Benediction (21 page)

No, Mother.

At least you didn’t wait till you were this old.

Alene leaned forward and kissed her on the cheek. We’re out here now, Mother.

Lorraine pushed off and swung her arms and swam a few strokes across the tank, the
water was deep enough, and crossed to the water pipe. She stood up half out of the
water gleaming wet and spun around making a wave with her cupped hands and then came
swimming back. She stood up again. Then without a word Willa just lay out and began
a surprising backstroke that made her appear to be a kind of delicate white bird in
the water and went a little ways across the tank and stood up. Her hair had come loose
from its pins and was long and full and shiny, then she floated back to them and stood
again.

Your hair is so beautiful, Lorraine said.

Oh. Thank you. I’ve always been too vain about my hair. I’m afraid I still am.

It’s beautiful, Mother. I’ve always wished I had your hair instead of mine.

But you’ve always been so pretty, dear. So tall and graceful.

Oh no. That’s not true.

It is, dear.

Then Lorraine said, Alice, do you know how to swim?

No.

Can you float?

I don’t know how.

It’s time to learn. Come out here into the middle. Alene, will you help?

The two women held her as she lay back.

Now just breathe. And spread your arms out.

When she began to sink they lifted her up, and after a while she was able to stay
up and they stepped back and she lay out on the water, half-submerged, her blue eyes
open to the blue sky.

After a time they got out and sat in the lawn chairs, facing the sun. It was past
middle of the afternoon now. The women put on their sunglasses and drank the chilled
wine that had been set in the tank and gave Alice a little to taste. They sat naked,
drying in the sun. Willa’s long white hair hung down over the chair back.

Then some of the black cows in the pasture began to come cautiously up to drink. The
cattle snorted and switched their tails, looking at the women, until one of the older
cows came up and halted and advanced and came on, still watching them, and stepped
heavily up onto the concrete and shoved at the stock water with her black rubbery
muzzle and drank and afterward stood dripping, looking at them, and drank again. Then
the other cattle came up and drank, their young black calves with them.

The women and the girl watched one nearby cow with a calf beside her.

That calf will want to eat when they go back out to the pasture, Willa said. You know
how they butt and pull on their mothers.

Yes, but it’s nice to nurse, Lorraine said. You feel the world might be all right
then. And you can feel it down inside you too.

What if you had to be butted like they do? Willa said. What if you were a milk cow
with that great bag hanging down? Think of that between your legs, the way milk cows
have to trot with that full bag.

I know, Lorraine said. But think of a man washing your tits with warm soapy water,
fondling you twice a day.

She and Alene laughed.

Or a woman, Alene said. Women milk cows too.

Or a woman, Lorraine said.

Now you’re going to embarrass Alice and me, Willa said.

Are you embarrassed, Alice?

No.

No. She’s not embarrassed.

I’m going to get back in, Alice said.

The women watched her move to the tank, this young thin quiet girl, naked out in the
country in the broad daylight. The cows looked at her. She climbed into the tank and
lay out flat and floated and paddled her feet and came to the other side and stood.
A brief gust of wind rose up, the water spouted from the pipe, and she turned her
head and drank.

The women climbed into the tank with her and squatted down and lay back and floated
and stood streaming. Their faces and bodies shining. Later they got out and dried
off and put on their clothes and carried the lawn chairs and the empty wine bottle
and walked back through the corral and across the hot gravel drive to the house. Their
hair was still damp. It felt heavy and cool on the backs of their necks.

T
WO MONTHS AFTER
Alene introduced the principal to her mother in a Denver restaurant, she was buying
groceries on a Saturday morning in the little town where she taught school. She was
standing in the produce section when a short black-haired woman in nice clothes came
up to her and without warning reached up and slapped her in the face.

Wait! Alene said. What are you doing?

But she recognized the woman. She’d never met her before, but she’d seen her picture
in the newspaper once, showing the principal with his wife and their two children.

The woman began to scream. You’re filthy! You’re just a whore! I won’t let him go!
I won’t ever! She raised her hand again, but Alene caught her wrists and shoved her
away. The woman fell back in her high-heeled shoes and good dress against the stand
of oranges and knocked some of them rolling out across the floor.

Oh! You shoved me! You can’t do that.

People were watching them now. Housewives, old single men, the stockboy. The woman
rushed at Alene and tried now to hit her with her purse, swinging it. Wait, Alene
said. Stop it.

Oh, don’t speak to me. Whore!

Then the grocery manager came hurrying up. What’s going on here? What’s this?

She’s sleeping with my husband. She wants to steal him. She’s a whore.

Here now, he said. Stop this. Let me help you. He put his arm
around her and she tried to slap him too, but he caught her arms and pinned them to
her sides. Whoa, he said, let’s just go outside. Come with me.

He held her tight and half carried her out the door. Alene and the others watched
them out in the parking lot. The manager opened the car door and she got in. She appeared
to be calmer now, as if she suddenly were exhausted. He stood talking to her, and
then he shut the car door, she started the engine and drove off. The manager came
back in the store and walked up to Alene. Aren’t you a teacher in the grade school?

Yes.

What are you doing? he said and shook his head.

I’ll just go, Alene said. She left her grocery cart and went outside to her car into
the cold day. She drove home and on the following Monday she returned to her classroom
of young children. Everyone in town knew what had happened in the grocery store and
nevertheless there she was, still teaching.

The principal of her school called her into the school office and said they could
not have this behavior, she’d have to be on probation now, and one more thing like
this, if anything happened again, they’d let her go. She was a good teacher, he said.
They didn’t want to lose her. But they couldn’t have this.

In the other town the man, the principal, almost lost his job too. The district school
board met with him in executive session in the school’s library. The board chairman,
a retired insurance agent, said, In the name of Jesus, what were you thinking of?
Didn’t you know you can’t do that?

Yes. I knew.

Then why did you?

Oh, we all know why, said one of the other board members, a young man. Why did you
think you could get away with it? That’s what I want to know. I thought you grew up
in a place like this.

Yes. It was about this size.

Then you would know you can’t do anything without everybody else in town hearing what
happened before you even got home. Whether you broke your leg or your thumb or some
woman’s heart on the other side of the county there.

I know that, the principal said.

So what were you thinking of? Tell us.

He didn’t answer. He looked around the room at them, in the school library with the
reference books collecting dust on the shelves and the school librarian’s desk located
in the place where she could keep watch on everything, and the bright posters on the
walls.

He wasn’t thinking, one of the others said. That’s the point of all this. You weren’t
thinking, were you. It wasn’t about thinking. Thinking didn’t have a thing to do with
it.

He didn’t answer that either.

All right, the old chairman said. You can never mind that. You will have to at least
answer this, though. Are you done with her?

The principal looked at him for a moment. I am, he said.

You’re finished.

Yes.

You promise us that.

Yes.

Never mind what you promise your wife. You have to be sure, what you tell us. We won’t
put up with this kind of thing. We’re not like your wife might be, we won’t take you
back.

I said it was over.

All right. The chairman looked around the room. Anything else concerning this issue
here today?

None of them spoke.

All right then. I don’t like this way of doing things. Talking out here in the open
about what ought to be kept back secret behind closed doors. This isn’t good. I don’t
like it.

She never met the principal again. She did not even have a final talk or a final hour
with him in a café or a last night in a rented bed in a hotel room. She only ever
saw him once again, and that was from a distance at a meeting when he crossed in a
hallway fifty feet away, wearing a suit and tie. Then in the summer she heard that
he and his wife and children had moved to Utah.

She phoned three times during those months, but he couldn’t or wouldn’t take her calls.
She wrote him a letter but she never knew if he received it, or if he simply refused
to answer. She decided finally that he was a kind of coward for that. That was the
word that came to her mind. She herself stayed and taught for years in the same little
town. She believed she had to do that. It took a kind of courage. She was marked and
known. It was how you paid for love. But over time that was lost too. She became part
of the history of the town, like wallpaper in the old houses—the aging lonely isolated
woman, the unmarried schoolteacher living out her days among other people’s children,
a woman who’d had a brief moment of excitement and romance a long time ago and afterward
had retreated and lived quietly and made no more disturbance.

The principal only ever came to visit her in dreams that were never satisfactory and
from which she woke in tears, with an ache that wouldn’t be healed or soothed.

She had a picture of him that she had taken herself. And one of them together in the
hotel lobby that the desk clerk in Denver had taken that first winter. A black-and-white
picture which didn’t show how red their cheeks were, coming in off the cold street,
before they rode the elevator up to the room to undress and lie down in bed together.

H
E WAS SITTING
in his chair at the window after breakfast when he saw Alice go out the front door
and retrieve her bicycle from the back porch and then push it along the side of Berta
May’s house and begin to ride in the street. He watched her pedal out of sight. He
looked the other way to the west where the barn and the corral were. He hadn’t got
the barn painted and the weeds in the corral were as tall as the top of the fence.
Then Alice rode back into view and he watched her pedal out of sight in the other
direction.

He drifted off to sleep. When he woke it looked hot outside in the yard. He couldn’t
see the girl. He pushed against the arms of the chair and stood a while to steady
himself. All was quiet. He took his cane and began to walk, shuffling, and looked
out to the kitchen. He called, Are you there, Mary? He shuffled on and entered the
bathroom, looking at his face in the mirror, an old man with a day-old grizzled beard,
looking angry and puzzled at the same time. He stood his cane against the wall and
pushed down his sweatpants and sat too hard. After a while he tried to get up. He
called, Mary, come here, will you? He sat. He called again. Where in the hell? And
dozed off.

Then she had come in. You’re in here, she said.

He opened his eyes. Where were you? I called for you.

I was outside talking to Berta May in the backyard.

I couldn’t find you.

I’m sorry. Are you done here?

As much as I’m going to be. Now I can’t get up.

Let me help you.

Wait. Maybe you better get Lorraine.

She’s downtown shopping.

I don’t want you to hurt yourself.

I’ll be careful.

She lifted under his arm and he gradually rose up and stood, his legs shaking, quivering.

Honey, are you all right?

He looked straight ahead. Yeah.

She drew up the diaper inside his sweatpants. This one’s still good, she said. We
don’t need to change it.

I’m about like a goddamn baby, he said. It’s a damn nuisance.

It’s time for your pill. Let’s get you in the bedroom.

She held his arm while he used his cane and they went into the room and he slumped
on the bed, then he lay back and she lifted his legs over in place.

I don’t like you lifting like that, he said. You’re going to hurt your back.