Miller's Valley

by Anna Quindlen

  I don’t know how I managed to keep up with my schoolwork. Maybe it was because Steven acted as though it was a part of me he thought was important. We would be at the dumpy apartment where one of his friends lived, up a rickety set of wooden stairs to the second floor of what you could tell was meant to be a one-family house instead of a collection of weird apartments with half kitchens and sketchy bathrooms, drinking beer, or gin and orange juice for the girls, someone in the bedroom passing around a joint, and Steven would announce, “This woman? Top of her class. You wouldn’t know it to look at her, but she’s more than a pretty face. She’s a brain. Calculus, man.”

  “Precalculus,” I might say under my breath, but no one listened to me much, in those apartments or in the bars. Steve Sawicki’s girlfriend. Tommy Miller’s sister. That was all I was, no matter how often Steven told people otherwise. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he’d say, putting out his hand, “Mimi Miller.” It was embarrassing, but there was a part of me that liked it, too. He made it feel like life was a party, and he was hosting it. Sometimes when I wasn’t with him and I thought about him he seemed unreal to me. But then he’d be sitting next to me and I’d look down at those little dark hairs on his arms and they were the realest things in the world. I know some people wondered why I was with him, and part of it was because he made it seem like he was training for the Olympics and I was the gold medal. No one had ever acted like I was the gold medal before, or not so I’d noticed.

  But I know now that some of it was simpler than that. It was the sex, although I spent a lot of time pretending we weren’t having it. I wouldn’t go into one of the bedrooms at those crappy apartments the way those other girls did, so you could hear them through the thin hollow-core doors. Some of them sounded like they were pretending to me. I wasn’t pretending, not one bit.

  None of the people Steven hung out with were the kind of people who cared if you took calculus, or precalculus. Some of the girls seemed just shy of low-dull normal, although maybe that was what they thought their boyfriends liked. One or two were nice to me. Brenda, who was a beautician, was always telling me how good my hair would look if I let her put streaks in it. She said she could do it right in the kitchen, but I thought my mother would go nuts. She was already suspicious of Steven. Maybe she could smell the sex on me. Maybe that’s why I was keeping up with my schoolwork, too, because my mother kept watch, was always going in my bag and looking at the grades on my quizzes. They didn’t give her any ammunition: A A A A. Even the English essays.

  Once Steven insisted on driving me to the state capital when I was planning to do research. I tried to get out of that by saying that I had to take Richard, too, but he insisted on giving Richard a lift. The three of us were sandwiched in the cab of his truck, Richard and me with our notebooks on our laps, Steven with his hand on my knee.

  “He seems like an okay guy,” Richard said when we got inside. “He has a lot of plans,” I’d replied, but that sounded lame even to me. Although it was true. Steven could talk about his plans for hours at a time, until Tommy, who liked him less now that I was with him, would tell him to shut up. His plan—his business plan, he always called it—was to buy a run-down house cheap, fix it up, then resell it at a profit and buy another one. He would take long drives to look for the right areas, “up-and-comers,” he’d call them. I’d go with him, if I wasn’t working at the diner or doing extra credit after school, and study in the truck while Steven walked around the main street, checked out the parks and playgrounds, picked up the local paper to read the real estate ads. Sometimes he’d see a house in an ad that looked promising and he’d drive over and sit at the curb, saying things like “I just want you to picture that painted white, with green shutters. That real dark green, kind of a classy color. Like, country club, you know what I’m talking about?”

  “Hunter green?” And he’d look at me like I’d invented fire, and kiss me, first a smacking kind of kiss, then a long kiss that made me go all soft. “That’s why I need you to help me with this,” he’d say. “You understand this. You’re on the same wavelength.” At the end of the day, if it wasn’t cold or raining, or even sometimes when it was, we would drive to some gravel road off the main drag, where the trees closed in, and he would put a sleeping bag on the bed of the truck. We would take off our clothes as fast as we could and jump on each other like crazy people. It’s been a long time, and I know more now than I did then, a lot more, but I’m not sugarcoating anything when I say that the charm didn’t fail him there, or in the twin bed in the room he rented from an elderly man the other side of town from the valley. Maybe that’s why I kept up with my schoolwork. A long line of correct equations, a physics test with the number 100 at the top in red ink: they made me feel more like my old self. My old self believed all the stories about how boys had to talk you into it, about how you had to just smack them down or put up with it. I’d never heard anyone talk about putting up with dinner and a movie just so you could get to the part where the warped wooden door was closed and locked and your boyfriend had to put his hand over your mouth so you would stop making so much noise.

  “Dear Mimi,” said the postcard I’d just gotten from Donald. “I’m here. Hope I will do okay. Donald.” On the front was a picture of what looked like an apartment building with palm trees and the ocean behind it. It was in Santa Barbara, but it looked like the Garden of Eden only with tennis courts. “California,” Steven said when he took it out of my purse. “That’s an idea.” The next time he saw LaRhonda he said, “Who’s Donald?” LaRhonda rolled her eyes. “Loser,” she said. “That’s mean,” I said. “But true,” LaRhonda said, and I’m ashamed to say I didn’t say anything after that. I told myself that he was just a boy I’d known when we were kids, who I hadn’t seen in years.

  It was funny—LaRhonda’s interest in me had revived. It didn’t hurt that her boyfriend knew Steven from construction. His name was Fred, and he had red hair and freckles and bright green eyes, so depending on your taste he was either good-looking or just plain weird. He and Steven liked each other, maybe because, unlike the other guys on the jobs they worked together, Steven didn’t mock the little inspirational palm cards Fred liked to hand out. Sometimes I would find a card in Steven’s pocket with a picture of a bird or a flower or something, and then some verse: “Out of the ground the Lord God formed every beast of the field” or “All we like sheep have gone astray,” something like that.

  LaRhonda was still part of the God Squad, and so was Fred, but the numbers had gotten smaller and smaller since LaRhonda had first taken Jesus as her personal savior, or what her father sometimes called “lost her tiny mind.” One of the girls had gone the other way and become part of the new hippie group, kids who had moved from skirts and sweaters to bell-bottom jeans and Indian print blouses. “All of them smoking that pot in Lizanne’s basement!” LaRhonda said, and Fred frowned and tapped her on the knee, as though I was the only one in Miller’s Valley who hadn’t heard that my brother was the man to see for marijuana.

  LaRhonda’s mother loved Fred, and I could tell why. He was so agreeable that it sometimes seemed like he didn’t have an opinion about anything. He’d order whatever LaRhonda did at the Dairy Queen, go along with anything Steven said. “Definitely!” was his favorite word, and about as close to a sentence as he usually got, unless you counted “Praise God.” But even praising God he was the guy who would buy beer for the fifteen-year-olds who hung around the package store after every other guy had passed them by and said “Get lost.” Sometimes we would go to LaRhonda’s house and swim in her pool, lie on the chaises, and ask Fred to bring out iced tea or sandwiches, see if there were more towels in the laundry room. “Definitely,” he always said.

  We usually left if the Ventis showed up. Even with the four of us there, a situation where most parents went out of their way to pretend to like one another, they were uncomfortable to be around. Their conversation went like this:

  “You need more ice cream like you need a hole in the
head.”

  “What difference does it make what I look like? Unless I was twenty and wearing a waitress uniform, you wouldn’t even notice.”

  “You’re crazy.”

  “You’re disgusting.”

  LaRhonda was working as a hostess at the steak house during the shifts when her mother was off, and she said she didn’t know what her mother was talking about, but at the diner we all did. After Callie shut Mr. Venti down and told him that if he fired her she would tell Tommy why, he’d turned to a girl whose mother was also a waitress at the diner. It caused all kinds of problems because both daughter and mother let Dee know that while she made the station and schedule assignments they would change them if they didn’t like them. Plus when Mr. Venti would stop by there were always angry customers wondering where their club sandwiches were when they were sitting right up on the to-go shelf waiting for a waitress who was in the back office doing who-knew-what, usually on her knees.

  “The man is almost sixty!” Dee would mutter to herself sometimes, but the rest of us kept our mouths shut. I had to admit, Mr. Venti was right about one thing: Mrs. Venti was getting really fat, and to make it worse she was wearing the clothes she’d worn when she was thinner. “She’s a total mess,” LaRhonda said. “She imagines all kinds of disgusting stuff about my father.” Once Mrs. Venti came in and spilled hot coffee down the front of the uniform of the girl at the diner, but that only made things worse because then everyone was talking about what had happened. Mrs. Venti laughed so hard, in a kind of odd and uncomfortable way, that everyone knew the coffee was no accident. That was the last time we saw her at the diner. When I came over she would try to ask me questions about what was going on there, but I stayed vague. The glass of orange juice she always had in her hand smelled like it had gone bad, and Steven said that was because it was half gin. “I thought things would be different,” she said to me one day looking out the kitchen window to the big back lawn, and after that I tried not to be alone with her.

  Mr. Bally came into the diner at least once a week. He was spending a lot of time in the valley. One Saturday he waited until I’d changed out of my uniform and then asked me if I wanted to join him at his table. A busman’s holiday, he called it, which I’d never heard before but looked up after. “Can I offer you a soda pop?” he said, when I slid into the booth, looking wary.

  “A soda pop?”

  “Why is that funny?”

  “I’m sorry, but the only person I know who calls Coke soda pop is my aunt Ruth, and that’s because she hasn’t left the house in thirteen years.”

  “She hasn’t left the house?”

  “It’s a long story. I don’t really need anything, thank you. I’ve got to get home.”

  “To work on your science project, correct? I’m still not entirely clear on the thrust of your science project.”

  “Me neither.”

  “But I can tell you’re a smart girl or you wouldn’t be doing all this research. So you’re smart enough to have a handle on what’s going on here. Let me just ask you one question: what was the biggest mistake they made in the original Roosevelt Dam project?”

  I knew the answer, but I wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction. It got so quiet at our table that you could hear the clink of knives and forks all around us. “Adam and Eve on a raft,” Dee called to the grill cook, one of her customers having eggs for early supper.

  Finally Mr. Bally said, “You must know there are two ways this can go. There’s the easy way, and there’s the hard way.”

  “The easy way.”

  “The homeowners are offered a fair market price for their properties as well as compensated for the cost of relocation.”

  “The hard way.”

  Mr. Bally leaned back and didn’t say anything. He made his fingers into a little steeple. He had a tie clip with the state seal on it, and an old Timex watch, and a wedding band. He looked like he felt sorry for me, which made me angry. Plus I felt like he was using me somehow to get what he wanted. That made me angrier.

  “You know what I’ve noticed about you, Mr. Bally? You have two different voices. You have the voice you’re using with me here, and then you have the voice you use when you come out to the valley.” It was true: when he was talking to the men at the diner, or arguing with Donald’s grandfather, or talking to Mr. Langer, Mr. Bally used a kind of folksy voice and vocabulary. It seemed practiced, and natural, and I wondered whether it was because that was the voice he’d grown up with and this, here, all business, was the voice he’d grown into.

  “So do you, young lady. You just haven’t noticed it yet.” He stirred sugar into his coffee. “Someone from the valley who understood the process and the science behind it could be extremely helpful to me and to the state water board in terms of bringing others around to a reasonable point of view. Do you have any thoughts about your plans after graduation?”

  “They’re holding a spot here for me at the diner,” I said.

  “Very funny.”

  “Are you offering me a job, Mr. Bally?”

  “Would you like one? I know you’re planning on college, but we could give you a job for the summer. It would be a lot more interesting than waiting tables. And state employees get a break on tuition at the university.”

  “A job flooding my family’s farm?”

  “That’s going to happen one way or another, Miss Miller,” Mr. Bally said. “The easy way or the hard way. Why don’t you discuss my offer with your mother?” He put a ten-dollar bill on the table, then put his coffee cup on top of it. “You still didn’t answer my question,” he said. “What was the biggest mistake they made in the original dam project? I know you know the answer.”

  I sat there saying nothing, watched him pick a mint out of the bowl at the register and walk out the double glass doors. “Too smart for your own good,” Ruth said about me sometimes when she was irritated, and I felt that way then.

  There was something I wanted to say to Winston Bally, and the simple fact was I hadn’t had the guts. One afternoon near the end of summer I had spent three hours on the banks of the river, waving off the gnats with a hand in front of my face, thinking about what I’d do if I were the engineer, the manager, the person calling the shots on Miller’s Valley. The dam was big, bigger than it needed to be. The reservoir was big, too, but not as big as it could be or maybe ought to be. The air was as thick and still as tapioca, and I felt like I might as well be the only person in the world, it was so deserted and silent except for the sound of rushing water and the occasional bullfrog thump. Until I followed Miller’s Creek pretty far in and broke through a thick line of trees, there was no sign of anything human or even alive, and then not much of one until I’d hiked so far that I could almost see our place down below. Which was the point, I guess, as far as the government people were concerned, so few people who needed to be moved to do what needed to be done.

  I’d gotten to a spot on the creek where I used to build dams myself, as a kid, and I’d stood and stared at it for a long time. As wide as that spot was now, as deep as the water lay, as fast as it ran, there was no way that any kid could build a dam there on their own the way I had when I was younger. Slowly I’d walked back the length of Miller’s Creek from that point to the river. It had always been bigger than a creek, but now it was much much bigger. Not from groundwater coming up, but from river water coming in. It was like a knock on the head, realizing that instead of reading books in some state office building I should have been here, that what Winston Bally knew that I didn’t wasn’t in maps or charts but in the way my feet were sinking deep into ground that used to be dry and now was wet.

  Sometimes I wonder whether it would have made any difference if I’d said anything, if I’d leaned across the diner table to Winston Bally and said, “You all rigged it. Years and years ago, maybe before I was even born, you decided you wanted more water and less land. You blocked off the flow of the river out of the dam locks. You block off a little more each year. What we thou
ght was nature letting more and more water take over the valley wasn’t nature at all. You all made it happen. It was slick and it was smart, deciding that one way to convince people to leave was to drown them little by little, by inches instead of all at once.”

  Maybe I would have added, “You killed Donald’s grandmother, too.”

  I wonder what he would have said. He would have known that there was nothing in all that microfilm, in any of the documents, that said, If we make the valley wet and then wetter, sooner or later all those dumb farmers will give up and move out. Besides, it was a different time then, when lots of people still believed the government always did the right thing, had our best interests at heart, and so he might have pretended to be shocked and amazed at my suggestion.

  But maybe not. We’d developed a strange relationship, me and Mr. Bally. I think he liked the idea of talking things over with someone who’d been born and grown up in Miller’s Valley, who loved the place and would mourn it forever but who also knew that its time was past. He got a strange look in his eyes sometimes when he was talking to me, like he got a kick out of what I knew, and how I knew I couldn’t do anything about what was coming.

  So maybe I would have spit out all those things that I had figured out while slapping the gnats away, and when I was done, my voice choked, my face all balled up in a battle against the tears, he would have leaned toward me and said, again, “I always knew you were the smart one.”

  Out in the diner parking lot Mr. Bally pulled down the car visor to shade his eyes. I sat in the booth watching him and said, so low no one could hear me, “The biggest mistake they made in the original dam project is that they didn’t flood a large enough area.”

  I stood up and handed Dee the ten. “Your table,” I said.

  “Hot dog,” she said, shoving the bill into her pocket.