Kathleen Valentine (10 page)

This summer has been quiet. Lenore and I spent a lot of time in the family’s cottage on Nantucket. She turned as brown as a wood nymph in the ocean sun. Rob came out every weekend to be with us. The time passed sweetly, if somewhat sadly. The first time our daughter asked where Uncle Stash was, Rob had to explain. I could not. From time to time she would ask if Uncle Stash was "weally and twuly" dead but finally she stopped asking.
Now, late in September we are home. Home in the house that had always seemed an impossible extravagance until a tiny little person made it hers—and thus mine. As Rob continues the story I retreat to the porch. This may be the last evening warm enough to enjoy here. The last of the primroses twine over the railings and a faint glow of crimson settles on the horizon out beyond the lighthouse. I am trying to absorb and retain as much of the warmth as possible in preparation for the long, cold winter afternoons ahead.
I hear Rob’s footsteps as he descends the steps to the foyer.
"I’m out here," I call.
Rob and I have become closer than ever in the past few years. Children can do that, they say. He is still intense but there is a new stillness in him these days, mysterious and beautiful. I love him more with each passing day.
"She’s out like a light," he says, sitting down beside me. I snuggle into his warmth. "It’s amazing how she does that—like somebody flipped a switch."
"I know. How does that happen? She can fall asleep in the middle of a word."
"Like Aunt Pris."
I giggle. "I guess it helps to be either four or ninety-two."
He nuzzles my hair and I sigh and rest against him.
"You’re thinking about Stash, aren’t you?"
I nod. I don’t know what to say.
"You miss him."
"Yes." I pick up his hand and press it to my heart. "Don’t you?"
"Yeah." He wraps his arms tightly around me and his lips are close to my ear. "Chrissy, I want to say something to you. Hold still. I’ve been thinking about how to say this and I want to say it now."
"What?"
"I know what you did."
My heart begins to pound and I try to turn but he is holding me fast against him. "Rob, I..."
"Shhhh," he whispers. "Shhh, just be quiet and let me talk." He takes a deep breath and I realize I am trembling. "I always knew it was me."
"What do you..."
"Shhh, come on, I want to say this. I always knew I was the problem when you couldn’t get pregnant. I screwed around way too much before I met you and I never got a girl pregnant. I knew there was something wrong with me." His voice is brittle and sounds on the edge of tears. "I thought I had lucked out until I met you and we got married. It used to kill me to see how much you wanted a baby and I knew I couldn’t give you one. I felt like such a limp dicked failure."
"Oh Rob! No..." I try to turn but his arms are locked around me holding me in place.
"Chrissy, come on—please."
I stop struggling and let him continue.
"I wanted to give you a baby so much but I didn’t know what to do. I knew you were getting endless shit from your mother and my mother—Christ, I didn’t have a clue how to handle it. I tried to convince you that I didn’t really want kids but I knew that you saw through that, too. You don’t know what I was going through."
I sighed. He was right. I didn’t.
"Then when you got pregnant I thought some kind of a miracle had happened. I’ll tell you the truth—I really wondered if you had been screwing around. I just couldn’t figure out who you could be screwing around with, you were always so faithful and reliable."
"I’m sorry, Rob..." I am choked and frightened and don’t know what to say.
"No, no, don’t apologize. I think what you did took incredible courage."
I can’t believe what I am hearing. "What are you talking about?"
"When Lenore was born and everyone kept telling me how much she looked like me I thought I was wrong. I thought maybe she really was mine but then when we took Lenore to visit Aunt Pris I figured it out. Aunt Pris said we were right to name her Lenore because she looked exactly like her sister Lenore. I knew that was Stash’s mother and it all became clear."
"Oh Rob." He relaxes his hold on me and I turn to him taking his face in my hands. Tears are streaming down his cheeks as his eyes search my face.
"Maybe I’m not much of a man," he gasps between tears, "but I think you are incredible."
"What?"
"I told you how much I admired Stash and how great I thought he was..." He is looking directly into my eyes and I am humbled by his love and his courage. "You got the baby that you wanted so much and you did it with the man you knew I admired so much. I think you are remarkable, Chrissy, I really do."
"Oh, Rob," I wrap my arms around him and now I am holding him. "I’m so glad that you know but you have to understand it wasn’t just like that."
"I know, I know," he whispers as we cling to each other. "I know you loved him. I’m glad that you loved him. Whatever the circumstances I want Lenore to have been conceived in love. I have no problem with that." He pulls back and fixes his eyes on mine. "You did a wonderful thing, Chrissy. She’s a gorgeous child and you made Stash happy and you can’t begin to understand what you’ve done for me."
I stare at him speechless.
He pulls me close against him and we sit cuddled together in the last warmth of summer as upstairs our daughter dreams of narwhals and as mermaids sing far out at sea.

TREAT YOURSELF TO THE BEST

I wanted to live a romance. I wanted a life so perfect, so exquisite in every detail, that each moment would be poetry. Maybe my mother read me too many fairy tales when I was a little girl but I had a storybook idea of my future.
I would be a pre-Raphaelite vision of loveliness in velvet (silk, not polyester) and lace (preferably made by nuns in a tiny, cloistered convent in Switzerland). My home would be a treasure trove of perfect little vignettes, tiny portraits of aesthetic sensitivity. A sun-warmed salon, inviting in rose-patterned chintz and tumbling arrangements of summer flowers which always seemed to be shedding one trembling petal in the cozy silence. A dining room, sparkling and fragrant, in which beautiful friends would linger unable to withdraw themselves from its nurturing aura. And, of course, the bedroom—lace upon lace, billowing curtains, crackling fires in the marble fireplace—a sensual retreat from the days intoxicating society for my love and me. My love and me... Naturally that was the buttercream icing on my meticulously blended, marzipan-filled cake. My love and me...
How I was going to achieve all this, I didn’t know but one thing I knew for certain—I had to get out of my home town.
There are two kinds of kids who grow up in small towns—the ones who are going to stay there forever and the ones who are just living for the day they can leave. I was definitely among the latter. It was a good town to grow up in. Small and reasonably picturesque up in the Pennsylvania Highlands surrounded by piney woods and trout-filled streams. Its name, Hamlet, was no doubt derived from its size and remoteness but I preferred to imagine that one of the founding fathers had a passion for Shakespeare. I wanted to believe that there was something romantic about Hamlet—something to counterbalance the neighborhoods filled with single story homes covered in aluminum siding and surrounded by chainlink fences. I wanted to believe Hamlet offered more than Thursday night bingo parties and Sunday afternoon sauerkraut dinners at the Moose where scratchy recordings of Fred Waring and the Pennsylvanians playing the Beer Barrel Polka boomed from the PA system.
My father was a stone mason and well respected. We lived outside of town in a turn of the century farmhouse with wide porches, an apple grove, and a huge barn that housed my father’s workshop and heavy equipment. That barn was the focal point of my discontent. When I was a child it was a wonderland of adventure and escape. But as I entered my romantic teens it was a gigantic embarrassment. A dreamy-eyed girl whose head is filled with bittersweet love affairs with winsome poets has a hard time nurturing her fantasies in the shadow of a barn that reads "Chew Mail Pouch Tobacco—Treat Yourself to the Best" in five foot high, screaming yellow letters.
Treat yourself to the best. God, those words chafed my lilac-scented skin.
"Treat yourself to the best," my father would say, laughing as he plucked a glob of the nasty-looking stuff and tucked it into the corner of his cheek formed by years of chewing.
"Treat yourself to the best, boys," he’d say holding out the pouch to my older brothers, despite my mother’s protests, as Thad and Bart followed his example. My sister Andie would beg for some, too.
"Come ON, Pop," she would say. "Thad was chewing when he was my age."
My father would shake his head and tuck the folded foil pouch into his hip pocket. "You’re a girl, Andie, even if you don’t want to be. There are just some things that are off-limits to girls."
"That’s not fair," Andie wailed—she wailed that a lot.
"You should try to act more like Fifi," he said winking at me. "Fifi likes being a girl."
"Being a girl stinks," Andie would scream flouncing out of the kitchen slamming the screen door behind her.
Personally, I was grateful for the things that were off limits to girls—hunting, fishing, camping, and other messy, smelly disgusting entertainments. Even my quiet brother Simon, the only family member I could relate to, was becoming more like our older brothers with each passing year.
I was the baby—a change-of-life surprise, my mother always said. Sometimes I wondered if they had lied to me—if they had found me on their doorstep (tucked in a basket of woven willow branches under a hand-sewn quilt) or maybe I was the love child of some tragic, distant relative who had died of a broken heart waiting for her lover to return to her and they were stuck with me. Nothing that I could see in either of my parents or my siblings was remotely like the genetics I was certain I came from.
Andie and I could not have been more different. She was tall and "well-packed", as my father liked to say, and loved every aspect of small town life including a monosyllabic, grubby car mechanic called Junie. There’s a real small town curiosity for you—nearly every guy around here has a nickname. "Junie" was short for "Junebug" which came from the expression "crazy as a...". That was popular. So were Ace, Stretch, Whitey, and Bugs. Going through life with a name like that was what you got for spending your life in a small town, in my opinion.
Also, no one ever forgets anything. My mother, the sweetest person you could ever meet, can name every female between the ages of sixteen and sixty who "had" to get married. I found out about "having" to get married listening to my mother and her friends gabbing on our porch on hot summer afternoons. They would gather to fold laundry into wicker baskets, peel mountains of vegetables for canning, or mend bottomless baskets of well-worn clothes while discussing what was on sale at the A&P, the misadventures of their children, and who "had" to get married.
In a primarily Catholic, pre-Pill community there was no shortage of playmates. At the far end of the porch my friends and I would play with our Betsy McCall dolls while eavesdropping on our mothers’ chatter. Some recent scandal would be discussed when there was a pause, voices were lowered and someone would say those words, "well, you know they HAD to get married." And there would be a hush and a slow shaking of heads.
My friends and I were pretty interested in having to get married. We didn’t know what it meant but we decided to act it out with our dolls devising an elaborate wedding complete with tissue and pipecleaner flowers. All we actually knew about weddings of that sort was that they happened in a hurry because Barbie Simbeck’s mother had been worried terribly about getting everything done in time a few years back when Barbie’s older brother Chip had to marry a girl down in the valley. All Barbie could remember was that her mother cried a lot but that was mostly because the girl wasn’t Catholic so what could you expect?
The wedding turned out to be uneventful and we couldn’t figure out what was so interesting about it. We went onto other games until we overheard the horrible news that Maureen O’Rourke’s parents had been shocked to learn that their oldest son, who was going to college in California, had a limp wrist. This seemed to be a lot more disturbing than having to get married but since our Betsy McCall dolls had bendable wrists to begin with we felt trying to act it out was pointless.
Now I know we lived in a cocoon back then. A cocoon many might envy now. Everyone knew everyone else and, as my brothers found out early on, if you misbehaved in public your mother would know about it long before you got back home. And you would be very sorry. When I was eight my mother never worried when she sent me down the street to Sonny Wheeler’s grocery store for a quart of milk. Sonny Wheeler’s was famous in Hamlet for two things, the collection of Rigid Tool calendars hanging in the back room where the butchering was done, and the penny candy counter. He had more penny candy than anyone in the world. The change from a quart of milk would provide me with a paper sack filled with licorice babies, wax teeth, candy lipsticks, Mary Janes, crystal rock candy, and peanut butter nuggets. Such delights satisfy an eight year old but by eighteen my entire life seemed a humiliation to me. Once I entered college, Hamlet and I were headed for a divorce.

It is snowing as we turn off the interstate onto a two lane winding through the dense, dark pine forest. Tim is smiling and humming to himself. I adjust the shoulder harness of my seat belt and turn toward him. We are no sooner off the highway than the Bach cantata on the radio fades out and is replaced by loud static.
"See if you can find something," he says without taking his eyes from the road. Tim is a careful driver.
"What do you want?" I ask "Polkas or Tammy Whine-ette?"
Tim closes his eyes for a fraction of a second and then says softly, "Fifi, please..."
I fiddle with the buttons. "Oh, I forgot, maybe we can find a good old Christian rockabilly station."
"Don’t start, Fifi," he says it patiently but I know he has been waiting for this. "Just this once, can you please..." His voice trails off.
I flip through the CDs in the console between the seats and pop in Miles Davis’s Love Songs. I know he likes that.
"That’s nice," he says, "thanks."
Tim is the love in "my love and me". After graduate school I spent a few years in London before coming back to Philadelphia as head (and only) librarian in a small, privately funded research library. Tim, who taught English literature in a nearby college, was a regular. With his tweed jackets, argyle vests and meticulously shaped beard, he looked as though he had just stepped out of one of the books he carried around. One look at him and I could tell there was no foil pack of Mail Pouch Tobacco in the pocket of his flannel trousers. I fell promptly in love. We were married within a year.
"What do you suppose ever happened to Clint Walker?"
"What?" I frown at him. "Who’s that?"
"You don’t remember Clint Walker?" he looks at me. He is keeping his voice light but I can hear the undertones of tension. It’s always like this when we’re headed back to Hamlet for a visit. "Cheyenne? You know." He sings. "Cheyenne, Cheyenne, where will you be sleeping tonight?"
"Was that a TV show?"
"Yeah. I forget what night it was on. There were a bunch of them —Maverick and that blond guy with the dog that drank beer and Bronco Lane. Man, they were so great. You didn’t watch them?"
"I suppose," I shrug. "You can ask Bart or Thad when we get there. They watched all those cowboy things."
Tim was a real TV kid. In my house TV was a treat reserved for after homework, dinner and chores but Tim grew up in front of the television. He can tell you the names of all the Mousekateers, the plot of any Three Stooges show and which Stooges were in it, and do credible impersonation of endless cartoon characters including Mighty Mouse, Yosemite Sam, and the entire cast of Bullwinkle. But he especially loves the old cowboy programs. When I first took him to meet my family, they were far more impressed with his TV trivia skills than his extensive academic publications. It figured.
"Tell me again what those things are," he says pointing to large round Masonite signs painted in bright colors that are for sale in front of a farmhouse we pass.
"Hex signs," I murmur. "The colors and the symbols have different meanings. It’s a Pennsylvania Dutch thing. People buy them to hang on their barns..."
He grins. "We should get one for the kitchen."
"Absolutely not!" I glare at him.
"It would be a real conversation piece, Fif."
I know he is teasing me but I can’t quite force myself to play along. "Watch the road," I say trying not to sound angry. "There are deer through here."
"I hope we see some."
"Yeah, well, just hope they don’t jump out in front of the car. When I was in high school a buck rammed me broadside and knocked the car into the ditch. Thad and Bart had to haul it out with Bart’s truck. It was a mess."
Tim is silent and I realize how sharp my voice sounded.
"Thad said there are a lot of coyotes and bobcats around this year. Maybe tomorrow he’ll take us out woodsing in his truck. It has four wheel drive," I say trying to make amends.
"Really?" he smiles again. "That would be great." He is happy now. It really doesn’t take much to make Tim happy, it’s one of the many things I love about him. He’s a nice guy — in fact when it comes to my family, he’s nicer than I am.
"Think Thad will ever get married?" he asks.
I sigh. "No. I wish he would. For a guy who likes wives as much as he does, you’d think he’d want one of his own."
"Wives?"
"Well, yeah. I mean he sure keeps a lot of wives around Hamlet happy. He takes such stupid chances. I’m scared to death he’s going to get shot by a jealous husband someday."
Tim chuckles. "Sure you’re not exaggerating just a little bit?"
I glare at him. It positively infuriates me that he finds Thad’s irresponsibility so amusing but I’m determined not to fight. "Bart says he’s headed for trouble. He says it’s just a matter of time until he gets his butt kicked but Andie says most of the husbands just look the other way. She says they’re glad for the relief." Tim is trying not to laugh. I turn and look ahead out the window. "She says as long as they know their wives have plans with Thad they won’t get any grief about taking off hunting. That kind of thinking makes sense in Hamlet."
"Sounds like a mutually beneficial system to me."
"Well," I sigh again, "you know Bart... he worries about everything. It’s that Catholic guilt thing."
Tim grew up in a Unitarian family and learned more about social responsibility than religious obligation. When he first met my family he asked about our old-fashioned names.
"The Twelve Apostles," I told him. I’m not sure if my mother planned on twelve children but since the Apostles were short on women she improvised naming my sister and I Andrea and Philipa for Andrew and Philip. Andie, who was five when I was born, began calling me Fifi which stuck. I’ve always been grateful to her for that when I consider I might have had to go through life being called "Phil".
"Seneca Summit, elevation two-thousand one-hundred and seventy-eight feet," Tim reads the sign as we crest the hill just outside Hamlet. Ahead of us Hamlet, snow dusted and frozen, sparkles against a backdrop of purple hills. "Gosh," he says, "it gets prettier everytime I see it."
Sweet Tim. You’d think this was his home instead of mine. Tim grew up in a private section of one of Philadelphia’s more affluent suburbs. His parents, both intelligent, reserved, soft-spoken people are academics who wrote books and traveled leaving their only child to be raised by a series of nannies and housekeepers. Now, quite elderly, they welcomed me into their family with polite reserve. Their delicate health provided the perfect opportunity for a small, quiet wedding, a thing I was grateful for but which my mother still shakes her head over.
Tim took to my family with an enthusiasm that baffles me. Our rare visits home are as much of a treat for him as they are a trial for me.
"So, tell me again about this sausage making business," Tim is grinning now as he guides the car down a steep, snow-packed two-lane and across a metal bridge. The tires sing as they roll over the grates. I turn to look downstream where the old mill still stands. Andie told me someone bought it and is renovating it into a bed and breakfast.
"A bed and breakfast," she exclaimed in one of our weekly phone calls, "in Hamlet! Isn’t that exciting."
"Well, it was just hunting season and all the guys got deer again this year. Your parents would die if they knew what we are going to be doing."
"Look, just because my folks think deer hunting is barbaric doesn’t mean I do. Hunting to provide food for the family is one of man’s most basic instincts."
"That was before Stop and Shop," I mumble.
"I thought you said you liked helping to make sausage." Tim glances over at me. He has never understood my ambivalent feelings about my family. Understandable since I don’t quite understand them myself.
I nod slowly thinking about it. "I do... well, I did. It was always quite a party. You’ll see."
A week earlier my Dad called to remind me of the annual post-deer-season sausage-making party.
"You and Tim should come," he told me, "you’re still my best stuffer, honey. Last year Bart and Simon took turns. Bart stuffs them so full the skin ruptures and Simon’s look like wet socks. We need you."
"I’ll see what Tim thinks, Dad," I said but I knew Tim would be enthusiastic. Tim has made occasional quiet mumbles about spending our summers in Hamlet but promptly drops it when I stare it him speechless at his betrayal.
Now I feel guilty and confused by all the conflicting feelings that Hamlet provokes in me. "Dad said they have four deer and Bart butchered a pig so there’s a lot of work to do," I add. "Just do what Bart tells you to do. He’s in charge." I glance over at him. He is smiling and humming to himself. "You’re so sweet," I say trying to make amends. "I appreciate it so much that you don’t mind coming here with me."
He reaches over and takes my hand. "Fifi, I love coming here. You know that. Hey!" He points. "Isn’t that Daisy?"
A woman with flying yellow hair and a bright red ski sweater is running through a snowy field pulling a toboggan loaded with small, colorfully dressed children. Tim honks the horn and rolls down the car window to wave. Daisy waves back and all the children chorus a loud "hi Uncle Tim!" Even at this distance Daisy’s eyes sparkle and her cheeks glow. Daisy is Bart’s wife and, after five children and her fiftieth birthday, she is still the most beautiful woman I know. Everything about Daisy is radiant — her eyes, her hair, her skin. In high school she was the most popular girl in the tri-county area and the fact that she married my huge, silent, kind but dull, brother amazed everyone. Her name is really Eleanor but Bart started calling her Daisy when they were teenagers because he said she looked like Daisy Mae in the Lil Abner comic strips.
I was only three when they were married and was the flower girl in their wedding all I knew then was that she was the most beautiful woman in the world. Later as an adult I asked her why, of all the guys who were crazy about her, she chose Bart.
"It’s simple, Fifi," she laughed her pretty laugh. "He has the most of what I like the best."
I flushed hoping I misunderstood her but she laughed again.
"I’m not like you, Fifi. I’m not very complicated or smart. I was just cut out to be a wife and mother so I figured I might as well do that with the guy that could make me the happiest doing it." She winked. "I know what I like and Bart’s the man for that."
I never mentioned it again.
We round a bend in the road and there, outlined by the snow-covered hills, is the huge dark barn with its fading yellow letter, Treat Yourself to the Best. Despite my complaints and reservations I feel the excitement grow inside. I roll down the window and hear the steady, dull thunk of wood being chopped and smell the familiar fragrance of fresh snow, pine sap, and wood smoke. I am home.
"Fifi!" Simon swings his ax down solidly into the cutting block and saunters across the driveway to pluck me from the car in a bear hug. "Hey, Tim," he says over my shoulder. "Thanks for coming."
Tim is grinning. "Wouldn’t miss it," he says.
In the door of the barn I see Bart’s shape loom and he raises a hand in greeting. I wave back. There is a fundamental goodness in Bart that rumbles up from the depths of his great body and wraps you in its warm assurance.
Simon releases me and begins taking bags from the back seat of the car.
"Thad’s not here yet?"
Simon rolls his eyes. "You know Thad. He either forgot it was today, or he forgot to wear his watch, or he forgot where we live." He winks. "I’ll put your bags in the cabin. Mom figured you two lovebirds would rather stay there. I started a fire." He nudges Tim as he passes him. "I know you two need a little privacy."
Tim grins. My Dad, Bart and Thad built the cabin before I was born. It is made of logs with a stone fireplace and has evolved from a playhouse to a party place to a guesthouse over the years. It is a blessing for me. Whenever we visit here, Tim, away from the pressures and distractions of the city, seems to become particularly amorous and the privacy of a separate building saves me a lot of embarrassment. It just annoys me that everyone seems to know that — and find humor in it.
My mother is waving through the stalks of amaryllis and begonias crowding the kitchen window. I run up the back porch steps, pull open the storm door to hugs and noise and the fragrance of baking bread.
There is a wall of noise generated by my family that sort of wraps around and forms a thick swell of both confusion and happiness in me. I get lost in the labyrinth of voices and squeezes, laughter and shouts. I can never fix my attention on anything for more than a few seconds before another conversation begins or a child needs attention. The competition for attention instigates a persistent headache that will plague me for the duration of our visit. The kitchen is filled with treasured faces and affectionate words. I see my husband disappear into my mother’s abundant arms as I work my way through a sea of hugs. My mother releases Tim as Daisy arrives with four of her grandchildren adding the fragrance of sugar cookies and another decibel of chatter to the room.
Simon’s wife, RuthAnn, sits nursing their new baby on a stool by the stove. Bart and my father arrive from the barn for coffee and hugs. Just as the din begins to settle Andie comes through the door with her two teenagers carrying the twin sons Andie’s oldest had shortly after her wedding last autumn.
"Junie can’t make it," she calls to my father over the noise. "He got called in at the mill. One of their big presses went down. I don’t see Thad’s truck out there."
Simon, who is washing his hands at the kitchen sink as my mother scolds him about getting dirt on her freshly peeled potatoes, snorts.
"We’re starting without him," Bart rumbles.
"Come to daddy, Champ," Simon says reaching for his new son as RuthAnn adjusts her blouse under her sweater. I glance at Tim but he is talking to Bart who towers over him by at least a head.
"Let me do that, Maudie," Daisy says taking the potato peeler from my mother’s hands and setting to work on the mountain of potatoes, "Go have a cup of coffee with Fifi."
"Fifi," RuthAnn calls over the heads of assorted little one, "Simon and I want you and Tim to come to the Seneca Highlands with us tonight. They have live music and this guy tonight is really good. We think you’d like him."
"Is that Thad’s truck?" Tim leans closer to the window over the sink, brushing shoulders with Daisy who turns to RuthAnn and I, "Can Bart and I come, too? He owes me a night out."
"Let’s go, guys," my father says swallowing the last of his coffee. "If that’s Thad we better get him before he comes in the house or it will be an hour till we can get him moving." He looks at me and gives me the wide, beaming smile that is mine alone. "Coming, sweetie?"