by Nelle Davy
He paused.
“Except Ma.”
“Why?”
“Because she was waiting for it. She’d been waiting on something like that for years. Sometimes I used to think that…” He stopped and stared at the wall ahead, and then he shook his head, his great mop of blond hair swirling in a wave.
“Never mind. What’s done is done. That’s what I say.”
“And your pa, what does he say?”
My father went quiet and put his hand on Mom’s stomach. Apparently I gave a kick.
“He doesn’t say anything anymore.”
Julia spent her life on the farm, living in the fantasies that her mind had created. Her whole world was a product of imagination and so whenever she was faced with reality she found it an unwelcome and even hostile intrusion to the series of reveries she constructed in which she was rich, admired, loved and famous. She took singing and dance lessons and forced her family to sit through an endless parade of recitals despite the fact that, while no one would ever acknowledge as much to her face, Julia had no ear for music and no talent for dancing. In fact, the girl had no performing talent at all, but it didn’t deter her. She didn’t care. Her real talent was the strength of her self-belief, so much so that her ferocity could make other people doubt their own.
Years passed and my grandmother watched her intently for any sign of a chink in the girl’s armor, but as time went on she saw, much to her dismay, that the surfaces of Julia’s resolve were still smooth and gleaming. When she believed in something, neither contradiction nor refusal would be tolerated. If her father told her she couldn’t have a dress, she found a way to convince him that her reasons were more important than his for refusing her. If she insisted on singing the national anthem at the Fourth of July fair, even though Mrs. McClusky knew Rita Pessel was a far more gifted singer, she found herself falling for Julia’s rationale as to why she was the obvious choice. She would then spend the entire performance wincing, until she finally gave up the ghost and closed her eyes in pain as Julia attempted and failed to find that elusive top note on “free.”
Julia only had to want something for it to be hers. This was her greatest talent, and even though she never fully recognized it, it was far more valuable than that of singing or dancing.
It was a talent that would allow her to seduce Jess Thorne away from his long-term sweetheart Caroline Lumas, and convince him to marry Julia when she was just eighteen.
As if in a replay, one night in June, Lavinia experienced an uncomfortable sense of déjà vu. She found herself at her dining room table with Cal at the head and the boys and Piper on either side. There was a bowl of mashed potatoes in the middle, a chicken-and-mushroom pie and a jug of sweating ice water on either side. She saw all these things and thought nothing of it, but when her stepdaughter came in bearing a roast ham on the silver tray and set it down before her father in such a way…Lavinia felt the hairs on the back of her neck rise. She knew it before the girl even said it, and for a second, the walls could have melted and all the people with them and she would be staring into the face of her cousin, wearing a red-checked house dress just before she told them that—
“Pa, I’m getting married.”
Lavinia opened her eyes, startled that she had somehow closed them.
Cal turned to face his daughter, his face arranging itself in such a way that it could start smiling at the joke she was so obviously playing on him, but she stayed silent.
“Did you hear me?” she said finally.
“Julia—what did you just say?” asked Piper, bracing her hands on the table.
“I’m getting married. Look.” And she thrust forward her hand on which sparkled the blink of a diamond underneath the lights.
She stared at everyone around the table. Theo watched her for a second and then went to help himself to a piece of pie.
“Theo, we haven’t even said grace yet,” admonished Piper. He set the dish down with an irritated clunk.
“Why isn’t anyone saying anything?” Julia pouted. “For goodness’ sake—in polite circles I believe the word you’re looking for is congratulations.”
“Julia, let me get this straight—you’re getting married?” asked Piper, incredulous. Julia put her hands on her hips and tossed back her flicked red hair.
“Yeah, I think that’s what I said like half an hour ago.”
“But what about college? And who is this man, I mean you’ve never even brought a boy home here, how can you be marrying someone?” Piper insisted. It seemed she was the only person besides her niece who had found her voice. Theo sat back in his chair bored and was eyeing the mashed potatoes, Ethan was watching his sister, his face a mask devoid of expression, and Cal…well, Cal was utterly still, frozen, as he gazed on his daughter and all that she was telling him.
“I’m not going to college anymore—well, not this year anyway. Me and Jess were thinking of traveling to Los Angeles for a bit actually—he’s got family there. His uncle’s a music producer or something and you know how talented he is? Remember in May when he played that gig at the Oden theater? And—”
“Jess Thorne?” asked Piper. “You’re marrying Jess Thorne?”
“Yep,” said Julia proudly, and a smug look of pride flashed across her mouth.
“But isn’t he with—” Piper trailed off and stared at Lavinia, who sighed and said it for her, “Caroline Lumas.”
“Not anymore,” Julia said with a raised eyebrow. “Not for quite a while, no matter what else she’s been spreading around town.”
“I’m hungry,” said Theo. “Food’s getting cold.”
“Daddy, ain’t you going to say anything?” asked Julia sulkily. “Can you hear me? Are you even in there? Your only daughter has just said she’s getting married and you’re struck dumb?” She folded her arms and surveyed him in disappointed indignation. “You do realize what I’m saying, don’t you?”
Cal stood up very slowly, letting his napkin fall to the ground, and in that moment, Julia shrank back, wariness slicing through her arrogant calm.
“Daddy?” she asked, taking a step backward.
“You ain’t getting married to NO ONE!” he shouted, stabbing a thick digit at her. “You’re going to college and you’re going to finish your schooling, like we planned.” He smashed his fist down onto the table, making his glass jump.
This was what Julia had been waiting for and what she could more than handle. Lavinia watched her husband play into the girl’s hands and sighed in disappointment.
“Well, that ain’t in my plans no more, Daddy. My plans are about going to California and marrying Jess!”
Cal grabbed his daughter by her arm and shook her like a rag doll as she smacked him on his shoulder.
“Look at you, answering back, lifting your hand to me.” She raised it in an arc but he caught it at the elbow and batted it down behind her back, which made her yelp in pain. “I knew it, by God, I knew it would come to something—stepping out at all hours and your grades slipping. But marriage?! Over my dead body, girl,” he screamed into her ear, her hair flying as she thrashed under his grip. He leaned into her. “And yours!” he finished.
Sobbing, she freed herself, or more likely, Cal let her go, and she ran crying her hatred for him up the stairs and into her bedroom.
Cal sat back down as he heard her bedroom door slam and wiped his brow with the back of his hand. He stared from the impassive face of his wife to the horrified one of his sister and promptly began to start dry heaving.
Lavinia watched the food wilt under the hot lights and even hotter temper of her family and took in a deep breath. Ethan stared at her solemnly; Theo kicked the table leg in frustration.
“Am I right?” asked Cal as he finally composed himself. “I am right, ain’t I?”
Piper shrugged, Lavinia arched an eyebrow.
“What the hell’s gotten into her? I just—I just don’t understand it.” He stared at the table, his eyes running back and forth along the edge as i
f trying to decipher the answer among the wood grains.
Lavinia pursed her lips and took Ethan’s plate.
“Well, I suppose the pie will still be good even if it is lukewarm,” she said.
Cal looked up at her, startled. Slowly and carefully she picked up the silver knife and caught his eye as she sliced it deep into the heart of the crust.
My father would come to remember 1961 for many reasons. It was the year that JFK was inaugurated as president and my grandmother sighed in annoyance because she had voted for Nixon, her reason being that “he had just wanted it more.” It was the year he was forced to sit through The Old Man and the Sea and For Whom the Bell Tolls in English class because his overemotional teacher had changed the syllabus after Hemingway had shot himself; the year Charlie Brown successfully flew his kite for the first time and the first American soldier was killed in the Vietnam War. That part, the part where this fact slipped into and through his consciousness with very little disturbance, he would remember years afterward with incredulity at his innocence.
My uncle would come to remember 1961 as the year he first bought The Fantastic Four comic book, the first time his father started to give him more responsibility on the farm, the first time he successfully mastered riding a horse backward, and the year Allie Lomax fell asleep in his arms as they lay underneath their tree one afternoon after school. It was also the year when their relationship was still secret. It had been at Ethan’s request. He didn’t want anyone to know about them. He had a tight feeling of panic just below his lungs whenever he thought of anyone finding out about them. I suppose perhaps he thought if people knew, they would start spoiling it—a paranoid but prophetic idea.
But despite their differences, both boys would remember 1961 for one thing in particular and that was Julia. It was the year Julia turned eighteen and had a huge party in the spring that Theo wasn’t allowed to go to because he was considered too young; it was the year she announced over a roast ham that she was getting married, and it was the year that she eloped.
After the argument at dinner, Julia took to her room. She refused to come out and speak to my grandfather even though he raged at her, slammed his fist against the door and threatened to kick it down. She said she would not come out until Cal had agreed she could marry Jess, but for the first time in my grandmother’s memory, Cal refused his daughter. He walked past her locked room with a stiffening in his features and a heavy step, but he did not speak or call out to her. Piper brought Julia food on a tray, but she refused to eat and each time she took the tray away bearing the now cold dishes, she scraped them into the trash and asked my grandmother the same question: “What are we going to do?”
My grandfather didn’t speak at meals anymore, only glared at the empty chair that was Julia’s place and wolfed down whatever had been put before him. He was irascible, distant, and whenever my grandmother woke in the night she would find him lying on his back staring up at the ceiling, his face a hard mask. This lasted for three days—Julia’s hunger strike, my grandfather’s inner war—until on the morning of the fourth day my grandmother rose from her bed, dressed herself in a long green wrap dress and, carrying her gloves and bag, went into town, to the house of Julia’s best friend, Betsy Turner.
Betsy, even when I came to know her when she was married with twin boys, was a flighty, excitable woman with absolutely nothing between her ears. She was kind, though, and whenever she used to see me or my sisters in town she always smiled and said hello, though her smile would falter when she saw our cousin Cal Jr. Then she would nod and look down at her feet as she left. I believe this was guilt—for what people still accused her of even after—but I’m getting ahead of myself. Needless to say, she always was and always would be a simple girl with a simple mind and my grandmother had a field day with her.
This part my father did not know. This part no one but myself and a raving woman with glassy colored eyes, as she lay in her bed and poured out her secrets, would ever know. My grandmother went into the house of Betsy Turner, to find out about Julia’s relationship with Jess in the hope that she could somehow convince them both to see sense. Betsy’s mother, who opened the door to my grandmother, had been with her daughter at the time because, she said, she didn’t want Betsy’s good name being dragged into Julia’s mess. Betsy’s mother had more reason than most to fear any sort of sexual scandal being associated with her daughter: Betsy’s grandfather was Michael Banville, the town preacher.
My grandmother sat on their hard sofa and watched Betsy squirm and twist her fingers under the glare of her questions. But Betsy’s answers were less than sufficient for my grandmother. They were barely polysyllabic. All she would say was that Julia and Jess were in love and that he had proposed. She insisted Julia had been secretive with her; she didn’t want anyone else to know. She stared at the floor the whole time she spoke. Ordinarily, my grandmother would have pressed on Betsy like a board that was bound to crack under her weight, but that day she didn’t need to. Her own mother was more than happy to add her feet to the cause. She pulled Betsy’s fingers apart when she buried her face in her hands, and hit her daughter on the back when she took too long with an answer.
“Answer the woman,” she said through gritted teeth.
Lavinia suspected the woman thought if Betsy were as truthful as possible, my grandmother would be lenient with her reputation and not accuse her of being involved in Julia’s sordid affairs. She pondered this idea as she gazed from mother to daughter and leaned back in her chair.
“Daphne,” she said gently, “would you mind awfully if I had a glass of your blackcurrant cordial? I am absolutely parched and I remember you bringing a large jug of it at the last church fair— Oh, it was just refreshing. I’ll have to get that recipe from you…if you can bear to part with it? Would you mind terribly?”
Daphne bit the inside of her lip. While she did not want to leave her daughter alone to incriminate herself, neither did she want to pass up the chance to indulge in my grandmother’s flattery. So Lavinia watched the woman wrestle with her fears and her wants and waited for her to choose.
“I’ll just be a minute. I’ll be right back,” Daphne said, rising quickly from her armchair.
While she was in the kitchen, my grandmother slid one leg over another and said softly, “Do you know Julia’s starving herself?”
Betsy looked up at my grandmother, meeting her eyes in surprise before dropping them to her feet.
“They used to do it in my day when I was a young girl, that sort of thing. Hunger strikes. Sometimes they would have to force-feed them.” My grandmother played with the hem of her skirt, which had come loose, and wound it around her finger. She watched the girl from the corner of her eye.
“They’d push a long tube down their throat into their stomach—they’d have to or they would die. They were so serious about their causes, those women. I hope Julia isn’t the same about Jess. I hope he’s worth it if she is. He must be quite a man if he’s worth dying for, don’t you think?”
Lavinia watched a wet dark spot form on the floor below where Betsy bent her head.
“Malnutrition can do such awful things to a girl. I used to be married to a doctor, you know—and the stories he would tell me. Damage your insides something awful, shrivel your organs, stretch your skin so it’s like cracked paper, dry up your womb so it’s like a prune, withered and shrunk—but there’s no use talking to her, she’s so stubborn, so sure. If only I knew what was going on inside her head I could convince her that maybe—” my grandmother watched the hands in Betsy’s lap tremble and released the curled hem “—he isn’t worth dying for. No one is, except your children.”
“Here you are,” said Daphne, and she gave my grandmother a tall frosted glass of cordial. She was so busy smiling at my grandmother she didn’t notice her daughter shaking in her chair.
My grandmother reached out and took a long drink from the glass.
“Thank you, Daphne,” she said after she’d finished. “Th
at was exactly what I needed.”
Between sobs that both exasperated and bewildered her mother, Betsy revealed as much as her body would allow. Lavinia left the house both satisfied and purposeful. But as she wandered down the street, a growing sense of unease began to plague her. The thing had to be done carefully, delicately, especially because of Cal. She ran her gloves through her hands. Cal would have to be managed.
What she learned was this: Julia had always had a crush on Jess Thorne, ever since freshman year. He was popularly considered to be one of the most handsome and talented boys at school. Everyone thought he’d be a great musician and he was always talking about his uncle in California. He had so many ideas and plans to travel and Julia loved to listen to him. She hung around him and his friends as well as on his every word, Betsy said. She was besotted.
But for a long time, Jess was not. Jess had been with Caroline Lumas since ninth grade and it was a relationship he was happy to maintain. How then, my grandmother asked, did Julia convince him to marry her? Daphne Turner looked at my grandmother sharply when she said this.
“What do you mean convince?” she’d asked, but she received no answer because just then her daughter swept ahead with her tale.
There had been a night when they had all gone drinking down by a creek on Bull Tucker’s land. Bull was a meathead but a good friend of Jess’s and they had rung up a crew of girls and boys. Caroline had been away on a class trip to Washington, D.C. They had grabbed some cans and taken a blanket and whiled away the hours. Betsy hadn’t really noticed anything until she saw Julia leaning over Jess, who was reclining on the blanket. She was talking and he was playing with the curls of her hair, but, added Betsy, they had thought nothing of it, they were all pretty drunk.
Julia had grown more secretive after that. She had watched Caroline and Jess constantly, her moods fluctuating whenever she saw them. If Jess held Caroline, she slammed her locker door and lost herself for hours after. If he was alone or bored around his girlfriend, Julia smiled and teased him. Caroline noticed Jess’s mood swings and Julia’s attentions and apparently there had once even been a “scene” between the two of them in the locker room after gym class.
