Ordinary Love and Good Will (16 page)

Now she relaxes, but her inspection of me is frank, as if suppositions are being confirmed. It is Liz who should have come. I say, “I guess we haven’t met before. I don’t have a car, so we don’t very often get to the evening conference sessions. You know, where everybody gets to meet?”

She sits far away from me, doesn’t smile or shake my hand. She is young, maybe twenty-five or -six. Last year Tommy’s teacher was about my age. She at least remembered a time when others had the ambitions I had, but this one doesn’t. She says, “Well, these actions of Tommy’s have upset the whole class. And they’ve upset me, as well.”

“Mrs. Miller and I were very surprised.”

“Well, to be candid, Mr. Miller, I wasn’t, really. Toward the beginning of the year, another thing happened, but I thought it had passed, and was forgotten. I was wrong, and I should have sent a note home to you then.”

“What was that?”

“Well, one day, apropos of nothing, Tommy just spoke
up in class and said, ‘How’d this nigger girl get in here?’ I was shocked. And, actually, Annabel didn’t really react. I’m not sure she’s ever heard the word before, and I don’t know that she realized he was talking about her.”

“I wish you had let me know.”

She smiles a tight, uncomfortable smile. “Well, Mr. Miller, I actually wasn’t certain that you would care, I mean, that that sort of language would be unacceptable to you.” She gives me a challenging glance.

“Miss Bussman, I can say with certainty that Tommy has never heard that word at home. In fact, he says he heard some of the teachers using that word early in the school year.”

Miss Bussman’s wide blond face closes over, and she says, “That’s absurd, Mr. Miller.” I should have begun with the fifth-graders in the bathroom. We stare at each other for a second, then look down at the table. The knowledge that someone is lying has already soured this discussion.

I gather my patience. The visceral knowledge that Tommy’s teacher is predisposed against him, for whatever reason, makes me a little breathless. I say, heavily, “Well, thank you for talking to me. You shouldn’t have any more trouble with him, and I’ll arrange things with the Harrises about the dolls.”

“Mrs. Harris. Just Mrs. Harris.”

“Fine. I’ll get her address.”

“I have it.” She holds me at the door, rummages through her purse for an endless time. The walls of the schoolroom are awash in construction paper and bright sayings: “The only bad question is a question never asked,” “Have you smiled today?”, “Reading Is Fun!” She says, “Route Three. The number is 453-9876.” She holds my gaze, but there are no more even tight smiles; something has released the rein she was holding on her disapproval. Outside the school, my anger suddenly fires, not at Miss Bussman, but at Liz,
for opposing home schooling and holding out for one more year.

I dredge a quarter out of my pants and call the number. “Dr. Harris,” she keeps saying. “Dr. Harris.” I am not even sure she hears what I have to say, although she does tell me where her place is, about a mile out, southwest of town. From there to my place it is about five miles over roads, three over the hills. By the clock in the drugstore it is already four. It will be dark by six. One thing Liz and I have trained ourselves to do is wait patiently. The other one
WILL
get home. But I am not looking forward to the long, dark walk I will have to make on an empty stomach, turning over the mystery of my son’s misdeeds all the way.

The house is a nice one, built in the twenties, it looks like, with mullioned windows in the front and a little stream, Laurel Creek, running along the western edge of the property. Dr. Harris, or someone, has planted a lot of flower beds, and though they are frosted this late in the year, they tempt me to veer from my straight, narrow, and chastened path to the front door. The front entrance is one I could envy—two sidelights and a fanlight above. When I ring the bell, the hall chandelier blazes up, and its glitter pours through the fanlight onto the front porch. The door opens. A pleasant voice says, “Mr. Miller? Come on in.”

Immediately it is apparent that Dr. Harris has the touch. The front hall and the living room leading off it are bright, warm, comfortable, and stylish. The high ceilings, painted pale, peachy rose, the white woodwork, the pale green walls, the graceful dark shine of the banister curling toward the second floor, the lamps, lit. I have lived without electricity for so long that the silvery gold light of the lamps enchants me. The furnishings aren’t expensive, I would bet—the same mix of almost antiques and affordable new pieces that others I know around here have—but hers have been refinished and reupholstered to look bright and fresh.
Plants and dried-flower arrangements are grouped about. In a southern bay window I hadn’t noticed from outside sit three gardenias. Two of them are blooming. I realize I am gawking. I look at Dr. Harris, who is dressed in peacock-blue sweatclothes. She is not pretty, but her face has a pleasant, knowing look. Her hair is pulled back, giving her head a sculptured quality. I wonder what she knows. I would give anything to find out that she thinks the incident of the dolls is just little boy mischief that could have happened to any girl, nothing directed at Annabel herself, nothing perpetrated by Tommy himself.

I say, “I came to apologize for Thomas. If it weren’t such a long walk, I would have brought my son, but we don’t own a car.”

“Thank you, Mr. Miller. If the dolls hadn’t been new for Annie’s birthday, she wouldn’t have had them at the school—” She pauses. “They’re silly dolls. Have you seen them? Members of a girls’ rock band. Worse than Barbie.” She smiles. “Maybe your son was esthetically offended.”

“Thanks, but you don’t have to let him off the hook. I’m sure your daughter was upset, and I feel bad about that. Anyway, we’ll replace them, but I need to know about where you bought them, and I also need to ask your patience, because, since I don’t have a car, it might take me a couple of days to find a ride there.”

“I got them at the Walmart in State College. If you want to just repay me—” Her voice trails off rather delicately.

It is hard to judge what strangers might know about me. Among my friends in town I am somewhat famous, the object of teasing for the elaborate lengths I have to go to, to perform some very simple transactions. The fact, however, that they needle me (“Dear Bob, We are having a potluck this Friday. You and Liz and Tommy are invited. Let us know next week, as early as possible, why you didn’t come. Love, the Herberts”) shows that my habits entertain
more than annoy them. A lot goes unspoken, and most of what goes unspoken is about money. I never have to say, as I say to Dr. Harris, “Well, actually, all I have at the moment is about ten dollars, but I should be getting more by the end of the week”—and, in a rush—”actually, I was going to ask you what you paid for them, so I would know how much money to get and take with me.”

She is shocked, so she doesn’t know anything about me. I fill in quickly, “It’s not how it sounds. This is not a hardship, believe me, food out of the babies’ mouths or anything like that. I just don’t collect money. I get almost everything by barter. Someday I’ll tell you about it. But I don’t want Annabel to have to be without her dolls.”

“They were thirteen apiece.”

“Fine. I’ll try to have Tommy bring them to her next week.”

“Fine. Mr. Miller, I feel like—”

I put my finger to my lips. “Don’t say it. The fact is, I live in a weird way and I make people feel funny. But the most important thing is that Tom live through the consequences of those moments when he was breaking the dolls. If you make it easier for me, that will make it easier for him. It can’t be easy for him, or he won’t learn the real lesson.”

“That’s true.”

“Thanks.” We have backed toward the door. She reaches behind me to open it, and I glance around one last time, with the sensation of looking into a Russian Easter egg—the scene, bejeweled with light, is impossibly lovely and self-contained, impossibly unattainable. Her hand on the figured brass doorknob is slim, strong, beautifully manicured, a hand, I realize, that is unlike any hand I’ve looked at in years, right beneath my gaze, but as far away as a hand in a magazine advertisement. I am disconcerted; then I am
on the porch. It is cold and I pull up the hood of my sweatshirt. The hood string broke long ago, and to replace it, Liz crocheted one from some yarn she’d spun. She hung tassels from it. Tying them fills me with longing for her, and I hunch my shoulders and hurry down the porch steps.

The next four days constitute an orderly demonstration to Tommy of the consequences of his actions. When Martin Summerbee stops by for a visit, I sell him part of the lamb for $26.50. Tommy is standing there. I take him with me when I walk into town on Saturday, looking for a ride to State College, and he watches while I promise a friend of Liz’s, Dinah Hart, to till her flower beds one morning in May. “Tom will help,” I say. We wait on the porch without speaking while she gets ready to go. The “Jem” dolls are at the far end of the Walmart toy department, requiring a longing march through all the aisles of Transformers, games, art supplies, Legos. He reacts to it all in little starts of recognition, probably with much the same enchantment that I felt in Dr. Harris’s lamp-bejeweled front hall. In the doll section, “Kimber” and “Jem” are right on the top, anticlimactic in every way, an obvious waste of money, of effort, of the lambs and the affection and care they represented. I say, “I’m sorry that we have to spend our money on these dolls, Tommy. If you hadn’t broken Annabel’s, we wouldn’t have to.”

“I know,” he says, chastened, and after that I don’t save him by hastening him to the checkout and out the door. I let him look, but not touch. This might have backfired. When we are standing in the vestibule waiting for Dinah, he mutters, “We wouldn’t have bought anything, anyway.”

I am calm, paternal. I kneel and turn him toward me. His hair is dark brown and springy, his eyes round and thickly lashed. Though he is lanky and slender, his cheeks are round and cherubic. He looks at me, I search his face, and I find
no defiance. I say, “Tom, having money and spending money or not is our choice, but wasting it takes our choice away. Do you realize that?”

“Yes, Daddy.”

And then Dinah pulls up and I have to believe him. On Monday he takes the dolls to school, and around the place he is helpful and interested, same as always. On Wednesday he brings home another note, this on a half-sheet of peach-colored stationery engraved, “Lydia Martin Harris.” It reads,

And I do. That night the air is especially clear, and when Liz is looking down the valley at Moreton, she says, “Can you pick out the house?”

It takes us a while, and at first we think not—it is hidden by the flank of Snowy Top. But no; Laurel Creek Road curves around the mountain a ways after the Harris place. It is there, its lights seeming to flicker as the breeze tosses about the leafless branches in front of the house. After we find it, Liz says, “Fanlight above the door, you say?”

“Sidelights, too. Even curved windows aren’t hard to frame up, you know.”

“Ooooh.” Liz says. “Mmmm. Let’s.”

“Miller takeover bid?”

“Miller Conglomerate Expands Holdings Once Again.”

“Miller Fanlight Has Wall Street Worried—Can Millers Be Stopped?”

Liz gives a peal of laughter and rolls back on the bed, her feet in the air. “Ha!” she says. “We are so greedy. People don’t know how greedy we are.” She takes off her overalls, and the moonlight through the window lays a flat, pearly triangle over her thigh, attaching it to the quilt, so that all I want to do is burrow into layers and layers of comfort and warmth and strength and softness. “Come on,” she whispers, “come on.”

3
.
November

On the Monday before Thanksgiving, I come into the kitchen for lunch, and Liz tells me that she has been saved. She is smiling, her eyes are sparkling, she looks very flushed and attractive, and so I believe her. After a few moments of confusion, I sit down at the table. I don’t know whether to pick up one of my library books from the shelf beside the table, whether to wait for my lunch, or whether to go back out to the barn for a while. I do not, right this minute, want to hear about the circumstances of her salvation, but I am not surprised. Maybe a cancer diagnosis is like this—mortality is expected, but the date comes as a shock.

When I was in the army, I had a buddy named Larry Strunk. We were inducted the same day, trained in the same boot camp, given the same job, and sent to the same unit. For a while we shared the same hooch, and a few times we went on patrol together. In our own minds, our fates became superstitiously entwined, and we even called ourselves “the brothers,” only half facetiously. He went out one day and lost his left leg in a mine explosion. Afterward one of my regrets was that we had dared fate by twinning ourselves, however innocently, however jokingly, that we had doomed ourselves to divergence by naming aloud the coincidences and similarities, and feelings of affection that had
been felt but could have gone unspoken. When I married Liz, I recognized the same magic at work. Now, at the table, it seems to me that she has taken off the way he did, leaving me alone with the old, good life. Certainly she doesn’t see it that way.