Of Time and Memory (11 page)

A
nd so, through the long summer she is always returning from that dark vault which contains her and surrounds her with the terrifying knowledge of her own unworthiness.

You'd better change your attitude, her father tells her.

Where are you, Peggy? her mother asks again and again.

How could she answer her mother's question? Would the question only add to her darkness? Would the distance separating her from these people she loved push her so far into darkness that she tried desperately to force her mind to concentrate upon what she knew to be true and familiar, like the little town of Hatfield? A picture in her mind that might release her from the terrible darkness? A picture of the Town Center where she lives in the real world. The loading platform behind the lumberyard and the holding pens for sheep and cattle. The train station with its overhanging roof. A few freight cars on side rails, waiting or forgotten. Anders Market with its wood-planked floor, a great circle of yellow cheese on a stool inside the front door, the tall shelves lined with clean white stiff paper. The coffee grinder and scales. The Hatfield National Bank with its seven barred windows. In Geo. S. Snyder Estate, in the hardware section, the lightbulbs that the salesclerk tested for you before you paid for them. And out on the sidewalk people watching Hatfield's first television set in
the tall front window. The great pretzels in Zepp's Bakery and the chest of ice-cold soda in Nick Gerhart's Mobil station. At Pete Wyer's barbershop, men filed in the front door as if to have their hair cut, then out the back door to the taproom of the Knipe Hotel. At I. C. Detweiler's General Store, racks of Clark's thread in all colors. The huge water tower on steel legs at the north end of town. Maybe this portrait inside her head is enough to make the darkness tolerable. This small town which was once freshly painted, everything restored and newly provisioned for the returning soldiers, will be there for her as well when she returns.

Did anyone warn her that one day when she returns from this blackness which people have begun to call her moodiness, and she walks down Market Street to the corner where she can see the school and the church and the train station, suddenly none of it will feel real, none of it will be hers? And she will be left waiting for her own life to begin and suspecting that she does not possess something essential that is required of everyone to live in this place. She will wonder if the normal life will ask a price of her which she cannot meet. The price paid by a neighborhood girl. Maybe the great illusion of life is that we are moving ahead, when, actually, we are always returning, stepping off the train, back again. Or perhaps it is only her; she is the only one who moves against life's momentum.

She draws some consolation from the possibility that these thoughts she has, these dark thoughts, mean nothing at all, nothing profound. They are just the restless thoughts of a teenaged girl with hormones racing through her veins.

But this is a cold consolation and it vanishes completely when she overhears her uncle talking about her father's dark moods. At Lauchman's print shop, where he runs a Linotype
press in a room with a dozen other men, her father sometimes goes for a week at a time speaking with none of them. On the hot summer days when they eat their lunches out on the loading dock, he will eat with his back turned to his confederates. Oh, there are other times when he is the life of the party and the center of attention, but he can change his mood without provocation.

She is too much like you, and you're too much like her, she hears her mother telling her father one morning. She is waiting for him to give her a ride to work. It is raining hard, a morning thunderstorm with great sheets of blown rain. She runs through the rain and takes a place in the back seat of her father's car. She will spite him by making him drive her like a chauffeur.

They ride along without speaking a word to one another. The rain is hitting the roof of the car with the sound of buttons poured from a jar. She looks at the back of his head where the hair has begun to turn gray. He has the same naturally wavy hair that she has. They are both the same height now. She is staring at his hand on the steering wheel when suddenly through the rain-streaked passenger window on her right she sees something straight out of a nightmare, an enormous shape rising out of the storm like a great passenger ship and coming right at them. She screams hard and this is enough to rouse her father. He stomps on the brakes, rising up in the seat as he drives the pedal to the floor.

After the train has passed, he drives ahead a little ways then pulls over to the side of the road. His head is bowed and he is breathing hard. You saved our lives, he says to her through his tears. Though she might have wanted to say something to him, or to reach out and touch his shoulder, she keeps her distance and her silence.

I
n Grace Lutheran Church the minister, Reverend Fluck, is talking again about the communists who are going to try to take over America. There was something in the news just the other week. A man named Walter P. Reuther, president of CIO United Auto Workers, was shot through the kitchen window of his home in Detroit and everyone knows that communists shot him. Before too much longer they are going to assassinate every public official who refuses to go along with their plans to dismantle everything this great nation holds most dear. Especially the right to worship God and Jesus Christ, the son of God.

Lifting her eyes, Peggy can see the heads nodding in agreement with the minister. Not just the old white heads and bald heads in the congregation, but many heads that are not much older than hers. Her father's head is nodding but her mother is staring out the windows of the church. Jack is leaning against her, placated by a pack of Life Savers, as she gazes serenely out the windows at an empty blue sky. She looks like she is at peace with the world, unthreatened by the communists, or anyone else. The minister's warnings are falling on deaf ears; communists, war, the Russians digging entrenchments in Korea, the man on Cow Path Road digging a bomb shelter in his backyard. All of this is beyond her immediate
concern; she is a mother with children to take care of. And once you are a mother in this world, it is something that can never be taken from you. No one can take this from you, and it can surround you and separate you from the rest of the world, enclosing you within an order and a shape so completely defined by its necessity that the great troubles of the world will not matter anymore.

After church she asks her mother what she was thinking about. The farm, she tells Peggy. The farm in Souderton where she grew up.

They have driven by only a few times since the family lost it during the Depression, but her mother has spoken of it often.

An hour later Peggy has made up her mind and arranged everything. She makes a picnic lunch, asks her uncle Howard to drive them there, and then walks her brother, Jack, across town, to leave him with the mother of one of his friends. It is another sunny day, the summer has been a succession of bright days. There is a gentle breeze.

Peggy sits in the back seat with the picnic basket so her mother can ride in front with Howard. He is wearing one of those ditchdigger T-shirts, white with straps over his shoulders. He is tanned and strong, her father's brother, but different from him in small important ways. Howard is carefree, always down on the floor roughhousing with his three little boys. Always putting his arms around his wife, Muriel. She is just a few years ahead of Peggy, still a girl herself, and a source of information about the important things in life that must be explained by someone. What is it like to be in love with a boy? Muriel had responded frankly: When he's away, when
he's not in bed with you, you ache for him, I mean you feel this physical pain right through your bones.

Howard drives with the window down, one arm hanging out, his hand cupping his cigarette against the rushing wind. The hard muscles in his tanned shoulders rippled.

At the farm Howard pulls to the side of the road and stops.

What are you stopping for? Peggy's mother asks.

Howard replies with a big grin. I was in the service long enough to learn to do what I'm told to do.

Peggy tells him, Go on up the driveway.

Yes, sir, Howard says, saluting her.

Oh, we mustn't do that, Peg. Her mother worries.

It takes a while for Peggy to coax her mother out of the car.

This is the bank's property, Peg.

Big deal, Mom. Who cares about some stupid bank! The bank didn't live in these rooms—you did.

Peggy is walking ahead when they cross the wide front lawn. The wind is to their backs. When Peggy looks back at Howard he has taken off his T-shirt, lit a cigarette, and is lying across the hood of the car like he owns the place. Peggy laughs and tells her mother to look at him. A smile comes to her mother's face and it is so full of surprise that for a brief moment Peggy glimpses her mother as a younger woman, a girl really. It is such a pleasure to see, such a rare and precious thing. This woman, her mother, if only Peggy could have known her when she was a girl. How unfair that she couldn't have been a friend to her in her youth.

Now, with every step her mother is afraid that someone will come by and see them trespassing. Peggy takes her hand and tells her to stop worrying. It is such a splendid day, such a beautiful moment when the two of them stand before the wood-frame house. The place seems to be waiting
attentively for them to climb up the front stairs onto the porch. The windows are not just full of light, but of music, some song that seems to convey itself in her mother's voice.

Their faces are pressed against a window. This is where her grandmother Swan used to do her quilting. And here is where their old dog used to take his naps.

A secret part of her mother is being restored; Peggy doesn't understand it completely, doesn't grasp its whole meaning. At age eighteen she is too young to comprehend fully what the experience of this day means to her mother, how it will manifest itself in her own future. But for now she is trying to delight in her mother's pleasure as she inspects the house through every window.

The kitchen! Oh the marvelous bright kitchen with windows along the front and back walls so you can see straight through the house here. The porcelain cookstove that took either coal or wood. The cabinets with their glass doors. Here is where they spent most of the summer canning food, she tells Peggy. There was a big table right there. Someone has taken the table, but I remember. We would pickle red beets and can them. We put newspapers on the table so we wouldn't stain the wood. When we went to church my mother would make us wear white gloves to hide the stains on our hands.

A picture for Peggy. An image of herself in a sundress, sitting at a table with children of her own, their palms stained red.

They eat the picnic lunch behind a tiny outbuilding which was once an ice shed, in a meadow of juniper and Indian paintbrush. Howard can dispose of a sandwich with three bites. Then he lights a cigarette, lies back in the wildflowers, and blows smoke rings that float above their heads.

You have to eat more than that, Peggy, her mother tells her.

She is eating only carrot sticks and she tries to change the subject. Lately what she eats has become an issue. She has begun to feel that her mother and father, and even her grandmother and grandfather, are trying to fatten her up for somebody's Thanksgiving table. She thinks,
What business is it of yours? It's my stomach! Why don't you leave me alone!

She has been around long enough to know how the world works, how a girl who grows up to be heavy will hear the same sound over and over in her life, the sound of doors closing just ahead of her. If she's beautiful enough, she can do anything. Maybe she can marry a banker rich enough to buy back her mother's farm!

And one thing she has learned just recently about her beauty is that it is vulnerable. She has lovely hair and fine features in her face, and piercing green eyes, but she can gain weight easily in her legs. She has to be careful. And it doesn't seem fair either. Men are lucky; her father is losing his hair so he has started slicking it down and combing it straight back and he looks as handsome as a politician or a dean. A man gets a fat belly and he just loosens his belt a few notches and takes on the posture of a Supreme Court judge. So easy for men. Not for a girl.

Her beauty is important to her. A validation. Something she can hold between herself and the world, something that lets her off the hook.

It's a man's world, her aunt Sue has told her. Don't let anyone tell you otherwise. And in this world few things count more than beauty does. It can save a farm. Or carry you to Venice to stand at the grave of John Keats.

There is a tire swing hanging from the branch of an apple tree. It takes a long time for Peggy to persuade her mother to
sit on it. Kick your legs, Mom, you remember how to swing. Soon she has her mother sailing through the air. Each time she flies forward her dress blows back in the wind and she has to tug it down between her knees. Finally she takes the rope in both hands and her dress flies up around her face. Howard turns to face the road—I didn't see anything! he calls to them.

C
herry Cokes at Inky's with Adelle who has come home from Ursinus College for the weekend. Her first semester, her first time home as a college coed. Peggy wants to know everything. Adelle can't tell her fast enough. Life in the dormitory. Football games. The professors. The boys. Tearing through town in the rumble seat of some boy's roadster. I always get stuck in the rumble seat, Adelle complains. She is the brainy one, valedictorian in their high school class. Oh, Peg, the best part by far is this feeling that comes over me sometimes when I'm walking across campus. It's like I suddenly remember that I'm on my own, you know? I'm on my own and whatever I do from now on, whatever I make of my life, it's up to me to decide.