The Other Shoe (6 page)

She remembered that when she'd left the county attorney's office that day, Mrs. Hemphill had huffed, “Well that really cuts it. We can't do anything for you. Can we, Karen?” Karen had never imagined that anyone could, and had never asked for anyone's help. She apologized, however, if only because that was what seemed to happen every time she opened her mouth.

Jean quit bowling after that, though she was carrying a 143 average in league play, and soon she had joined another church. She got busy at her sewing machine and made them all Sunday clothes so that they could attend services with her. Jean and Galahad and the twins were newly baptized, properly baptized at last, and the boys learned to speak in tongues, which they considered hilarious. Karen could never repent of her sins to the pastor's complete satisfaction, and so she was weekly admitted to the Chapel of the Lamb but never gained admission to the church, not as a member. Both Pastor Hurlburt and Jean would frequently remind her of how they suffered, of how fearful they were for her as she stood in darkness, outside the church, stubbornly denying herself its warmth and light. But all this dreamy talk of dying or not-dying, and of big swings in the temperature and in people's fortunes? A God so mean and grudging he'd require gratitude of men with holes in their filthy socks? She wanted no part of him. Having not found grace, Karen continued to haunt her family's twilight, and she entered a trackless adolescence where even the thrumming of her powerful good health sometimes made her anxious.

Jean's new religion required the doing of good works, so Pastor Hurlburt offered them a succession of rootless men who could benefit by exposure to the loving warmth of the Dents' home and a decent
Sunday supper. As Jean liked to cook, and as Galahad was willing to transform the floor plan of the trailer to accommodate a long table, and as his willingness extended even to going out and gathering up those selected strays who lacked transportation, most Sunday evenings in the Dent household now began to savor of Thanksgiving at the mission—good, aromatic food, bad hygiene, and, of course, our Heavenly Father to be beseeched and thanked for this and that. Not all their guests were bums or bums in the making, though, and it was at these Sunday suppers that Karen first encountered Henry Brusett.

Mr. Brusett was the only one of their guests to bring gifts for the household; it was safe to assume on Monday morning that the teapot left without explanation on the counter or the wildflowers tied to the screen door had been his offering. Among Sunday's smelly pilgrims, few found the wherewithal even to say thanks, and even Mr. Brusett, who was so very appreciative, would never hazard to say more than that. He had come up in hippie times and must have been one, for he still wore his hair long, tied in back and center-parted, and it was streaked with gray so that his scalp suggested a skunk's back. But he was not so glossy as a skunk, and not nearly so self-possessed. His right leg didn't carry him so much as it had to be carried, and to be lifted and thrown forward in every troubling step, and Mr. Brusett was so unwilling to give offense that in company, to be safe, he ceased to acknowledge his own existence.

Karen saw—could she be the only one?—that Mr. Brusett was embarrassed by the needy whining the Dents shared in prayer. “Lord, please help Slim endure those frostbit fingers, and let Tony find a way back to the loving arms of his Lucinda, for we fear you, Lord Jesus, and from you all things can be given, and to you all thanks is due.” Mr. Brusett, looking away, looking at his feet. A man who spoke only as much as necessary to be polite, he was otherwise a blank slate, and each time he came, Karen imagined some new history for him. As his
Sunday appearances became more important to her, Karen grew more and more certain that her parents would soon drive Mr. Brusett away with their loony devotions, with their Let-us-all-join-together-nows, their constant Let-us-now-bow-our-heads. Ordinarily, only very hungry men could stomach much of her folks' blustery ministry, for the Dents' preaching was the kind that incites sidelong looks. Galahad worked for the county road department, but he liked to think he was more than that. He owned his own home. He was fully insured. He had a nice wife and a nicer fishing boat, and he'd seen his salvation. It pleased him to lord it over the woebegone, and share his gooey rapture with them, and Pastor Hurlburt called Galahad Dent his great soldier in Christ. Her father, beaming in his certainty of life eternal, would say, “Christ died, boys, died on Calvary for my sins, and he'll die for you, too, if you let him. He'd be glad to. Christ is Lord.”

And, worse, there was Karen's mother, Jean. A mother who, out of sheer, sweet, unwavering incomprehension, had formed the habit of treating people like pets and conferring on them personalities having almost nothing to do with anything to be found in their actual characters. Jean would insist on everyone's general decency, and that anyone who came through their door became honorary kin, and she called Mr. Brusett “Uncle Henry.” Every time Jean said something of that sort, Mr. Brusett's head would bob slightly, not in agreement, but another distinction, another little gesture that only Karen seemed to understand. He certainly never agreed to be taken in, but even so, and even though he kept no other company that anyone knew of, Mr. Brusett was their guest more Sundays than not for several years. That was the same set of years, as it happened, when Jean had taken to calling her daughter “Dad.”

And so Karen would try to meet Mr. Brusett at the door, and when everyone came to the table she'd try to sit across from him or to either side of him, somewhere within the scent of the astringent
soap he used. His knuckles were large and egg-shaped and uneven; she saw that his hands, when not concealed between his legs or under the table, would often clutch at something not there. They were alike, she and Mr. Brusett; they'd made ghosts of themselves and learned how to go unseen. Only in his presence did she ever feel less than completely alone.

On a Sunday also memorable because she'd been mentioned in church for having graduated junior high, there came a new visitor to the dinner gathering, a fat man infatuated with his own name who talked rapidly and exclusively of Ned and Ned's doings. Ned wore a yellow mesh cap streaked with some of the same greases it advertised. His hair and beard were cinder black and had been cropped to various lengths with clumsy shearing. In a half hour among them he had claimed to be the very best at some worthy thing which, unfortunately, he was not at liberty to describe or even name, and he claimed descent from Algonquins and presented the tips of his fingers as proof of it, and he told them he knew, more or less, what most of them were thinking. He said he didn't mind. Mad in some barely governable way, Ned, it seemed, had known Mr. Brusett in years past, and he asked him about a woman named Juanita. Mr. Brusett said that Juanita was probably in Alberton with her new husband. What about Dave, then? Mr. Brusett, his voice an eggshell cracking, said that Dave was in jail, he thought. In the joint, actually. Deer Lodge. And Denny? Mr. Brusett shrugged with such finality that even the blithering Ned knew to let him alone. But Mr. Brusett was to spend no more Sundays at the Dents'. After that, Sundays were Ned's, Ned who was not long in becoming, for Jean's purposes, “Uncle Ned,” and the man, fascinated not only by his name, but by any name anyone might care to give him, would sometimes huff it like a toy train, “Uncle Ned. Uncle Ned. Uncle Ned. Uncle Ned.”

A summer passed. Karen entered high school without a friend in the world.

With just these few years ahead of her in which to become some kind of woman, she knew she could probably use a pal, and Karen thought that it was immature of her to not have one yet, but pep band and the like filled her with revulsion, and she knew that she must be revolting in her own turn, and the very situations in which friends were typically made were the times and places she could not abide, not when given any choice. There was always sufficient reason to not belong. Volleyball was out of the question because of the yelling involved, the yipping the girls did in that echo vault of a gym, and Karen wouldn't think of basketball, knowing she was too clumsy for it, and her folks said their long Lent prohibited her running track. Karen did not join the glee club. She didn't raise a sow to show in the 4-H barn at the fair. She was reliable in her studies, responsible about her homework, and invariably graded “Not Disruptive” in classroom deportment, but teachers did not call on her to answer. Karen knew she somehow willed this result. As a freshman she adopted the dress and swagger of the lumberjacks she'd found a generation back in family photo albums: Grandpa and Great-Grandpa on Jean's side, standing rakish always on some freshly butchered sidehill. They held tools capable of such work, peaveys and pikes and two-man chain saws, big machines with malice for all and built to give no quarter, and these men seemed in every shot to be entirely satisfied. In their honor, or in honor of their contentment, she wore her denim pants spiked or cuffed, and she wore suspenders, and long underwear, and wool flannel, and the heaviest boots a girl could buy in her size, and it all proved itself again and again to be imprudent wear for the well-heated classroom, but she wore it anyway.

“All that girl wants,” Jean said of her, “is to be left alone. And I've got no kick with that. I'd rather have that than have one of these boy-crazy little brats on my hands—now that'd be a rodeo. One of these ones that's always got their belly buttons hanging out? You just know that can't be chaste—not in thought and deed.”

In her high school's bleak hierarchy, Karen, when she was thought of at all, was thought to be a lesbian and coveted by no one, no one willing to announce themselves. Of too little consequence even to be persecuted, she ate her lunch in an exclusive and especially ugly corner of the cafeteria with her hair tied in the tightest knot she could form with it. Her hair, she knew, could be like field-ripened grain, but she kept it in a knot on her neck. Her whole range of expression consisted of tilting the slash she made of her lips, sometimes to the left, sometimes to the right, and behind this blank display she'd be crowning herself High Priestess of the Half-Moon. Her imagination flourished, but it was only to preoccupy and gave no real satisfaction. She wanted something, anything, that was entirely hers and that might be touched. She wondered if she was ever to learn anything of love. The girls at school, those girls she could approach near enough to overhear, talked of loving each other, they talked of loving Brad and Wesley and Tim Flowers and Louie Natrone, they loved their moms and dads, and even sometimes their siblings, “soooo much,” and they loved colts and cats, rain in the spring, pretty blouses, and they draped “love” on every scrap of pleasure or longing that blew by them, and even if they were mistaken, even if they were working it way too hard, love, or their constant mention of it, seemed to keep them at a level of enthusiasm Karen could not sustain.

She was not very interested in anyone of her acquaintance, and so, by default, by protracted accident, she fell a little in love with herself. She conquered the last of her girlish bashfulness about mirrors in less than half of one mild May upon discovering in them that she was good at any angle, in any light, but, as she had no prior reputation for beauty, it was hard at first to credit what she so furtively saw in the glass. She looked harder, longer, and still she liked what she saw, liked herself too much, probably, but at least now she had a better use for the extensive privacy that had always been her only privilege. In
private, she let her hair down, and, as it wasn't customary there, she was fully aware of its whispering friction on her shoulders.

Her face was taut as an apple, square but not mannishly so, and her color ran from bronze to khaki depending on the current warmth of her blood. Her skin was clear. Her breasts were successful, she thought, or should have been—ready little monuments to reproduction. She had a golden brow, a kitten nose. With high school came more excursions, and Karen found herself more often among strangers, shopping with Jean in other towns, swept up in field trips or field trials or whatever she was being forced to attend that day, and as she passed among strangers now she saw that she caused sudden, deep interest in them. The boys. The men. Everyone, really. And it was so very strange that in these strange places she'd got such power when at home and in those places where she was most familiar, where she had been so ordinary for so long, Karen was still nothing special. Her blooming passed unremarked and largely unnoticed there.

Jean's notion of her daughter, a notion she published to anyone unable to avoid her on the subject, was that her Karen was the guileless fawn, a creature so delicate of spirit she needed more than anything else to be left alone. “She's out there talkin' to the ravens, and that's how she likes it. Girl's half-wild herself. All she wants, all you ever got to give that Dad is a little toast and plenty of breathing room.” Of course Karen was not at all the feral nymph her mother wanted, the innocent chipmunk. She was just a girl too often alone, and like any such girl, she was bitter about it. Too often alone, too often cold, and she spent far too much time in that tiny tract of personal wilderness that could be lit by her parents' yellow yard lights. After nightfall, she did not explore. She would stand out by the henhouse listening to the sage dialogue of nesting, dreaming hens, and wondering still, “What have I done?” She was ashamed of herself without knowing why.

“Remember,” Jean would say. “Remember, remember, remember, 'cause these are the good years, Dad. These years here might be the best ones you'll ever get. Remember.”

But, for a very long while, nothing memorable occurred. Karen was a freshman, then a sophomore, reduced to playing chess with pimpled and humped Tana Holt. The girls said, “It just flies by, doesn't it?” They'd say, “We have so much
fun.”
Karen could detect little momentum, but she did become a junior. For weeks on end she'd get by on the utterance of a few dozen words. She brought her lunch in a sack to avoid standing in line for hot meals. She rode the bus sitting right behind the driver. She read
Black Beauty
twelve times. On Friday nights, Jean let her make popcorn and a powdered fruit drink. Karen endured like a weed in drought, having learned nothing useful so far but how to wait. She did what each day required of her.