Acts of God

by Mary Morris

  Often he came to my house and we watched television in the finished basement my father built or sat in the den. There was something about him—a kindness that I carried with me over the years. His touch was light, as if it fluttered over me, and I imagined I’d find that same gentle hesitancy everywhere I went in the world.

  Patrick and I, heads bent together, talked about this and that. He was estranged from his wife, though they were trying to work it out. Basically for the kids. “You know, Tessie, whenever I don’t have anything to do, I drive by your old house. I just look at it and think to myself, Tessie lived here.”

  “Do you? That’s nice.”

  He nodded, sipping his beer. We were silent for a minute. Then the band came blasting back on and we could hardly hear ourselves think. “Let’s get out of here,” Patrick said. “Let’s go somewhere where we can talk.”

  We were heading outside to get some air when we ran into Nick Schoenfield walking in with a younger crowd. He wore a Hawaiian shirt open to his chest, which revealed a slight paunch. He was wide, built like a safe, and boisterous. Giving a wave to his friends, telling them he’d see them inside, Nick looked at us with his dark blue eyes, and laughed as if he’d just heard a great joke. “Tessie,” he said, recognizing me right away, “It’s good to see you.”

  “Well, it’s good to see you, too.”

  He and Patrick exchanged a series of male pleasantries—slaps, handshakes, and locker-room jabs. “Just like old times. You two back together?”

  Patrick laughed with him as if I were somehow their private joke. “How ya been, Tessie?” Nick said.

  “I’ve been good. I’m still living out West.”

  “Well, the Coast agrees with you.” He nodded, looking me up and down. “I always think of you as the one who got away.”

  “Did I?” I asked.

  “Well, you give the impression you did. I thought you’d end up a star out there. You know you were voted ‘The girl the boys were most likely to be secretly in love with.’”

  “I was? By whom?” Nick opened the reunion brochure, pointing. There it was. Tessie Winterstone. “I had no idea. When did all this voting take place?” I wiped the back of my neck with a cocktail napkin.

  “The ballot was in one of the invitations.” Patrick laughed. “You probably threw it away.” Nick smiled, his blue eyes piercing as if they could see through steel doors. His grin was warm and he hadn’t lost his looks. He had been a beautiful boy and the years had been kind to him.

  For a time when they played varsity, my brother Jeb and Nick had been friends. When Jeb first started bringing Nick around, that was the way he smiled at me—the wide, confident grin of a boy who is sure of himself. His boldness unnerved me. I had a crush on him, but then all the girls did. I used to bring them tunafish sandwiches and Cokes on Sundays when they watched football games in the den. If I asked questions, they ignored me. Sometimes I stood in front of the television just to annoy them.

  My last memory of Nick was when he intercepted a pass and scored the winning touchdown in a game that made the Winonah Wildcats first in the state, beating Evanston. Evanston had huge, black players. (The joke used to be “Why did Evanston get the blacks and Winonah get the Jews?” And the punchline: “Because Evanston got first pick.”) It was a big deal for the white boys to win. Nick rode around town, waving from the back of a convertible while the town cheered.

  Larger-than-life caricatures of him were painted on the picture windows of all the big stores. Though he never realized his athletic promise, everyone believed he’d grow up to be just like his father. Mr. S., as his father was called, had once been a star quarterback for the Chicago Bears. He was a beefy man with knees so bad he wobbled, but he’d given the Bears some of their finest victories. In local restaurants people asked for his autograph.

  Nick was being groomed for something big. That much you could see from the start. His father rooted for him at every ballgame and chided him whenever he missed an easy pass, a basket, a pitch, depending on the season. He was always coaching his son from the sidelines. On Saturdays Mr. S. made Nick work at Prairie Visita Automotive, a business he owned a share of. Nick didn’t like to go, but his father insisted because it built character. All through high school Nick had grease under his nails. Now I noticed that they were manicured and buffed.

  Nick paused, his head cocked, a frown on his face. He seemed to be listening for something, like a distant train. “Lousy band,” he said at last. Patrick shrugged and said they were local and he couldn’t afford better.

  “Well, tell them to get a new bass player.” Nick ruffled my hair as if he was really glad to see me. He had that same wide grin he’d always had, though his features were puffy like those of someone who didn’t sleep much or did his share of drinking.

  “So is she there?” Nick asked Patrick, an almost pathetic but slightly bemused look on his face.

  Patrick nodded. “She’s there.”

  “Well,” Nick said, “is she behaving herself? How drunk is she?”

  “Drunk enough,” Patrick said.

  Nick dropped his head down and shook it, the way I’d seen him do when a pass wasn’t received or his team had lost an easy point. Then his smile came back and he slapped me on the arm. “So, Tess, what do you hear from Jeb?”

  “Oh, the usual. He’s still making out like a bandit.” My older brother had, in fact, done exceptionally well for himself. He worked on Wall Street, had three kids, an apartment on Park Avenue, a house in the Hamptons, an impenetrable wife. We rarely spoke, though he sent me money from time to time, with a note, saying it was a gift for the kids. But it was always too much for a gift and more than the kids needed. He and I knew that.

  “And you?” he asked. I told him it had been going great.

  “Oh, less of a bandit.”

  I laughed. I told him that I had two terrific kids, and I worked for a real estate broker near Monterey. I got divorced a few years back but it was all right because I liked my freedom.

  Nick listened intently, taking this in. “Well,” he paused, “you always did.” I wasn’t sure how he knew this or if it was even true, but he said it in such a way that it seemed to be so. It left me feeling strange, as if this person I hadn’t seen in years and who hardly knew me then was aware of something about me that I didn’t quite know myself.

  Nick heard someone call his name and said he had to get going, but it was great running into me. He told me his business took him west from time to time, and I gave him my card from the real estate office, scribbling my home phone on the back. Then he ruffled my hair again, gave Patrick a fake punch, and walked inside.

  * * *

  The houses get bigger as you drive down to the lake. It wasn’t anything I’d ever really noticed before, but I noticed it late that night as I drove down to the shore. I took Lake Road and watched as the small brick- and wood-frame split-levels near the railroad trestle turned into sprawling ranch houses, which we called prairie houses, and then as I got nearer to the lake those houses built close to the ground rose into the two- and three-story mansions made of stone where the rich people lived.

  I passed the old Everett Log Cabin, which had been my favorite house when I was growing up and for which Mr. Everett himself had chopped and honed the big trees and where his son still cut his lawn with a scythe, which my mother for years considered to be an abberation. And the Frank Lloyd Wright house on the corner of Laurel. Then I came to the old fairy castle where a princess was said to live.

  I paused here, gazing down the long driveway at the house with its huge castle-like structure with turrets, a round tower, a big circular drive, and a fountain that poured around an arched cupid. The gates were looming, black wrought iron, and the huge front door was made of glass and wrought iron. From the road you could look down the long drive and see into the marble entranceway.

  My mother liked to walk me down to this house when I was little. She’d stand with me at the wrought-iron gates. Sometimes she’d wr
ap her fingers around the iron as if she were trying to get in. I didn’t usually feel sorry for my mother, but I did when she brought me here because I could tell there was something she wanted that she’d never have. Everytime we came here she told me the same thing. That the family was reputed to come from an obscure branch of Hungarian aristocracy and a real princess lived inside. Years later when I grew up, I learned that she was not a real princess at all but the heiress to Princess Pat cosmetics, but my mother—who knew the truth—liked to pretend we had royalty living in our midst.

  When I was a kid, I tried to imagine what it was like to live in this castle. I envisioned myself dancing on its marble floors, sleeping in a canopied bed. But no matter how often we came here we never saw anyone waltzing inside, and we never got a glimpse of the princess. Still I imagined for her a happy, wonderful life.

  The road down to the lake was dark and winding, black really, but once I got beyond the twists and turns of the old Indian trail, the moon was out and the beach shimmered a hot bright blue. I pulled up so that the car faced the lake and sat with the windows rolled down. The moon sent a trail of gold out across the water. The water lapped the shore peacefully, though I have known Lake Michigan to be not so peaceful.

  The thing about Lake Michigan—what makes it a dangerous lake—is that it has a pretty shallow shoreline, then it takes this big drop about a mile out, and it’s about as a deep as a lake can be. In the middle nobody knows how deep it is. It’s also true that there’s as much magnetism on its shores as on the North Pole, so it is very difficult to navigate by compass when you’re out in the lake. A lot of ships have gone down over the years, and almost everyone who goes down in them is lost. It’s a dangerous place that looks nice and safe, which is what in part makes it so dangerous.

  Tonight it looked peaceful. For a few moments I sat, enjoying the view. Other cars were parked nearby with their windows down. A pair of legs stuck out of the backseat of one. I used to come here with boys and kiss in the backseat of their cars. Now I was gazing out at the lake, alone. I sat for what seemed like a long time, half an hour or so, not wanting to leave. But then I forced myself to turn on the ignition, which seemed so loud in all that quiet, and drive back toward town.

  In town I turned left instead of going straight to the highway. I knew I should be heading back, but there was one more thing I wanted to do. I took a detour down Dearborn to Sandburg, then crossed Lincoln, following the railroad tracks to the trestle. Driving under the trestle, I made a right and went a block or two until I came up to 137 Myrtle Lane.

  I pulled over and got out of my car. It was still a hot night, but there was a breeze now coming off the lake. I stood under the sycamore and maples as the branches rustled. The house was dark, but in the moonlight it seemed to glow. I hadn’t stood in front of this house since I’d left for college. It still had the white picket fence around it, but the old rose bushes had been taken out. There was a thick, unsightly hedge now. Heavy white wrought-iron furniture lined the front porch and a flagpole was spiked in the lawn.

  Once I went with my parents to the house when it was being built. It smelled of fresh paint and sawdust. The toilets had no walls around them and the bowls were filled with cigarette butts. My father walked around with a set of blueprints in hand. My mother wanted a closet somewhere and my father stared at the blueprints, shaking his head.

  When they weren’t looking, I found a razor blade. I’d never seen a razor blade before and I drew it across the skin of my forearm, cutting a line. Blood flowed, soaking into the unfinished wood. It wasn’t a very deep cut, but my parents screamed, horrified. It left a thin white scar. When I touch it, I think of home.

  I used to imagine that I’d live in this house again one day and I was furious with my mother when she told me she’d sold it. “What do you want me to do,” she shouted at me into the phone, “keep living in the past?” She moved into a condo in town and neither of us went back to Winonah again. There was no reason to, really.

  But for years I used to dream of going inside the house once more. In the dreams there were doors I’d never seen before that opened into secret rooms. One room opened into the next until I found myself in a completely different house—a place I’d never been. Now I stood looking at the house in the moonlight. It made me feel odd to know that other people were sleeping inside. I’m sure if they’d seen me, they would have phoned the police.

  I don’t know how long I stood there before I got in my car. I decided to take the highway home. I put myself on automatic, turned the radio on high, and tore down the road like I was a kid again and my curfew was coming up fast.

  6

  Horse chestnuts come in hard shells with pointy thorns, looking like instruments of medieval torture. When they split open, out slips the smooth, dark seed, like polished stone. I didn’t know what it was, this sharpness and this smoothness, but in the fall of the year they held infinite interest.

  The best place to collect them was in front of the old Episcopal church, where the flowering chestnuts bent with bursting white flowers in late spring, cool shade in summer, and the chestnuts in their green, thorny pods in the fall. On my way home for lunch I paused there, scooping what I could, filling my pockets with prickly pods or, when I split them, with the wondrous polished seeds. I would spend my lunch hour collecting them.

  If Jeb saw me, he’d shout, “Hey, Squirrel, last one home’s a rotten egg.” That’s when they really started calling me Squirrel. When they’d find me under these trees.

  I didn’t care if he beat me home. I was always late, wolfing down the peanut butter and jelly sandwich with chips on the side and chocolate milk that waited for me in the breakfast nook. But during chestnut time it didn’t matter to me if I got home for lunch or not. I couldn’t get enough of these seeds, couldn’t slip enough into my pocket. I was greedy for their touch. I never ate them or asked my mother to cook them, but I wanted to have them in my pockets, or on the shelves in my room.

  Vicky and I and the rest of the gang found endless things to do on our way to and from school. We took this walk four times a day. Up and back, up and back. Sometimes we got a ride, if it was very cold or inclement, but mostly we traveled on foot, books strapped to our backs. We liked to kick leaf piles, taking care that no smoke came from them. If there was smoke, there was fire. We gathered gold and scarlet maple leaves, pressed them into our math books, and had our mothers iron them between sheets of wax paper. We put them in the windows of our rooms where the light shone through as if they were stained glass. And we collected horse chestnuts.

  Now suddenly a new girl was there with a paper sack, digging under the leaves. She’d grab a pod, split it open with her bare fingers, hold up a shiny chestnut. “Look,” she’d say, that wide grin on her face, “I got one.” Her black hair tumbled over her shoulders and leaves got caught in its thickness. Her blue tweed coat was frayed. When she stooped down, I could see where the lining was torn.

  * * *

  I don’t remember when anyone else came to town, but I remember when Margaret Blair did. Like magic, one Indian summer morning she suddenly appeared, sitting at the desk I coveted in Mrs. Grunsky’s fifth-grade homeroom—the one in the sun, a little off to the side, not far from the turtle’s bowl.

  She didn’t come at the beginning, but almost in the middle of the first term with her neat pile of pencils and books. Already the sugar maples were golden and there she was with her thick black hair and her rosy cheeks, her round body, her face that smiled as if she knew us already, as if she’d always been there.

  Mrs. Grunsky said, “This morning we have a new girl.” And that’s what she’d be from then on. She’d always be the New Girl. What is she? we wondered. Spanish or Italian? Eastern European? Our parents spoke of Gypsy blood. The boys called her a spic or a wop. A dago or meatball or just the girl from the other side. She was trash or beautiful. Strange or mysterious. She’d be whatever we wanted her to be.

  The year when Margaret appeared, I ha
d the best homeroom in the world. Our gang formed a neat, little clique. Ginger Klein, who told great jokes, was there and Samantha Crawford, who lent me her clothes, and, of course, Vicky Walton, and we all sat near one another. Lori Martin was just down the row. The year Margaret Blair arrived was the one when we got to move from classroom to classroom and carried our books.

  And now this new girl was here, walking between classes, waiting for us after school. Thinking she could just be one of us, but, of course, she couldn’t. We wouldn’t let her.

  We called her Wishbone. Not to her face, though sometimes we did. We called her that because of the way her legs shaped themselves into those smooth, arching curves you felt you could just snap in two. Bow legs, my mother said, from a vitamin deficiency or from sitting on a horse.

  Later we liked to taunt her. Make a wish, Wishbone, we’d shout, and we’ll break you in two.

  * * *

  I’d never seen hair so long and thick, or the color, almost blue black. We weren’t even sure it was real. During recess some of us placed candy bar bets, daring one another to go up and tug on that hair. Some of the boys raced behind her and tried to grab it, but I just went right up and asked. “Can I touch your hair?” I said. In the corner of my eye I saw the gang, huddled, giggling.

  “Sure,” Margaret said, giving me a wide smile, the way you do when you think someone’s going to be your friend. I reached out and touched it. It felt like a horse’s tail and was wavy as a snake. I thought it would turn itself into a serpent and wrap itself around my neck, but it didn’t. It just lay there, compliant, agreeable in my hand. It was smooth as silk and, though I was only doing this on a dare, I kept on holding it like a rope you could use to slide down the castle walls. To escape with. “You can touch my hair whenever you want,” Margaret said.

  “It’s like a horse’s tail,” I announced when I got back to the huddle of the gang. “It’s real.” Still nobody believed me.