Two Rivers (13 page)

“Holy shit,” Betsy said, dropping her feet from the balcony and searching under my chair for her shoes. I found them and offered them to her.

“Hey, what do you know?” was all I could manage.

Inside I stood at the periphery of the crowd as Betsy ran to the makeshift stage, where she was crowned and bannered and flowered. I also stood at the edges as she slugged Howie in the shoulder, their old rivalry now like some sort of intimate private joke. Unbelievable. And then he kissed her on the cheek (
kissed her
,
kissed her
), and they joined the rest of the royal court dancing slowly to “Maybe Tonight.” She smiled at Howie as he spun her dramatically, one hand on his shoulder, the other clinging to her crown. “Maybe Tonight” flowed softly into “Are You Lonesome Tonight,” and they kept dancing. I tried to catch her eye, but she was so caught up in the music, so caught up in Howie Burke’s arms, I might as well not have been there at all. It wasn’t a date anyway, I reminded myself. Just friends,
best
friends. And finally, when it seemed the band might play forever without even the slightest pause, I went outside again, alone.

I was still sweating, though the air had gotten cooler. I sat in the chair that Betsy had been sitting in. I pulled out the postcard and thought about Betsy wandering through the museum, about Betsy seeing this painting and thinking of me. The river was even louder now, louder than the music, which thumped and hummed in the background. My head was pounding. I waited a long time out there on the porch for Betsy, but I was used to it by then; I’d been waiting for her almost my whole life.

When she finally emerged, she was with Rosemary and Ray. She was still wearing her crown, but her hair had come loose and was wet with sweat. I shoved the postcard in the pocket of my tux.

“My curfew’s midnight,” Rosemary said, frowning.

Ray draped his arm over her shoulder. “I’m ready. The music sucks.”

“Is your royal highness finished dancing already?” I asked Betsy.

She looked at me quizzically, and I immediately felt bad.

We all piled quietly into the DeSoto. The windows of Madame Tuesday’s glowed brightly in the darkness. I thought about all of the men driving home after their rendezvous with the ladies of Madame Tuesday’s. I thought about Betsy in the blue dress, her golden shoulders. I was pissed at myself for not kissing her, pissed at Howie. Pissed, even, at Betsy. The music struggled through the thick air and into the quiet car. I grew dizzy watching as the lights swirled and then disappeared in the rearview mirror behind us. In the backseat, Ray and Rosemary giggled and groped, quietly, trying to be polite. Betsy rolled down the window, leaned her head out, letting the air dry her wet hair. I felt my stomach roil.

Before we made it back into town, I knew I was going to be sick. And despite every effort to keep the growing nausea at bay (breathing deeply, rolling the window down all the way), as soon as I pulled into Rosemary’s parents’ driveway, I knew I couldn’t stop the inevitable. As Rosemary and Ray said their good-byes on the front stoop of her apartment, I felt a wave stronger than I could will away. I opened the door, leaned over and vomited. I felt Betsy’s hand on my back, heard her voice swimming to me, “Harper? You okay? Were you
drinking
?” But her voice was distant and muted; she was already so far away.

I figure now it must have been a bad shrimp in the cocktail, but in that moment it felt like sadness pouring out of me. Just bitter sorrow. When we finally got to my house, Betsy asked if I needed her to come with me inside. I shook my head and motioned for her to go home. I gave her an awkward hug and said, “See you tomorrow.” Then I ran across the lawn, forgetting all about the badminton net, which captured me like a fly in a spider’s web. I untangled myself and rushed into the house to the bathroom, where I tucked the postcard into the mirror’s frame and then continued to vomit until my eyes burned and my ribs ached. I thought about the last time I got really sick. My mother made peppermint tea and we sat together at the kitchen table until my stomach stopped churning. She put me to bed, tucked me in, and brought me saltines and ginger ale. But tonight my mother was at her interview in Boston, and my father was already asleep.

S
helly didn’t go to the dance. Instead she went into her room and would not come out. When I knocked on her door, she said softly, “Just leave me alone.” Maggie was sitting on the couch, watching TV, her arms crossed against her chest. She wouldn’t speak to me either. I didn’t know what to do to make things right again. With Shelly
or
Maggie.

And despite the chicken and dumplings waiting in a steaming casserole dish at the table for me, I excused myself and went downstairs to the bowling alley, where I ordered a bowl of chili and a beer. It was Ladies Night again, and the place was filled with women.

“Hey, Harper!” Missy Knowles hollered, waving with her left arm. Her right arm was in a sling. Missy was a regular on Ladies Night; she belonged to one of the women’s leagues. She was in my class in high school, but I hadn’t known her until we moved in above the bowling alley. I liked Missy. She was plump and friendly. Funny.

She came over to my booth, where I was just finishing up my bowl of chili, and slid in across from me. “What happened to
you
?” I asked, motioning to her arm.

“Slipped on some orange juice,” she said. “Seems Jessie couldn’t take thirty seconds of her precious time to mop it up after she knocked her glass over. Busy girl, you know.”

“Is it broken?”

“Nah, just a sprain. I told Jessie it’s fractured in four places though. Figure I should get as much mileage as I can out of it.”

“Is it working?”

“She cleaned out the fridge and did all the laundry this week.” Missy chuckled. Her cheeks were flushed.

“You playing tonight?”

“I’m here for
team spirit
,” she said, and gestured toward my beer. “And my
spirit’s
just about run out.”

“How about I buy us a pitcher?” I asked. It felt good to have someone to chat with. I hadn’t had a normal adult conversation since the wreck.

When I came back to the booth, Missy said, “Where’s Shelly at tonight? Over to the dance?”

“Upstairs,” I said. “Pouting.”

Missy nodded, sympathetic. She had three daughters, each just a year apart. The youngest, Jessie, was in Shelly’s grade. We’d commiserated before.

We finished off the first pitcher and then a second one before I checked my watch. Missy was telling dirty jokes. I’d been laughing so hard tears were coming out of my eyes. “I should really go back upstairs,” I said.

“You got some help, I hear,” Missy said. “A girl to help out with Shelly?”

I thought about Maggie then, for the first time all night, remembered the argument we’d had.

“Yeah,” I said. “But it’s just a temporary thing.”

“It’s real good of you to take her in,” Missy said. “A lot of people’s hearts only got so much room for a girl like that. Especially around here,” she whispered.

I remembered Maggie’s shoulders like two unripe plums in my hands.

“I really have to get home,” I said.

“And leave me all alone?” she asked, flirting a little. This was the inevitable outcome of two shared pitchers with Missy. She was one of the few women who still bothered with me. I could always count on Missy.

“You’re not
alone
,” I said. “Here comes Louise.”

Missy’s best friend, Louise, kissed me on the cheek as I stood up and then slid into my seat in the booth.

“Goodnight,
ladies
,” I said with a smile.

“See you at the bake sale tomorrow?” Missy asked.

“Bake sale?”

“At the graded school. The fund-raiser for the families of the people in the wreck? I was pretty sure Shelly told Jessie she’d be there.”

“Sure,” I said. “Bake sale.”

In the morning, I woke up wishing I hadn’t had either the chili or the beer the night before. I was paying for both. I made my way to the kitchen, my head thick and my legs shaky.

Maggie and I sat across from each other at the kitchen table eating leftover dumplings drizzled with maple syrup in complete silence. Each time I glanced up from my plate, she looked down at hers. Shelly was still in her room.

“Listen,” I said, wiping my mouth with a paper towel. “I’m sorry about last night. But you really shouldn’t have gotten into my things.”

“That was a mean thing, what you did,” she said.

“I know.”

“You coulda hurt me.” Maggie’s face was that of a child’s, her bottom lip trembling.

I nodded, resisted the urge to reach out for her hand.

Maggie shook her head, sniffed, a fighter going back into the ring. She folded her paper towel daintily and set it on her plate. “It
was
kinda your fault anyway. Shelly didn’t have nothin’ nice to wear to the dance. You know that girl doesn’t have a single dressy dress? I was only tryin’ to make her feel pretty. That’s important, you know. She’s not a little girl anymore.”

“Yes, she
is
,” I said, setting my fork down.

“Maybe in your mind, but not in hers.”

I nodded. Point taken.

Maggie offered me another dumpling. I shook my head, took a long sip of my coffee. “Maggie, we really need to discuss what to do next,” I said. “I understand that you don’t want to go to Canada. I’m assuming that your family has arranged for some sort of adoption or something…you’re obviously too far along for…” I took a deep breath. “But, what I don’t understand is why you want to stay
here
. I don’t mean to sound disrespectful, but for someone like you, Two Rivers is hardly the place to
blend in
.” I thought about Missy’s comment. I thought about the stares we’d already gotten at church. On the street. “You’ve got the baby to think about.”

Maggie closed her eyes for a minute, her jaw tightening. She opened them again and smiled. “Are you sayin’ that I haven’t been a good guest?”

“That’s not at all what I’m saying,” I said, exasperated.

“I mean, you’ve come home to a hot meal every night this week. Shelly’s been to school on time every morning; she gets her homework done every night.”

“It’s been very helpful having you here,” I said, speaking slowly, trying to remember that Maggie was still a child. I had to try to think like a child. Whatever her father had said to her, done to her, he was still her father. “Don’t you miss your dad? I’m sure he misses you.”

Maggie’s face softened; her eyes were wet. “I don’t miss nobody.”

“What about the baby’s father?” I asked quietly. “Does he know where you are?”

Maggie’s face grew hard again. She stood up and cleared the dishes off the table, setting them down hard on the counter. A knife dropped and rattled onto the linoleum.

“I made a raspberry pie for Shelly’s bake sale,” she said, turning on her heel. “Unless you’re fixin’ to make somethin’ else?”

M
y mother left for Ohio the day after my graduation from Two Rivers High School.

The graduation party was thrown by Carla Simmons’s parents, who owned a whole bunch of land, which they offered up for the all-night event. Most attendees brought tents and sleeping bags. If my mother hadn’t been leaving the next day, I probably would have drank myself silly and passed out under the stars too, but instead I spent the whole night feeling disconnected from the music and laughter and celebration. Betsy found me sitting in one of two adjacent tire swings, which were suspended from a single giant oak tree near the creek. She sat down in the other one, swinging quietly, and we barely spoke. Nothing to say, maybe. Or maybe too much.

Just after ten o’clock, I stood up, my legs all pins and needles. “I should head home.”

“Will your mom be up still?” she asked.

“I don’t know.”

“She’s so brave,” Betsy said, leaning backward and swinging slow and low.

“How so?”

“It’s
dangerous
down there. It’s not like it is here. People like your mom, just wanting to help other people, they get treated like they’re criminals or something.”

“Hmm?”

“
Helping
colored people? That’s worse to those bigots than actually being Negro.”

I hadn’t thought much beyond what it would be like for my father and me after my mother was gone. I certainly hadn’t thought about her being in any sort of danger.

“She’s just teaching.
Piano
lessons,” I said. I imagined my mother sitting in her straight-backed way at a piano, little colored children all around her.

“I’m just saying that it takes courage to do what she’s doing.”

“I’ll tell her you think so,” I said, feeling defensive. I was a little angry still, about my mother leaving us. And about Betsy leaving me.

“Someday I’m going to do something like that,” she said.

“What’s that?” I asked.

“Something big. Something that will change the world.”

I wanted to tell her that she already had: that her very existence made the world a brighter place. I wanted to tell her that when I was around her I barely remembered to breathe. Instead I hopped off the swing and said, “Anyway, I gotta go.”

“You okay to drive?”

I nodded. “Wanna ride?” I asked.

“Nah,” Betsy said. “I’ll catch a ride home later.”

“Howie going your way?” I asked. Howie Burke and Betsy Parker seemed to have completely reconciled following their respective coronations. At graduation Howie had put Betsy in a playful headlock and called her “Duchess.” When I told Betsy I couldn’t believe she could forgive him for what he’d done to her, what he’d said about her mother, she’d only shrugged saying,
We were kids then. And it’s not like he wasn’t telling the truth.

“Did you see where I put my shoes?” she asked. She was always losing her shoes. We couldn’t see anything in the dark. “Oh well,” she said. “Coming?” And she started walking barefoot through the grass back to the house, which was filled with light and loud with music. She was wearing blue jeans, rolled up, a soft white sweater that glowed in the little bit of moonlight that burned through the heavy clouds. I walked behind her as she skipped ahead. Her hair had grown so long it was touching the waistband of her jeans. I wondered what it would feel like in my hands. Imagined the way it would feel on my skin. I wanted to catch her up in my arms, collapse with her, make love to her. I wanted to
keep
her.

“You leavin’ already?” Ray asked. He and Rosemary were sitting on the porch steps.

Ray was wearing his mortarboard crookedly on his head. He’d started his job as a maintenance mechanic at the paper mill on Monday. Rosemary was going to go to cosmetology school. I envied them, their certain futures.

“Come over tomorrow?” Betsy said to me, sitting down next to Rosemary on the porch.

“Sure, after we drop my mom off.”

“Wish her luck,” she said.

I drove home, sober and feeling slightly melancholy though I couldn’t pinpoint why. It seemed like this day had signaled the end to so many things—some of which I wasn’t quite ready to see end yet.

When I got home, my mother was in the kitchen, sitting at the table with a glass of wine. My father had moved the kitchen table into a corner in order to make room for the computer, which sat ominously in the middle of the room.

“Where’s Dad?” I asked.

“I sent him to bed.”

“What are you doing up?”

“Can’t sleep,” she sighed. “Thought this might help.” She gestured to the wine bottle, which was half empty. “Want some?”

“Nah,” I said.

She poured a little more and then peered into her glass.

“I bet it’s hot in Mississippi in the summertime,” I said.

“So they say.”

“Are you nervous?”

“Nervous?”

“About the summer?” I could count on one hand the number of nights my mother had spent away from this house. I tried to imagine her with a church family in Palmer’s Crossing, Mississippi. I tried to picture her pale moon face staring out at a room full of colored kids. What would she say to them? And they to her? I thought about the people there who would hate her for what she was trying to do.

She looked at me, studying my face. It made me feel self-conscious. “Did you know that when I was pregnant with you, I almost lost you?”

I shook my head.

“I was only a few months along. Barely showing yet.” She smiled. “Your father was down in the basement, working on
something
, and I was cleaning out the cupboards. You wouldn’t believe the stuff that your grandmother left behind. There was barely room for our dishes when we moved in. So, anyway, I was trying to get everything cleaned out. They call that the nesting instinct, though I’ve never much believed in that sort of thing. We had this step stool, but I still couldn’t reach the top shelf. I figured I could just pull the drawers out, use them like steps. Like a ladder. Well, I should have known how stupid that was. Especially with my being pregnant, but I had my heart set on getting that junk cleared out, so I climbed up. And just as I was reaching up for a mason jar filled with bobby pins or some such thing, my ankle twisted and down I went. The next thing I knew, I was having terrible pains,” she said.

She’d never told me this story before.

“I’d also knocked the wind out of myself, and so I couldn’t make a sound to let your father know that I’d fallen. Luckily, I must have made a big enough thud when I fell that he heard it and came rushing upstairs. Back then, the closest hospital was in St. Johnsbury, so he was driving like a maniac to get me to the hospital, and I remember lying in the backseat
praying
. Like I used to when I was a little girl. The whole way to the hospital, I was bargaining with a God I didn’t even believe in anymore to keep you safe. But what I mostly remember is thinking about what would happen if I
did
lose you. I hadn’t wanted to have children, you see….”

“Mom,” I said.

“I’m sure you knew that already. You’re a bright kid. You know you weren’t exactly part of the plan back then. But that afternoon, I had three hours of sitting in the emergency room to think about what would happen if you
weren’t
born. And even though I was scared out of my mind to be a mother—I
wanted
you. I wanted so badly to have you.”

I picked up the bottle of wine and studied the label.

“You see, the things that terrify us—the things that scare us—are sometimes the best things
for
us. If not for you, I would probably have gone on to do all the things I planned to do. Moved home to Boston, gotten a job with the symphony, all that. But that would have been an easy life. Being a
mother
. Taking that leap of faith, that was the real thing. That, for me anyway, was taking a chance. And now I can’t imagine having done anything else.” She smiled and reached for my hand. “I’m so proud of you. Graduating from high school, in the wink of an eye. Off to college. I didn’t do half as bad a job as I thought I would.”

“So now your job is done?”

“Oh, I don’t know about being done. But you’re almost grown now. A man. A good,
kind
man.” She squeezed my hand. “And now suddenly here is this opportunity. Of course I’m nervous. I’m
terrified
. But I have to do this. Not only for the people down there, but for myself.”

“Betsy says that the white people down there will hate you,” I said.

“It wouldn’t be the first time someone hated me.” She laughed and took a sip of wine. “Luckily, I never wanted to be belle of the ball.”

I looked at the kitchen computer. “Dad won’t know what to do without you here,” I said.

“He’ll be fine,” she said. “Maybe now he can channel all that creative energy into something truly useful.”

I smiled.

“You’ll be home at the end of the summer?” I asked. “Before I leave for school?”

“I’ll be home when my work is done,” she said. “And I hope to be done by the end of the summer.”

I wanted to tell her how much I would miss her, but I only managed to say, “Okay.”

The day that my mother arrived at the Western College for Women in Oxford, Ohio, for orientation, three civil rights activists working for Project Freedom disappeared in Mississippi. We heard about this on the news, and my father sat pale and stunned on the couch for nearly an hour afterward. I knew then what the mothers and fathers of my classmates who had been sent to Vietnam must be feeling: a distant sort of terror, palpable but removed, like trying to touch someone’s face through a window. There was only the TV screen between us and the horror of what had likely happened to those three kids, to what could very well happen to my mother.

I left my father on the couch and wandered around the house, feeling lost. Usually the door to my mother’s study was closed all but a crack, revealing just a sliver of her frizzy hair, a glimpse of her peering over the top of her glasses, a flash of gray from her ratty old sweater. But today, the door was wide open. I had never set foot inside that room, not that I could remember anyway. Even as a child, I never trespassed. I imagined it though, dreamed a dark, quiet place—a tiny lamp on her desk providing the only illumination. Everything, in my imagined version of this room, glowed an amber color and smelled the musty smell of books. But now, on this early June evening, sunlight streamed through the bay window, blinding me as I opened the door. Her desk, which I knew was large, wooden, and heavy, was not as large as I dreamed it, and it was not cluttered but completely tidy. There were books, of course, but they were not in the disarray I had assumed they would be. In fact, they were alphabetized, fitting snugly into the floor to ceiling shelves along one wall behind her desk. There were no stacks on the floor, no scattered papers, no calico cat purring softly atop a pile of paperbacks. (I knew we did not have a cat, but still, this is what I imagined.) The one lamp on her desk was not amber glass but a simple banker’s lamp—brass with a green shade, the kind you find at public libraries. There was not only an unexpected orderliness to this room but an
ordinariness
. I felt the suspicions I’d been having suddenly confirmed; I didn’t know my mother at all.

But just as I was about to leave, I noticed the familiar gray sweater, the heavy cabled cardigan she almost always wore both inside and outside this house, hanging on the back of the door. I suppose I could have seen it as a good sign: that she would soon be back, that there had been no real reason to take it along for such a brief journey. But instead I knew that what it really meant was that my mother, this mother of unexpected order and efficiency, might believe that things were disposable. And suddenly her absence was even more complete, as if I’d found her very skin there. Shed. Molting one life for another. Only the cast off husk remaining.