Juliet in August

by Dianne Warren

  When Vicki returns to the kitchen, she finds four of her six kids sitting at the table eating jam on bread: nine-year-old Martin, little Lucille (the youngest at three and a half), and the five-year-old twin boys, who look so much alike that even she has a hard time telling them apart. Shiloh isn’t up yet. He must be enjoying his new room, Vicki thinks.

  The children look at her.

  “Daddy doesn’t like jam,” Lucille says.

  “Well, it’s not his favorite, that’s for sure,” Vicki says. “But you can’t always have your favorite, can you?”

  “Are we going to town for ham?” Daisy asks.

  “Not today,” Vicki says. “We have a big job to get done.”

  “I need a fudge sundae,” Daisy says.

  “You don’t need a fudge sundae,” Vicki says. “You might want one, but you don’t need one. Anyway, they’re too expensive.”

  “I heard Dad say we aren’t supposed to go to town today,” Martin says.

  “That’s right,” Vicki says. “At least not until we get the beans done, and that’s going to take all day.”

  “Fudge sundaes aren’t that expensive,” Daisy says. “Don’t tell me we’re so poor we can’t even buy ice cream.” She sticks her lip out and sniffles.

  “Oh, stop it,” Vicki says. “Those aren’t even real tears. Those are crocodile tears if I ever saw them. You’ve been watching too much TV.”

  While the kids are finishing their breakfasts, Vicki gets herself dressed and then, there’s no way around it, she might as well get started. She kneels on the floor in front of her kitchen cupboards and fishes around for her two blanching pots. Pots and lids clatter as she drags them out and sets them on the floor. After the kids pile their breakfast dishes on the counter, she decides she has to wash them up to make more room for the whole ordeal of doing the beans. Once that’s done, she takes a final swipe with the tea towel at a few wet spots on the counter, and as she does so she notices just how white the towel is. It’s amazing, like fresh snow in bright sunlight. The tea towel is like a pep talk, and as she looks at it she thinks, I’m not such a bad homemaker—just look at how white that towel is. She lays it on the counter and goes downstairs for the plastic tubs full of beans.

  At first she tries to be quiet in the basement, but then she thinks Shiloh could be a help, so she crosses the cement floor to his new room and parts the curtains. She notices that the light is on, and she smiles to herself at the thought of her big boy Shiloh being afraid to sleep alone in the dark. He’s not quite grown up yet, she thinks as she switches off the light and says, “Wakey, wakey.” When Shiloh opens his eyes, she says, “So, Mr. Man. What did you think of your first night in the royal chamber?”

  As soon as she’s said it and sees the look that crosses his face, she knows she’s made a mistake, just like when she said Good morning, you to Blaine. Everything she says to either of them is wrong these days. She probably shouldn’t have called Shiloh Mr. Man.

  “You should knock before you come in,” Shiloh says.

  So that’s it. The new room is to be private. Well, that makes sense. She’d wanted privacy when she was a teenager, although she’d never gotten it.

  “You’re right,” she says. “Sorry.” She steps back outside the bedspread curtains and says, “There’s no place to knock.” Then she stamps her feet on the cement floor. “Wakey, wakey,” she says again.

  Shiloh says, “If you weren’t so useless you’d go away and leave me alone.”

  Vicki is shocked. Shiloh has been sullen lately, but he’s never said anything like that to her. She isn’t sure what to do. Is this just typical teenage behavior? she wonders. She can’t help but feel hurt by what he’s said, but on the other hand she remembers saying a few rude things to her mother and then immediately feeling bad. She imagines Shiloh already regretting what he’s said, but being unable to apologize because he doesn’t know how. She decides to ignore the outburst. She leaves him in bed, gets a tub of beans, and carries it upstairs to the kitchen. Then she retrieves the other two and sets them on the kitchen floor with the first tub.

  She looks at the two little blanching pots and the three huge tubs of beans. She tries to imagine how many beans she will have to snap, how many times she will load the beans into the pots, time them, cool them in cold water, bag them, carry them down the basement steps to the freezer. The thought is unbearable. She prays that she’ll be out of freezer bags, but, of course, when she looks in the cupboard, there are plenty. Years’ worth. Every year she makes a special trip to town for more freezer bags. Her ability to maintain a positive attitude is being sorely challenged.

  Vicki picks up a handful of beans, hoping there’ll be something wrong with them, but there isn’t. There’s nothing to do but put them up. She looks at her stove. It has four burners. If she had two more blanchers, she could cut in half the time she’ll need to do the beans. She could borrow from a neighbor, but if she’s going to load the kids in the car to go and borrow blanchers, she might as well drive to town and buy another two, and then she’ll have them for next year. It will only take an hour or so.

  “Come on, kids,” she says. “We’re going to make a quick trip to town. A quick one, mind you. In and out of the hardware store, that’s it. And no fudge sundaes, Daisy. Don’t even ask. And no crying about it, either. We’re in too much of a hurry.”

  “But Dad said—” begins Martin.

  “Never mind that,” Vicki says. “Dad means well, but he doesn’t know anything about freezing vegetables.”

  Vicki calls down the stairs to Shiloh that they’re going to town and to hurry up if he wants to come with them. Five minutes, she says, and within the five minutes Shiloh comes up the stairs with his hair all over the place. He doesn’t say anything but makes a quick trip to the bathroom and then grabs a bag of Oreo cookies from the cupboard.

  “That’s not much of a breakfast,” Vicki says. She almost adds Mr. Man, but catches herself.

  At the last minute Vicki tells the kids to get their bathing suits; maybe there’ll be time to stop for a quick swim at the pool since it’s supposed to be such a hot day. She unzips a huge gym bag and they all shove their suits in, all but Shiloh. Vicki adds a handful of old towels.

  “Shiloh, don’t you want to go for a swim?” she asks. “It’s going to be hot.”

  Shiloh ignores the question and heads out to the car, shoving the cookie bag in his backpack. Vicki and the rest of the kids follow, and they all pile into her old Cutlass Supreme. Shiloh says, “Shotgun,” and gets into the front seat, and none of the kids argues with him. Vicki is about to start the car when Shiloh says, “Wait,” and he runs back into the house.

  Vicki looks absently out the car window and sees Blaine’s buckskin horse standing in the shade and is so thankful that Blaine has been able to hang on to him even if no one but Blaine can ride him. The horse has his head around and is kicking at something on his flank, and Vicki remembers that she and Daisy were going to spray him. It would only take a minute, but then again, they’ll be back home before the heat of day when the flies are at their worst and she can do it then. Anyway, Blaine never sprayed the horses when he had more than one. It was too expensive.

  Shiloh comes back out with his hair combed, wearing a different T-shirt.

  Daisy notices and says, “Shiloh’s going to see a girl.”

  “Shut up, stupid,” Shiloh says.

  “No one in this family is stupid,” Vicki says.

  On the way to town, Lucille finds someone’s lost ball of bubblegum on the floor in the backseat and chews it up and then sticks it in her hair. The twins watch her do it, and when Vicki hears them giggling she turns to look and sees the mess.

  “I decorated it,” Lucille says.

  “Oh my God,” Vicki says. “How am I ever going to get that out? We’ll have to go and see Karla, and al
l I can say is, it’s a good thing for you we had to go to town today.” Vicki tells Martin to keep an eye on Lucille and make sure she doesn’t get gum all over the backseat. “You keep your hands away from your hair, Lucille,” Vicki says. “Or Martin will tell me and there’ll be no candy for a week. Do you hear me?”

  Vicki drives south along the grid road, and just as they get to the railway tracks she sees at least forty head of yearling calves strung out to the west, grazing along the tracks. She assumes they’re Hank Trass’s calves and makes a note to call him from somewhere and let him know. She used to have a cell phone, but Blaine wouldn’t let her renew her contract because of the money. She tried to argue that it was her way to get in touch with him in an emergency, but he said that if she’d stay home there wouldn’t be any emergencies, and if there were she could use the perfectly good landline in the house.

  She glances at Shiloh, who hasn’t said anything the whole way to town. He’s eating cookies and Vicki sees no sign of the teenage defiance she heard when she first called him to get up. Their moods are all over the place, she thinks, and then she notices with a sideways glance how much he looks like his father. She wonders how long it will be before he talks, and if she should say anything about the rude way he spoke to her earlier.

  In the end, she doesn’t have to. As they turn off the highway, Shiloh folds down the top of the cookie bag and zips up his backpack and says, “Well, anyway, you should have knocked.”

  She takes it as an apology. “You’re right,” she says.

  She wonders where she should begin her search for blanchers and whether she should take the time to get a few groceries. These things are necessary, she thinks, just as necessary as, say, tractor parts. No farmer would consider frivolous a trip to town for parts. When there’s a breakdown, a wife is expected to drop whatever she’s doing and head to the dealership to collect some crucial pin or belt or drive chain that she’s never heard of, and try to explain to the parts manager what she needs when she doesn’t exactly know, and get home again as quickly as possible so the work can resume, and if she’s lucky she won’t have to make another trip because she’s brought home the wrong part. A trip for blanchers and groceries is the same: inconvenient but necessary.

  “Ha,” she says out loud, congratulating herself for her brilliant logic. The kids all look at her. “Just part of the job, isn’t it?” she says.

  Vicki turns up the street toward Karla Norman’s house so she can get Lucille’s hair fixed, the first of the quick stops.

  There’s lots of time in a day, she assures herself.

  The Theater

  Norval opens his eyes to see Lila, hands on her hips, staring down at him. He can tell by the look on her face that he’s done something wrong, but his head is fuzzy and he can’t quite think what it is. As he slowly comes awake, his misdemeanors begin to line up: He’s on the couch (Norval, why didn’t you just come back to bed?); the TV is still on (How can you sleep with that sound blaring, for heaven’s sake?); the light is on in the kitchen (The power bill keeps going up, I wonder why). And then there’s the meat loaf, a crumb of which is lying in plain view on the white carpet. Norval watches as Lila bends to pick it up and examines it closely before giving him a glaring look of admonition. He watches her carry the crumb between two painted fingernails toward the kitchen, holding it out in front of her as though it’s the most distasteful bit of evidence of Norval’s domestic inadequacy.

  “I am housebroken, you know,” he says in his defense, although not really loud enough for Lila to hear him.

  He sits up and switches off the weather lady with the remote control. Through the arched doorway to the kitchen he can see Lila obsessing with neatness, wiping the counter and the sink before anyone has even had a chance to mess them up, her green satin dressing gown swishing as she moves. He remembers the TV commercial that makes fun of sea-foam green bridesmaid dresses and thinks, Lila’s dressing gown is sea-foam green. What does that mean? It can’t mean that she has bad taste, for Lila is well-known for her sense of style. Perhaps that her taste is of another era, although she would not be amused at the notion that she might be, heaven forbid, a fashion relic. Not that Norval has anything against Lila’s style, which he has always appreciated as long as he doesn’t have to be the other half of a matched set.

  “Sometimes I just wonder,” Lila says, and Norval thinks, Sometimes I wonder, too. How he got into all this.

  He and Lila met in the city when he was in the last semester of his commerce degree and she was in her second year of a degree in acting. Norval was working part-time as a junior teller at the small bank where Lila had her account. It was in an older working-class neighborhood, and not one in which university students generally lived. Lila was staying with relatives while she went to school, and she and Norval struck up a friendship over her careful managing of her money, which Norval couldn’t help but notice. They ran into each other on campus one day, and Norval invited Lila to go for a beer in the campus pub. They played pool—Lila was surprisingly good and beat him in several games until coyness got the better of her and she backed off and let him win. As they played, she entertained him with stories about her adventures as a theater student, making them sound more adventurous than they really were. In truth, Lila was a small-town girl who was having trouble fitting in with the trendy and sometimes ruthless theater students who already had years of experience in high school productions and summer drama camps and improv competitions, none of which had been available to a student like Lila with her simple dream of being onstage.

  At the end of the term, Norval went to see her in the theater department’s production of a Shakespearean play—he can’t remember which one; he just remembers that he didn’t have a clue what was going on and couldn’t understand a word anyone was saying. Lila had a small part and was angry that the director hadn’t selected her for one of the starring roles. Norval went backstage after the performance as Lila had directed him to do. There was to be a party, at which she would introduce him to the rest of the cast. But when he arrived in the greenroom after making his way down a dark, moldy-smelling corridor in the bowels of the theater building, she grabbed his arm and dragged him outside, still in her stage makeup, and when they were away from the building and on their way to his car, she burst into tears because the cast was going to a party at someone’s house and they hadn’t invited her. She swore the slight was intentional. They didn’t like her, she said, because she had talent and they didn’t, and one of them in a mean fit had told her that she should try cosmetology for a career. It was a jab at the fact that Lila never went anywhere without Cosmo-style lipstick and eye makeup, while the other theater girls were experimenting with the Cleopatra look. Either that or going au naturel, blank slates to be made up as their roles demanded.

  Norval held Lila in the parking lot, mascara running down her cheeks, his feathers all puffed up because it was clear that Lila needed him. She was quitting school, she said. She couldn’t study theater at this two-bit university, and she would work for a while and then go to a bigger university where they had a good theater department and graduates got jobs in television commercials and even movies. Norval hadn’t actually thought she was very good onstage, but that didn’t matter because he believed studying theater was pointless anyway, and what was wrong with cosmetology? He knew enough not to say this, though, at least not at that moment. Instead, he suggested that they get married.

  Lila quickly forgot about the tragedy of her theater school experience and became completely engrossed in getting married and the prospects of setting up house with Norval and following him wherever the bank sent him on his climb up through the corporation. Someday, she told him, they would live in, say, Calgary, and he would work at a big main branch, or perhaps head office, and they would build a new house in a new subdivision and their kids would play basketball and the violin, and they would have season tickets to the symphony and Lila w
ould find an agent who would get her work at a real theater. Norval wasn’t sure about that whole scenario, but he was happy with the thought of marrying Lila. For one thing, there was the prospect of frequent sex (right now sex was not nearly frequent enough, with Lila living with relatives and Norval sharing a two-bedroom apartment with three roommates). He admired her looks, and her taste in clothes, and she was outgoing and fun. He was happy to turn himself over to her certainty about how marriage should work, because he didn’t have a clue.

  Well, he knows how it works now. Lila’s wish is pretty much his command. Not that he’s complaining, not really. What is marriage in middle age but a living arrangement, a contract for comfort, and they have a comfortable home in Juliet, and a partnership with quite a lot of time and money invested in it. Investments of any kind Norval does not take or leave lightly.

  This memory of Lila’s past in theater leads him to look at Rachelle’s upcoming wedding in a new way. These demands for renovations to the church are really instructions for building a set. It all begins to look like a production in which Rachelle is the star and Lila is the director with a cameo as mother of the bride. And this leads Norval to feel just a little sorry for her, and to think that maybe he has failed her in some way by not being ambitious enough in his own career, by being satisfied with small-town banking, and by not aiming for jobs in progressively larger towns and cities. Norval knows himself well enough to admit that he hasn’t really had the desire to be any more successful than he is. He makes a vow to participate more willingly, for Lila’s sake, in the orchestration of her wedding production.

  He lifts himself off the couch and makes his way to the kitchen, where Lila has his heart-smart breakfast waiting for him. Another reason he should be more generous in his feelings: If it weren’t for Lila, he’d fill up on bacon and put whipping cream in his coffee. Instead, he has a bowl of colorful fruit salad, followed by bran flakes with skim milk. He’s learned to drink his coffee black. Lila eats only the fruit salad. She follows some kind of diet that doesn’t allow you to eat anything but fruit before noon.