Sing Them Home

by Stephanie Kallos

  These babies have clothes. They are dressed in infant-sized doctor and nurse costumes: the girls in exact replicas of the uniform Viney is wearing (right down to the starched hats and stockings and shoes and red crosses on their front left pockets) and the boys in white pants and lab jackets and white golfing shoes. Every one of the babies clutches a small white medical bag with a red cross on it.

  The engine shuts off. The conveyor belt comes to a full stop.

  “Break time!” Hope shouts. Viney is worried that her voice might wake the sleeping babies, but they don’t stir.

  Hope hoists herself to sit on the conveyor belt, unbuttons the top of her uniform, takes Wally Jr. in her arms, and starts nursing him. “Keep an eye on the rest of them, won’t you, Viney?” Hope must be the shift supervisor.

  “Am I supposed to feed them, too?” Viney asks, looking down at her chest. The red cross on her uniform looks much bigger than it was before, whereas her bosom has completely disappeared. “I’m flat as a pancake!” she proclaims.

  Hope doesn’t respond. She is rocking Wally in waltz time and singing: “The future’s not ours to see, que sera, sera …”

  Viney regards the babies. It occurs to her that painting their lips is really a very silly and unnecessary thing to do. Their mouths are a perfect shade of red—except for the sleeping babies, Viney suddenly notices; they do look a bit pale, and so she takes up her brush and jar of paint and goes to work on them. Her hand is tired; it keeps slipping. She’s lost her rhythm, lost the knack. Even though these babies are perfectly still, Viney can’t get their mouths to look right. Eventually she realizes that the sleeping babies aren’t sleeping at all; they’re dead. She wishes that she could cover them with something. She wishes that the conveyor belt would start up again and carry them away.

  A wind swirls up, a wind so strong that it starts tearing the red crosses right off all the medical bags and uniforms and sending them flying. Soon they’re everywhere, hovering and spinning like helicopter blades. Viney realizes that there is peril in these red crosses; they have razor-sharp edges, and the live babies—entranced—are reaching up for them. Viney scoops Gaelan and the five girls into her arms and places them at her feet. “Shoo!” she shouts, trying to angle her body protectively over the dead babies while at the same time swatting at the wasplike swarm of red crosses.

  The conveyor belt starts up again, but soon it’s moving too fast, accelerating like a freight train pulling away from the station and making the same rhythmic, clanging sound.

  “Hope!” Viney calls. “Welly! I didn’t mean it!”

  Hope doesn’t get off the train. She gathers the dead babies close—they don’t look real anymore, they seem to have turned back into dolls—and clasps Wally to her breast. “I’ve got him, Viney!” she shouts, and the two of them are carried out of sight.

  Suddenly there is so much dust and debris in the vortex of the wind that Viney can no longer see anything. Where are the babies? Panicked, she falls to her knees and starts searching for them with her hands, feeling mud and flattened cornstalks against her legs. Her white stockings will be ruined. Eventually she feels small hands grasping at her, desperately, frantically, as the wind howls.

  “Aviator grip!” she cries. On either side, hands latch onto her wrists, but they’re adult hands, and Viney is suddenly afraid. Who is holding her? The wind howls, the train clangs, the rain is stinging her eyes …

  The church bell wakes her.

  She listens, trying to quiet her heart by matching her inhales and exhales to the sounding of the bell and the resonating space between soundings. It must be midnight.

  Is there anything you want from over there, Viney?

  Larken and Gaelan’s question still hangs in the air, demanding her attention, like something that she must get to but can’t quite reach: a serving dish in the high cupboard over the fridge that is hardly ever used, but when needed is needed right away.

  She gets up, puts on her slippers, and heads downstairs. Larken and Bonnie’s bedroom door is closed; their light is off. All must be well with the two of them and Viney is relieved. She hates it when the children fight.

  The kitchen smells of Mop & Glo; Larken must have cleaned the floor. That was thoughtful of her. Viney opens the fridge and pulls out a bottle of spring water, noting a big empty space on the second shelf. Ah, Viney thinks. She must have eaten all the macaroni salad. That girl.

  Is there anything of Dad’s you’d like to keep?

  Yes, Viney reflects as she fills a glass and drinks it down. There are many things of your father’s that I want, but I doubt they will be found at his place of residence.

  Nevertheless, she realizes that that is where she needs to go.

  From the coat closet, she retrieves Welly’s light blue cardigan—the one he was wearing when he died—and checks to make sure that his keys are still in the pocket. They are. It suddenly seems strange to Viney that, after twenty-five years of sharing a bed, Welly never had a duplicate set of house keys made for her. Why was that? She had keys to his office, his car …

  Putting on socks and tennis shoes, and throwing Welly’s cardigan over her shoulders, she sets out on foot.

  It is a hot and humid night. It has never seemed fair to Viney that heat and humidity should have such a hold on the nighttime as well as the day. She always means to ask Gaelan about that, why it is that some places get relief at night, but not us, not here.

  Llewellyn’s house is several blocks away, on a big, isolated corner lot at the very northeastern edge of town, just within the town limits. It’s a house that’s as close to Lincoln as you can be, Viney reflects, without leaving Emlyn Springs.

  Welly loved going up to Lincoln—to the college football games mostly, but also to movies, restaurants, plays, concerts. Beatrice certainly offers those kinds of things, and it’s closer, but Welly always wanted to get his entertainment farther away.

  Was he always like this? Viney doesn’t know. She’s older than Welly by six years. That’s a big difference when one is young, so even though they grew up in the same place, they didn’t know each other, not really. Viney married Waldo at seventeen and started having babies right away. That was her life for many, many years—a husband and four children and all that goes with it: diapers and the croup, vaccinations and fever scares, solid food, toilet training, locking up the household poisons (vigilance, vigilance, so much vigilance!) and skinned knees and runny noses and, oh God, chicken pox! Head lice! They cried, she held them, she took their temperatures, patted their backs, smoothed their foreheads, combed and brushed their hair, helped them with their homework. She sang to them, too, and tickled them and wrestled with them, with Wally especially because boys need that kind of thing. And made hundreds, maybe thousands of school lunches and snacks, sat on hard, paint-chipped bleachers in all kinds of weather watching softball games and football games. And saved every Mother’s Day card and Happy Birthday card they ever made. And shopped for groceries and cooked and cleaned and went to the Surf’n’Turf with her husband every year from their first anniversary to their last.

  That time, how it flew! Her life didn’t intersect with Welly’s for years, although she knew of him: Llewellyn Jones, the oldest Jones boy, that smart handsome homegrown young man who everyone said could have been an opera singer if he’d wanted, could have had a music scholarship (who hadn’t heard his beautiful singing voice in church and at every Gymanfa ganu ever held for the dead?) but who wanted to be a doctor instead, a doctor, and became one! Not only that, he came back! Came back to his hometown with his tall pretty wife, a girl named Hope who everyone liked at first but soon snubbed for her tallness and prettiness and eagerness, for her passionate love for all of them and their town—everyone except Alvina Closs, another miscreant, another oddball, because who goes to nursing school leaving four children to fend for themselves? Who does that?

  For so long, Viney’s life was as far removed from Welly’s as if they’d grown up on opposite sides of the world.
But after Hope and Viney became friends, another life began—a conjoined life. The fact that Hope’s been gone for twenty-five years hasn’t changed that in the least.

  There it is. There’s the mayor’s house.

  It’s attractive enough in a 1970s kind of way—solid brick, split level, spacious—but Viney has never liked it. It has always seemed so sterile and uninviting, maybe because it was built from insurance money and in this case stands as a kind of monument to the Jones family tragedy, or maybe because Welly never did anything to make it homey. Outside, no flower boxes, no wind chimes, no flags; inside, white unadorned walls, monochromatic modern furniture. Of course, Hope was the artistic one when it came to decorating. All that work she did to restore the Jones farmhouse, all the care she took to furnish it with period antiques, create something beautiful and lasting … All gone.

  During the six months it took to build this house, Welly and the children lived in the King’s Castle Motel. It was hard arranging time to be together during those months, and it was then that they started having their quickies: after work—when Viney’s children babysat Welly’s kids at her house—and at lunchtime—when the kids were at school.

  Viney is suddenly angry at the house and all it represents. They could have saved that insurance money, taken a trip. Why didn’t they? Why didn’t Welly and the children just move in with her, appearances be damned? They might as well have; every significant holiday, every birthday celebration—they all happened at Viney’s house.

  She unlocks the front door. The house has a stale smell. Moving through the darkened rooms, she turns on lights, opens windows. She notices a stray sock at the bottom of the stairs and frowns. Unlike Welly to leave a sock lying about. She looks up and sees that the stairs are strewn with them, socks of all colors, none of them matching. All the lost socks of the world have accumulated on this stairway, like a trail of bread crumbs, but leading where? To what? To the bedroom she never shared with him? To his study?

  She’s not ready to go up there, not yet. She heads for the kitchen.

  Viney starts going through the fridge, throwing spoiled food into the garbage can. There’s not much in there. She moves on to the freezer.

  It’s full of meat.

  Red meat.

  All kinds of meat.

  Beef steaks, liver, hamburger, pot roast, sausages. There’s even some venison in here.

  She opens the cupboards.

  They’re crammed with junk food in bulk: endless bags of candy and cookies and chips, all manner of fatty and sugary products, enough to stock a 7-Eleven several times over.

  Now she’s mad as hell. Now she’s really had it.

  Grabbing a package of M&M’s, a bag of Cheetos, and a can of pop, she stomps up the stairs, leaving the socks where they lay. She strides to the mayor’s study and pauses at the closed door. Hell’s bells, there could be a whole herd of cattle in here. There could be a set of firearms or the makings of a taxidermy business.

  Not knowing what to expect, she flings the door open.

  Nothing. Just a desk with a leather blotter, a chair, bookshelves, a couple of file cabinets, and, on the floor, more socks.

  She moves across the room and stands in front of the file cabinets; each drawer is clearly marked: “Past taxes,” says one, “Bills,” says another, “House Insurance,” “Health Insurance,” “Medical Records,” and so on. When she spots a drawer marked “Correspondence,” she opens it and starts rifling through the files. There’s not much here, business correspondence mostly, between Welly and medical equipment suppliers, that sort of thing. If there were love letters from Hope, they would have gone up with her; and Viney and Welly were never a couple to express their affection for each other on paper.

  But here’s something: a fat file marked “Sister City beg. 1980.”

  Viney knows from firsthand experience that the mayor kept excellent records (he insisted on making copies of all his outgoing correspondence) and was persnickety about organizing his papers. The oldest letter will be found in the very back of the file.

  Bringing the file to the desk, Viney settles herself in the mayor’s chair, kicks off her shoes, and opens the M&M’s, Cheetos, and pop. She pulls out a carbon-copied letter and starts to read:

  Dear Sirs, the letter begins, and please forgive me if that is not the correct form of address. I have never corresponded with a monastic community before. I am writing in the interest of beginning a dialogue with you, the founders of our sister city. I realize that this may come as a surprise—Emlyn Springs has made no overtures to our sister city since shortly after the war ended. But I am hoping to rectify this state of affairs—partly because, as a newly elected member of the city council of Emlyn Springs, I feel a keen obligation to do whatever I can to keep our small town thriving, but also to act upon an idea that was dear to my wife’s heart (she died in 1978). It was always her fervent wish that Emlyn Springs could one day be described in words other than “small and dying” and to that end, I would like to initiate a dialogue …

  Viney moves forward in time, letter by letter.

  For the first two years, Welly and his correspondent—a monk named Brother Henry—speak in formal, businesslike tones. Viney reads with detached interest. The language of city government—much like the language of football—has always been a reliable soporific as far as Viney is concerned, and several times she finds herself nodding off. She really should go home.

  Over time though, she notices Welly initiate a new language, one including words like family, children, wife, illness …

  Another year passes: guilt, punishment, penance, shame …

  Viney begins barreling ahead, reading only Welly’s letters, skipping his correspondents’ replies. She feels the slamming of heavy doors in her chest, as if she could still contain in that vault the revelations that Welly keeps pouring out onto the page without her permission.

  Too late, too late. Her hands are shaking.

  The telling of tales, the naming of names.

  My wife, Hope … my mistress, Alvina …

  Viney reads the entire file without looking at the clock.

  By the time she arrives at Welly’s most recent letter—taking note of the cramped, down-sloping penmanship, the embittered tone …

  Nothing ever changes … the same old story … lack of vision …—it’s nearly four A.M. The dairy farmers are awake.

  … nearly twenty-five-years … and still I cannot … still I feel …

  They are stirring, the people of her town, casting off whatever lives they lived in their sleep—lives of gay, improbable adventure, or of drowning, voiceless horror—and filling their hands with what is real, what is here, what needs doing: bedclothes, coffee cups, buttons, combs.

  Was there nothing of her in what he became? Was it always wife and mistress to him, all the way to the end?

  More aware than ever that she doesn’t belong here, Viney puts on her tennis shoes, pulls the laces up tight, and walks home. The stars are still out.

  No real point in going to bed now, she thinks, I won’t be able to sleep anyway.

  By the time she walks back into her own kitchen the sun is starting to come up. Larken will be leaving soon. Viney retrieves some textured vegetable protein sausages from the freezer and a box of Bisquick from the pantry.

  It’s a new day. She needs a new word.

  She opens the dictionary at random, sets her finger on the page, and finds “holochroal: having compound eyes with the visual area covered by a continuous cornea—used esp. of certain trilobites.”

  What’s a trilobite? she wonders, followed by, How the hell am I going to use that?

  Hope’s Diary, 1962:

  Elusive Pancakes

  I’ve become obsessed with pancakes. Who would have believed such a simple thing could be so elusive?

  L. is distraught over this, my latest compulsion, but when one’s world is defined by domesticity and certain other matters that preoccupy young wives, things like making perfect
pancakes take on great significance. All the activities of daily living—and one’s successes or failures in measuring up to the title of “homemaker”—become metaphors. Nothingis what it is; it is all something else, it all has the potential to instruct, to give one insights, to condemn.

  Buddhist monks probably know all about this. Prisoners too. The more restricted one’s view, the more one is compelled to give meaning to what is available. It’s how we rise to the challenge. We elevate the mundane. We sanctify the ordinary.

  But back to pancakes. It is far more difficult to make a perfect pancake than one would imagine. All those short-order cooks all over America don’t get nearly the respect they deserve. I don’t remember my mother making pancakes for me. We were not a breakfasting sort of family. Cold cereal, bananas with milk and liberally sprinkled with sugar; once or twice perhaps an egg. Anything special in the way of breakfast we had out, on Sundays, and after church—as if our attendance in the Lord’s House earned us an outing. We ate our pancakes at Essie’s House of Pancakes in Germantown, where there was a lazy Susan full of syrups with the most unlikely colors. I always wanted to try the lime green–colored one—could it have been lime?—but was never offered the opportunity. Plain syrup was what was poured for me, caramel brown. And lovely igloos of whipped butter that melted instantly and glided across the pancake surface, creating a kind of self-generating skating rink.

  Essie’s pancakes were big! Gigantic! How in the world were they flipped? Maybe bigger spatulas are the secret. I’ve already sent L. out several times in pursuit of the perfect pancake-making skillet. I’ve started a collection.

  So. Apart from the cooking implements, pancake success begins with generating perfect batter. There’s a particular texture that is crucial—thin, a bit thinner than cake batter, but not much. Not too thin. Too thin produces crepes. Too thick, and the thing never gets done on the inside. There’s an oozy, unappealing middle. Uncooked pancake batter doesn’t have the allure or good taste of uncooked cake batter or cookie batter. No one asks to lick the spoons and bowls. Then there’s the oil question: Should oil be added? Oil makes the batter heat up much more quickly, so there’s the potential danger of burning the pancake and I’ve had multiple experiences with that as well.