Still Life with Plums (2 page)

“Mother will love the car, Dolan,” Mom said, pulling a compact from her purse to powder her dishwater-steamed face. She peered into the mirrored disk in the evening’s last light and tried to fluff her hair and apply lipstick because she never had one single minute to gussy up at home.

Dad grunted, spine straightening as if he’d forgotten about the dents and dings and his older brother’s smug mug when he handed over the keys. “Don’t ride the clutch,” Uncle Merritt had said. “Change the oil more than once a year. And don’t ever let those wild boys drive it!”

“Maybe she’ll buy us new Easter dresses!” Mary said, a thought that set the twins shivering, and me, too, but for different reasons. I remembered too well the previous year’s shopping disaster, all that purple chiffon and itchy lace because the three girls had to match—though I was no match for my sisters.

“Don’t you girls pester Grandma,” Mother said, craning around to better glare at the twins, her eyes more fearful than challenging. Clearly she remembered my father’s ear-steaming rant when he discovered that his mother-in-law had clothed his daughters in a grander style than he could ever afford.

“Didn’t your mother just make you new dresses?” Dad said, his black eyes peering into the rearview, a look that would have me stuttering but that had no effect on the twins.

“Nobody wears homemade clothes anymore,” Meg said.

I looked at the back of Mom’s head, her shoulders stooped as if she were still hunkered over the sewing machine with the bobbin that routinely clotted with thread. The way her eyebrows furrowed whenever she tried to untangle the knotted mess, as if she wanted to hoist the blasted machine over her head and hurl it through the side window.

“Your mother wears handmade dresses,” Dad said. “What’s good enough for her should be good enough for the loiks-a-yew.”

“Then let
her
wear them,” the twins spat.

The turtleneck pinched my neck as Duff and I glanced at each other, both of us holding our breath. I don’t think Mom was breathing either.

“Spoiled brats,” Dad finally muttered, his voice firm, but the crinkle around his eyes betrayed pride in his mouthy offspring.

I marveled once more at the twins’ nerve.

“Your father called today,” Mom said, tugging her earlobe in that frantic way she always did when she delivered bad news.

Dad’s shoulders drew up. “What for?”

“He wants you to pick him up after Easter mass and bring him to our house for dinner.”

Dad hunkered over the steering wheel, jaw grating back and forth. “Something wrong with his car?”

“He didn’t say.”

“He can’t drive two miles?” Dad said, voice raspy.

Mother didn’t answer because what could she say?

“Why can’t he eat over at Merritt’s?”

Even I knew the answer to that. The last time the extended family gathered at Uncle Merritt’s for a meal, Grandpa knocked over his water glass. He mechanically drew his hand back and swiped at his wife who would have been sitting beside him if she hadn’t bluntly died a month before. Instead, Grandpa struck Merritt’s eight-year-old daughter who wailed like the banshee she was.

Aunt Sally swung around from the stove, spatula in hand. “Did he hit you?” she asked her sniveling daughter. “Did you hit her?” she spat at Grandpa.

Mom and Dad slunk down in their seats as Uncle Merritt thundered up his basement steps, bottles of homemade beer clinking in his arms.

“Your father hit her!” Aunt Sally squealed.

Uncle Merritt gawped at the red handprint blooming across his daughter’s cheek.

“Do something!” Aunt Sally implored.

Uncle Merritt looked at his father, his brother, his wife, his poor little slobbering daughter, the pathetic sight of her turning his neck splotchy, but that only made me want to kick her under the table and yell:
Don’t show it!

Uncle Merritt peered down at his father and seethed: “I don’t care if you did just lose Ma. No one hits my daughter. No one! I want you out of my house!”

Grandpa’s eyes rounded as if he couldn’t believe the sudden expulsion, and neither could I. We’d just gotten our salads. Grandpa slammed his fist on the table, water glasses trembling, pushed out of his chair, and stomped to the front door, but not before thumping my dad’s ear and growling: “Dolan! Get in the car!”

Dad shot up. Grandpa was our ride, after all. “Come on, Marge,” he said to my mother who was shoveling in peaches and cottage cheese as fast as she could.

“Not you,” Aunt Sally said to Mom. “I’ll give you and the kids a ride home after supper. Stay, please.”

“Marge!” Dad seethed. “Get the kids in the car!”

Mom cringed and we all tugged the napkins from our collars and piled them on our empty plates.

At the curb, Grandpa raised his fist to the house. “I’ll not stay where I’m not wanted!” he railed before smacking Dad once more. Dad’s face paled and he whipped around to yank Kieran by the elbow and hurl him into the backseat of Grandpa’s sedan, followed by Killian, then Kevin, their bony shoulders and skulls clacking together like coconuts. The twins quietly slid onto Mom and Dad’s laps in the front seat, and Duff and I balanced on the KKK’s knobby knees for
the grueling ride home. That was the night the KKK devised the rubber band/emery board/coat hanger torture.

Eighteen months after that, in our new old car on the way to the train station, Dad stopped at a traffic light. I looked out the window as two wet dogs rooted for scraps from a tipped-over, rusted-out trash can. They fought over a wad of tinfoil, the smaller one winning, and I was glad.

Meg fidgeted in her seat and finally whined, “Why can’t we take the train to visit Grandma? She invites us every summer.”

Every time Grandma visited she prodded my father:
Dolan, let Marge and the girls come to Pittsburgh. Surely you and the boys can fend for yourselves for two weeks
.

Even I was afraid of that notion, imagining a mass grave in the backyard upon our return. Filled with exactly whose bones I wouldn’t hazard to guess, but maybe then I could have my own room.

“Grandma doesn’t want you squawking brats up there,” Dad said.

“She does, too,” Mary wailed. “She wants us to move in forever!”

Grandma never told me that, or Dad, I’m sure. The light turned green and Dad emitted a low growl before pressing the gas as he no doubt considered the tense week we were about to endure. The trouble Grandma Lorraine always stirred. The only perk for me was that I would be relegated to the living room sofa where I could pretend to sleep while Mom and Grandma sipped highballs in the kitchen after Dad went to bed. Invariably Grandma would slur:
Why did you have to marry a coal miner, for God’s sake
, a puzzling dig at our West Virginia roots since Dad was a telephone lineman and Grandma knew that.

Truthfully, I had never seen a coal mine or a miner in all my nine years except on TV. Often a newsman would stand before a
mineshaft as helmeted men hopped onto a contraption that would drive them into the gaping black hole. I knew those men and their families lived in a strip of dingy company houses on the east end of town. Shantytown, everyone called it. I had also seen coal trains winding through our shadow-filled valley, whistles howling, car after car piled high with the glistening black stuff that would bounce out and ping like popcorn against the iron rails. The miners’ kids went to my school and on my very first day of first grade Meg and Mary impressed upon me that I should never talk to a coal kid, not even to borrow a pencil or a piece of paper. If at all possible I shouldn’t breathe the air around them because their skin was cootified with noxious mine fumes which would turn my skin even darker than it already was.

I didn’t talk to the coal kids, but I watched them run in packs on the playground, their lungs laboring, their skin ruddy. I stole peeks of them greedily eating together in the cafeteria, never leaving one crumb. Afterwards, a few of them hovered around as the hair-netted lunch lady scraped off uneaten morsels from other kids’ trays. When her back was turned they reached their hands into the bin of mangled food to steal hunks of cheese, half-eaten sandwiches. Coal niggers, the KKK called them, both black and white, after routinely chasing them away from the school bus stop.
Run on home you little snot-nosed, soot-skinned, coal niggers!
More than once they added:
You too, Doreen!

The twins started rocking in their seat, chirping about Grandma’s visit, hoping she would paint their nails and let them wear her jewelry and for the millionth time describe her two-story house which had four bedrooms, two full bathrooms, and a solarium: a glassed-in porch filled with African violets, white wicker furniture, and streaming beams of sunlight. If we ever did make it to Pittsburgh I would
muscle my way to the solarium and stake my claim. The twins could have all four bedrooms for all I cared.

“Maybe she’s bringing the piano!” Mary said, a reference to the upright Baldwin Grandma offered to ship down so the twins could take lessons.

“Like we have a place to put it,” Meg sniped.

Dad grumbled at this gibe at the cramped quarters he provided. He clicked on the left turn signal and paused for oncoming traffic at the entrance to the train station parking lot. The windshield wipers squeaked. The turn signal tick-ticked.

“I hope those boys aren’t into my cheese ball,” Mom mumbled to herself, a valid concern since the KKK devoured everything, regardless.

“They’d better not be,” Dad said, probably wondering, like me, if they were balancing buckets of mice on doorjambs or hiding copperheads under Grandma’s blankets.

The twins pressed their fingers to their chins and in their best Grandma imitation said: “What those boys need is a good military school. They’re out of control, Marge! Completely out of control!”

Dad looked in the rearview at his treasured girls, though it didn’t look as if he treasured them that second.

Meg leaned over the front seat—a brave maneuver, I thought. “Mom, Mrs. Ottman puts pineapple rings and cherries on her ham—”

“And pokes cloves into it,” Mary added, leaning forward, too. “Can we do that this year?”

Mom started tugging her earlobe. “That sounds pretty, but—”

“Those damn boys better not be fooling with my Easter ham,” Dad spat.

“And brown sugar!” Meg said. “She rolls the whole thing in brown sugar mixed with Coca-Cola!”

“That sounds fun,” Mom said, pulling her fleshy earlobe nearly
down to her shoulder. “But I thought we would eat something different this year.”

“Something different!” we all said, even Dad. Even Duff.

My little brother looked forward to Easter ham even more than the chocolate bunnies and Marshmallow Peeps the KKK would inevitably
trade
for their black jellybeans. Of course no one anticipated it more than Dad. He made an elaborate production of sharpening his knife and pulling down the wire ham stand from its place on the highest shelf in the kitchen as if he were a priest pulling the Eucharist from the tabernacle during mass. It might have been the singular joy Duff and Dad shared. Emboldened by hunger, Duff would hover around as Dad positioned the ham firmly in its stand before sawing off slice after slice and piling them onto the good china platter. Every now and then Dad would slide a piece into his mouth and offer one to Duff. “Atta boy,” Dad would say. “That’ll put muscles on you.”

I could hear Mom exhaling even from where I sat. “Actually, we’re going to have roast chicken this year—stuffed with wild rice! Doesn’t that sound exotic?”

“Wild rice?” said Meg and Mary, plopping back in their seats, practically cracking me in the nose, and Duff, since were still leaning over their seatback.

“Wild rice!” said Dad.

“Everyone has ham for Easter,” Mom said, flapping a dismissive hand, pushing out a laugh that sounded more like a sob.

“We can’t have chicken for Easter dinner,” Dad said to himself. “We can’t have chicken for Easter dinner!” he said to the rest of us.
“My father
is coming, for Christ’s sake. And your mother!”

“They both like chi—”

“You know what Merritt is serving?” Dad railed.

By the way Mom’s shoulders jerked I knew she was bunching up the hem of her skirt as she often did.

“Do you know what Merritt is serving?” Dad asked her again.

“No,” Mom said.

“A standing rib roast
and
ham.
And
ham!”

“What’s a standing rib roast?” Mary asked.

“Why aren’t we having ham, Marge?” Dad said. “Tell me. What made you think we shouldn’t have a ham?”

Mom sat there, pleating her hem, looking at her lap.

“Marge! Why aren’t we having a ham!”

“Because the boys needed new shoes,” she whispered.

All the air was sucked out of the car, all sound, too, until Meg opened her fat mouth and said: “We can’t afford anything nice.”

Dad jerked around in his seat, hand raised as if he were going to strike one of his precious lilies, but a car horn wailed from behind. Detoured by our ham plight, my father had missed numerous opportunities to turn into the parking lot.

Dad shook his fist at the driver behind us. “Shut up!” he yelled. “I’ll stay here all night if I want to!”

I turned to look out the back window as the burly driver honked again, a long, lingering wail followed by a staccato burst from yet another car stacked up behind him.

Even with the windows closed I heard the burly man howl: “Make the goddamn turn!”

Dad started to open his door but Mom grabbed his arm. “Dolan, Mom’s train is due any minute.”

Duff and I bent over to scan the station. We always looked forward to waiting on the platform, leaning as far over the painted yellow line as we could before some black porter tugged us back by the elbows.
You kids don’t cross the line, now. Don’t want to get hit by the train
. We wanted to be the first to spot the train’s white headlight in the distance barreling toward us, followed by the squeal of the brakes as the train neared, growing larger and larger, a slick,
coal-burning, black monster that awed us completely.

The man behind us leaned on his horn once more. “Move that hunk-a-junk before I rear-end your ass out of the way!”