Vinegar Hill (11 page)

E
llen grew up with the man who is their waiter. His name is Roy and, though it doesn't show, she knows he has a rooster tattooed high on his forearm. In high school, he used to flaunt it, pushing up his sleeve, flexing his elbow to make the rooster stretch its neck as though it were about to crow. Kids crowded around him to see, and for a while all the boys talked about getting tattoos, what design was their favorite, what their parents would do. Now, like Ellen, Roy is past thirty, and a rooster tattoo is the sort of thing that makes people smile little, wise smiles and shake their heads. A rooster tattoo no longer fits into his life, which is quiet, perhaps even dreary, Ellen thinks, noticing the way he smiles at Barb as he guides the menu onto her plate. He winks before he turns away.

“It's my time of the month,” Barb announces long before he is out of earshot. She shakes her head and her yellow sunflower earrings clatter. “I could eat every last thing under
Dessert
.”

Barb's fourth-grade class has been moved to the room across the hall from Ellen's fifth grade. Sometimes Ellen is distracted by Barb's high clear voice (
I should've been a mezzo
, Barb likes to say) and she thinks of their growing friendship with a mixture of plea
sure and disbelief. They share their lunches in the teachers' lounge; Barb is a vegetarian, and over the past few weeks, Ellen has tasted interesting foods like bean sprouts and herb cheese. Barb teaches in hip-hugger jeans and brightly colored turtleneck sweaters, the clatter of her bracelets ringing like tiny bells. She is the first person Ellen knows personally who thinks there's nothing wrong with Women's Lib. Once a week, they work recess duty together, walking between the swings and the slide, taking turns patrolling the far edge of the playground by the parking lot. Ellen wonders, with the same self-consciousness she remembers from childhood friendships, what Barb sees in her. Whenever she thinks of herself, she sees a pencil sketch, wobbly and frail, with arrows pointing to each part:
leg, arm, hair
. There are ways, she knows, to imply
mother, wife, teacher
, but there is no part of herself which she can imagine labeling
friend
.

“What are you getting?” Barb asks, chipping fingernail polish from a tapering nail.

Moments ago, Ellen was grimly determined to stick to her diet and order just coffee, black. But the day calls for an ice cream sundae: this morning, walking to school with the children, she saw geese fly over Vinegar Hill, and she marveled at how they navigated through neighborhoods where all the houses looked the same, lined up in tidy rows without a river, a mountain, a lightning-split tree for a landmark. Flight is something Ellen can imagine, even wish for; navigation has always been a mystery. It is hard enough to travel through well-known streets and rooms and hallways, but how does one navigate wisely through tomorrow, the next day, the next week? Ellen sighs and closes her menu. There are only two more weeks of teaching until Easter vacation begins; still, she doesn't know how she can wait that long. At school, the children are restless, throwing mud balls at recess, doodling on their work sheets during math. At home, Amy and Herbert have divided their
bedroom into sides, mine and yours, and they argue the borders with all the vigilance of two small hostile countries.

“A sundae, I guess,” she says, just as Roy reappears.

“Excellent choice,” he says, scribbling on his pad. “How's Jimmy doing?”

Ellen stares at his high, pink forehead, remembering how his hair used to grow curly and thick. “Um, he's okay.”

“Is he home right now?”

“Until Saturday.”

“Where's he off to then?”

“Somewhere west, I think,” Ellen says vaguely. She doesn't like to talk about James in front of Barb, who is divorced and petitioning for an annulment. She tries to minimize the differences between herself and Barb whenever she can. Sometimes she pretends she is single too and can come and go as she pleases: eat whatever she likes, sleep in a bed with lavender sheets that smells only of herself, wear red and orange and purple turtlenecks that a husband would say are
too young
. James's name hangs between them like a foreign word, pretentious, something that doesn't belong.

“And what can I get for you, Hon?” Roy finally turns to Barb, his eyes suggesting endless possibilities. “A little shortcake, maybe? We got fresh strawberries.”

“How fresh?” Barb says, loading the word.

“
Fresh
,” Roy says.

“Sounds good,” Barb says, and Roy picks up the menus, sweeping the side of his hand across her arm. Barb watches the tight curve of his jeans as he walks back to the kitchen, and Ellen struggles with a vague sense of jealousy.

“He's married, you know,” she says, somewhat sharply. “Four kids. And he has a tattoo.”

“Tattoos can be interesting if they're in the right place,” Barb says diplomatically.

“I wouldn't know.”

“No tattoos on old Jimbo?”

Ellen laughs.
James with a tattoo!

“Didn't you ever date a guy with a tattoo before you got married?”

“I never dated anyone but James,” Ellen says, and as soon as she's said it, she feels she has stepped over an invisible line and become too intimate, too revealing. She imagines Barb is embarrassed for her, and she suddenly pictures Barb's adolescence: formals and dances, proms and homecomings, Friday night movies with boys who tilted their heads to hear the bright music of her bracelets, which must have been so risqué. Her own Friday nights she spent doing chores. To boys, she was never anything more than
a good sport, a cute kid
. “I was sort of a grind,” she says quickly. “Always with my nose in a book.”

“How did you meet James?”

Ellen searches for a lie, but can't find one. “He was one of my sister Julia's boyfriends, and she wanted to get rid of him. I was home for Easter vacation, and every time he called, she made me say she was sick. So one day he asked me out instead.”

“Oh,” Barb says. “Well.”

They look away from each other and gaze awkwardly around the diner. It is small: six tables, two red vinyl booths, and a row of stools along the counter. Buoys hang from the ceiling, and one wall is covered by plastic sand dollars and lobsters and crabs pinned to a fishing net. The nautical theme is for the summer tourists, who will be too charmed by the quaintness of Holly's Field to remember that lobsters aren't found in Lake Michigan. Tourist season, though, is still months away and the diner is almost empty. A man dressed in coveralls perches on a stool, picking clay from between the cleats of his boots with a pencil tip. An older couple shares a piece of raisin pie, alternating bites. Ellen stretches her neck to
peer out the window at Barb's red Camaro, which is parked in front of the fire hydrant.
My divorce car
, Barb calls it. Father Bork has summoned her to his office on several occasions, quoting letters from parents concerned about the moral integrity of a Catholic school that employs divorced teachers who drive flashy cars, smoke cigarettes in public, date men before their annulments are official. What effect might Barb have on young minds? these parents ask. What would Barb have Father Bork reply? She still takes Communion at Sunday Mass, staring him down until he releases the wafer.

“I've decided to get married again,” Barb says abruptly.

“What? To who?”

“Oh, I haven't picked him out yet,” Barb says. “Let's face it, the options are limited.”

“I don't know why you'd want to get married again,” Ellen says.

“I don't know either,” Barb says. “Why do you suppose that is?” The day before he left for good, Barb's ex-husband locked her in the garage. The mail carrier found her on his rounds, then went on to spread the story throughout Holly's Field. Barb showed up for work the next day to face a classroom filled with nine-year-olds who knew all the details. “I guess it's because I'm turning thirty soon and I feel like that's too old not to be settled.”

“Do you have to be married to be settled?”

Barb laughs. “Well, I think it helps. I mean, look at you. You're settled, you've got James and the kids—you know, someone to go home to.”

Ellen shrugs, rearranges her silverware. She has no right to complain to Barb about her marriage. Barb would think her problems with James are silly after all she's gone through. “So how will you find a husband?” she asks. “I mean, just
choose
someone?”

Barb laughs. “Of course,” she says, but then Roy comes with their orders and she turns her smile to him. Ellen has known women like Barb all her life; her sister Heidi, for instance. Heidi
can be talking to Mom or Ellen or her best girlfriend in the world, but when a man appears, other women become invisible.
It's natural
, Ellen reminds herself.
I don't mind. It doesn't make me angry
. She takes up her spoon and pushes it into her sundae, through the soft whipped cream, into the frozen center.

If I could have chosen
, she wonders,
would I have chosen James
? She remembers the vinyl interior of his car, an old Chevy he'd bought from Fritz with two summers of work. Bits of hay clung to the foam that poked out of the cracks in the seat. A small blue statue of the Virgin was glued to the dash, and a Saint Christopher medal hung by a chain from the rearview mirror. The night of the blizzard, when they no longer could see the road, James slipped the Saint Christopher around his neck.
Don't worry
, he said,
This car never stuck me anywhere
, but soon, like a sleepy animal looking for rest, it nosed its hood into a drift. The windshield wipers grew heavy with snow, heavier still, until they froze to the glass.
We can't spend the night here
, Ellen said; in a sudden panic, she tried to open her door and realized it was sealed with ice.
I'm so sorry
, James said again and again; he took her hand and for the rest of the night they talked, huddled under the stiff wool blanket, and in the morning when he said,
Well, we ought to get married, what do you think?
she looked into his kind, frightened face and told him,
Yes
.

She was twenty years old, home from college for Easter vacation, and she had known James most of her life, the way people know each other in towns like Holly's Field. Even now she can remember him as an altar boy at eight, stumbling over his robe and sending the gold serving platter flying like a discus into the pews. She remembers when he was held back at the end of sixth grade. She remembers him dropping out his first year of high school to help his dad with the farm the way kids often did back then. She tries to remember other boys, but she can't think of anyone in particular. There is only James, tall and thin, awkward in the old black suit
of Fritz's he wore when he picked her up for their first date. Two months later, just after her graduation, they were married.

Her wedding dress was the one that Ketty, Heidi, and Julia had worn. Mom said it would bring her luck. It was yellowed under the arms and along the hem. The day of the wedding, Julia pinned the top of the sleeves to the bodice so Ellen would not forget and raise her arms; Gert stitched white flowers over the stains. As her sisters moved around her, Ellen watched them with her eyes half-closed, drifting, letting them take control. They were in the downstairs bathroom at her mother's home—after today, it would no longer be her own—and the air was close and warm as water. She doesn't remember fainting, but when she came to Mom was standing over her with a rag dipped in ammonia.

“She's just like Ketty was,” Julia said.

“You're nervous,” Mom said, though Ellen could see that she was afraid it was something else, and for one awful moment she hated her mother for what she was thinking. “It's like this for everyone.”

“Not for me,” Miriam said, suspicious too. “I wasn't nervous at all.”

“Get her up,” Mom said. “She's wrinkling the dress.”

They smoothed out Ellen's dress, patted her face with a wet washcloth, and took her out to the truck. The fresh air stung her cheeks. It was a clear June morning, and the smell of the henhouse was in the air.
Ellen Grier
, she thought to herself, trying to make the name sound right, but in her heart she knew she was still Ellen Schumaker, would always be Ellen Schumaker, and she was ashamed, going into her marriage with a selfish attitude like that.

She feels Barb's finger on the back of her hand. Barb is studying her with the same expression she uses when she suspects a fourth-grader of telling a lie. “You know,” she says, “what I'd really like to do is move away from here, start fresh, maybe live someplace
where nobody knows me. Honolulu or Mexico or something. I was just pretending about wanting to get married again.”

Ellen licks her spoon, trying to act unconcerned even though she senses a trap. “Why?”

“I wanted to see what you'd say,” Barb says. “I wanted to see if you'd try and change my mind.”

 

Every diet Ellen has tried over the last few years has failed. Dressing for work in the morning, she avoids looking down at herself as she yanks her control-top pantyhose into place. Beside James and Fritz, who are bony as mules, or in the slender shadow of Mary-Margaret, or running after Amy and Herbert's quicksilver bodies, she feels bovine and slow, squat, hideous. And it's her own fault. All she needs to take charge of her life is a little self-discipline, a little self-control. But what she feels is out of control, out of focus, out of sync. Lately, she finds herself scrutinizing things so closely that they become unfamiliar. It reminds her of the way, when she was a child, she used to say her name over and over until the word stopped making sense and she became disoriented and afraid.