One Minus One (Nancy Pearl’s Book Lust Rediscoveries)

by Ruth Doan MacDougall

  I’d thought we would drive back into town, but we continued on the dirt road through woods and past a pasture, and then Cliff turned at a mailbox that said PARKER and we drove up to a long white farmhouse and a big gray barn.

  “Good heavens,” I said.

  “It’s my grandparents’, really. When my father and mother got married they built a house on the land down the road. During the Depression. Then when my grandparents died we moved back here and rented the other house. This hasn’t really been a farm since my grandfather died. My father worked at the shoe factory, he just retired, so we mostly only had chickens and rabbits and a couple of pigs. I had a horse for a while.”

  “It’s a beautiful place.”

  “Well, they’ve managed to keep it up, and they haven’t sold any land. Not like McLaughlin, the bastard. Brace yourself, my mother’ll go wild. Only child, that’s me.”

  We got out of the car. The side door of the house opened and a buxom woman in a housedress and apron cried, “Cliff! What on earth!”

  “Hi there, Mother,” he said, and she said, “That awful beard,” and embraced him. “You’re still too thin!” she said. “It’s your vacation, isn’t it? I wondered if you’d be coming up.” Then she noticed me and smiled a delighted smile. “Why, Cliff. Who’s this?”

  “This is Emily Bean,” he said, taking my hand and drawing me forward. “She teaches English with me.”

  I said, “How do you do,” and we smiled at each other, and she said, “Come in, come in. Have you eaten?”

  “Oh, yes,” Cliff said, “we just ate.”

  “How about some coffee and some pie? I made a lemon meringue pie this morning.”

  Cliff looked helplessly at me, and we went into the sunny kitchen. The linoleum was worn but shiny with floor wax. In the windows there were nearly as many plants as in Susan’s kitchen windows. It was the kitchen I’d always wanted, old sink and cupboards, humming refrigerator, black iron stove, red-oilcloth-covered table, the warm smell of cooking. A kitchen from my early childhood, Lucy’s kitchen, Ma’s kitchen, before newer refrigerators and stoves were bought.

  Mrs. Parker said, “You go on into the living room and I’ll bring the coffee—”

  “Now, Mother,” Cliff said, and sat down at the kitchen table. “Where’s Dad?”

  She didn’t answer immediately, bustling more than necessary with coffeepot and cups. Then she said, “He’s taking a nap, I’ll go call him.”

  The cups and saucers and plates were exactly the same kind Ma had used for everyday, a set of different colors, pink and blue and green and yellow, always chipped and mismatched.

  Cliff paused in offering me a cigarette. “Dad doesn’t take naps. Does he?”

  “He’s started to lately. It does him good,” she said defensively, and poured our coffee.

  “Don’t wake him then.”

  “What do you think he’d do if I let him sleep through your visit?” she asked, and next asked the question all mothers ask. “How long can you stay?”

  “We ought to be heading back.”

  “I’ll go call him,” she repeated, cutting the pie and setting pieces on our plates. The meringue was an inch thick.

  When she left the kitchen, Cliff said, “A nap. Good God, a nap.” He ground out his cigarette in the glass ashtray and stabbed his fork into his pie.

  “It’s glorious pie,” I said.

  “Yes, she’s known for her pies.”

  I said, “Have they heard about Miss Higgins?”

  “She’d’ve mentioned it if they had.”

  “Sometimes I take a nap when I get home from school.”

  “I guess I do, sometimes,” he said.

  Mrs. Parker returned. “He’s coming down. Do you live in Millbridge, Emily?”

  “In Hull,” I said, “with a couple of other girls.” Girls? I amended, “They teach at Millbridge, too.”

  Cliff said, “Great pie, Mother. As always.”

  I said, “It certainly is.”

  We didn’t distract her. She said, “Are you from Hull?”

  “No, from Saundersborough, I grew up in Saundersborough.”

  “That’s a nice place. All those lovely old houses. Is this your first year at Millbridge?”

  “Yes,” I said, and just when I knew she was going to ask me where else I’d taught, Mr. Parker came in. His hair was a preview of what Cliff’s would be, as curly and white as the meringue on the pie. He wore no beard, so I could see the deep cleft in his chin, and I wondered if Cliff also had one.

  “Well, Cliff,” he said, and Cliff stood up and they self-consciously shook hands.

  “This is Emily Bean,” Cliff said.

  We said hello, and Mr. Parker’s eyes, blue like Cliff’s, twinkled at me. He pulled up a chair and sat down at the table.

  Mrs. Parker poured him coffee and asked, “More pie, Cliff? Emily?”

  “Thank you, no,” we said.

  Mr. Parker said, “What brings you up here?”

  “A job,” Cliff said, and instantly they were alert. He said, “Miss Higgins is going to retire.”

  Mrs. Parker sat down abruptly in the rocking chair by the stove.

  Mr. Parker said, “Judas Priest.” Then he said, “I beg your pardon, Emily.”

  “Did you see Matthew?” Mrs. Parker cried. “Oh, no, you didn’t go to see Matthew with that beard, did you?”

  Cliff said, “As a matter of fact, I did, and he offered me the job. I signed the contract.”

  “Oh, Cliff!” she said, and rushed over to him and hugged him. Mr. Parker beamed at us.

  Cliff said, “Of course, the school board has to okay it—”

  “The school board!” Mrs. Parker said, laughing and sniffling, fishing a Kleenex out of the bosom of her dress.

  Mr. Parker picked up the pipe and tobacco pouch on the table. “I don’t think the school board will be any problem,” he said, tamping tobacco.

  “No,” Cliff said, “neither do I,” and they laughed. “Nepotism,” he explained to me. “My uncle’s on the school board.”

  Mrs. Parker said, “When will you be coming back, when does Millbridge let out in June?” I knew her head was busy with the cleaning of his room somewhere upstairs, the dusting and polishing and washing she would do. I saw her suddenly remember the question of me, and I saw her excitement mount and realized that this was what she wanted most, Cliff to be married. I wondered, as I’d always wondered, why he hadn’t.

  She said, “Would you like more coffee, Emily? More pie?”

  “More coffee would be great, but I’d still better restrain myself about the pie.”

  She poured coffee. “You wouldn’t by any chance be up here for an interview as well?”

  “Oh, no, I’m just along for the ride.”

  “Can’t you two stay for supper? It’s only the beans left over from Saturday, and yesterday’s roast, but there’s time to make some of those bran rolls you love, Cliff—”

  Cliff, giving me a cigarette, said, “We really ought to be getting back, Mother.”

  Mr. Parker looked at Mrs. Parker, and there was a brief discreet silence. Did they suppose we were hurriedly returning to a love nest?

  Cliff said, “Matthew did quite well by me, you’ll see it in your taxes. He asked what I wanted, and I said I was making ten thousand five hundred and forty now, and he said the step I’d be on here was nine thousand eight hundred and sixty, and I said let’s have a round number like ten thousand, and he went along with it. God only knows what he got away with paying poor Miss Higgins all these years.”

  “My goodness, ten thousand dollars,” Mrs. Parker said admiringly, taking away our plates. “Isn’t that nice.”

  I said, “Let me help you wash up.”

  “No, no, it’ll be no trouble at all. Look,” she said, and for the first time I noticed the dishwasher. “Cliff and his father gave it to me last Christmas. When I was out in the kitchen making the eggnog, they sneaked it into the living room, they’d hidden it in th
e barn. They put it under the Christmas tree—well, beside it, you know—and it had a big red ribbon on it.”

  “Aforementioned uncle,” Cliff said to me, “has a hardware and appliance store. Very handy.”

  Mrs. Parker said, “I never ever thought I’d want one, and now I don’t know how I managed without it. The Christmases I got my washing machine and my dryer, I tried to be pleased but I couldn’t see any reason to have a new washing machine, and as for a dryer, what was wrong with sunshine? I’ve been using sunshine all my life. But of course I changed my mind. And now they keep wanting to get me a new stove, and I just know I wouldn’t like a new one, I just know it. And a refrigerator. Why on earth should I want a new refrigerator when this one is still working fine?”

  “No defrosting,” Cliff began, looked at me, and grinned. “Wonders of modern science,” he said, and we had our secret joke about my nylons.

  “Well, I don’t know,” Mrs. Parker said. “Maybe. It’d be awfully easy, wouldn’t it? I hear those new stoves actually clean themselves.”

  We stubbed out our cigarettes, and Cliff pushed back his chair and stood up.

  “Now,” Mrs. Parker said, ripping Saran Wrap, “you take the rest of the pie with you, you can bring back the pie plate next time you come home.”

  Again Cliff looked at me helplessly. He said, “Thank you, Mother. I’ll drop you a card to let you know when I’ll be up.”

  We all went outdoors.

  “What a nice day,” Mrs. Parker said.

  Mr. Parker said, “There’ll be another snowstorm.”

  “You always say that!” she said.

  “There usually is,” he said, and I remembered that in Thornhill there usually was.

  Mrs. Parker kissed Cliff, and he and his father shook hands once more.

  I said, “It was very good to meet you.”

  “Come again soon,” they said, and Mrs. Parker added, “Why don’t you see if you can’t make him shave off that awful beard, Emily?”

  Cliff was laughing as we drove down the dirt road.

  We took another way home, through Bethlehem and Twin Mountain, and through Crawford Notch. At first we mostly looked at the mountains, and then we began talking about Ethan Allen Crawford’s adventures here, and as we neared Cate we talked about Millbridge and our principal, who had been a gym teacher and whom, as I’d suspected and now learned, Cliff despised.

  “He can’t even get his clichés right,” Cliff said. “Remember the last teachers’ meeting, he said, ‘If on this side you had a hole and you stuck your hand in it’? Remarkable.”

  We drove along Cate’s coy main street.

  I said, “My sister lives here.”

  “Does she? Do you want to stop?”

  “I guess not, thanks.”

  From Cate he drove the back roads I myself had discovered on my second trip to Susan’s, and we went through little villages of old white houses.

  And then we were in Hull. I wanted it to be this morning all over again, with the trip ahead of us.

  He said, “How about a drink, to celebrate the job? This place is a nightmare and the drinks are terrible, but they’re the best in town.”

  It was the Hampshire Motel. I walked into the baronial cocktail lounge with Cliff instead of Warren.

  “What would you like?” he asked when we’d sat down at one of the little candlelit tables.

  “A martini, please.”

  The waitress was new, the room dark. She said, “I’m sorry, miss, but do you have any identification?”

  “Oh,” I said, “how absolutely marvelous!” and hauled forth my billfold and got out my driver’s license, which showed I’d turned thirty-one last week.

  “For heaven’s sake,” she said, and went off to the bar.

  Cliff said, “Did she think I was robbing the cradle?”

  I laughed, and then, as he reached toward the bowl of potato chips, I thought, my God, his hands are like David’s. They were very square hands, with square flat nails. I saw David’s hands moving about his desk in the evenings when he prepared to correct papers; he and I were neat, a trait intensified by our years together, but he was even neater with his desk than I was with mine. His was a battered roll-top he had discovered in the loft of a second-hand store, and in the evenings his hands tidied the contents of pigeonholes, arranged a stack of books according to size, nudged the rank book until its left side matched the right side of the blotter, and chose two red pencils and put them with the fountain pen, points away from him, beside the pile of papers. Once I had said, watching him straighten everything again after he’d finished work, “It must be superstition. If you don’t keep the dictionary lined up beside the Elmer’s Glue-All, you’ll forget to pay the income tax and we’ll go to jail.” “Wise guy,” he had said.

  Now Cliff was holding the candle aloft and peering around.

  I said, “Let me guess. You’re looking for an honest man.”

  “I’m looking for our drinks.”

  They came, so he held the candle forward to me and I lit a cigarette off the flame. We drank, and he said, “I gather you haven’t applied for a job at another school.”

  “No. I signed my contract.”

  After a silence, he said, “People aren’t clawing at each other in a desperate rush to teach at schools like North Riverton, but they ought to be, because such schools aren’t going to exist much longer. North Riverton has been talking for years about a regional high school, consolidated with towns around it like Thornhill, and someday it will happen and I’ll have to go along with it, but until then I’ll have this last chance to teach at a small high school.”

  What was he explaining?

  He grinned and said, “The classrooms still smell of manure, just as they always did.”

  And just as David’s classroom in Thornhill had, the few times I’d visited it. The dark old classroom, the faint warm smell of manure, the blackboards that were black, not modern green, David’s desk as neat as at home, and nothing on the walls, because David hated bulletin boards, except a brownish painting of Anne Hathaway’s cottage, and the old clock which clicked and jerked each minute forth.

  I realized I’d eaten my olive and was chewing on the plastic toothpick. Back then, I had never dreamed I too would have a classroom. Pale-blue cinder-block.

  Cliff was studying me. He seemed to hesitate. “Well,” he said, and changed the subject, asking obliquely, “it must be difficult, writing while you’re teaching and taking that course.”

  “I’m not writing.”

  He was the first English teacher, besides David, I’d ever met who didn’t say that he himself would write if he had the time. Even I had said it to Warren. Cliff said, “How about going out to dinner tonight?”

  No. I was getting too involved. “I’d love to,” I said, “only I’ve got to do homework, I have my class tomorrow night. I’m sorry.”

  But as we drove along the Miracle Mile he said, “What about the day after tomorrow? We could go to the beach or something and have dinner at the Seaside or someplace.”

  He gave me time to try to think of an excuse. He parked in front of my building and reached into the back seat for the picnic basket. “That pie,” he said. “I’ll gain ten pounds if I even look at it. Would you like it?”

  “No, I’d gain twenty. But Grace wouldn’t, if you really want to get rid of it.”

  “I sure do,” he said, and put it in the basket. He looked at me.

  I couldn’t think of an excuse.

  “It’s vacation,” he said, and suddenly his arms were around me and he kissed me very thoroughly.

  “Okay,” I said, laughing. “Okay, let’s go to the beach.” I touched his beard. “I don’t agree with your mother. I like it. It’s sexy.”

  “Aha,” he said.

  When I went into the apartment I called, “Hi, I’m back,” and put the pie in the refrigerator, the plastic containers and forks in the sink, the aluminum foil and paper plates and napkins in the wastebasket. P
ollution, I thought guiltily. Pollution and habit; I should have used regular plates and bowls and silverware, cloth napkins and waxed paper, to help out Mother Nature a tiny bit. “Anybody home?” I called.

  The toilet flushed. Grace came slowly into the living room. She was drunk. I had never seen her drunk.

  She asked, “Did you have a good time?”

  “In ways,” I said, wondering if I should offer her coffee, or something more to drink so she’d pass out. She solved this by pouring herself a scotch.

  “Busy busy day,” she said. “I corrected papers this morning. I watched The Galloping Gourmet, and I had two beet sandwiches. I went to Norma’s this afternoon and heard all about her kids and the ceramics class. She gave us that cream pitcher, she made it.”

  The cream pitcher stood on the counter. It was a ceramic cow. Grace tilted it by its tail, and it vomited milk.

  She said, “Then I came home and had about ten drinks.”

  I sponged the milk off the counter. “Kaykay’s not back from Witherell yet?”

  “She’ll be spending the night at Bob’s. Vacation time.”

  I said, “There’s some lemon meringue pie in the fridge.”

  “From where?”

  “Cliff’s mother. She’s known for her pies.”

  Grace began to cry. Her face red and ugly, her sobs harsh, she stood there holding her glass and crying, and then she dropped the glass and it smashed on the tile floor, and she ran staggeringly into the bathroom.

  I stood and listened to her retching between sobs. I got the broom and swept up glass, got the sponge and mopped up scotch.

  Grace was quiet. I started toward the bathroom, and paused, and went back to the phone and looked for Bob’s number in the phone book. I dialed, but nobody answered.

  Grace came into the living room again. She’d brushed her hair and put on lipstick, and she smelled of mouthwash. She said, “Norma says the new Chinese restaurant downtown is very good. Why don’t we have supper there?”

  The sea was blue-green. The late afternoon was sunny and windy.

  “Kite-flying weather,” Cliff said, pointing toward the sky of kites and seagulls, “let’s go watch,” and he drove into the parking lot of the state beach. You didn’t have to pay until summer.