by Joanna Scott
Eddie rarely laughed. He was such a steady man that the inconsistencies of others aroused in him an unyielding indignation. How could people be so crass, so stupid, so decadent, so selfish? He would have made a fine judge, Marge liked to tell her friends, and she took care not to act in ways that might invite his disapproval, though it would have been difficult to do so, for just by being married to Eddie, Marge enjoyed in his eyes an angelic disposition. She could do no wrong as long as she remained his wife, and she’d remain his wife as long as he held himself up to the highest moral standards. So what if he didn’t like to laugh? Marge could depend on him — this, she’d learned after the mistake of Tony, was all that mattered.
And whether her life added up to a glass half empty or half full, what she had was enough simply because she’d grown tired of wanting more. No more, please. The scene of her old age was set, the props carefully arranged, nothing of value to speak of but she was snug — almost. If only Ann would go back upstairs and Eddie would switch off the television and the rain would fall hard to drown out the other noises, Marge would be content. The time she liked even better than her cheeseburger noons with her friends was midnight, when her home was as quiet as an empty theater and she sat alone in the living room, no longer performing the role of herself, no longer weighing her value against others, when solitude erased vanity and Marge could enjoy the silence of night.
There, Ann had folded a slice of white bread around a piece of cheese and left the kitchen. And soon enough Eddie came in to rinse his soda can. He tossed it into the recycling bin, kissed Marge on the back of her head, and then returned to the living room to turn off the television and a table lamp, leaving the other lamp for Marge to turn off when she came up later. An evening routine — and both he and Marge preferred routine to improvisation. How compatible they were. How perfectly suited. Through the doorway Marge watched his shoulder blades shift under his green turtleneck as he started to climb the stairs, felt proud of his reliable companionship and let herself feel another stab of regret at having wasted so many years on Tony, years of pounding music, squealing children, Tony howling lyrics to one indecent song after another. Sometimes the neighbors called Marge to complain, and sometimes they just called the police.
Wasn’t it understandable, then, that when all was said and done, Marge should love silence even more than laughter? And here she was, melting into the quiet of an April night. She looked through the kitchen out the dining room window — she couldn’t hear or see the lake but she felt it there inside the darkness. For thirty-five years of her life Hadley Lake had been just a few hundred yards away, down the slope and across the road. Marge hadn’t had much chance to swim as a child and as an adult had felt no inclination to learn; instead, she preferred to watch the water as she would have watched a wolf in a zoo. There it lay, its great heart beating so forcefully that the beating of her own heart was no more than a weak imitation.
She was settling at last, just as she had night after night for years now. There was nothing but the routine of solitude, the drift of wind through the trees, the sound of the rain and of her own breathing — lovely quiet sounds in this pocket of time. Precious little to fill the emptiness, and that was as it should be. Adding up to no more and no less than this, everything in place, the furnishings adequate, the circumstances uncomplicated.
Marge meant to keep out all disturbances. She would not watch the news or even read a magazine. So when Joe Simmons, who happened to be the Hadleyville sheriff as well as Eddie’s hunting buddy, rang the bell, Marge answered the door and before he could speak she said, only half joking, “We don’t want any.”
“Marge, there’s been an accident.”
She looked past him and saw that he’d come in the patrol car rather than in his Buick. She couldn’t have said how long she stood there listening, but at some point Eddie came up behind her and draped his arm over her shoulder. He wore the navy blue terry-cloth bathrobe she’d given him for Christmas, and he’d tied the belt in a bow. His breath smelled of peppermint mouthwash. Joe stopped explaining what had happened long enough to say, “Heya, Eddie,” and Eddie answered, “Hi, Joe,” in the familiar tone of voice born from a long history of cahoots. Marge decided then and there that everything Joe had told her was a lie.
And then what happened?
Well, right around midnight the cold spring drizzle that had made the roads slick and tempers short changed to a steady rain. It rained in the city and straight on across the countryside. It rained in the valleys and in the mountains. It rained on plowed fields and gathered in thick brown streams between the mounds of wet earth. The rain fell through the trees and onto the surface of the dark lake.
What about the boy?
The boy snuck from his house while his mama napped in front of the TV, and he ran between the raindrops to the shore. He sat beneath the canopy of an old willow tree and watched the rain hit the lake.
Why?
Because raindrops hitting dark water is a fine sight, that’s why. So fine that boy decided he wanted to taste the rain. So he squatted on a willow root jutting out from shore, leaned over, and caught a sweet raindrop on his tongue. But he hadn’t realized how slick a willow root becomes after it’s been rained on for a while, and the boy slid right off and into the water.
And then what?
He sank straight to the bottom of that lake, and when he tried to push himself up his hands got stuck in the mud. He just held his breath and waited for someone to come help him. But no one came. So he gave up and took in a good lungful of water. He tried to pull his hands out of the mud and discovered that he had no hands. And wouldn’t you know, he could push himself forward by wriggling his tail. He sipped that murky water, glided forward, and headed for the river that would take him to the seaway. He thought he heard his mama calling for him, but he kept going.
Why?
Because heroes and heroines have to endure a terrible loneliness in order to prove themselves worthy. And I’ll tell you, that little boy hadn’t been sure what loneliness was until this moment. Now he knew. It was the taste of lake water in his mouth. It was the body of a fish. It was the voice of his mama calling in the distance.
PART TWO
Here’s what happened the first time Jenny Templin’s father was fired from a job: at about noon Dorrie Jelilian came by with a box of tulip bulbs, and Marge ended up chatting with her for half an hour in the living room, leaving Jenny alone in the kitchen with the flour bin and the flour and sifter. She made magic North Pole snow that would never melt. She dumped cupfuls of flour onto the kitchen floor and left a serpentine trail of footprints. She dusted her hair and eyelashes with flour. She clapped and sneezed and threw handfuls of flour in the air. She rolled her teddy in the flour, she rolled her sister’s bottle in the flour, she rolled herself in the flour. She was building a little snowman out of the ball of sticky pie dough Marge had left on the table when she heard a tapping on the glass pane of the kitchen door.
Oh no! It was Tony to give it to her good. Crack crack crack of the wooden spoon against her bottom. Jenny had better run for her life, but the best she could do was clamber under the kitchen table and hug her knees to her chest and hide her face so she wouldn’t have to see the spoon descending, crack crack crack!
Now Tony was inside, slipping his arms around her waist and pulling her out from beneath the table like a bucket of sloshing water, lifting her up and whispering in her ear, “Quiet, girl!” while he hopped through the magic snow and ran out the back door.
“Put me down!”
“Come on, Jenny-Benny, let’s go have some fun.”
Sure, but first he’d hit her with a wooden spoon. Jenny knew the usual order of things. Except Tony wasn’t his usual self. When had he ever before grabbed Jenny and run with her out the back door and across the yard, through the patch of woods, down the old logging road all the way to Goram Creek? Never! Until today, Tony would appear around suppertime and heap his plate with food, eat his meal, take tur
ns tossing Jenny and Ann high in the air, then disappear again. Tony was lots of fun when he wasn’t in a temper, but you couldn’t count on him to stay around for long or to take you with him when he left.
Yet now Tony was different, and Jenny felt an urge to call him by something other than his name. But Tony had always liked to be called Tony, and the rest followed — Marge was Marge and Jenny was Jenny and Ann was Ann. Nothing could change any of that, not even the surprise of a trip to the creek. So Jenny called, “Tony!” between hiccups of laughter and clung tightly to him so she wouldn’t jiggle quite so much as he bounced along the trail.
It was early fall, a glittering blue day, and the creek was as cold as the air inside a refrigerator, Jenny discovered, combing her fingers through the water after Tony had set her down. Yellow birch leaves floating between the rocks looked like paper-thin sheets of gold. “Look what I found!” she called, lifting a leaf, but Tony didn’t bother to look. He was examining pebbles he’d dredged from the bottom of the creek.
“Gold, Tony!” That got his attention. He looked at Jenny with panic in his eyes, as though he’d been caught stealing, and she wanted to say, “Don’t worry,” but right then her foot slipped off the rock into the water. She cried until Tony took off both her sneakers and let her go barefoot.
Oh how wonderful the icy moss on the rocks, the yellow leaves, the blue sky mottled by treetops, the glinting mica. And look — a fish! Two dragonflies! A yellow bird flashing like a falling star! Jenny climbed onto a boulder, cupped her red toes in her hands to warm them, and decided that she’d wait a little while before she complained. Tony needed to find whatever he was looking for and would get angry if she interrupted him. She sucked her lower lip beneath her front teeth. She listened to the coo of a mourning dove and the distant rattle of a woodpecker. Her feet ached from the cold. A cloud shadow darkened the woods, and Jenny wondered if there were bears around. She started to ask Tony if he’d ever seen a bear at the creek but he suddenly found what he’d been looking for and shouted, “Come here, Jenny! You won’t believe it.”
He’d finally found gold. And was it a coincidence or had Tony arranged to have more than just Jenny for an audience? At the clearing where the trail led to the edge of the creek stood a fancy brass-buttoned trooper and another man wearing gray slacks and a navy sweater. And then Mrs. Jelilian of all people huffed up beside them, fixed her hands on her hips, and shook her head at Tony as if to say, You have no right to that gold!
Jenny wanted to clap for her father but sensed that she should keep quiet. She waited for Tony to say something. He just stood there hiding his treasure in the bowl of his dripping hands.
Then Mrs. Jelilian broke the silence. “Tony!” she said sharply.
“What’s wrong?” he asked.
“What’s wrong? What the hell is wrong with you?” She stomped her foot at the edge of the water, splashing the hem of her skirt. Tony made his way over the slippery stones back toward Jenny, who eased down from the boulder and stood shivering in the shallow water, causing Mrs. Jelilian to cry, “And the poor child with no shoes! Taking her out of the house with no shoes!”
So that was the problem — she wasn’t wearing shoes. “Here are my sneakers.” Jenny lifted a soggy sneaker as proof.
“Her shoes!” Mrs. Jelilian cried, ignoring her.
“But what’s wrong?” Tony said again, smirking now, Jenny could see. As he lifted her by the waist and carried her back to shore he secretly pressed his treasure into her hand. “Don’t tell,” he whispered.
Don’t tell what? Jenny wondered even as she closed her fist around the secret. Tony just handed her across the last spread of water to the trooper and shielded himself with his hands from Mrs. Jelilian’s screaming accusation that he had the whole county looking for him and Jenny. He started laughing, so Jenny laughed, too, and the trooper laughed, and the man in the navy sweater said what Jenny wished she had thought to say — “Just a lot of fuss over nothing.”
It turned out that the treasure was not gold. It was just a dull gray slab of shale. But Jenny kept the stone anyway, kept it all her life. She discovered only years later, when she was packing her things to move out of the house, that etched into the hard surface was a finely detailed fossil about the size of a marble — the spiral of a prehistoric snail, a relic that would last almost forever.
The next time Tony lost his job Jenny was in second grade. He didn’t come home for six days, and when he did pull up in his truck at dinnertime the next Monday, Marge locked the doors against him. To Jenny’s disappointment he didn’t even try to bust in through a window. As she liked to remember it, Tony walked in his sad, slouched fashion down the porch steps and turned in the rain and stood looking up at the house, not caring about the drenching, caring only about the melancholy girl who stood at the living room window looking out. But the truth, Jenny knew, was that her father had tried the door handle, knocked, and when no one answered he simply stomped back out to his truck, lit a cigarette as he stood by the cab, then climbed in and drove away. A gray cloud bed hung low to the ground, but in fact it wasn’t raining and hadn’t rained all that day.
What happened later, however, was just what Jenny would have wanted to remember:
“Jenny-opolis.”
“What?”
“Shhh. Be quiet. Come with me.”
“Where are we going?”
“I have no one to dance with. Will you dance with me?” And with that the light burst from an invisible balloon, loud music filled the room, and she was spinning in her pink ballerina nightgown around the pole of Tony’s arm, twisting her forefinger inside his hand while Tony sang a song about love. Ann was there, bouncing across the floor — Badump, badump, badump! And then Marge, no-nonsense Marge, her arms folded to prop up her bosom beneath the plaid robe that Tony had left behind, Marge frowning, Marge crying, Marge being kissed by Tony, Marge dancing and laughing until the phone rang and she stopped to answer it.
“That’s it,” she announced, clicking off the stereo after she hung up the phone. “Dorrie has promised to call the police if we don’t settle down. Girls — up to bed. March!”
And so they marched, Jenny singing softly as she followed her little sister: “The ants go marching one by one, hurrah, hurrah,” leaving Tony and Marge to a tense new privacy, enabling them to renew their marriage, if that’s what they wanted, and how could they have wanted anything else? That was Jenny’s thought as she drifted back to sleep. How could they want anything else? Hurrah, hurrah.
The third time her father lost his job Jenny was nine years old, and Tony came home so drunk that Marge couldn’t risk sending him away. So she let him sleep on the sofa, and the next morning when she left for work he was still sleeping. Ann hit him across the head with a pillow to wake him up because she and Jenny wanted breakfast. So Tony made them a breakfast of French toast and bacon, then he ordered them to change their clothes, to put on their pretty Easter dresses. Hadn’t they been told? It was a holiday — Happy Racetrack Day! He drove them to the track an hour east of Hadleyville, he gave them each an amazing fifty dollars, and he bet it for them at the window in increments over the course of the day, winning nothing back, nothing but the fun they had losing it, screaming for their picks to run faster, faster, not caring when their horses came in fourth or fifth or even last because Tony didn’t seem to care. He just loved being with his girls. Loved them more than any other girls in the whole wide world, he said, draping his arms over their shoulders and leaning against the empty bench behind him. Did they say their prayers at night? Did they listen to their teachers? They must not let themselves get fat like their mom, he said — fat as an old sow. The boys wouldn’t like them if they let themselves get fat. But they shouldn’t even be thinking about boys, not at their age. They should be thinking about dollars — “Dolls, I mean dolls,” he said, correcting himself and breaking up in laughter that provoked in the girls an uncertain echo. Were they supposed to laugh? Probably, so they laughed with faint
tee-hees, until Ann stopped abruptly and announced that she had a stomachache and wanted to go home. Jenny certainly wasn’t going to be the one to mention that they hadn’t even eaten lunch, and Tony thought only to buy two Cokes and a beer on the way out.
He dropped them at home just after three o’clock, and when Marge came home two hours later she didn’t ask any questions and so she never found out where the girls had gone. At the supper table Jenny sat in silence, wondering how such a strange and memorable day, the one and only Racetrack Day, could have no consequence.
Six years later, Jenny would have been able to pick him out of a crowd. She knew that faded red baseball cap and the curve of his neck as he walked along. Even after six years of not seeing him she would have recognized him. Even after smoking a joint with her friends. Even after piling into Stephie Johnson’s mother’s red Datsun. Seven fifteen-year-old girls packed into the two-door sports car. Three in the front, four in the back. Oh the giddy feeling of danger! Gina had a learner’s permit — none of the others did — but it was Mrs. Johnson’s car so Stephie drove. Brit doled out cigarettes and Carrie held the lighter. Stephie drove up North Lake and onto Route 62. Fifty-five, sixty, seventy miles per hour. Don’t worry. There were never speed traps along Route 62. A twisting, neglected country road, a striped, pocked ribbon of tar. If you knew what to look for you’d see wild asparagus growing along the side of the road. Honeysuckle, buckthorn, spicebush, mountain holly, patches of blooming charlock and peppergrass. Two-thirty on a May afternoon, a half day for the Hadleyville schools, and the girls were having the time of their lives.
