Miller's Valley (15 page)

C
allie said Clifton had gotten sad and quiet, but I couldn't see it. I was worried that this new Gramps, the one with the draggy leg and sandbag arm and funny mouth, the one who couldn't talk and sometimes cried, would freak him out, but Clifton seemed to like him just fine. I guess that made sense. My father had turned into a giant toddler. Maybe Clifton, who I thought ought to be in nursery school with other kids, believed he was finally with someone his own age. Sometimes he would climb into my father's lap and try to lift the low loose corner of his lip, and it always made my father laugh a little, a deep heh-heh laugh that almost sounded like his old one. Sometimes the two of them would sit out on the steps of Ruth's house and eat Fudgsicles. Clifton would count cars on the road, which was easy because there weren't many, and my father would turn the Fudgsicle stick around and around in his hands as though he was trying to figure out what he was supposed to do with it. His workbench in the barn was the saddest thing you ever saw. It was so clean and tidy, but with a faint smell of motor oil and mildew, so that it seemed like whoever once used the tools on the pegboard hadn't used them for years. The ghost of the old Bud Miller was nowhere to be found there.

When Clifton stayed at our house he would take that picture of Tommy in his dress uniform from the bureau and kiss it before he got under the covers. He thought Tommy was still away in the service, and none of us told him different. “God bless Daddy,” he said when he said his prayers, “and make him come home to Clifton soon.” That's when he looked sad to me, not when he was with my father.

If a prisoner at the state penitentiary doesn't want to have visitors, even if the visitors have driven two hours and emptied their pockets and filled out a form and gone through all the rigamarole you have to go through to sit on the other side of what looks like glass in the movies but is really plastic, then he doesn't have to come out. The guard comes back and says, “I told him you were here but he wants to stay in his cell.”

My mother tried. My brother Ed tried. Steven tried, or at least he came with me, and he said to the guard, “Go back and tell him his sister will wait in the car and it will just be me.” Nothing.

Steven and I went to the trailer Tom had been renting, and that was when I finally cried over him, my big brother in jail and his sad, nasty little life for anyone to see in a shoe box of white vinyl siding with one cracked concrete step to the front door. Inside there were some jeans and T-shirts in old plastic milk crates, a drawer full of rolling papers and condoms, and nothing in the refrigerator, which was one of those half-size dorm room numbers, except beer, a lemon that had dried out to a yellow marble, and a half of a ham sandwich that wasn't even wrapped in paper and that smelled like rot. “There aren't any drugs here,” I said, and Steven looked at me like I was crazy. “He flushed his stash as soon as he saw the red lights outside,” he said. “The staties are so damn dumb that they let you know they're coming.”

The guy who owned the trailer, who owned the one next door, too, wanted us to take Tom's stuff, but except for the picture of Clifton stuck in the edge of the mirror in the medicine cabinet, we pitched it all. I almost left the picture, too. It was maybe two years old, Clifton as a toddler. There were a dozen prescription bottles, but they were all empty. I looked at the labels. “All the others are happy pills or chill pills, except that one,” Steven said, pointing. “That one revs you up.”

“You seem to know a whole lot about all this stuff.”

“Guys in construction don't live such clean lives,” he said.

Even Callie got in her little junker, which was ten thousand miles away from rattling to a stop forever, and drove up and tried to get Tommy to see her, although she just did it for my mother. But she wouldn't bring Clifton along. “It's okay that he thinks Tom is back in Vietnam,” she said.

“I almost wish he was,” I said.

Callie was dropping Clifton at the house a lot more, and I'm sure part of it was to make my mother happy because it was pretty much the only thing that did. But I knew there was another reason, too. I'd been helping Mrs. Venti out at the steak house when she had to go to the hospital in Philadelphia to have some female surgery that turned out to be, far as I could tell, something that made her face look really tight and not at all younger. One night I was seating people and there was Callie with a man in a jacket and tie who looked familiar to me, although I couldn't tell from where. “Mimi!” she said, as though I was the last person in the world she'd ever find with a wine list and a menu under her arm, but I just said quietly, “Good evening,” and led the two of them to a table as far away from the podium as I could. Callie had on a blue dress and heels, and she was carrying one of those little purses that doesn't hold anything except a lipstick and some tissues. She was wearing makeup, too, and she looked so pretty, like a twenty-one-year-old girl whose only care was what to wear to a restaurant dinner, which she'd never gotten to be. Or maybe was getting to be now, every once in a while.

“Please don't say anything to your mom,” she said the next time she dropped Clifton by, making him blow his nose into a tissue before she let him loose. “It's not a big deal.”

“I think your date thought it was a pretty big deal,” I said, remembering how the man had pulled out her chair and then settled himself, leaning across the table so that when I glanced over I was worried the votive candle was going to set his shirt on fire. Halfway through their dinner I'd realized I knew his face from the community college, that he had some kind of suit-and-tie job there, although I wasn't sure which one. I didn't spend enough time there to find out. I had four courses and they were harder than I'd expected, especially the history seminar on America between the world wars. Trig was fine, but there was an intro statistics course Mrs. Farrell had insisted I take that was kicking my butt, and the bio had a lab that required me to stick around the building, which was one of those pale cinder-block boxes from the 1960s that looked like a middle school only more so. It was strange that I'd gone from the Miller's Valley high school, a serious red-brick building that looked like it belonged on some Ivy League campus—it actually had ivy, although they were always tearing it off so it wouldn't mess up the pointing—to a place that looked like a municipal building and had actually been built by the same people who built the municipal building, probably from the same set of plans.

A girl from my high school class named Laura was my lab partner. “I thought you were going to State,” she said the first day. We hadn't really known one another in high school because she was prealgebra when I was algebra, geometry when I was precalculus, so our class schedules were out of sync all the way along. It was funny, how that kind of thing could make all the difference in who you knew, and who you just knew by sight.

“Next year, I guess,” I'd said. “My dad is sick.”

“Me, too,” she said. “My mom.”

She was a good lab partner, careful and hardworking. I was afraid in the beginning that she might try to let me carry her, which had happened sometimes in high school, but she put in half the work for sure. We would have been friends if I'd had time for friends, but I didn't. School and the farm, the farm and school, and Steven when I could, which he said wasn't half enough. My mother wanted to sell the beef cattle, but I thought that might level my father, and he was leveled plenty. So I kept on doing what I needed to do every morning and evening in the half-light of the barn. Cows are companionable animals to cry around. Dogs notice and they run over and try to lick your face and cheer you up. But when there's no hope of cheering up, give me a couple of cows any day.

I have clear memories from that time, but they're not the ones you'd think. They're never the ones you think. When I walked across the stage at graduation, that's a blur. Even that morning when I found Tommy under the tractor isn't real sharp in my mind. My mother said she could barely remember her wedding day, she was so jittery.

No, it's strange little moments that live inside you and keep peeking out the windows that open suddenly in your mind. One morning outside the barn my boot got stuck in a suck hole made of water, mud, straw, gravel, and hay, with maybe some cowpat thrown in. It was like quicksand, and I pulled and pulled and pulled back until I came loose with a wet sucking sound and fell on my butt with my bare foot in the air, the boot and even my sock still in that hole. I can still see my toes, white and a little wrinkled from the humidity in my boots, and I can still feel the water soaking into the seat of my jeans and the empty feeling I had inside that was just plain hopelessness.

I guess there are times in your life that tell you what you're made of, the weeks after you bring a colicky baby home from the hospital, the year when you lose your job and the number in your checking account just gets smaller and smaller until it looks like it's going to wink out like daylight on a January afternoon. This was my time. There were record rains, and the two sump pumps we had now because one just wasn't enough went day and night, a chunk-a-chunk noise from the basement, and one morning I woke up because the sound had changed and I thought, Thank God, because it meant sunshine. But what it really meant was that one of the pumps had failed. You'd think that the saddest day would be the one when I found my father all folded up outside Ruth's house, but instead it was the one when I had to hire a guy to come and fix that pump. “My father's sick,” I said, “otherwise he would do it.”

“It's an antique,” said the guy. “I'm not sure I can even get parts for something this old.” My father used to make the replacement parts for sump pumps himself, which was something I just took for granted until I figured out how remarkable it was in the basement that morning, tapping my foot because I was afraid I was going to be late for class.

“We need to buy a new sump pump,” I'd said to my mother, and she passed over the coffee can from the summer's corn. It had a couple hundred dollars in it, in singles, mainly. The price had gone up since I'd been a kid selling corn with Donald and LaRhonda, but the same card table was there, with the coffee can on top of a sheet of loose-leaf that said
10¢ AN EAR
. People pulled up, filled a bag, and left the money in the can. I imagined someday Clifton would sit there and sort out thirteen-ear dozens for people he'd known his whole life. I'd figured out a long time ago that it had been busywork for me as a kid, but busywork seemed like most of my life now.

The weeks went by, each day the same as the one before it, and my father didn't get any better at all, although he seemed a little happier when Clifton came by. Ruth tolerated Clifton better now that my mother had stopped talking about moving Ruth out and moving her grandson in, now that my father was spending so much time at Ruth's house. He sat in front of the television, and he ate soup and pudding and ice cream, and his nice flat stomach went all slack and soft. “Bell,” he said some days. “Wall,” he said on others. “Me!” he shouted when we were out in the truck. “Me!” It was like when Clifton was small: I couldn't tell whether he was using what he could of my name, or trying to tell us that he was still there, that Buddy Miller was still inside there somewhere, lousy balance, no words, but still there.

The swearing was really bad some days. “Oh, put a sock in it, Mimi,” Ruth said one day when I made a face. “You're just like your mother. Let the poor man say whatever he wants.”

“Shit shit shit!” my father yelled.

“That's right, Buddy, you go right ahead,” Ruth said, taking his hand, but he pulled it away.

I liked to sit with him and pretend everything was just the same. “Pop, we're reading about the Depression in this course, and I have to say, I had no idea how bad it was. You were, what, fourteen or fifteen or something? Maybe it wasn't as bad for farmers. At least you could grow your own food. I guess that's always been the advantage of having a farm, right? You might not have money but you've always got food.”

“Not in January you don't,” Ruth said.

“I wasn't talking to you,” I said.

“I know, honey,” Ruth said. “There's a car pulled up on the drive.”

It was still pouring, but as soon as I saw the dark sedan through the window I went outside. My shirt soaked up the rain like a sponge, like it wanted to pull me down into the mud, like my foot and the boot had been just the beginning and the farm was going to eat me whole. I went over to the driver's side window of the car, and Winston Bally rolled it down.

“Get off my property,” I said.

“I just wanted to check in on your father. I was sorry to hear about his illness.”

“Get off his property,” I said.

“I need to talk to your mother,” he said.

“Get off her property.”

“I'll go to see her at the hospital,” he said. “I guess your father's not really in a position to make decisions anyhow, is he?”

“Just stay away from my family,” I said, turning my back on him. It was the rudest I'd ever been to anyone, and I didn't care one bit, not after what he'd said about my father. It made me feel good, to talk like that, better than I'd felt in weeks.

M
y least favorite part of the fall was listening to people tell me how much their kids liked it at the state university. Mrs. Venti said that LaRhonda had the prettiest roommate, a girl from outside Pittsburgh whose father worked at Alcoa, and that the two of them were both figuring on being Kappas. The only thing worse than hearing that was listening to the woman who worked in the steak house kitchen and went on and on about how homesick her daughter was. I wanted to tell her that if her daughter really wanted to know homesick, she should stay home in my house. I felt like my head was always full of things like that, that I felt like shouting but could never get away with even saying out loud.

LaRhonda came home at Thanksgiving, and the next thing I knew she was asking me to be her maid of honor, telling me that she was getting married over Christmas break, showing me a good-size diamond ring. “I'm telling you right now, there's no way Fred bought that unless it's a cubic zirconium,” Steven said. It always amazed me, the things he knew. A cubic zirconium. He was right about one thing. Fred hadn't paid for the ring himself but with a loan from his future father-in-law, who took one look at the chip Fred had gotten at the new mall and said, “You'd need a microscope to see that thing.”

“I guess there are some girls at school who are married, right?” I said, but LaRhonda frowned and her mother said, “Oh, Mimi, she's not going back to the university. She's staying right here with Fred. Mr. Venti's got plans for him. He always wanted a son.”

“I don't know why you keep saying that,” said LaRhonda.

“When I get the money together I'll buy you a ring bigger than that one,” said Steven in the back bedroom of a house he'd just bought at auction. He loved telling stories about the future. He moved from place to place now, couldn't see the point in renting an apartment or even a room when he owned a couple of houses and didn't care about living in a place with the kitchen cabinets in a pile in the backyard waiting to be carried off and replaced by ones he'd found at a job lot. He was really good about doing more with less. At some building site he'd found a small stall shower that had been the wrong size for the bathroom it was intended for, and bought it for ten bucks from the foreman. It was in the second bathroom of the house he was working on, and living in. We'd had sex standing up in it. It sounded a lot better than it turned out to be, but Steven seemed to like the idea. It was one of those things he could talk about after.

The other bridesmaids were two of the Holy Rollers from high school, and two girls LaRhonda had met at college and who I was pretty sure she wouldn't be seeing again. They stayed at the Ventis' house the week of the wedding, and the rooms in the children's wing were finally full. But I was the one who stayed in LaRhonda's room, and who heard her after the rehearsal dinner throwing up in her bathroom, with its metallic wallpaper and ruffled shower curtain. Her hair was in rollers for the next day, and one fell out and landed in the toilet with a plop, and I think that's what set her off. She sat back on her heels, her pink furry slippers poking out from under her nightgown, and wailed, “It was only three times and it hurt and I didn't even like it. Not one little bit.”

I knelt down next to her, feeling stupid because I was probably the only bridesmaid who hadn't immediately understood the reason for getting engaged at Thanksgiving, getting married at Christmas, and quitting college. I put one arm around her shoulder, which I don't think I'd ever done in all the years we'd known one another, and then all of a sudden the weird funny feeling I'd been having for a couple of days turned into something worse, and I leaned down into the toilet and threw up, too, right on top of that pink foam roller. I'd had a lot of clams casino at the rehearsal dinner, and a couple of whiskey sours. The inside of that toilet was ugly.

“Oh, Lord, I'm sorry,” I said, wiping my mouth with a piece of toilet paper. “That smell gets to you, like it's contagious.” But when I looked up at LaRhonda she'd stopped crying and her mouth was open, with a little pearly drop of drool at one corner, and she was staring at me.

“Oh my God, Mimi, you, too? You're the one who is supposed to be so damn smart.”

“What?”

“I figured you must have been doing something to take care of yourself, all the times you've been doing the dirty with him. And I do it three lousy times and here I am.”

“I just ate a bad clam,” I said, but then it happened again.

Lying in bed I stared at the ceiling, willing a bad clam onto the stainless platter with the paper doily that had been passed around before dinner. A bad clam would save my life. “You know what my mother says?” LaRhonda said from the darkness. “She says now I won't think I'm so special.”

“You've only had sex with Fred three times?” I said.

“I've only had sex with Fred once.”

“I didn't really care for her dress,” my mother said Sunday morning when I finally got home. “That empire waist that's so popular just looks like maternity clothes to me.” We were at the kitchen table and my mother was watching me carefully, to see if I showed anything on my face, but I was holding it still so I wouldn't look down at the fried eggs and bacon she'd put in front of me and get sick all over again. I kept telling myself I was hungover, which was true beyond anything I'd ever known before. Standing at the altar of the Presbyterian church, watching the peevish look on LaRhonda's face when Fred couldn't get the ring over her knuckle, trying to block out Steven's big grin as he stood two ushers down in a rented tuxedo with lapels like landing strips, I kept telling myself that I was just as smart as LaRhonda said. But I wasn't sure I believed it anymore.

We were slow-dancing to “Raindrops Keep Fallin' on My Head” at the reception when Steven whispered in my ear, “I wonder where Mr. Venti keeps his shotgun.”

“They probably would have gotten married eventually anyhow.”

“You think? I figured LaRhonda would have dumped him by February for some frat boy with blond hair and a rich daddy.”

So had I. I wondered if the frat boy had been time one and time two, and Fred had been time three to explain away the baby. But I just said, “She has the rich daddy, so I guess that's taken care of.” Then I ran for the ladies' room. It was packed the way it always was at a wedding. It's hard to throw up silently, but I thought I'd managed it until I got to the sink and one of the other bridesmaids said, “I know, right? It's that punch. It tastes like Hawaiian Punch going down but I think there's a lot of booze in it.”

“Right,” I said, washing my hands and hoping I was done. “I'm drinking nothing but champagne for the rest of the night.”

“Don't do that,” she said. “Champagne is the worst hangover ever.”

“Amen, sister,” said someone at one of the other sinks.

There were bottles and bottles of champagne, empties everywhere, and some of the guys were having a great time popping the corks and hitting the ceiling. “Anybody hits a chandelier, they're paying for it,” Mr. Venti had yelled.

“You okay?” Steven said.

“I will be,” I said.

“You got black stuff all over your eyes,” he said, coming at me with a cocktail napkin that said
LARHONDA AND FRED
with a pair of gold bands circled above their names and a dove that looked more like a pigeon on top of the bands.

“I'll do it,” I said, glad for an excuse to go back into the bathroom. LaRhonda was there, too. “I knew I'd find you in here,” she said, trying to push some pieces back into the big poof of curls they'd made on her head.

“I had too much to drink,” I said.

“Yeah, that's what I keep telling people, too, and then my mother laughs and starts to cry. She's going to give everybody in town something to talk about. You're next, Mimi.”

“No, I'm not,” I said, knowing I meant it but not what I was going to do about it. I walked out and Steven and Fred were talking, their arms around each other's shoulders, their bow ties hanging from clips off their collars, and behind them two older women danced while their husbands sat at a table with Mr. Venti. I felt a hand on my arm and it was my mother. “I'm heading home to check on your father,” she said. “You okay to get yourself back? You don't look well.”

“I had too much to drink,” I said.

“Well, it's a wedding. I think you got a little tipsy at Ed's wedding, too.”

“You're not planning a wedding like this for me, are you?”

My mother looked around and made a little bit of a face. “I always thought it made a lot more sense to spend the money on a down payment,” she said. “But even so we've got years and years to think about that, Mary Margaret. Don't stay out too late.”