“What will you do when you have children?” she said. “Certainly you’ll want them to have a moral upbringing.”
“I am a moral person,” Adam said, “and I never went to any church when I was a kid.”
He picked up his plate and left the room, leaving my mother and me to glare at each other.
Now she wants to know if we’re making plans for a baptism. “I’ve never been a godmother before,” she hints. “Maybe Adam could get baptized at the same time. A two-for-one special.”
I match her tone. “It’s only a bargain if it’s something you need.”
I’m tired of my mother’s hints. Today at Turkey Hill, watching lines of geese scarring the horizon, I have the urge to jump in my car and drive…where? Anywhere. Away. But it’s autumn that’s making me feel this way, the restless wind, the skittering leaves, and I realize it’s the perfect time to open Uncle Olaf’s wine. He called it Autumn Tonic, and though he’s been dead for several years now, Auntie Thil still sends me a bottle each fall from what’s left of his well-stocked cellar: dandelion or mulberry or plum. The names themselves are sweet to the tongue. Usually, Adam is amused by that sweetness—he prefers beer to sugary wine—but when this year’s bottle arrived in the mail, he said, You shouldn’t be drinking; you should be taking care of yourself. All summer, he’s been busy with what he calls the preparations, finishing household projects, taking on extra carpentry work. He waxes the truck, vacuums out my car. He joined a shoppers club in Binghamton and comes home with boxes of bulk toilet paper, pasta, rice. When I tell him it feels like we’re anticipating war, he reminds me of what I already know, what everyone with children has been telling us almost gleefully: Four months from now, there will be little time for anything other than the baby’s needs.
For the next three days he’ll be traveling across the state, scavenging for antiques he’ll restore and sell at Pat’s shop in Cobblestone. It’s a lucrative sideline, something to do when construction work drops off for the winter. He left yesterday, one suitcase filled with clothes rolled into tidy logs, and when I come home from work, the dark windows remind me he’s gone. At least there’s the cat for company, but the moment I open the door, she weaves between my legs and runs to the edge of the lawn, where she rolls happily in the dead grasses. I think about getting back in the car, driving to Pat’s house for supper with the girls. Pat wouldn’t mind, especially if I picked up some ice cream for desert. Right now I’d choose even my nieces’ messy clamor over this silent house.
It’s then that I remember Uncle Olaf’s wine. I remember the low cedar barrels where he aged it, under the cellar stairs beside crates of yeasty pilsners, stouts, and ales, and his own potent invention, Raspberry Glog, which he stored in glass jelly jars. At Christmas, we kids got a taste on the tip of a teaspoon, perhaps the last sip that someone didn’t want. But every now and then throughout the year, we’d sneak down the steps—me and Sam, Monica and Harv—to steal another swallow or two. The glog looked as harmless as Auntie Thil’s canned fruits, plums and peaches and spiced brown pears, which occupied identical jars. I took a long, dizzying swallow, hiccupped the exquisite taste of raspberry, and experienced the light-headed chill of knowing I had done something I could not undo. The alcohol ferreted through my veins, tickled the hard-to-reach places in my mind. When I passed the jar along to Sam, it seemed as if it were taking an awfully long time for my hands to obey my wish: Let go, Let go, Let go.
The glog was eighty proof; I know that now, the way I know each sip of wine means death to a handful of brain cells. As I sit in the kitchen rocking chair with my glass, pushing the floor away with my toes, I imagine those cells—the baby’s and mine—like frogs’ eggs: clear, clumping jelly, thick with information. There is no way to know if it is information we might someday need. There is no way to know if it is information we might someday need. There is no way to know if it’s information we are better off without. But this I do know: one glass of wine can’t be any worse than these past few months of stifling caution—low-salt diets, doctor visits, vitamins that leave my mouth tasting strange, eight glasses of water every day, eight hours of sleep every night. Adam believes in these rules the way my mother believes in the Ten Commandments, as if they are a magic formula, an infallible recipe.
Beyond the French doors, I can see clouds of migrating birds rising and falling, dust devils blown by a hundred wings. Our house is the last on a dead-end street, perched on the edge of a ravine. We bought it when we got married, liking the back porch, which juts out like an impulse, and the side yard, with enough space for Adam’s sculptures. Deer pick their way up from the ravine to strip bark from the apple trees we planted along the lot line, standing on their hind legs to nibble beyond the wire protectors. In Horton, the deer drifted in herds of fifty and sixty, like cattle. They came at dusk and grazed until darkness, finally in visible except for their eyes, which trapped light from passing cars and glowed like floating spheres. First frost always made them bold. Even the yearlings were anticipating winter, the long, gray days of bitter bark and tough, dead grasses, and they ate steadily, fiercely, as Sam and I watched from my bedroom window, wrapped in a quilt, our feet dangling off the edge of my bed to catch the heat that rose from the vent on the floor. I told him the deer were really souls of the dead. If we went outside, we’d instantly die too. During the day, they transformed into other animals—bears and fish and even dogs and cats—so you never should approach a strange animal, in case it wasn’t what it appeared to be. My mother overheard our murmurings one evening and put an end to it by stomping outside, my father’s jacket thrown over her nightgown, and startling the herd into white-tailed flight with an exasperated flick of her hands.
Where you got your ideas, she still likes to say, Heaven only knows! But looking back, I don’t see them as any stranger than the things we were taught to believe. Once, when Sam and I were quarreling over some small thing, she told us that each time we raised our voices in anger, it was the same as holding a burning match against the flesh of Jesus, which made all the angels weep. I was filled with remorse, imagining the hot sizzle of Jesus’ skin, the agony in His eyes, the wailing of thousands of white-winged creatures. But Sam ignored the kitchen match my mother had lit to emphasize her point. Undaunted, he looked around the room.
“I don’t see any angels,” he said, crossing his arms on his chest. “Prove it.” My mother doesn’t remember this. Her Sam was a boy who volunteered to lead Grace before meals. Her Sam sat up straight at Mass, hands folded just so, like in a First Communion picture. With age, she’s becoming as religious as my grandmother ever was, and it’s hard for me to remember there was a time when she urged me to rely on myself—not God alone—for answers. She recently joined a women’s prayer group; they meet twice a month to pray. One woman has cancer of the liver, and when the group joins hands, they ask God to shrink the tumor. They pray for each other’s children, for people in the community; they pray for news about Sam. They believe that if a person has faith the size of a mustard seed, anything is possible. “Why do you always look for negative things?” she asks me. “Or is that just what happens when a person stops going to church?”
Even now, she’ll call with news, real or imagined, of Sam: a dream, an anonymous phone call, a hopeful letter from a missing persons organization, an insight from a psychic, saying, Sam is thinking about us or Sam is ill or Sam is coming home soon. Prove it, I want to say. There have been too many disappointments, too many trips across the country to discover yet another stranger, someone else’s lost son. But since my grandmother’s death, I’m eager to hear my mother’s voice, as lonely for her company as she is for mine. When she talks about Sam, I keep the silence she believes means we agree.
Growing up, my house rang with many of these silences; the things you did not say because to say them would be wrong; the things you did not feel because they were sins. The things you wanted to do but couldn’t because you were a girl, or a boy. The questions you could not ask becau
se you might be acting too big for your britches or else talking nonsense, in which case my father would tell you to simmer down. If you can’t say something nice, my mother told me again and again, don’t say anything at all. And perhaps what I remember are things that should not be remembered, should not be spoken. Simmer down. Simmer down.
For my thirteenth birthday, my father gave me matches and a pack of Camels, wrapped up in pink tissue paper. I was in the backyard, where I’d been idly throwing rocks at a stump. It had been, until that moment, a normal kind of birthday. We’d had an early supper of meat loaf, my favorite, and a store-bought cake I’d picked out myself at the bakery downtown, a chocolate cake with green frosting and lavender sugar flowers and Happy Birthday Abby written in cursive across the top. My mother had given me a diary with a key and a glass horse tethered to two glass foals. Sam had saved his money to buy me a king-size box of Milk Duds and a key chain that was a flashlight too. Now my father was giving me a pack of cigarettes.
“Thank you,” I said.
My father looked pleased. He played with the zipper on his Fountain Ford windbreaker. “Have one,” he said politely, as if he were offering me a cookie, a stick of gum, some unexpected little treat.
I studied the Camels uneasily. My mother usually bought our gifts, and I figured my father just didn’t know any better than to give me cigarettes. He’d given things to Sam that I’d considered strange; a Baggie of smashed butterfly wings from the grille of his car; his broken watch; chewed-up pens with the names of car dealerships trailing down their sides; a large inflatable spark plug from a gas-station window display. The Camels were just one more mistake, only this time the mistake was aimed at me. Or was it some kind of trick? No makeup, he had warned me. No high heels, no nail polish. He’d never said specifically that I wasn’t allowed to smoke, but I knew it was something I wasn’t supposed to do.
“I don’t smoke,” I told him.
His expression did not change. He took the cigarettes, put them in his pocket, and said, “C’mon, let’s go for a walk.”
The red and gold of the turning leaves glowed eerily in the twilight. I watched the faint crescent moon move with us, slipping from tree to tree as we walked down the driveway to the highway, and I tried to keep up with my father. He was a fast walker, a businesslike walker, head down, shoulders forward, hands jammed into the pockets of his windbreaker. Sam and I had once imitated his walk for amusement, stretching our legs like wading birds, tucking our chins to our chests. But lately, Sam tried to throw an extra inch into his own stride, my father’s broken watch sliding up and down his arm the way the high school boys’ class rings slid on the slender fingers of their girlfriends.
At the highway, my father turned right toward Oneisha, and I wondered if he was leading me there, if I would be expected to walk the ten miles behind him in silence. But when we came to the end of our land, he stepped off the road and followed the gully to the stand of hickory trees that belonged to the Luchterhands. There I paused, catching my breath. The hickory trees had a reputation: Older kids biked out from town to hold secret meetings here, to drink Southern Comfort from Dr Pepper cans, and to beat up younger kids like me. “C’mon,” my father said when he realized I had stopped.
“Mom’s going to wonder where we are,” I said, but I picked my way toward him through the weeds. The wind moved in the branches of the hickories, and they clicked together, the sound my grandmother made with her tongue to mean Shame. My father took the cigarettes out of his pocket, and I knew then that he meant for me to smoke one. “Somebody’s going to see,” I begged, but the highway was a pale gray scar in the distance.
He opened the pack, selected a cigarette, put it between his lips. “I used to smoke,” he said. “Did you know that?”
“Yes.”
He lit the cigarette, drawing once, twice. His wispy hair lifted slightly in the wind. “Son of a bitches make me sick now,” he said. He coughed, shaking his head. “I want you to have your first smoke with me, not with some kid at your school.”
He held out the cigarette.
“Dad,” I said.
“One cigarette,” he said. “Then we can go home.”
His face wore the look that meant, no matter what, he was going to get his way. I took the cigarette from him gingerly, stuck it into my mouth, and sucked. It tasted like dirt. I spat out a stream of smoke, watching it curl upward and upward until it blended into the sharp white tooth of the moon. The glowing end of the cigarette was oddly beautiful, like a ruby but deeper, etched with gray patterns of ash.
“Your mother would kill me if she knew about this,” my father said.
I took another puff, inhaling this time. My stomach churned chocolate cake with green icing; I choked for a minute, tears streaming down my face. “Kids aren’t supposed to smoke,” I said.
“Tap the ash off the tip,” he said, and he demonstrated with his finger. Sparks spun into the arms of the hickory trees. I tried smoking with my left hand, then smoking no-handed. I tried blowing smoke through my nose.
“I could teach you how to do a smoke ring,” my father said after a while.
“That’s OK.”
“I guess you don’t have to finish all of it,” he said.
I handed it to him, relieved. He put it out under his heel and kicked loose ground over the butt. For a moment, I thought that if I stood on my toes the wind would lift me high into the trees, and their arms around me would be soft and warm, and the smell of them would be magic.
“You going to smoke when the kids at school give you a cigarette?” he asked.
I shook my head no. My mouth tasted awful.
“That’s my good girl,” he said. He turned away, and I followed him out of the field. We passed Mrs. Luchterhand, who was riding one of her black Morgans. Both her long braid and the horse’s tail were clipped with reflectors, which glowed like eyes. “Wonderful evening for a walk,” she said to my father, her voice high and airy, like my mother’s.
When we got home, he led me inside through the back door so my mother wouldn’t see. “Will Sam have to smoke a cigarette when he turns thirteen?” I said.
My father watched me kick off my sneakers by pushing my toes against the heels. “No,” he said. “Take your shoes off with your hands.”
“How come?”
“They’ll last a long time if you take care of them.”
“I mean how come about Sam?”
My father laughed and shook his head as though he were remembering something private. “Boys can take care of themselves. It’s you I’ve got to worry about.”
“Why?”
He smiled, reached into the pocket of his jacket, pulled out a small box wrapped in green paper. “Happy birthday,” he said, and he watched me open it. It was a necklace with my birthstone. He’d picked it out himself. “For my teenage daughter,” he said.
The clock by the bed glows 2:00 A.M. when I first start hearing music, or, more precisely, a muffled, driving beat. I close my eyes, half dreaming the long Saturday nights in Horton, the slow cars moving up and down the dirt road that followed the lake-front all the way out to Herringbone Beach, trawling for girls sitting in small groups in the grass. Music was the simplest bait—Led Zeppelin, the Stones, AC/DC. My friends and I floated toward that music and the heat contained in the sound of it, so much like a heartbeat, but faster, harder, freed from the limits of the body. Hey, girls, wanna ride? Wanna ride? and we came up out of the long trampled grass, brushing off our jeans, rubbing stiff knees. In the morning, I’d get up and go to early Mass, tamed by knee socks and a fresh cotton slip, penitent in my good church dress.
I led two lives when I was in high school, and each had its own sound track. Classical music was for church and home: my private voice, a gift from God. This was the music that accompanied the girl my parents knew, the girl my grandmother admired and my teachers praised. Mornings, I got up early and practiced on Elise’s piano for an hour before school; after school, I used the grand piano
in the school auditorium, taking the late bus home with the athletes and cheerleaders and pom-pom girls. They treated me kindly, if a bit uncomfortably; I was something of a bewilderment to them. But every now and then I’d show up at their parties, which made me acceptable, even marginally cool. Rock was for those forbidden nights—lurid, public, urgent—and this is the sound that unravels me from my sleep, peeling the layers away like onion skin, until finally I get up and step into my sweatpants. Pulling an old sweater of Adam’s over my T-shirt, I go into the kitchen, open the French doors to the cold night. The moon is almost full, and the houses and trees are outlined in silver. I can hear lyrics, laughter, and I realize the noise is coming from the belly of the ravine. Sometimes I walk there in the morning before work, carefully following the faint deer paths until I reach the trickle of water at the bottom called Poison Creek. In spring, it swells into a river, seven or eight feet wide; Adam and I saw a dead raccoon once, swollen and stiff, its curious hands stretched skyward.
My next-door neighbor, an older woman whose name I do not know, steps out into her yard. She has a man’s coat draped over her shoulders; she uses her hands to pin it chastely over the front of her robe. When she sees me, she walks over to our lot line and stops precisely at the edge, as if she’s toeing a mark for a race. “You’re new here,” she calls, “so I’ll tell you. They have parties down there every fall.”
“Who?” I ask. She is wearing slippers shaped like rabbits, and they hop in place as she shifts from side to side in the frosty grass.
“Kids,” she says, and she takes one hand from the front of her coat to shake her finger in the air. “High school kids. They wait till the weather gets cold and the police don’t want to get out of their nice warm cars and chase them off.”
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