Miller's Valley

by Anna Quindlen

  The swearing was really bad some days. “Oh, put a sock in it, Mimi,” Ruth said one day when I made a face. “You’re just like your mother. Let the poor man say whatever he wants.”

  “Shit shit shit!” my father yelled.

  “That’s right, Buddy, you go right ahead,” Ruth said, taking his hand, but he pulled it away.

  I liked to sit with him and pretend everything was just the same. “Pop, we’re reading about the Depression in this course, and I have to say, I had no idea how bad it was. You were, what, fourteen or fifteen or something? Maybe it wasn’t as bad for farmers. At least you could grow your own food. I guess that’s always been the advantage of having a farm, right? You might not have money but you’ve always got food.”

  “Not in January you don’t,” Ruth said.

  “I wasn’t talking to you,” I said.

  “I know, honey,” Ruth said. “There’s a car pulled up on the drive.”

  It was still pouring, but as soon as I saw the dark sedan through the window I went outside. My shirt soaked up the rain like a sponge, like it wanted to pull me down into the mud, like my foot and the boot had been just the beginning and the farm was going to eat me whole. I went over to the driver’s side window of the car, and Winston Bally rolled it down.

  “Get off my property,” I said.

  “I just wanted to check in on your father. I was sorry to hear about his illness.”

  “Get off his property,” I said.

  “I need to talk to your mother,” he said.

  “Get off her property.”

  “I’ll go to see her at the hospital,” he said. “I guess your father’s not really in a position to make decisions anyhow, is he?”

  “Just stay away from my family,” I said, turning my back on him. It was the rudest I’d ever been to anyone, and I didn’t care one bit, not after what he’d said about my father. It made me feel good, to talk like that, better than I’d felt in weeks.

  My least favorite part of the fall was listening to people tell me how much their kids liked it at the state university. Mrs. Venti said that LaRhonda had the prettiest roommate, a girl from outside Pittsburgh whose father worked at Alcoa, and that the two of them were both figuring on being Kappas. The only thing worse than hearing that was listening to the woman who worked in the steak house kitchen and went on and on about how homesick her daughter was. I wanted to tell her that if her daughter really wanted to know homesick, she should stay home in my house. I felt like my head was always full of things like that, that I felt like shouting but could never get away with even saying out loud.

  LaRhonda came home at Thanksgiving, and the next thing I knew she was asking me to be her maid of honor, telling me that she was getting married over Christmas break, showing me a good-size diamond ring. “I’m telling you right now, there’s no way Fred bought that unless it’s a cubic zirconium,” Steven said. It always amazed me, the things he knew. A cubic zirconium. He was right about one thing. Fred hadn’t paid for the ring himself but with a loan from his future father-in-law, who took one look at the chip Fred had gotten at the new mall and said, “You’d need a microscope to see that thing.”

  “I guess there are some girls at school who are married, right?” I said, but LaRhonda frowned and her mother said, “Oh, Mimi, she’s not going back to the university. She’s staying right here with Fred. Mr. Venti’s got plans for him. He always wanted a son.”

  “I don’t know why you keep saying that,” said LaRhonda.

  “When I get the money together I’ll buy you a ring bigger than that one,” said Steven in the back bedroom of a house he’d just bought at auction. He loved telling stories about the future. He moved from place to place now, couldn’t see the point in renting an apartment or even a room when he owned a couple of houses and didn’t care about living in a place with the kitchen cabinets in a pile in the backyard waiting to be carried off and replaced by ones he’d found at a job lot. He was really good about doing more with less. At some building site he’d found a small stall shower that had been the wrong size for the bathroom it was intended for, and bought it for ten bucks from the foreman. It was in the second bathroom of the house he was working on, and living in. We’d had sex standing up in it. It sounded a lot better than it turned out to be, but Steven seemed to like the idea. It was one of those things he could talk about after.

  The other bridesmaids were two of the Holy Rollers from high school, and two girls LaRhonda had met at college and who I was pretty sure she wouldn’t be seeing again. They stayed at the Ventis’ house the week of the wedding, and the rooms in the children’s wing were finally full. But I was the one who stayed in LaRhonda’s room, and who heard her after the rehearsal dinner throwing up in her bathroom, with its metallic wallpaper and ruffled shower curtain. Her hair was in rollers for the next day, and one fell out and landed in the toilet with a plop, and I think that’s what set her off. She sat back on her heels, her pink furry slippers poking out from under her nightgown, and wailed, “It was only three times and it hurt and I didn’t even like it. Not one little bit.”

  I knelt down next to her, feeling stupid because I was probably the only bridesmaid who hadn’t immediately understood the reason for getting engaged at Thanksgiving, getting married at Christmas, and quitting college. I put one arm around her shoulder, which I don’t think I’d ever done in all the years we’d known one another, and then all of a sudden the weird funny feeling I’d been having for a couple of days turned into something worse, and I leaned down into the toilet and threw up, too, right on top of that pink foam roller. I’d had a lot of clams casino at the rehearsal dinner, and a couple of whiskey sours. The inside of that toilet was ugly.

  “Oh, Lord, I’m sorry,” I said, wiping my mouth with a piece of toilet paper. “That smell gets to you, like it’s contagious.” But when I looked up at LaRhonda she’d stopped crying and her mouth was open, with a little pearly drop of drool at one corner, and she was staring at me.

  “Oh my God, Mimi, you, too? You’re the one who is supposed to be so damn smart.”

  “What?”

  “I figured you must have been doing something to take care of yourself, all the times you’ve been doing the dirty with him. And I do it three lousy times and here I am.”

  “I just ate a bad clam,” I said, but then it happened again.

  Lying in bed I stared at the ceiling, willing a bad clam onto the stainless platter with the paper doily that had been passed around before dinner. A bad clam would save my life. “You know what my mother says?” LaRhonda said from the darkness. “She says now I won’t think I’m so special.”

  “You’ve only had sex with Fred three times?” I said.

  “I’ve only had sex with Fred once.”

  “I didn’t really care for her dress,” my mother said Sunday morning when I finally got home. “That empire waist that’s so popular just looks like maternity clothes to me.” We were at the kitchen table and my mother was watching me carefully, to see if I showed anything on my face, but I was holding it still so I wouldn’t look down at the fried eggs and bacon she’d put in front of me and get sick all over again. I kept telling myself I was hungover, which was true beyond anything I’d ever known before. Standing at the altar of the Presbyterian church, watching the peevish look on LaRhonda’s face when Fred couldn’t get the ring over her knuckle, trying to block out Steven’s big grin as he stood two ushers down in a rented tuxedo with lapels like landing strips, I kept telling myself that I was just as smart as LaRhonda said. But I wasn’t sure I believed it anymore.

  We were slow-dancing to “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head” at the reception when Steven whispered in my ear, “I wonder where Mr. Venti keeps his shotgun.”

  “They probably would have gotten married eventually anyhow.”

  “You think? I figured LaRhonda would have dumped him by February for some frat boy with blond hair and a rich daddy.”

  So had I. I wondered if the frat boy had
been time one and time two, and Fred had been time three to explain away the baby. But I just said, “She has the rich daddy, so I guess that’s taken care of.” Then I ran for the ladies’ room. It was packed the way it always was at a wedding. It’s hard to throw up silently, but I thought I’d managed it until I got to the sink and one of the other bridesmaids said, “I know, right? It’s that punch. It tastes like Hawaiian Punch going down but I think there’s a lot of booze in it.”

  “Right,” I said, washing my hands and hoping I was done. “I’m drinking nothing but champagne for the rest of the night.”

  “Don’t do that,” she said. “Champagne is the worst hangover ever.”

  “Amen, sister,” said someone at one of the other sinks.

  There were bottles and bottles of champagne, empties everywhere, and some of the guys were having a great time popping the corks and hitting the ceiling. “Anybody hits a chandelier, they’re paying for it,” Mr. Venti had yelled.

  “You okay?” Steven said.

  “I will be,” I said.

  “You got black stuff all over your eyes,” he said, coming at me with a cocktail napkin that said LARHONDA AND FRED with a pair of gold bands circled above their names and a dove that looked more like a pigeon on top of the bands.

  “I’ll do it,” I said, glad for an excuse to go back into the bathroom. LaRhonda was there, too. “I knew I’d find you in here,” she said, trying to push some pieces back into the big poof of curls they’d made on her head.

  “I had too much to drink,” I said.

  “Yeah, that’s what I keep telling people, too, and then my mother laughs and starts to cry. She’s going to give everybody in town something to talk about. You’re next, Mimi.”

  “No, I’m not,” I said, knowing I meant it but not what I was going to do about it. I walked out and Steven and Fred were talking, their arms around each other’s shoulders, their bow ties hanging from clips off their collars, and behind them two older women danced while their husbands sat at a table with Mr. Venti. I felt a hand on my arm and it was my mother. “I’m heading home to check on your father,” she said. “You okay to get yourself back? You don’t look well.”

  “I had too much to drink,” I said.

  “Well, it’s a wedding. I think you got a little tipsy at Ed’s wedding, too.”

  “You’re not planning a wedding like this for me, are you?”

  My mother looked around and made a little bit of a face. “I always thought it made a lot more sense to spend the money on a down payment,” she said. “But even so we’ve got years and years to think about that, Mary Margaret. Don’t stay out too late.”

  Sometimes you don’t know who in the world to ask for help and then you just run into the right person by accident, like some stranger who comes down the road when your car won’t start and has jumper cables in his trunk. My lab partner, Laura, who looked like the kind of person who would someday be a Girl Scout troop leader, who someday would actually turn out to be a Girl Scout troop leader, always went to the ladies’ room right after class was over because she had a long drive to the hospital where her mother was being treated for breast cancer. Three days running she found me in the stall on my knees, and on the fourth she said, “Are you expecting?”

  “I think so.”

  “Do you want to be?”

  I looked up at her and I figure it was written all over my face. It was written all over hers, too. I never asked and she never told me, never in all the time I knew her, but there was something about the way she lifted her chin and narrowed her eyes that made me know she’d been kneeling where I was and had found some way out of it. We went out to her car and she wrote something on a sheet of loose-leaf and tore it out of her binder and handed it to me.

  “Are you okay for money?” she said.

  “I think so,” I said.

  This is all I have to say about that because it’s pretty much all I recall:

  I took the day off work. I called in sick to school. Laura made an appointment for me so the long-distance number wouldn’t show up on my mother’s phone bill. She would have noticed. Before dawn I drove an hour to a grubby little bus station with a wire newspaper stand and a candy machine in one corner.

  I rode for almost two hours on a dirty bus with candy wrappers on the floor in the back, which was where I was sitting. Fifth Avenues and Baby Ruths. It was early in the morning and it was a good thing I had a plastic bag in my purse, because I brought up the Cheerios I’d had for breakfast.

  I fell asleep for the last ten minutes and woke when the bus went up a big loop-the-loop ramp that felt like a carnival ride in the worst way. I left the plastic bag on the floor of the bus, next to the candy wrappers. I was past caring.

  I walked fourteen blocks through the city streets to an office building with an elevator that seemed to take a long time to come. I took it to the sixth floor.

  The waiting room was filled with women but I can’t tell you anything about them because none of us looked at each other. There were two men and they seemed to make it worse. Both of the women they were with were crying.

  We all pretended to read magazines. I don’t know why they had Highlights for Children. Maybe some women brought their kids, although I couldn’t imagine why, or how the rest of us would have felt if there had been a child in the waiting room. I read “Goofus and Gallant” in Highlights, just the same as I always did at the dentist. Goofus chewed with his mouth open and used his hand to wipe his mouth. Gallant chewed with his mouth closed and used his napkin. I felt like I was waiting to have a tooth filled. The smell was the same as the dentist’s office, too, that sharp chemical combination of whatever they used to clean the floors and whatever they used on the patients. The carpet was somewhere between tan, brown, and grubby. The way we all stared down at it, you would have thought it had the secret of life woven into the pile.

  “Ruth Kostovich,” one of the nurses said, and I didn’t move at first. “Ruth?” she repeated, and I put down Highlights. The girl next to me picked it up. Somebody had already done the puzzles in pen.

  The doctor was a woman. I had never seen a woman doctor before. She asked me if I had ever had an internal. When she saw the look on my face she explained about a speculum. She said it would be cold. I put my arm over my eyes. The lights were bright.

  “Count backward from one hundred,” the nurse said. I remember ninety-seven.

  I woke up and had orange juice and an Oreo. Then I threw up into a basin. I had two Ritz crackers and fell asleep for an hour. A nurse led me to a chair in the waiting room, but there were no magazines on the table right next to me and I didn’t want to try to walk across the room. I just sat and thought about nothing for a while. The nurse at the front desk said I had to wait for a friend or relative to pick me up before I could leave. When she was on the phone I slid out the door. The elevator took even longer and I was afraid the nurse would come looking for me, but there were plenty of women to keep her busy. I leaned against the wall while I waited for the elevator.

  On the bus back I started to cry because I remembered the doctor putting her hand around my ankle as she left the room and whispering, “I’m glad I was able to help you.” I started to cry because I realized I was free. I was one of those people who read the papers every morning, at first because we had to for social studies, later because I just liked to do it to remind myself that there was a world outside of where I was. I already knew that a year ago there wouldn’t have been any doctor, any waiting room, any anesthetic. I wondered how you found someone to do this before, and what it felt like. I was glad I didn’t have to find out. Maybe Laura knew.

  If anyone had asked me how I felt, I would have said, scared and relieved. Scared that someone would find out, relieved that it was over and I was done. I never for one moment thought of it as a baby, even when I was reading Highlights for Children. I thought of it as an anchor, dragging me down. I thought of it as my mother’s disappointment like a living thing, more of a living
thing, more real, than whatever had been inside of me. I thought of it as a lifetime of mornings spent listening to Steven’s stories at the table, of mopping kitchen floors and folding ragged towels, of going to dinner at the diner and maybe the steak house on my birthday and looking around and thinking, No, no, no, this is not my life, this is not my life. I didn’t know what my life was, or would be. I just knew it couldn’t be that.

  I never told anyone beforehand, especially not Steven, because he would have started making plans, a two-bedroom house with a tiny bedroom for a baby, a small ceremony with LaRhonda and Fred standing next to us. You were supposed to be so smart, Mimi, I could hear LaRhonda thinking as she stood next to me holding a bouquet. Steven would have tried to stop me. No one was going to stop me. I paid with cash from the corn can. Then I folded the whole thing up and put it in a sealed envelope in my mind, and that’s where it stayed.

  “How are you?” Laura said two days later as we walked into class.

  “I’m fine,” I said.

  We had a test. I got an A. After that I never got anything but an A on anything, even statistics. And I never, in my whole life, ate an Oreo again.

  Except for sex and school I lived like what Ruth called a spinster, cooking, cleaning, taking my father for hospital appointments and long drives with no destination. Somewhere nineteen-year-old girls were going to parties, but I wasn’t one of them. It was like everyone and everything had moved on, and I was standing in place, shifting hay bales and making stew. Even Donald had stopped writing to me. His last letter said he’d decided to major in history, and that he had given up on the golf team because it took too much time. It could have been a dispatch from the moon, as much as it had to do with what I was doing, or not doing, or never doing. I didn’t write back. What would I say? That the feed corn in the back bin got moldy and I had to shovel it out and ditch it? Every once in a while I went over to play chess with Donald’s grandfather. “What do you hear from our college boy?” he would say. “He sounds good,” I would say. That’s how life is, I guess. You know your lines.