Child of a Rainless Year (3 page)
Read Child of a Rainless Year Online
Authors: Jane Lindskold
“Welcome, Mira! Welcome to Idaho.”
Stanley Fenn had gone off and collected my luggage. Now with a grin and a toss of his head he led the way to the family car. It was one of those big, cavernous cars that were so common then. Judging from the shine of its royal blue paint, it was its owner’s pride and joy. My bags were put in the trunk, but I was offered a seat up front between the Fenns.
As soon as we were out of the station parking area, Stanley said, “We could take you back to the house right away, but we thought you might like a chance to visit first. Are you interested in having some ice cream?”
The funny thing was, before this trip I probably would have said “No, thank you,” very quietly, but I’d learned a little about adults during that long train ride. I’d especially learned to hear when an adult very much needed to give a treat. So I said, “Yes, thank you,” and we went off, not just to a lunch counter that served ice cream, but to a full-fledged ice cream parlor, a place that looked like a sweet itself, with pink-and-white-striped wallpaper and Tiffany shades on all the hanging lamps.
Once we were seated, and careful consideration had been addressed to the incredible assortment of flavors and combinations on the menu, Maybelle Fenn gave me a serious look.
“Now, first things first, Mira. We need to settle what you are to call us. We’re not your parents, and we don’t expect you to call us Dad and Mom—or even Mother and Father. That just wouldn’t be right.”
I felt immensely relieved to hear this. I had never before met two people who deserved more to be called “Mom and Dad” but with my mother only missing … I sat up straight as a thought hit me. I’d always assumed my father was either dead or had walked out on my mother of his own free will. Could it be that he was missing, too? Could Mother be out there somewhere, looking for him?
That last idea seemed ridiculous. Mother had certainly never seemed to miss him, but for a moment my father seemed a little bit more real.
“We were thinking,” Stanley said, taking over from Maybelle, “that maybe you could call us Aunt and Uncle.”
“Uncle Stanley,” I said, testing the words, “and Aunt Maybelle?”
“That would do it,” he replied, satisfied.
And it did, but before the year was over he was Uncle Stan and she was Aunt May. The names fit better, and we were all quite pleased: them because it showed them I was getting comfortable with them, me because these new names made them a little more my own.
In all the time I knew them, the Fenns only did one strange thing. Soon after I came to live with them, they sold their house, packed up everything, and moved us to Ohio. This is when they changed their name to “Fenn.” Before it had been Flinwick. At this time, my surname was also changed to “Fenn,” and whenever anyone asked about my origins, they were told that I was the child of cousins of Uncle Stan. He had a way of saying this that made further questions unlikely, and before long no one asked.
Later, when I thought about it, I realized that the Fenns had been planning this change since before my arrival. They had introduced themselves to me as Maybelle and Stanley, but the few people we had contact with before the move called them “Martha” and “Steven.”
Once we moved, however, the Fenns did nothing at all strange. Uncle Stan went to work for an architect for whom he drew blueprints. He also kept—or so I gathered from dinnertime conversations—the architect’s more fanciful designs from falling down or coming to pieces.
Aunt May’s job was the house and taking care of me. Mine was going to school. I went to a perfectly ordinary school here, rather than the exclusive seminary. This wasn’t because the Fenns didn’t want to spend the tuition. The public schools in our middle-class neighborhood were where just about everyone went. They offered a good, solid grounding in the basic subjects, with extracurricular offerings in art or music or sports for those who showed the inclination or interest.
Needless to say, I was interested in whatever art classes I could get, but I was getting another education, especially during the first few years following my move to Ohio, an education that almost drowned out my perennial fascination with color. I was learning how the society outside of my mother’s house lived, and I was completely fascinated.
For one thing, there was the entire electronic media. When making one of my rare visits to friends’ houses, I had listened to radio and seen television, but this exposure had been in passing. Mostly my schoolmate’s mothers were eager to chase us outside to play.
Now I lived in a house with several radios. The Fenns encouraged me to tune the one in the family room to programs I liked. There was also a television, but my interest in that was limited. I enjoyed the variety shows, and have many happy memories of evenings spent with the Fenns watching some singing or dancing troupe on the small screen. However, the dramas and adventure stories that fueled the imaginations of so many of my classmates didn’t grab my attention. I simply couldn’t believe that the black-and-white pictures, everything defined in shades of grey, were real.
Movies were another matter. Those that were in color fascinated me to the point that Uncle Stan laughed and said that I acted like I was drunk after seeing one. Black-and-white films, even those my schoolmates assured me were wonderful, bored me, sometimes even put me to sleep.
But there was so much more … Cheap toys from the drugstore. Comic books—I loved those! Ice cream sundaes. Coloring books. I was a kid growing up in a town where the post—World War II security of the fifties hadn’t yet been touched by the unrest of the later sixties. My new family was neither rich nor poor, but comfortably middle class. Even when I was denied something, even when I whined and fussed, I knew deep down inside that the Fenns were making the right decisions.
Sometimes, though, especially in the matter of clothing, I longed for something other than the practical playsuits and jumpers Aunt May bought for me. I positively hated stretch pants, and actually preferred skirts to the trouser sets my playmates delighted in.
Back at home in New Mexico, other than my school uniform, my clothing in my mother’s house had been styled after the fashions of another time. My skirts had been nearly floor-length, the cuts modified versions of what a grown woman would wear. Everything—even my underwear—had been handmade, tailored to every shift of my growing body by one of the silent women. The fabrics had been expensive and soft. In comparison, the clothing Aunt May and I selected from the Sears catalog or bought at one of the local shops seemed stiff and unforgiving.
I longed for a bit of lace at my collars or for frocks made of velvet, and Aunt May gave in—for special occasions.
“You can’t wear party dresses everyday,” she said, “especially not the way you’re always messing about with paints and crayons—not to mention pastels!”
I didn’t push, especially since I knew Aunt May was right. When I got absorbed in whatever I was drawing or painting, I
did
make a mess. Even so, a little rebellious voice inside of me would think, “Mother wore dresses like that everyday—and nicer, too. Her lace never itched. Her velvet didn’t go all flat and squashy where she sat. I bet her shoes didn’t pinch either.”
did
make a mess. Even so, a little rebellious voice inside of me would think, “Mother wore dresses like that everyday—and nicer, too. Her lace never itched. Her velvet didn’t go all flat and squashy where she sat. I bet her shoes didn’t pinch either.”
When things like this made me think about it, I knew my earlier life—so increasingly dreamlike now—had not been at all usual. Life within the walls of my mother’s house had been more like growing up in a foreign land—even more than growing up in a small New Mexico town would have been for a girl now solidly ensconced in a small town in Ohio.
As I grew older and learned more, I began to think my mother’s clothing had possessed an early Victorian feel: full skirts, scooped necklines, capes and cloaks rather than coats, elaborate hats or even more elaborate hairdressing. Yet, Mother hadn’t been wearing old gowns dug out from some musty trunk. Her clothing had been new, the seamstress dummies in the sewing rooms always occupied with some new creation or some older one being refreshed.
It was a puzzle, but as time passed and I became more and more comfortable with my life with the Fenns, my inadvertent comparisons of my life now to what had been and what was faded away until my life before was nothing but a colorful dream. Moreover, I was growing up. Like most girls of that date and time, I had no desire to be thought different by my peers. The strangeness of my early life was something to be put aside in favor of finding my way in the present.
The Fenns were good to me, but they were hardly the unreal, perfect parents presented by television. Uncle Stan could have one too many drinks of an evening, especially when his architect boss had been particularly trying. Then he would become sullen, like a brooding thunderstorm. I learned to go off to my room when he was in one of those moods—not because I was afraid of him, but because I could tell the last thing he needed then was a noisy girl.
Aunt May lavished a great deal of attention on both me and Uncle Stan. Her house was always in perfect order. As I grew older I sensed Aunt May was searching for something. She never said what it was she felt she lacked, but I noticed that she collected churches and religious groups the way some of my classmates’ mothers collected recipes.
Officially Aunt May remained a solid, churchgoing Methodist, but the bookshelves in her workroom contained an orderly assortment of myths, legends, anthropological works, religious texts, and self-help books. I am absolutely certain that if Aunt May had been younger when the Flower Child movement began she would have been one of those earnest young people who practiced transcendental meditation and ate only natural foods.
Indeed, one of the few times Aunt May and Uncle Stan had an argument in my hearing was over her attempts to introduce vegetarian meals into our weekly routine. Stanley Fenn was a solidly meat-and-potatoes sort of man, the kind who would eat vegetables reluctantly—mostly because he knew his growing foster daughter needed to eat them and he had to be an example. Aunt May gave up her attempt to adapt the family diet, though I am absolutely sure that when she was alone, as she was so often once I became more and more busy with school, she reverted to what Uncle Stan would have called her “rabbit diet.”
But none of this touched me, except to give me a sense of balance. If Uncle Stan could be unhappy but get up and go to work anyhow, then I could do the same. If Aunt May was sometimes restless, well, then, that was a normal part of being human. In any case, I had more than enough to keep me busy.
Somewhere between grammar school and high school, I accepted that my fascination for color, line, shading, and all the rest meant that I really was what I had heard my teachers say practically since my first school term in Ohio. I was “artistic.”
I liked knowing that. It gave an explanation to the fascination I had for color, a reason for my preferring to spend my allowance on paints or crayons or colored pencils, rather than whatever toy was the fad of the moment. It put a word to what I was, gave my greatest oddity a place in the usual order—oddly enough, making the abnormal normal.
I wasn’t the most social of children, but I wasn’t the shyest either. My grades were solidly average, peaking and dropping as my interests did. I joined a few clubs, and when my talent for drawing and painting became generally known, I found myself drafted to help design sets for school plays, or banners and posters for upcoming events.
I was a junior in high school when my art teacher asked a handful of us to contribute a piece to be sent to a countrywide show. I knew she wanted me to give her an oil painting I’d done earlier that year, a complex piece called
Homecoming.
Homecoming.
Homecoming
showed an older woman in all her finery, viewing her reflection in what is obviously a mirror in a high-school public rest room. She is at least forty, but in her reflection she is still the seventeen-year-old prom queen she had been in her days of glory.
showed an older woman in all her finery, viewing her reflection in what is obviously a mirror in a high-school public rest room. She is at least forty, but in her reflection she is still the seventeen-year-old prom queen she had been in her days of glory.
I was loading the painting into the family sedan when I balked, almost as if I’d slammed up against a solid wall. I carried
Homecoming
back inside and returned it to its hook on the wall of the room I proudly called my “studio.” Then I took a just-completed collage from my workbench, wrapped it carefully in an old blanket, and loaded it instead.
Homecoming
back inside and returned it to its hook on the wall of the room I proudly called my “studio.” Then I took a just-completed collage from my workbench, wrapped it carefully in an old blanket, and loaded it instead.
The collage was a pretty piece, almost a mosaic, worked from fake gemstones glued down in an abstract pattern that nevertheless somehow evoked a rosebush in the fading lushness of late summer bloom. I named it “Last Blush,” as I drove over to the school. My teacher was initially disappointed, but she had sense enough not to push—and
Last Blush
was nothing to be ashamed of. It was painterly in its complexity, recalling Monet or Seurat.
Last Blush
was nothing to be ashamed of. It was painterly in its complexity, recalling Monet or Seurat.
To my great joy,
Last Blush
won first place in its class, the only piece from our school to do so. It went on to the judged competition for the statewide show and won there, too. So the Fenns and I went from our little town all the way to Columbus so I could accept my prize.
Last Blush
won first place in its class, the only piece from our school to do so. It went on to the judged competition for the statewide show and won there, too. So the Fenns and I went from our little town all the way to Columbus so I could accept my prize.
I was terrifically, almost irrationally, excited. It wasn’t like I had never gone anywhere before. Thanks to the Fenns, I was actually very well-travelled for a girl of my age and class. Uncle Stan’s architect had developed a national, then an international, reputation. Our family vacations had capitalized on this, allowing Uncle Stan to mix business and pleasure. Last year we’d gone to France for a month, then hopped over the channel for two deliriously wonderful weeks in England.
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