western saddles, including the Miss Plums’ sidesaddles, was now full of office equipment. One large box stall had become the faculty lounge cum sick bay. The other box stall, now enclosed to the ceiling, was the office of the business manager, Mr. Glarrow. Mr. Glarrow was a pale youngish man, quite long and thin, who existed on the edge of this bustle of life like a lost soul. He was brusque and clumsy with his grounds staff—he was not a “people person”—and he adored modern technology, although he had no talent for it whatever. Every summer when Rue went on vacation he drove her careful budget out of whack by buying new telephone systems that no one could work or networking software that couldn’t be installed because it competed with existing device drivers on the computers, and no one in the office except Rue knew what device drivers were, let alone config.sys files and autoexec.bats, all of which soon came into play when Mr. Glarrow had a new bright idea for making their lives simpler. He was, however, a crackerjack bookkeeper and a terrific steward of buildings and grounds. Rue had never known a manager who could do everything in the job description and was grateful Bill Glarrow could do as much as he could. The fact that he didn’t much care for children was not exactly a plus, either, but he worked terribly hard in early morning and evening hours, and rarely left his office during class times.
Emily had been thoroughly taken with The Country School when she visited, although it was still in summer session and she met only the staff, one teacher, and the assistant head, a Mr. Dianda. She had loved the air of the place, which had none of the prim sense of self-importance of the girls’ school she herself had gone to in Cedarhurst. But when Emily stopped in two days before school opened, she knew something had happened. The hum of life, the smiles of welcome she had seen all over campus the day she had brought the children to be interviewed, were gone. Faces looked blank, or hurt. People walked together in twos and threes, talking intently. Something was wrong, a family thing. No one looked at the outsider.
In the office, Emily found a plump woman in her mid-forties dictating a newspaper ad to Merilee. She was wearing a long loose jumper of some soft stuff, and she had strong red hair, piled on her head in a haphazard knot. Her eyes were gray, wide, and intelligent. If she wore any makeup, Emily couldn’t see it; she had beautiful skin and a fine acquiline nose, and carried herself as if to say that if that wasn’t good enough for you, too bad.
Merilee said in her sweet chirping voice, “Oh hello, Mrs. Dahl—this is Mrs. Shaw.”
The paragon, the woman with brains and principles. Rue had turned to smile Welcome, and her smile was extraordinarily warm. “Hello, how nice to meet you,” said Rue, taking Emily’s hand.
“You were still on vacation when we first arrived….”
“Of course, Mr. Dianda told me. I understand you have a son with a brain the size of Montana.”
Emily was pleased. “He tests well. He’s a little shy, though. He has trouble making friends sometimes.”
“Mike told me that too. But there’s another little boy in David’s class who has some physical problems, so he doesn’t play sports and he’s mad for dinosaurs. Pterodactyls are his particular field, I think. Mike says David goes in for tyrannosaurs.”
“He’s interested in pterodactyls too,” said Emily.
“Good. No point in specializing too early. Colin’s a dear little boy and we’ve been worried about his being lonely. The class was full, but Mrs. TerWilliams said she couldn’t resist David. And in Malone’s class, we happened to need a girl, so this has worked out well. Welcome to Country.”
“Thank you….”
“Mrs. Dahl,” piped Merilee, “did you bring me the health forms?” Merilee had a bright smooth face like an apple, and she spoke with a high-pitched lilt that was so full of good will that no one could say a cross word to her.
“I did, but Mrs. Shaw?”
“Rue.”
“…Rue, thank you. Did I hear you advertising for a Spanish teacher?”
“You did.”
“Could I apply for the job?”
“Do you know Spanish? I mean forgive me for asking, since I was about to offer it to Manuel who’s out mowing the soccer field. Have you taught?”
“Not recently, but yes…” Well actually, not in twenty years, but. She’d been good at it, she felt, and had once meant to go on with it.
“Come into my office,” said Rue.
Rue’s office was in the low-ceilinged back of the building, beside Mike Dianda’s. It too had heavy square beams and small windows. Rue had filled it with soft-blue furniture on a pale green carpet, and on her desk there was always a bowl of flowers from Merilee’s garden. Today they were roses. The effect was of a haven, like a favorite book-lined room under the eaves, or a cross between a cave and a garden.
What Emily noticed first, when she followed Rue in, were the boxes of Kleenex everywhere.
“People must cry a lot here,” said Emily.
Rue smiled. “They do.”
The second thing she noticed was there were no diplomas on the wall. She had a feeling Rue Shaw had some impressive degrees under her belt; she had looked forward to knowing exactly what, from where. She was hoping there might be something a little second-rate, so she wouldn’t need to feel one down. She herself had gone to a good but not great women’s college, from a very famous Eastern boarding school where she had received a very middling preparation from a faculty superannuated to the point of coma in some cases. It was a school, she liked to say, where girls were supposed to be awash in sentiment and have silver spoons for brains. Still she felt more secure after she’d managed to drop the name. It helped people place her, told them something true about who she was and where she had come from.
Rue apparently had no such need.
Her walls were crowded with framed pictures of children, drawings and paintings from children, handlettered cards and cartoons and certificates of commendation from eight-year-olds. These were interspersed with photographs of her family. There were, side by side, framed antique photographs of two men from other times and places. Each stared fiercely into the camera. One had light eyes and wore a soft hat; the other had puffy cheeks and muttonchop whiskers, and a heavy watch chain across his waistcoat.
“Two of my great-grandfathers,” said Rue, noticing Emily’s gaze. “The one with the hat was a sheep farmer on an island in Maine. His name was Long. He had eleven children and the boys all had names like Miles Long and How Long.”
Emily laughed. “And the other one?”
“My mother’s grandfather. A titan of indus
try.”
Emily stopped at a framed snapshot of a girl who could have been Rue herself at eighteen, except that she had a darker quality, too, something deep and intent. Like a cross between Rue and a fawn of some kind.
“I don’t have to ask whose child this is. You must have had her by parthenogenesis.”
“That’s Georgia,” said Rue. “Actually she and her father look exactly alike.” Rue picked up another picture from her desk, this one showing a good-looking man of about forty with blue eyes and unruly blond hair, with a ten-year-old Georgia, grinning, sitting on his shoulders in a striped bathing suit. She handed it to Emily, who said, “Oh my god,” and started to laugh.
“What?”
“Cricket Shaw…you’re married to Cricket Shaw?”
Surprised and pleased, Rue said, “Mostly we call him Henry now.”
“Does he still play the saxophone?”
“Only when he’s drunk.”
“I don’t know that I ever saw him sober. My god, I never expected to see Cricket again in this lifetime. What did he grow up to be?”
Rue, smiling, said, “He’s a brain surgeon.”
When Emily stopped laughing, she said, “I went out with one of his college roommates, Todd Bakeman….”
“Bakelund…”
“Bakelund. He was a little odd.”
“Still is.”
“I had the most tremendous crush on Cricket.”
“I don’t blame you,” said Rue, smiling. “Will he remember you?”
“I don’t know,” said Emily. Though she did know. He would.
“Tell me about your teaching experience,” said Rue.
When Rue got home from school that afternoon her Georgia, Georgia who looked like a cross between Rue and a fawn, Georgia who was somehow the image of Henry when she talked, was packed and ready to leave. Her room was a wreck. It looked as if she had taken out every article of clothing she owned, packed the things she wanted, and left the rest wherever they fell, on the bed, on the chairs, on the floor. Her suitcase, her enormous duffel, her boom box, and her guitar were waiting in a pile to be carried downstairs. The cassettes she couldn’t be parted from for twenty-four hours were in a carrying case. A few hundred more were packed in a cardboard box, with her name and her New York address written on it, ready to be mailed. And what looked to Rue like several thousand rejects remained in stacks in her bookcase, along with her Narnia books, her Nancy Drews, her Black Stallion books, and her paperback Great Books from high school English. From now on it was to be no more Dead White Male writers, just composers. She was going to New York to live and breathe music.
Georgia herself was out on the back porch in the glider, with her friend Caroline who had just gotten back from Outward Bound. Rue could hear cries of “Oh my god…” followed by laughter, as they rushed to fill each other up with every event and detail of the summer they had spent apart. Outward Bound had moved Caroline to take the safety pin out of her nose, Rue overheard, but the change had been temporary. It was back, with a full display of hoops and studs, but at least the safety pin was gold.
Tonight, after family dinners, would be their last evening with their old gang. Posse had been the right term for it at one point, but now Georgia rolled her eyes if Rue said it, so she gathered posse was past, along with so much else.
Tomorrow morning Henry would take Georgia to the airport, and Caroline would leave for UC Santa Cruz in a used ambulance her father had bought her. Caroline had already been arrested twice for having red lights and a siren on what was not an emergency vehicle, although she swore she only turned the lights on for, like, a minute. She and Georgia had become friends in high school, right around the time Rue had begun to wonder if she was tempting fate when she said out loud that Georgia alone in her experience with adolescents had never given her parents a moment’s unhappiness or worry.
Georgia had been their hearts’ delight from birth. She was a large-hearted, bright, wise, and beautiful little girl, and adolescence hadn’t made her as hideous as it did most. There was a year when her nose seemed too big for her face, but that had passed, and there had been the famous shouting match the time they caught her chewing tobacco in the bus barn with Manuel, and Henry made her swallow it. This had made Georgia furious at both of them and Rue angry at Henry because it had so upset Manuel. Manuel was a little simple. On this afternoon, Rue could remember being mad at Henry when they differed about Georgia, but she didn’t think she could remember ever being mad at Georgia.
Missing her daughter in advance, this morning when Rue left for school she had carried with her a leaden sense of loss that was so piercing that she barely had room for more when the news came that Mariel Smith was dead. If you wanted six children, and you only could have one, Georgia was the one you would want. Delight was the word that best expressed Rue’s feeling for her daughter. Georgia’s brain was very different from Rue’s or Henry’s; she was quick, inventive, and above all musical, and Rue simply adored her. Rue had begun to worry what would happen when Georgia was gone. The three of them had been so close for so long, she wondered if she and Henry would collapse like a triangle with a missing side.
For Georgia’s farewell dinner, Rue cooked eggplant curry, and raita and dahl and fragrant basmati rice, and she herself smelled faintly of cumin. Caroline had gone home to have steak with her family, and Georgia was now upstairs washing her hip-length auburn hair and listening to Tosca. Rue thanked God she wasn’t playing some ear-splitting heavy metal tonight; but Georgia was good. She nearly always saved her really awful music for when she was out of the house. You tended only to hear it when she had been driving your car and forgotten she’d left the radio tuned to KOL Rock and the volume cranked up to a thousand decibels. Henry had had a few mornings when he’d turned on his ignition and been blasted nearly into the back seat. Rue was spared the early morning assaults because she commuted to campus on foot.
Rue was very glad that school was starting tomorrow, despite the fact that one of the bus drivers had broken her arm, and pressure was already building from parents who didn’t want their children in Mrs. Trainer’s class, and the Spanish teacher was dead. She loved the first day of school because it was a day full of clean slates and new book bags and happy reunions and hope. And you could say one thing about having the house empty of Georgia tomorrow night. It would make meal planning easier. Since Georgia had become a vegetarian, Henry made sad remarks about “veggie pudding” and “Alpo burgers” on the nights she cooked for Georgia, and when she produced sausage or chops for Henry, Georgia ate cold cereal, looking pained at the savagery before her. Rue was on the fence between them. She liked the meatless meals, but she was constantly allowing herself to be frightened by friends who read women’s magazines who warned that if she didn’t make a full-time study of meatless nutrition, she would get a protein or calcium deficiency and become demented during menopause, or that all her bones would break, or something.
Dinner was ready, the candles were lit. Henry had come in, opened a beer, and stood around the kitchen humming snatches of the Beatles’ song “She’s Leaving Home.” Every time their eyes met, they laughed, because they were so sad. Georgia breezed in, fresh and clean and wearing a new white t-shirt of her father’s, which was huge on her. Her wet hair was twisted into a loose rope down her back. They all took their places at the kitchen table, where they always ate when alone. It was a big room, with wainscot cupboards under the counters and two stoves, the old wood cook stove the Plum family had once used and the thirties-vintage white porcelain number Carla and Lourdes had installed. Tonight there was a bucket of roses from Rue’s garden on the cold wood stove.
In the candlelight, and the lingering evening light of late summer, Georgia gave them their pitch. As they had done every night they were all together, for the last fifteen years, they sang “Tallis Canon,” in a round. Rue and Georgia began:
“All praise to thee my God this night”
And Henry followed with the same line,
as the women sang:
“For all the blessings of the light.
“Keep me, Oh keep me, King of kings
“Beneath thine own almighty wings.”
And Henry finished alone:
“Beneath thine own almighty wings,”
in his sweet raspy bass, and Rue felt tears start in her throat. In the silent second that followed the singing she had to wipe her eyes and blow her nose.
Georgia said, “You loved it when I went to camp, Mom. Don’t pretend you didn’t. You cried till the bus was around the corner and then you hardly remembered to write.”
“I wrote daily.”
“I was the only kid in my cabin who didn’t get mail all week. The counselors felt so sorry for me they wrote me notes and forged your name.”
“You’re a wicked liar.”
Henry said to Georgia, “She wasn’t crying for you, anyway. She was crying because she knows you’re going to sing ‘Tallis Canon’ at my funeral.”
“Oh, good,” said Georgia. “Are we? Have you printed the programs?”
“Not yet. No, the new rector at your mother’s church gave us all forms to fill out planning our funerals. He’s really trying to get us to call our lawyers and put the church in our will, but I thought that was depressing. I’ve done my funeral, though. I want ‘Tallis Canon’ and ‘For All the Saints,’ and ‘Oh God Our Help in Ages Past.’ And I chose my readings too, but I don’t think Father Tom is going to like it.”
“What are you having?”
“Robert Frost and E. B. White.”
“No gospel?” Rue asked.
“No, I want someone to read White’s essay on The Death of a Pig.”
“Mom, have you planned yours?”
“No. There are so many hymns I love, I can’t decide. Daddy just put ‘Tallis Canon’ in his because he knows it would make me fall apart. I know you fancy the idea of the widow wailing and sobbing and having to be led from the church, Henry. Would you pass me the chutney?”
Saying Grace Page 2
