Miller's Valley

by Anna Quindlen

  Eddie came for a visit. My mother took the day off to make dinner: lamb stew, green beans, a cake. He was in the area on business, he said, which is why Debbie wasn’t with him. He was wearing a tweed sport jacket and a plaid shirt and looked like someone from a Van Heusen commercial. Eddie was good-looking in a kind of average way, and his personality was not so different. He never got really angry, and he rarely got really excited. Or maybe he did. I didn’t really know him very well. By the time I was eight years old he was already gone at college. The difference between fifty and sixty is nothing; the difference between eight and eighteen is more or less a lifetime.

  “Mom says you’re doing great at the high school,” he said as he dug into his stew. “What are you thinking about after?”

  “She’s going to college,” my mother said from the stove. “I told you that.” My mother talked to Eddie on the phone every Sunday evening after the rates went down. Every time she got off the phone she said two things: I’m certainly proud of my son, and I don’t understand why they haven’t started a family.

  “I know that. I just meant in terms of a course of study. You can’t go wrong with a teaching degree, Mimi. Debbie had more job offers than she knew what to do with. She’s working in her father’s office because he couldn’t get anyone reliable to answer the phones, but she’ll go back to teaching school someday.”

  “I’m not sure,” I said. I was sure I wasn’t going to get an education degree or teach school, but I didn’t want to start a fight. Good morning, Miss Miller. I’m sorry I’m late, Miss Miller. I didn’t do the homework, Miss Miller. There was just no way. I’d told Steven about Mr. Bally’s offer of work, but he just waved it away like a fly at a picnic. “A government job? You’re better than that.” Of course I hadn’t said anything to my parents. My mother might have thought it was a good idea. My father might have beaten the man until his fists bled, and then where would we be? Four landowners had made deals with the state and four others had put their places on the market to see if someone who’d never heard of the water and the dam would be foolish enough to buy them. They kept lowering their prices but no one bit. In history class our teacher had talked about the domino theory because of Vietnam, which he stopped talking about after just one class, maybe because someone told him about Tommy or because he was afraid of getting in trouble with the principal, who had the tallest flagpole in town on his front lawn. But you could see the domino theory at work in the valley as the sales and the sale signs spread. And I was pretty sure I had seen the domino theory in the woods between our place and the river. A little more water in the reservoir made a little more in Miller’s Creek made a little more in the valley. Until soon it was a lot more.

  “You could run this place, the way you work around here,” said my father, tapping his fork on the edge of my plate. “I should have known neither of your brothers were going to come around to farming.”

  “Can I get a glass of milk, Mom?” Eddie said.

  “There’s nothing wrong with nursing,” said my mother.

  “No question,” said Eddie. “There’ll always be jobs for nurses.”

  “Everybody wants to eat, but nobody wants to farm,” said my father. “Where the heck do they think beef comes from?”

  “Did you see Aunt Ruth?” I asked Eddie.

  “If she wants to see him she knows where he is,” my mother said. “She can come down here and sit at the table like the rest of us.”

  Eddie looked sideways at me. No wonder he never showed up. He’d arrived in a Toyota and had to spend fifteen minutes standing outside discussing whether it had decent pickup and whether my father had fought the Japs so that they could take over the automobile business from the Americans. Eddie said it was a company car, but my father had been in a touchy mood ever since. I think deep down inside he didn’t know exactly how to feel about Eddie. He was proud of how well he’d done, but the way in which he’d done well made my father feel like Eddie was above the life he’d been raised in. I wondered if he’d feel the same about me if I went to college, especially if I didn’t become a teacher or a nurse. Sometimes LaRhonda said she was going to get a business degree, but I didn’t think she really knew what that meant. Maybe LaRhonda should go to work for Mr. Bally; she’d foreclose on a farm without thinking twice. Her father thought a girl going to college was a waste of time. “Look at this,” Mr. Venti would say, sweeping his arm out over the restaurant the way Ed Sullivan did when he introduced an act. “You’ll never want for anything. You’ll never even have to cook for your family.”

  My mother had cleared the dinner plates—“don’t get up”—and was dishing out cake when the back door slammed and Tommy came in. The look on his face, and my mother’s face, made me realize right away that he hadn’t known anything about dinner and Eddie.

  “Well, hell,” he said, slow and low and with an undertone.

  “Look what the cat dragged in,” said Eddie, and he stood up and the two of them shook hands, as though they were strangers meeting in an insurance office or something. My mother used to say sometimes that when they were little they were close, but it was hard to believe. Looking at them you couldn’t even imagine they were related. One looked like a cop and the other like a criminal.

  “What brings you to this neck of the woods?” Tommy said, pulling up a chair while my mother made him a plate.

  “Work, believe it or not. We’re doing the engineering on a new development off 502.”

  “Off 502? None of the construction guys have said anything about that.”

  “It’s early yet,” said Eddie, and the way he said it made me understand he didn’t want Tom to mention it to anyone.

  “How many houses?”

  “A good many,” said Eddie, shutting the discussion down and chasing cake crumbs with his fork. “What’s happening with you, brother?”

  Tommy mumbled with his mouth full, “Ah, a little of this, a little of that.” It was small-talk city, but that was the way my brothers liked it, I guess.

  “How’s your wife doing?”

  “She’s good. You should come down and visit. She’s teaching herself to cook. She’s getting pretty good. Mom and Dad drove down and she made them a roast beef dinner.”

  I remembered. My mother said Debbie had gotten the wrong cut of meat, made mashed potatoes from a box and gravy from a jar. “The carrots were good,” my father said. “Frozen,” my mother said.

  “Maybe I will,” said Tom, in that way you say you’re going to do something you’re never going to do. He handed his plate back to my mother, who refilled it. Eddie asked for a second piece of cake.

  “I want to take you two for a ride,” Eddie said to my parents when he was done with his cake, standing up and taking his jacket off one of the hooks by the back door.

  “We safe in that tin can?” my father said.

  “Ah, man, don’t get him started on Japanese cars,” Tommy said.

  “I bet you’d feel the same if people started driving Vietnamese cars,” our father said.

  “I don’t care who drives what as long as no one is trying to kill me.”

  When we were alone I said to Tommy, “You don’t look dressed for a wake.”

  “Yeah, right?” he said. “You want to make a pot of coffee?” He went upstairs and when he came down he was wearing one of my father’s sport shirts, a dark plaid with short sleeves. The fabric pulled across his wide shoulders. I didn’t know exactly what Tommy did with himself all day, but he was still in basic-training condition. All the other guys at the VFW had big bellies sloping over their belts. “Baby likes beer,” they would say, rubbing their midsections like a genie would show up and they would get three wishes. The wishes being three more boilermakers lined up on the bar.

  Tommy still didn’t look like he was going to a wake. No tie, hair curling down around his collar and over his ears, mustache drooping around his mouth. He poured himself some coffee and his hands shook just a bit.

  “So you and Stevie,”
he said.

  “So?”

  “I didn’t see that coming,” he said.

  “Are you okay with it?”

  “I mean, yeah. I’m just not sure he’s right for you. Don’t get sidetracked.”

  “From what?”

  “Anything. Everything. Be like Ed. Get out of here. Don’t get stuck.”

  “What about you?”

  “Never mind about me, Meems.” He took two sips of coffee and put his cup in the sink. “I’m rolling out,” he said.

  A boy three years ahead of me at the high school had joined the Army earlier in the year. He’d been in Vietnam for three weeks when he got killed. Nobody knew exactly how, except that it was a closed-casket wake, and Miller’s Valley wasn’t a place that was big on closed-casket wakes. He was the second soldier from Miller’s Valley to die there. Tom was so far the only one to come back alive.

  I did the dishes and thought about whether Tommy was going to make it to McTeague’s Funeral Home and figured that he wouldn’t. There were two bars between here and there, and a little cinder-block box of a house that one of Tommy’s semiregular girlfriends lived in. He’d get sidetracked. He usually did.

  I walked back to Ruth’s with a slab of cake on a paper plate. I figured my mother would think Tommy had eaten it. Aunt Ruth was watching The Beverly Hillbillies.

  “You know, Buddy Ebsen was a big song and dance man when he was young,” Ruth said, reaching for the cake without taking her eyes from the TV. “He was supposed to play the Tin Man in The Wizard of Oz, but he got hives when they put that silver makeup on him.” Aunt Ruth said that every time she was watching The Beverly Hillbillies, just like every time she watched The Andy Griffith Show she said the little boy was cute and Andy Griffith should have won an Oscar for A Face in the Crowd, and every time she watched The Carol Burnett Show she said, “Honey, I love her but that woman has no chin at all.” Aunt Ruth subscribed to movie magazines, and nothing ticked her off more than when my father would forget to bring them back to her when they showed up in our mailbox. She had her own mailbox, right on the road next to ours, but the mailman knew better than to put her mail in it.

  “This cake is a little dry,” Ruth said.

  “Beggars can’t be choosers.” As I’d gotten older I’d refused to side with Ruth in her spite war against my mother.

  “Just get me some milk before you go home, okay, honey?” she said, which was my cue to stop distracting her from some argument Jethro and Elly May were having on the television.

  I was at our kitchen table taking notes for a history paper on the medical techniques developed during the Civil War when I heard a car door slam and my father yelling. When my mother yelled her sentences were sharp and tight, but my father did it seldom and his words got loose-limbed and ran together so he was hard to understand. From inside the barn you could hear the cows mooing loud but low, and that made the whole thing even more confusing, like when the school band tuned up in the practice room.

  “Oh, for goodness’ sake, you know Eddie never intended any disrespect. The opposite. The exact opposite. You know that boy. You’re being ridiculous.”

  “I feel goddamned ridiculous, I can tell you that. He’s twenty-eight years old and he thinks he knows every damn thing.” I kept my head low over my paper and pretended to be writing something. “To take us out there and start talking about ranch houses and bathrooms with two sinks and attached garages and all that—what the hell was he thinking, that I was going to say, Well, gosh, Edward, sign me right up?”

  “He’s worried about you. If you’ve said it once, you’ve said it a hundred times: running a farm is hard work. And what’s wrong with living in a nice new house with wall-to-wall carpeting? You may not want to hear this, but I’d like some wall-to-wall carpeting.”

  “Miriam, you want carpeting, I’ll have it installed tomorrow. In this house. Which, in case you’ve also forgot along with that snot-nosed son of yours, was built by my great-great-grandfather. Built good, too, with four-by-fours and plaster over lath, not this sheetrock crap they’ll be using for those houses out there. You imagine my customers bringing lawn mowers out there to one of those nasty little nowhere roads to get fixed? Or no, I guess they won’t be doing that because, as Edward James Miller says driving around in his Jap car, maybe I might want to retire.”

  There was a picture in the book in front of me of a doctor dressed in a kind of cutaway jacket with a white apron over it. He was holding a saw. I just kept staring at the saw. It was bloody and looked dull. My father said a dull saw was worse than no saw at all. My brother must have lost his mind with this idea, or he’d forgotten where and who he came from.

  “You made it clear where you stand on that, and on all the rest of it. Just put it to bed.”

  “You put it to bed. You were the one standing there in an empty field, looking around and smiling and nodding like some goddamned beauty queen.”

  “You’ve let loose with enough profanity to blow the roof off this place for the next ten years,” my mother said. “Put that to bed, too. Speaking of which, I’m going to bed.”

  The door slammed twice, her, him. She didn’t even look at me as she stomped up the stairs.

  My father sat down hard at the table and glared at me, then down at my book, like he was mad at us both. “What the hell is that?” he said, still kind of yelling.

  “Amputation,” I said.

  “You want to live in a new house with all the modern conveniences?”

  I tried to imagine anyone in my position at that moment who would say anything different, even LaRhonda or Tommy. “No,” I said.

  My father walked out the back door and let it slam behind him. “Get back here,” my mother called from their bedroom window, but my father just kept walking down the back path and into the dark.

  I was happy that only the valedictorian gave a speech at the high school graduation. My mother was annoyed, though. “Every other school, they both speak, number one, number two,” she said. “How will anyone know you were the salutatorian if you don’t get to speak?”

  “It’s in the program,” I said. It also said I’d won the 1971 Chamber of Commerce Mathematics Prize. Richard got the science prize, although neither of us had placed out of our region with our projects. He’d been very disappointed, but I knew I wasn’t going to win with “Andover, Pennsylvania, 1921–1930: A History of Water Management in a Drowned Town.”

  “You pulled your punches, Miss Miller,” Mr. Bally had said after he’d polished off a western omelet at one of my tables the week after the regionals. “I thought you were going to be taking a good hard look at the water situation in Miller’s Valley, not go over ancient history.”

  “I did take a good hard look,” I said as I refilled his coffee cup. “I don’t know that you would have liked much what I saw.” That was as close as I ever got to saying that I suspected what the government people had been up to. I stood at the table with the coffeepot in my hand and looked at him with my eyes narrowed.

  “Aha,” he said. That was it.

  “Oh, Mimi, you took me right back to when I was a girl!” Cissy had said, clapping her soft little hands.

  “It turned out a little more like a history project than I expected,” Mrs. Farrell said. I could tell she was disappointed in me, and since she’d seen Steven pick me up a couple of times in his truck I was betting she thought he was the reason I hadn’t done better. I couldn’t really tell her what had happened. I wanted to say, Mrs. Farrell, if you did research and found out that someone you really loved was going to die, would you publish it or keep it to yourself? But I just came up with my own answer, and did what I did, and didn’t do what I couldn’t bring myself to do.

  I got a check from the Chamber of Commerce for a hundred dollars for the math prize, and a check from the PTA for a hundred dollars for being salutatorian, and Mr. Venti surprised me by giving me a hundred dollars in new twenty-dollar bills in a card shaped like a mortarboard. With the money I’d saved
from my job and a scholarship I’d gotten from the Pennsylvania League of Women Voters, I’d be able to make it through at least two years at the state university, and Mrs. Farrell said she was sure there was more scholarship money out there for a woman in math and science. I liked it, when she said that, like I was actually a woman, and in math and science.

  My parents had a party in our yard, the tables set up between the back of our house and the front of Ruth’s. If you talked to my mother she said that was the best place because there was plenty of room and some trees for shade. If you talked to my father he said it was the best place because then Ruth could sit in a chair by her window and hear most of what was going on. Steven insisted on walking with one arm around me, telling people to take a good look at the gold heart with the diamond at its center he’d given me as a gift. “It’s a quarter carat,” he said over and over again. “When she graduates from college there’ll be a bigger stone, and it won’t be in a necklace.” He’d already bought one house and then resold it. He’d made almost two thousand dollars and said next time it would be more when he was finished with the two new places he was working on.

  “Ed, I’d like to talk to you about an investment that I’m pretty sure will interest you,” he said to my brother, backing him up against the dessert table.

  “Now, son, this is a social occasion,” my father said to him after a few minutes. Eddie took his business card out of his wallet and gave it to Steven. Steven did the same. “I’m going to make your brother rich,” he said.

  He’d talked about calling his company Steamy or Misty, both names that combined his and mine, neither of which made any sense at all and sounded more like a dirty movie than a real estate business. “I guess I’m just a sentimental guy,” he said when I shot them down. Finally I’d come up with Home Sweet Home when I was having lunch with Aunt Ruth and staring at a fake sampler she had on her wall in the kitchen. Steven had gone right out and had cards printed up. He was still working construction, then knocking off to go over to work on the places he was fixing up. I helped him some, pulling up stained carpeting, chiseling Pepto pink tile off the bathroom wall. I’d panicked him a little bit in one of the houses when the toilet ran slow and I said the septic might be failing, but I had an old plumbing snake of my father’s, and once I snaked it it was fine.