All the Roads That Lead From Home

by Anne Leigh Parrish

  “That’s a nice dress,” Mary said, showing me the picture she meant.

  “It’s OK, I guess.”

  “You don’t like clothes, much, do you?”

  I shrugged. I usually wore T-shirts and blue jeans.

  “I love ‘em,” said Mary. “I should learn how to sew, make up some of my own.” Her own clothes looked like shit, the kind of stuff you found in thrift stores, lots of polyester and puffed sleeves.

  “Be nice to have something new for the first day of school,” she said.

  “Don’t remind me about school.”

  “Only a couple weeks off, now.” She looked at me suddenly.

  “What?” I said.

  “Bet you she didn’t sign me up.”

  “Who?”

  “Your mom. That weird friend of hers said if I was still living here in August, then I’d have to go to your school, on account of the one I went to last year’s about twenty miles off, and the bus probably won’t come all that way just for me.”

  “Shit!”

  “I got an idea. Call the school, pretend to be her, and say you want me to go there. Say we’ve become real good friends, and that you don’t want to split us up.”

  “Why can’t you?”

  “Because I don’t talk fancy enough.”

  I’d have said no except that the flame in her eye had gone all wobbly when she asked me.

  The next morning, with Mary beside me, I took a deep breath and picked up the phone.

  “Yes, I realize time is running short, but surely you still have room? She’s had the most difficult time, poor thing. I’d hate to do anything that would impede the fine progress she’s making,” I said. The secretary agreed to mail the required paperwork, and said I’d have to provide a copy of Mary’s birth certificate when I sent it back.

  “We have a problem,” I said, when I got off the phone.

  “Yeah, what?”

  “They want a copy of your birth certificate.”

  “I got it.”

  “You do?”

  “Hey, once I learned I was getting sprung outta there, I took everything I might ever need. Even my book of what you call it, from the doctor, vaccinations.”

  She grinned. Her hair was clean, with no dandruff at all. And she’d stopped wearing that awful makeup. I was glad to see her look more like herself, like a girl who’d do fine at my sort of snotty school. We made a plan to get her some new clothes downtown with a credit card my mother never used. If that worked, maybe we could get her a decent haircut, too.

  Four days later Harv appeared at the front door in a T-shirt, Bermuda shorts, and sandals. His toenails were thick and yellow. Mary saw them, too. She caught my eye as he made his way across the living room to my mother’s shriek and outstretched arms.

  “What in the world are you doing here?” she asked.

  “Seeing you.”

  “But—”

  “Can’t paint worth a damn, babe. And that’s the truth.”

  They set up in the back yard with a pitcher of martinis my mother made and spent the rest of the afternoon getting smashed. Mary and I ordered a pizza and ate it her room with a dusty fan I’d found in the basement. Then we watched an old movie on TV about some nutty woman who finds religion and blows off her family so she can do good works for everybody else.

  The next day was Sunday. After the martinis my mother and Harv had gone out somewhere and come home late. His van was still in the driveway.

  Mary was outside, looking up. The sky was silver and the air still.

  “Looks like we had company last night,” she said, when I joined her.

  “Yeah.”

  “They make noise?”

  “Not that I heard.”

  “Lucky you. Nothing worse than hearing people fuck. You wouldn’t believe the racket in my mom’s room, once Romeo moved in.”

  We heard someone slamming the kitchen cabinets, and went in to see. It was Harv, still in his shorts, and an old T-shirt of my father’s that had bright blue paint stains on the front.

  He looked at us with bloodshot eyes. “Hey, there. Either of you girls know how to make coffee?”

  “Just instant,” said Mary. That was a lie. She made my mother freshly ground coffee every morning. She put the kettle on to boil without looking at Harv. She brought down an ancient jar of instant coffee, set it on the counter by Harv’s car keys and said, “Spoons are in there, sugar’s over there, three scoops and you’re good to go.”

  I followed her into her room. She opened the window with a single, sharp push.

  “What’s wrong with you?” I asked.

  “Him. He got no business coming around.”

  “Maybe not, but he’s here.”

  She sat on her bed, and studied the braided rug. “Nothing pisses you off, does it?” she said.

  “What the hell’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Your folks split up. Your dad hangs out with some young chick, your mom turns into a three-year-old, then this clown shows up and acts like he owns the damn place.” Her face was full of color. She went on staring at the rug. Thunder boomed in the distance, and a slow breeze came in through the window screen. In the kitchen Harv banged one drawer, then another, looking for the spoons Mary had already pointed out.

  “Christ!” she said, and stood up.

  “I’ll do it,” I said. I went out and found a spoon. I poured him his water, stirred the coffee in, and put it on the kitchen table. He sat down.

  “You wouldn’t have any cream and sugar around, would you?” he asked. I passed him the sugar bowl, and got the carton of cream from the refrigerator. Mary was wrong. Harv pissed me off plenty, wanting me to wait on him like that.

  He sipped his coffee, and stared at it oddly. My mother came down the stairs slowly, holding hard onto the hand rail. She looked sick, as if she had the flu or something.

  “What the hell are you drinking?” she asked Harv.

  “Coffee.”

  She took his cup, and examined it. “Oh, darling, you’ll have to do better than that if I’m coming on board.” She ruffled his hair, and lowered herself carefully into the chair next to his, and had a sip of the coffee. “Heavens! This is dreadful.” She put the cup down. “Amelia, would you mind awfully? There’s got to be something potable with my name on it.”

  “Well, Mary and I were about to go—”

  “Christ. Mary! I forgot all about Mary,” my mother said. Harv threw his thick arm around her shoulder and pressed his chin to her forehead.

  Then she turned to me. Her eyes were bright and hard to look at.

  “Sit down, darling. There’s something I want to tell you,” she said.

  My hands gripped the back of the chair. “I’m busy right now.”

  “This won’t take long.” She sat up taller, and pulled her robe tight about her neck. “Harv and I are going to spend a little time together. In California. That’s what he came back to ask me, right? Isn’t that right, Harv?”

  “Sure is, sweetheart.”

  She drank again from his cup of coffee. There was something furtive about her then, like a mouse cornered by a cat.

  “And until I get settled, you’ll live with your father,” she said.

  “Are you nuts?” Shouting felt good, it felt strong.

  “It’s all arranged. I’ve already spoken to him. This morning, in fact. He’s delighted to have you.”

  “I won’t do it!”

  My mother’s face went still and flat, like when my father walked out the door with his suitcase.

  “Mary will go back to her family, you’ll spend time with your father, and that’s that,” she said.

  Mary had seen this coming. That’s why she’d been so weird with Harv. And then there she was, right beside me, drawn out by my shouts. She fixed my mother with such a firm stare that my mother looked away.

  “She can’t go back there,” I said. “And you’re not going to make her. You hear?”

  “Hey, now, take it easy.
No need to get all bent out of shape,” said Harv.

  “Shut up!”

  “Amelia. You apologize to Harv this instant.”

  “The hell I will!”

  Harv watched me. He started to look mean. Then my mother slumped, and massaged her forehead with her thumb.

  “What’s the matter, baby, you got a headache?” he asked her.

  “Terrible.”

  “Aw, babe.” He pulled her close. “You girls think you can bring this nice lady an aspirin or something?”

  Mary stood still, her hands on her hips, and then she grabbed Harv’s keys and was out the door. I was right behind her.

  “Fuck that,” she said.

  “Totally fuck that.”

  She already had the engine on by the time I got in. The van was a trash heap. I tossed an old bag of French fries out the window, then wondered if maybe I shouldn’t have, since we hadn’t had any breakfast. We veered down the driveway and sideswiped my mother’s peony bush.

  “You ever drive before?” I asked.

  “Not for a while. I just need to get the hang of it again, is all.”

  She gripped the wheel like an old woman and peered through the filthy windshield. When we reached the main road, she went so slowly that cars piled up behind and honked.

  She sped up. We went around a wide bend, and when she didn’t slow down enough for it, the tires squealed.

  “Jesus!” I said.

  “I’m okay. I got it now.” We went on, into the gray-black sky. At the edge of town she went north, away from the lake and the willow-lined shore where we’d be spotted in no time. We didn’t talk, because we were too busy trying not to think about what we were doing.

  Then the rain broke loose. It splashed through the open windows, soaking us in no time. I leaned my head out the window and let it pelt my face. Mary turned onto a narrow country road, bordered by fields of grass. In the distance was an old barn, leaning badly, its roof in a sag. I imagined a snug, cozy house where you could live and not be bothered. When the rain stopped, the air shimmered, and the drops that held on the blades of grass were so lovely I didn’t worry anymore.

  An Imaginary Life

  Ted and Nina lie in bed and watch the moon rise over the desert like a single brilliant thought. He says she’d understand if she’d only try, and she puts her finger to his lips because in the world they have left behind—the rolling farmland of upstate New York—that same moon is shining on Lake Dunston and she’s restless, in a mood to reminisce.

  So she tells him a story.

  About a Sunday afternoon in the late Sixties when she and her sister Ruth got stuck waiting outside a cocktail lounge at Newark Airport. Inside the lounge were her father and her Aunt Bip, drinking martinis. Bip was on her way back to Florida, and her flight was delayed. Ruth was sixteen, Nina was twelve.

  Bip and Nina’s father were talking about Ruth. Ruth was getting worse and plans had to be made. She couldn’t return to the same school because she tried to seduce one of her teachers and then pulled the fire alarm when he turned down her invitation, and Bip knew of a place in Vermont that catered to “sensitive students.”

  “Bip?” says Ted.

  “Short for Barbara Penelope.”

  “I’d have changed my name.”

  “To what?”

  “An alias.”

  “A lie.”

  Ted shakes his head. “Always the straight shooter. Always the hard line.” In the glow of the moon his face is so handsome. She runs her finger over the hard muscles of his arms. Her kisses are quick, then slow.

  “Show me,” she says.

  “What?”

  “The hard line.”

  He holds her close. After a minute he says, “You know I can’t.”

  Nina turns away. “Then stop taking them, for Christ’s sake!”

  “We’ve talked about this.”

  “Maybe just go off them long enough for me to get laid.”

  “You’ll get laid.”

  “When?”

  “He told us. After a couple of months.” Loss of sexual interest is the most commonly cited side effect of anti-depressants. Nina remembers little else of that visit except the doctor’s white coat and the pattern in the yellow wallpaper behind him—some sort of abstract petals that looked like fingers or tongues.

  “What if I quit you before then?” she asks.

  “Then you won’t get laid.”

  “Not by you.” She looks at the wall.

  “Hey, come on. Finish your story,” he says.

  “No.”

  “Come on. I want you to.” The moonlight washes over them like an uneasy dream.

  “Oh, all right.”

  Suddenly Ruth clutched Nina’s arm. Three black men stood a few feet off, looking tired and dazed, wearing afros and dashikis, with three guitar cases on the floor. The one on the end, Ruth hissed. That’s Jimi Hendrix!

  Nina didn’t believe her at first, but Ruth said no, she was sure because she’d just seen a picture of him in a magazine. She rushed up and asked Jimi for his autograph, and he dropped the pack of cigarettes he was holding, he was so surprised. He picked it up and stared down at them until Ruth asked him again. He found a piece of paper in one pocket, and a pen in another, and wrote To Ruth, all my love forever, Jimi.

  “Do you still have it?” Ted asks.

  “Oh, no. It got stolen. It was in her wallet, and someone lifted her purse.”

  “Bummer! What a story it would have made—Ruth the groupie, Ruth the underage lover, and with him dead and that piece of paper, who could prove you wrong?”

  Nina leaves the bed and goes to the window, where the saguaro lift their arms to the silver sky.

  “Nina, look, I—”

  “It’s okay.”

  “Come back to bed.”

  “In a minute.”

  Soon his breathing says he is asleep, and Nina remains by the window, remembering. Ruth wears a feather boa and races across their lawn. She sings an aria on the roof and her mother says, Oh, for Heaven’s sake, Nina, stop it! She’s not crazy, she’s just high-spirited. Then Ruth calls from Vermont, where the snow falls even deeper than in Dunston, and whispers, it’s like being trapped, sometimes I dream I’m stuck in one and can’t claw my way out. Nina doesn’t believe in ghosts, yet for a moment she is certain that Ruth is out there in the desert, trying to find her way home.

  ***

  Two years before the desert, while the low September light drops into lake, Nina stops by the Dunston Market. In the produce section, a tall, attractive man in a tweed jacket stands with an orange in his hand. He considers it as if hoping it were something better, maybe a peach or an apple. He even lifts it up for a better look.

  “Orange you going to buy it?” she asks. At thiry-four, her affairs have become routine, shabby episodes that end within a few months, and she sees nothing to lose.

  Ted considers her blue cotton dress from the hem up before his eyes finds her face.

  “Nothing rhymes with orange, you know,” he says.

  “I know.”

  “Smart girl.”

  “Orange thief.” He’s put the orange in his pocket by then, making a lopsided bulge.

  “You like looking at a man below the belt, don’t you?” he says, and she blushes the way she hasn’t since grade school.

  They go for drinks and talk. He’s in the history department at the university, a junior colleague of her father’s though he hasn’t made the connection yet. She knew him right away. He had the attention of the whole room at the last cocktail party she went to with her father, a duty she performs to keep her father’s social life alive since her mother seldom leaves home. Ted arranged the host’s marble chess pieces to recreate the battle of Little Round Top during the Civil War, which he does again there in the bar restaurant using salted peanuts. The more he talks the more animated he becomes. His eyes shine, his finger tremble.

  “And the officer in charge, Joshua Chamberlain, used an esoteric
maneuver, sending his men down the mountain from the side, like a gate swinging closed, making the Confederates think they were outnumbered,” he says. He stubs out his cigarette. “He was a college professor, thrust into a brand new life. A much more exciting one, I’d think.”

  “You sound jealous.”

  “Who wouldn’t be? To escape one’s life and the drudge of making a living.”

  “In exchange for getting shot at?” She’s aware that she’s smiling, her head slightly cocked.

  Ted regards her. “You’ve heard this before, haven’t you?” he asks.

  “Yes, actually.”

  “You’re a former student, making me look silly for not remembering you.”

  “I am a former student, you’re right.” Though his embarrassment is charming she lacks the heart to prolong it. “But not of yours, so don’t worry.” As she names her father, his damaged reputation shows in the lift of Ted’s eyebrows—his heavy drinking, a severely depressed wife, the one daughter’s possible suicide.

  “He’s a first-rate scholar,” says Ted. That’s true. Whatever else her father suffers, his research skills have not.

  Ted offers her a cigarette. She declines. She tells a story of smoking as a teenager and setting her bedroom trash can on fire by mistake. She is home alone at the time and smothers the flames with a quilt her grandmother made years before. The quilt is burned through its center and to hide the flaw, Nina keeps it folded neatly on the end of her bed, with its good side always up. Later Ted says she’s like that quilt, folded up tight, hiding her flaw and always showing her good side.

  He makes it hard to. During their first year together he is often moody or sullen. She keeps him going with good cheer, passionate love, steady support. He can’t get promoted, can’t publish a good paper, can’t stand teaching to students who live completely in the present. Don’t just memorize facts! Imagine what it was really like! Then he embarks on a project he says will move him up the ladder. He works in his study until late at night, pen to paper, the computer unused. After weeks of being curious, asking what he’s doing, Nina enters the study when he’s not there. She finds a photo of a Confederate soldier bought for a dollar at an out-of-town flea market on their second date. And she finds something else, a leather journal full of Ted’s handwriting. The first page says, Private Diary of Joshua Himes, 25th Virginia Infantry. The entries are dated during May and June, 1862. Joshua Himes is feisty, given to wild desires, inventive—there are several passages detailing an elaborate practical joke Himes plays on another soldier in camp, stealing personal articles like his straight razor and his pipe, then returning them by stealth until the soldier wonders about his own sanity. Himes talks about his superior officers, complains about pain in his teeth and right foot, describes the hard biscuits and tight jackets he must endure.