“WHAT ARE YOU DOING?”
“Christ,” I said under my breath.
Emma’s shrieks made our one crystal vase rattle and the blood pound in my head. She was flailing in her chair as if she’d been inadequately electrocuted. I knew from experience that there was not going to be any quick consolation for my transgression. “Emma, Emma, Emma,” I said, wishing I could somehow teach her to take the smaller blows of life in stride. It was possible my blunder would start a chain reaction that might last a full morning, one tantrum after the next, each round going off when we least expected it.
“Why did you do that?” she sobbed. She was the child who was frequently on the verge of hysteria, the tears right under her lids waiting to fall. She was so often unhappy about what she didn’t have or was about to receive. We led a hectic life, and she had a darling baby sister who had stolen some of her thunder, but even so her tantrums were excessive, indeed violent. They frightened me. They seemed to be about so much more than the protocol I had not observed. “Emma, I’m sorry,” I said. “I wasn’t thinking. Did I ever tell you about Aunt Kate’s chicken pitcher that clucked when it was empty?” Of course I had told her about the chicken. I had told her about the magical porcelain pitcher countless times and she usually interrupted, begging for one just like it. “If you want to start over,” I said, “I’d be glad to fill your cup with milk and begin again.”
She threw her head back and groaned. My dispensation meant nothing. Her skin was already so brown that when she spread her fingers in her woe the little webs between were white as pearl. Her face, stretched to the limit with exaggerated heartbreak, was red and blotchy. I wasn’t sure I could bear a day like that one was sure to be, and I slammed my hands down on the table, saying, with such exquisite self-control I felt as if I was
singing, “Emma, if you need to scream and cry and carry on you may go sit on the chair in the hall.”
“Why,” Emma heaved, “did you do that to me?”
“I did not do anything to you,” I explained, with emphasis on every word. “I will count to three, and if you are still in a temper you will go to the chair.” That was the procedure my neighbor Theresa used with great success to discipline her children. I counted. Emma remained seated during the punctuated and fractionated count from zero to three. Even after I was done, absolutely no place to go after three, I waited, giving her the chance to bolt. In the end there was nothing to do but lift her under her arms and drag her away. She kicked and tossed her head back and forth, snarling and spitting. She could be a torment, a humiliation, at nearly six years of age carrying on as if she was preparing for the role of Helen Keller. I didn’t know how the calm and deep wellspring of mother love could sustain itself through years of such storms. I hated her being so unreasonable and so fierce in her anger. She didn’t have any right to be angry!
There was a black chair in the hall that had been set there for those occasions, and when I forced her onto the worn seat she dug her fingernails into my arm and pulled down so that blood sprang up from the scratches. “Stay there,” I growled. I stumbled back into the kitchen and set the timer for five minutes. My hands were shaking. I looked at my arm, at the three bloody tracks. Emma’s rage was as perfect an anger as I could think of, flowing spontaneously on a moment’s notice from the depth of her being, where a careful accounting of justice, swift as light, must take place. I could have cried at the terror of it, the surprise, the strength of her fury; I could have cried because I knew that I was responsible for her anger; I wanted to cry most of all because I had wanted to right my own wrongs, to raise a loving family, and I had instead produced a hellion. A hellion! She would pursue us through our lives, fueled by rage, crashing into the nursing home where I would sit slumped over in a wheelchair, to give me a piece of her mind. Emma, more than anyone I had ever known, made me think in outlandish terms, in measurements that occasionally extended through to eternity. I covered the scratch with my other hand. “What did you say a minute ago?” I asked Claire, who
was sitting straight in her chair peeling the stickers off the bananas. Her short sleek, dark hair was molded around her head like a close-fitting cap.
“I forget,” was all. Our daughters had forged their roles early on with our unwitting complicity: Emma, the bad. Claire, the good. Emma had come hard into this world. “Who are you?” we had hardly dared to ask as she miraculously sucked and burped and moved her bowels. “Where did you come from?” We had stood over her waiting for her, our creation, to find her hands, to sit; we begged her to walk, to use the shape sorter properly, to say our names. We wanted to know she was normal and secretly hoped she was quite a bit above average. We were so careful, buying her skid-proof socks and a bike helmet for the goat cart. At night Howard and I fell asleep discussing her intelligence and her remarks. Claire was the blessed second child, nothing more than a baby, someone who had come to live at our house, who would grow up in her own time, her achievements more often than not overlooked in the confusion of getting to work, scratching up meals, finding clean clothes.
When the timer rang, Emma marched into the kitchen, climbed on her chair, turned her bowl over, and then dropped it to the floor, a look of triumph on her tearstained face. The bowl smashed. I fetched the broom, without missing a step, as if the scene had been choreographed, swept up the broken porcelain and then walked out into the yard, slamming the kitchen door behind me with all my might. She had been sitting so peacefully on the black chair, not because she was obedient, but because she had been hatching her plot.
Outside, the air smelled as if it had been cooked, as if it had been altered by the heat and was no longer life sustaining.
“Don’t leave me!” Emma shouted from the porch.
I did not direct my answer to her. I was cupping my hand over the yellow cat’s face while it went wild with the prospect of near suffocation. During the next tantrum I would have to tell Emma that I was going to count to infinity, that I would give her that much time to compose herself. I was hissing, shaking the poor cat as I lectured him, when Howard said, “What are you doing, Alice?”
He was standing in the doorway of the milk house, wearing his rubber overalls and his rubber boots, each the length of a basset hound.
The open buckles on the boots and the metal hooks on the overalls jangled when he moved. I felt a rush of admiration for him, in his stiff, clattery suit that on anyone else would have looked oafish. Because he himself was commanding he gave even a rubbery old hillbilly getup dignity.
“What am I doing?” I asked myself, prying the cat’s claws from my shirt. “I’m about to suffocate this cat instead of our daughter, that’s all,” I said, snorting, as if I’d made a joke. Without saying, he’d know I meant Emma.
“I’ll be in soon, as soon as I can.” He turned and shuffled into his barn. His overalls were pulled too tight in the back and had the beguiling effect of the wicked schoolboy’s trick known as Chinese laundry.
“I’m handling it fine, Howard, I really think I am.” I sometimes felt dismayed because he didn’t seem to trust me the way he should have. “I’m pretty sure I’m doing the right thing,” I said under my breath, “strangling the cat instead of Emma.”
I had always suspected that deep down Howard was able to slip into a phone booth, shed his rubber overalls right down to a blue body suit, and then take off into the sky, scooping up the children with one strong arm before he made off to a land where milk naturally flows in the rivers. He has always been capable. This is my fondest image from his childhood: Howard, nine years old, is in his back yard in Minneapolis, setting up battalions of toy soldiers and then digging the firecrackers into the ground, lighting them, and exploding his armies. The noise, the smoke, the destruction, are not only thrilling, but beautiful. I can so well imagine the pleasure he would have gotten from being the master planner. In his family album he always has the same crew cut and he doesn’t smile. He was a solemn boy who was taught that life is both important and nice. When I first knew him he believed in irresistible notions as the result of living in a neighborhood brimming with Lutherans. He believed that God gave people certain gifts and that if you used them appropriately you’d travel the path that was there expressly for you. His Maker was organized, just like his mother. For Howard, life was never ridiculous; humans, at heart, were not even remotely foolish.
I could see him disappearing through the inner door to the milking
parlor. “Don’t rush yourself,” I called, dropping the cat. “Theresa is bringing her girls over so we’ll be fine without your—” I was thinking the words, “model of control.”
The night before, our neighbors, Dan and Theresa, had come for dinner with their children. And in our yard, in the spot where I stood, Howard had thrown the glow-in-the-dark ball up in the air, the four little girls fluttering like bats, rising and falling, barely visible in the dark. The luminous ball, a strange glowing green, bounced in the grass and the littlest girl, Lizzy, clapped and shouted, “Moon. Moon. Moon.”
When I got to the house, Claire was dutifully eating her cereal. Emma sat in her chair sucking on a strand of her stringy hair. “Someone forgot to feed me breakfast,” she choked.
“I’d like some now,” I said. “Would you rather I ate here with you, so we could talk about our day, or should I take the tray out to the porch, where there is peace and quiet?”
“Here,” Emma said. “Could I please have something to eat?”
“Certainly.” I smiled a tight, close-lipped smile at my reformed daughter. Welcome back, I wanted to say. We will tread so carefully, so lightly, so you will not go off again.
“Tell me,” she said, “exactly what the plan is.”
The farm is surrounded by housing tracts now. Even so, on our swatch of land, looking across the rye, I occasionally had the feeling that all of the wide sky could be seen from our porch. Because of poor drainage and the whim of two stubborn town fathers, the land we owned was locked into agricultural zoning for time immemorial, or until money or new blood could forcibly change the rules. When we bought the farm it was the cheapest four hundred acres we could find. Although there were problems with standing water and rotting outbuildings there was the allure of varied topography, of marsh and woods and gentle hills. After we’d moved, every parcel around us fell prey to what has long been heralded as progress. From our sanctuary of woods and oats we looked out to garage doors painted with iridescent geese flying off to a better land, and black satellite dishes standing like lunar ornamental shrubs. When we walked to a place Howard called “the Highest Point on the Earth” we could see in the distance the square steel-and-glass complex with its black windows
where the greyhounds race. I’ve never been, but I think of it as a silent sport, the menacing dogs galloping noiselessly around and around the track, the spectators standing up to shout and nothing coming from their mouths.
We were, even under normal circumstances, outsiders, far more than the city dwellers who came to the subdivisions for the country life. First of all, it was common knowledge in Prairie Center—the kind of knowledge that one acquires by the simple act of respiration—that we had no business moving into a place that had been in the Earl family for three generations. After Maynard Earl died there was no relation who was willing to carry on the dairy tradition. Although ours was not Howard’s exact dream farm, it was four hundred acres for the price of two, had a solid house with a dry basement and three good floors, and it wasn’t too far away from an elementary school. Not least of all, the barn was in good repair, with a new roof and recent structural improvements. After the building boom he spent a fair amount of energy going out into the night, making blinders with his hands at each side of his head, and finding a place where he could look and see the dark. “I need to know there’s a patch of wild space,” he said once.
I can think of any number of reasons why people feared us. The wheels were set in motion that first week when Lloyd, an old friend of Howard’s, came rattling into town in a silver-green Thunderbird. One side of his car had been knocked out and replaced with a kitchen door. We didn’t stop to think that a person of African descent in their midst might frighten and then enrage the natives of Prairie Junction. And Lloyd wasn’t someone whom we could very well hide or disguise. His brown skin gleamed and his head was covered with long, dirty-looking dreadlocks. He loped instead of walked, as if the day would wait for him to catch up with it. He could fix anything, and did that summer, making miracles from rusty old parts that had no memory of their purpose. True Midwesterners, our new neighbors were polite about their revulsion. They didn’t burn our lawn or egg our house. Lloyd stayed with us for two months, during which time no one spoke to us, or offered a friendly word, or welcomed us with a potted plant or a casserole. It was as if we didn’t exist, not only that first summer, but for years after. I noticed the little things, how the bank tellers were falling over each other with their “Have
a nice day,” and then I’d come up to the window and they’d suddenly be all business. Howard never believed what I repeatedly told him, that those bank ladies used to turn away from me and file their nails, or they’d slap a Next Window sign down on the counter just when I’d come forward, or they’d go to their coin machine and do up hundreds of dollars worth of pennies while I stood waiting. We were labeled from the first as that hippie couple who had the—the help.
Later there were the usual problems that came with farming in what was becoming suburbia: Undisciplined dogs bolted from their owners and hours later came panting home from our chicken yard with bloodied teeth; teenagers plundered and pillaged and copulated in the outbuildings; occasionally neighbors complained about the smell of manure and the noise of machinery. Very few seemed to make the connection between the sustaining white liquid they poured on their breakfast cereal and Howard’s clattering, stinking enterprise across the way.