Falling to Earth (19 page)

Then the children are there racing through the kitchen, letting the back door slam behind them. They pound up the stairs to one bedroom or another and stay there. They were quiet outside and they're quiet now upstairs; the only noise they made was in getting from place to place. No one stopped to cadge just one more cookie. No one needed or wanted a thing. No child's voice yelled, “Look!” with a half-dead worm or snail or a misshapen rock held out on a grubby palm. No adult voice ordered, “Put that back outside and wash your hands.” There were no voices at all.

They don't seem to understand how it wears at him, this eroding life without voices. “I didn't speak to anyone today, Mother,” he could say if she asked, and it would be true enough. He'd hardly spoken at all, he'd just stayed in the office or been out back at the saws all day because it had gotten easier if Clarence or Lon were out front instead of him when the bell rang over the door. People had started writing their orders on bits of paper and sliding them at him across the counter, and he'd already had about as much of it as he could take. They'd wait for him to write the order up, to say when it would be ready, and then they'd give him their perfunctory nods and walk right out again, having spared everyone the trouble of actual conversation.

Still worse was when they came back to pick up finished orders, when the thing they were shoving at him was their money, which didn't move easily from hand to hand anymore but was counted out with slow fingers and then pushed deliberately, indignantly across the counter as if to goad him. And before they went around back to have their lumber loaded, they'd look at him once more to make sure he saw the bitter twist their mouths were in and the contempt they wore for him in their eyes because he had one hell of a nerve.

Here is Paul sitting with his mother at the kitchen table, bewildered and diminished after another day without voices, watching Mae swat at a fly the children let in with them through the kitchen door. She misses again and again and Lavinia is straining, turning right and left in her chair to follow the fly's haphazard path. The crack of a fly swatter is really no different than a whining saw when it bites into wood. No different than the scratch of broom bristles in a room without voices. It's all louder than it's supposed to be. And now the fly is refusing to be hit and Mae is refusing to stop trying to hit it and Paul sees Mae's furious lunging and he wonders if Mae even knows how she ended up so trapped.

A
mindless Friday spent plodding forward, forward, ticking off the unvarying tasks that, once done, will simply reemerge, thankless and undone, the next day. That laundry will just have to get itself upstairs somehow, Lavinia thinks. She knows that either she or Mae will eventually carry the basket upstairs and empty it onto closet shelves, but for now she leaves the folded whites to stand on the kitchen table, unties her apron and hangs it next to Mae's on the back of the kitchen door. It's not weariness that's made her leave the last of her work for later, it's restlessness. She's distracted, even edgy tonight. There's something else that wants doing. Not something she's forgotten, but a thing she hasn't thought of yet. She's never been given to nerves, she thinks, and she won't let herself be now. Best to just put this feeling right out of her head.

Paul, Mae, and the children are already all in the living room. Lavinia goes in cautiously, and is grateful when she sees that everyone is occupied. She doesn't much feel like talking tonight, or explaining her fretful mood. There's plenty to talk about, of course—not least the business of watching the town being built for the second time in her life, from the ground up this time instead of simply outward—but there are fewer times she feels like talking lately. There's less and less reason to walk downtown now, too. Not for lack of things to do, but for the want of conversation. People will sometimes still nod in her direction, mutter, “Morning,” as they pass on the sidewalk, but only because it is still less awkward than saying nothing at all. These days Paul's dinners are still warm in the pail when she reaches the lumberyard. “Why don't you just call it a walk, Mother, and let me eat a sandwich at noon?” Paul used to joke. “Because I can't just go visiting in the middle of each day. If I'm out on an errand and stop to talk, that's another thing altogether,” she'd say.

It's baffling that people she has known for decades, some her old schoolmates, can be so discourteous. It began with people neglecting to inquire after her and her family. Oh, they'd smile some and nod when they met each other walking, they'd answer her questions about their own families, but then they'd make like they had somewhere to be, leaving Lavinia alone and perplexed in the middle of the sidewalk. Then the same people began to give her only tiny nods, barely meeting her eyes and muttering, “Hello”, as they rushed past. No one had yet ever gone so far as to cross to the other side of the street when they'd seen her coming, but plenty had ducked under umbrellas or the brims of their hats, feigning that they'd never noticed her there in the first place, coming down the street at the same time she always came with Paul's dinner.

It's not right, she thinks. I doubt Homer would ever have believed it was possible. Our people have been here longer than most of the rest of them. The farm was here before the town, before the land was even cleared. Maybe people don't want to remember that, since we sold out and moved to town. Maybe they'd rather only see the new headstones in the cemetery, not the old plots under the old trees with our names on them. It's a pity to think that people can forget so willfully, so easily. But if they decide to do a thing, who can stop them? And if people can decide to do such a thing, why, what kind of friends were they to begin with?

Paul is sitting deep in the davenport, the newspaper stretched out in his hands. How can he be so comfortable, Lavinia wonders. He looks the same as ever, legs crossed at the knee, newspaper held up high to catch the lamplight. Lavinia goes to the sideboard, trailing a fingertip along the hard, silky wood. She takes up the photograph of her and Homer, taken on their thirtieth wedding anniversary. They had posed for it on the porch steps of the old farmhouse before going down into the yard for the big picnic supper. They were all there in the yard, the whole family, while John took this picture. John and Dora hadn't yet moved out West; everyone was there, smiling and laughing up at her and Homer while they posed, squinting in the early summer light.

Homer would have understood Paul, she thinks. He would have understood Paul's desire to mollify people lately, and his saying, “Wait for them to come around, they'll all come around soon enough.” Homer would probably have behaved the same way. But somehow knowing that husband and son would have been like-minded in this, knowing that she might even guess at what her son will do next, having known her husband so well and long, is little help in understanding.

Lavinia replaces the photograph and looks up at herself in the mirror hanging above the sideboard. She turns her head, lifts her chin slightly to look at the line of her jaw. She runs the backs of her fingers along her jowl, dips her chin again and pats at the back of her hair, as she does habitually, as if her hair pins might have fallen out without her noticing. Her hair is soft, half snow-colored, half steel, and not much thinner than it ever was. She sees Paul in profile in the wide mirror, where he is sitting on the davenport, wearing her nose and chin on his face. She had wondered, when he was small, what that would look like when he was grown. She had always been pretty, she was pretty still, and on Paul's face her fine features had made a boyish, handsome man.

They're a fine-looking couple, Paul and Mae. Lavinia takes a step to the side, so that she can see Mae reflected in the mirror. Mae's hair is walnut brown, just the color of the sideboard in the lamplight. It almost looks marcelled, except that Mae would never bother with the hairdresser's. Neither she nor Lavinia would bother. Not because of the expense—they could bear that, she supposes—but because neither needed or wanted to gild the lily. Lavinia is used to Mae's bob now, even amused by it. Funny to think of Mae and Paul taking turns to sit in the same barber's chair. Homer wouldn't have approved.
They're both so pretty with their short hair, who can tell them apart?
he might have said in private.

Mae and I would have been friends, Lavinia thinks, if we'd been the same age. She had felt she recognized something in Mae when Paul first brought her home to the farm. She'd known who Mae was, of course, but Mae and her parents always seemed to keep to themselves; they were town folks she rarely saw and knew only a little. When Paul had first walked through the kitchen door with Mae beside him, they were both beaming. So happy, so happy. Lavinia had felt certain they had just dropped each other's hands before they came in, and then felt as if they were always touching, somehow, even when they were not. “I believe we've just met our daughter-in-law,” she'd said to Homer that night, when Paul had gone to take Mae home. “Could be, could be,” Homer had said from behind his newspaper, and Lavinia had swatted the paper and said, “You know I'm right.” She had been touched by Paul's choice, because she saw that she and Mae were of a kind, and understood in a quiet way that Paul's loving Mae had something to do with his regard for her.

Perhaps she could have been more of a comfort to Mae if they had met as girls of the same age. As quickly as Lavinia had felt her mood lifting, watching Paul and Mae in the mirror, she feels it shift again as she considers Mae alone. How ever can she stand it, Lavinia wonders. How can she have allowed herself to become this way, to let that part of her that Paul fell so quickly in love with be clouded over like this? She might understand it if Mae were unloved, of if she had been unable to bear children, but Mae had always had family around her, and had never wanted for anything. Lavinia cannot fathom why Mae can't just look across the room and see, truly see, her husband and children who adore her; why she can't just look at her pretty, comfortable house and let her good fortune buoy her up.

Of course, the unevenness of it all is as troubling as the fact of Mae's unhappiness. Paul's having to come home each day from the lumberyard, not knowing what he'll find when he comes through the door; whether Mae will smile and greet him, or just turn away, trying not to cry. The children all cling to her in their own ways, unwilling to let her out of their sight, even on days they dare not approach her.

And yet Mae has never taken to her bed, like others you hear about. Her work is always done. She and Lavinia work together, inside and out and, no matter Mae's mood, the house and the children are clean, and the yard is tidy. Lavinia is grateful for this: for Mae's freeing her of the need to feign that all is well because, to anyone else's eyes, it seems that it is. When Mae's moods descend on her, she simply retreats, does not seek out people, so there is little to hide from others.

If Mae and I were friends, Lavinia thinks, perhaps she'd trust me. Her own parents are gone, she has no brothers or sisters, and though she might have trusted Paul, he won't face her, not properly.

If she thought Paul would listen, Lavinia could tell him what she sees: that he's utterly lost when Mae sinks into her moods; that when he's most wary of her, clinging to her as the children do, he should instead leave her alone; that when he holds Mae's face in his hands and whispers, “How's my girl?” she will always keep her eyes lowered, and she will never accept his sympathy. She could tell Mae a few things, too; that she has overcomplicated Paul and missed her opportunity to understand him. It had been a great disappointment to Lavinia, seeing an uncomprehending Mae decide to give up her habit of asking Paul what he thought of this or that for dinner over the breakfast table, having mistaken Paul's desire to submit to her for a lack of opinion.

Lavinia watches Mae bent over a skirt hem she has been mending. A wry little smile twists up the corner of Lavinia's mouth. Oh, darling girl, she thinks, I can love you all I want, but you'll never trust me. You'll never let me be another mother to you. You think you can only ever be my daughter-in-law, but you're my child as surely as if I bore you myself. My willful child. It is surely willfulness that keeps you this way. And if you can will yourself into it, you can will yourself out of it, too.

How ever did we get this way? Lavinia thinks. Mae staring out of windows with that desperate look, staring, always staring, no matter what is going on around her. Paul, baffled and loyal, smothering Mae with concern. The children, well, they were all changed, too. Ellis had just gone and crawled inside himself. He kept busy and did what he was told, mostly so he wouldn't have to meet anyone's eye. His head was usually bent down over whatever it was he was doing, not out of concentration, but in order to hide his frown. He'd gotten tired, like his mother, of constantly being asked was he okay. All at the grand age of seven.

Ruby had gone the opposite way. She was like a pocket turned inside out. Everything that should have been hidden was there for anyone to see. She kept busy, too. Often as not, she had a book in one hand. It was whatever she was doing with her free hand that was trying. If her nails were bitten all the way down, she'd bite some more, down into the painful quick. Then she'd chew the ends of her hair, till the strands of hair in front, the longest parts of her bob, were either perpetually wet or tucked into the corners of her mouth. And if she'd been told to give her nails and hair a rest, she'd start in tugging at her dress front. She'd wiggle her shoulders and her head would twitch like she needed to adjust the fit of her clothes. But then she'd tug at her dress again and twitch some more and sometimes, if she was standing, the neck of it would get pulled down so far in front you could see the top of her chest, and at the back, the hem would be hoisted indecently high.