Despite the encroachment, Howard often felt, and I did, too, that we were living in a self-made paradise on the last dairy farm in Prairie Center. Before dawn and then at night, before supper, I frequently helped Howard with the chores. In the morning I’d leave the girls asleep in their beds and go out into the cold night. The barn blocked the subdivision lights and gave us the sense as we walked hand and hand to our work that we were the only two people awake, certainly in Prairie Center, and perhaps farther afield too: the county, the state, the face of the earth. I loved that feeling, that we were alone. The routine was much like waitressing, cleaning counters and setting tables, and serving, and then wiping up afterward. We had our supply wagon in the aisle and Howard and I went from cow to cow, first cleaning off the udders with an iodine solution and then drawing off a milk sample, and attaching the milking machine.
After chores in the summer I tried my best to be a good farm wife, to live up to Howard’s expectations. We grew an enormous garden and there were literally days, breakfast, dinner, and supper, when we could boast that everything we were putting into our mouths had come from our own land. I made butter in the food processor, the girls and I put up strawberries and apple jelly and tomatoes and sweet corn and dilly beans and watermelon pickles. In hay season, “threshing time,” Howard called it, I
drove the tractor with the bailer behind it as it swept up the alfalfa and compressed it into bundles, and then of all things, expertly tied knots around the bales. I could never get over the fact that the poor old rusted 1949 McCormick baler knew exactly how to tie a knot.
From September to June, five mornings a week, I had the job of school nurse at Blackwell Elementary. It was as if I stepped into another skin when I put on my white polyester pants and my pink shirt and my stethoscope. In my school cubicle, the day always began with the dirty, smelly boy who never got breakfast and had chronic stomachaches, followed by those who had forgotten to take their Ritalin. There were seasons of head lice and influenza, chicken pox and bronchitis—the long line of wheezing children waiting to get their cough syrup. Several afternoons a week I traveled to the neighboring townships with a team of nurses, took my place behind a screen in the municipal buildings, and administered immunizations to howling babies and small children. We were widely known as “the shot ladies” and we inspired fear wherever we went. Howard and I were going to be in debt for possibly longer than we were planning to live. Shortly after we moved, almost six years before, I had cast about for a profession which I could take up after a brief and inexpensive course of study. It was my mother-in-law, Nellie, who suggested nursing at first, and then insisted I go back to school, and finally provided the funds for my degree. A nurse herself, she assured me that I would find great satisfaction in tending the sick. It took a year and some months at the technical college in Blackwell to become a licensed practitioner nurse.
On school mornings, after chores, I carted the girls off to a baby-sitter, so that I could sit at my desk brandishing tongue depressors. Leading a split life is what most everyone does, nothing extraordinary about it. And yet, it sometimes seemed as if an unnamed and terrifying thing was chasing behind me just about to sink its teeth into my calves. This was life, I supposed, running and running and running, and realizing along the way that the phantom was getting closer and also that I was losing my socks, my white polyester pants, my pink shirt, my head scarf, that my clothes were separating from my body and flapping off in the wind.
When June came each year I hung my uniform in the back of the closet. Every Monday in the summer my neighbor Theresa and I took
turns caring for all of our children. Theresa also had two daughters, each a year younger than Emma and Claire. When it was Theresa’s turn to baby-sit I dropped the girls up at the subdivision and ran home as fast as I could. I refused to see the ruins of my housekeeping: the ruptured, the overripe, the filthy. I did not hear Howard’s call for assistance. I used to take the tape player out on the upstairs porch and pull down the shades, and then I’d dance to the Hungarian, Bulgarian, Scandinavian, and Rumanian music I had recorded in high school. I would bow to myself and curtsey, and put my hands on my imaginary partner’s shoulders. I could dance for hours and not notice that any time had passed, feeling the happiness all the way up my throat, and afterward I could go and so peacefully drive tractor or pull weeds or hand the appropriate tool to Howard as he lay prostrate under some great broken machine.
Out of the twenty families in the subdivision on the hill, Dan and Theresa Collins were my only friends. I had an intimacy with Theresa that I had never expected to have with anyone. I could walk in the door at her house and call, “Yoo-hoo,” just the way Laura Petrie and her popeyed Millie used to do back in the Golden Age. I always took care to wipe my feet and check my hands and fingernails. When I was sure I was clean I put the copper kettle on for coffee and sat down at the oiled butcher-block table to wait. There were equal measures of comfort and amusement in our communications; I think it is safe to say that we delighted in one another. She used to laugh at my stories until she wept, and I tried to take her sound advice to heart. The quality of our friendship seemed to me to be heaven-sent, something that I had received not in direct relation to any deed performed. At first I thought it a windfall, free of charge. “Make yourself at home,” Theresa always used to sing out from upstairs. Like a nervous suitor her saying so every time made me wonder if the instruction on some day might suddenly change.
On that Monday morning last summer it was my turn to watch the children. Just as Theresa arrived in the driveway with her girls, Audrey and Lizzy, Emma ran into the bathroom and slammed the door. “Don’t let anyone come in here while I’m on the toilet,” she called.
I didn’t answer.
“DON’T YOU DARE LET ANYONE COME IN. DO YOU HEAR?”
Theresa opened the screen door with her foot and came into the kitchen with her arms full of clothes, and the diaper bag, and her two-year-old Lizzy, and a box of pea pods. “Can you use any of this?” she asked. “I’m under here, I really am.”
Theresa had a round face framed by black curls, octagonal tortoise-shell glasses, and blue eyes with lashes so long and dense and curly they looked as if they scraped against her lenses when she blinked. Her glasses were often halfway down her nose, pushed by the sheer force of her eyelashes. Her unadulterated Irish Catholic skin was faintly freckled and almost translucent across her cheeks. She had dimples and native sweetness which miraculously had not been tempered by her work for social service agencies. She grew up in Prairie Junction when there were seven working dairy farms surrounding the village, went off to seek her fortune as a therapist in Chicago, and then came home to the subdivision called Vermont Acres. Howard and I used to be privately scornful of their development that has a creaking, rough-hewn covered bridge at the main entrance and streets that are all named after New England states.
“Here are the diapers and the swimming suits, and a change of clothes, and Lizzy’s blanket and Audrey’s doll. These clothes are just some odds and ends my mother got at a rummage sale. You can use the peas, can’t you?” She bent her knees and set Lizzy down, and one by one unloaded the things onto the table. Lizzy had had the good fortune to inherit her mother’s eyes and skin, and her father’s long legs. She toddled off into the living room.
“Hi, Liz,” I called, but she was already on her way.
“I’ve got to run because I’m meeting Mom in town for coffee. You will not believe this,” she said, coming to me and grabbing my forearm. “We’ve heard that Uncle Emmett is going to introduce his secret illegitimate daughter at the family picnic. You know about her—my God, we’ve all known about her for years, but we’ve never admitted it. I think it’s a blessing, that he’s going to be able to get it off his chest, but my poor mother is so traumatized—she ate an entire Sara Lee cheesecake last night.”
“No!” I said, moving away, brushing my hand over the scratch marks Emma had made at breakfast.
“Did you hurt yourself?” Theresa asked, peering through my fingers at my wound.
“No, no,” I said, “I spoiled Emma’s world irrevocably first thing this morning by pouring milk into her cereal bowl, instead of letting her do it herself. I thought for a minute a cobra had bitten her foot off, but it was only a mistake I was in the process of making.”
Theresa wrinkled her brow, not quite sure how the marks on my arm related to the cereal bowl, and then she laughed, saying, “I know, I know.”
No, I wanted to say. You don’t know. Audrey and Lizzy are never as bad as Emma.
“I’ll tell you everything later,” she said, going out and closing the screen door. She went a few steps into the yard and then she turned around and called into the house, “Bye, Audrey. Bye, Lizzy.”
“MOM,” Emma shouted from the bathroom. “I need you in here.”
I went directly to her aid only to find her sitting on the toilet studying a catalogue. “Emma,” I said, “could you please ask me in a calmer way? I’m afraid I don’t have much patience this morning, and I don’t want to spend this nice time acting like an old witch. Please ask me in a calm way, and I’d be happy to help you.”
I leaned back against the wall wondering how she was ever going to be civilized enough to go to kindergarten.
“Could you please help me, Mom?” she asked. “Is Audrey here?”
“Yes,” I said, as I adjusted the criscrossing bathing suit straps, something she could have done herself. “Lizzy and Audrey are both in the living room, and in a little while, if we can all achieve some kind of radiant serenity, or at least get you out of the bathroom in one piece, we’ll go swimming. Now, go behave yourself,
please
, while I finish clearing the table.”
This was my plan: I would walk down the lane. The simplest thing in the world. The girls would run ahead, until they got to the edge of the pond, just about to fling themselves in the four-inch shallows, and then they’d stop short, test the water, say how cold it was. They’d play with their buckets and shovels and boats in a sand pile, and wade up to their thighs watching the minnows swim around their feet. I was going to get myself wet and then stretch out with my chin on my hands. I was going to
lie exposed, heedless of the dangerous sun. The girls would find endless amusement with four pails of water and seven acres of water and pretty soon the morning would be over.
First I put the milk away and then I climbed down the basement ladder to get some homemade butter from the freezer. When I’d gotten the plastic tub I could still hear the girls playing in the living room so I went straight upstairs to get my swimming suit. I thought I had thrown it over the chair in the bedroom, but I didn’t see it. We hadn’t swum in a day or two and I wasn’t sure where I had left it last. I walked to the storage room to look out to the clothesline. In Theresa’s house this would never happen. Their refrigerator was the size of a barn and was equipped on the outside with juice spigots hanging down like goat tits. There were oak drawers and shelves built into the walls, one drawer in the kitchen solely for pens, sorted by color. I don’t know what prompted me to look in the dresser in the hall, an unlikely place to stash a swimming suit in summer. I yanked the drawer open to the chaos of old shoes, pens and bolts, masking tape, and moth-eaten sweaters and my map, my map of the world.
I hadn’t thought about my map for years. I took out the sheaf of papers and knelt down, spread them on the floor, ran my fingers over the lime-green forests, the meandering dark blue rivers, the pointy lavender mountain ranges. I had designed a whole world when I was a child, in secret. I had made a series of maps, one topographical, another of imports and exports, another highlighting mineral deposits, animal and plant species, another with descriptions of governments, transportation networks, and culture centers. My maps had taken over my life for months at a time; it was where I lived, the world called Tangalooponda, up in my room, my tray of colored pencils at my side, inventing jungle animals, the fish of the sea, diplomats and monarchs. Although there were theoretical people in my world, legions of them, all races and creeds, when I imagined myself in Tangalooponda I was always alone, composed and serene as an angel in the midst of great natural beauty. I remembered that ideal solitude as I squatted on the floor last summer, and I laughed at my young foolishness.
I carefully rolled up the maps and put them in the back of the drawer. I stood, thinking, until I remembered that I’d hung the suit in the shower, the logical place after all. I left the dresser drawer open and looked. Yes, it
was there, in a puddle clogging the drain, along with a melting bar of soap. I picked up the soap and the suit. The soap I carefully placed on the filmy ledge. I went over to the sink and rinsed the suit in cold water, and then first wrung out the bodice, and then the skirt. It was a suit that had been designed to obscure as much of the body as possible without losing its integrity as a swimming costume. It had been one of the more peculiar presents my mother-in-law had given me. I wrapped the thing in a towel, set it on the floor, and stepped on it to get it as dry as possible. At the moment I couldn’t think of anything more uncomfortable than putting on a cold wet suit, even on a hot Monday morning. Finally I picked up the towel with the suit inside, walked down the hall, and took the stairs one at a time to the living room.
Emma and Audrey were feeding their dolls at the blue plastic table. Claire was sitting on a stool putting pennies in her mouth.
“Claire,” I cried, throwing the towel aside, kneeling down and fishing in her mouth, “You know better than that! What’s wrong with you?”
I began picking up the money that was on the floor and in Claire’s lap. “I like them,” Claire said.
“I know you do,” I said, “but they’re not to eat. They’ll hurt you.” I shouldn’t have said, what’s wrong with you? That was a terrible thing to say to anyone. “You’re a good smart girl,” I told her, “but money isn’t food.” I looked up to see if anyone had choked on coins and died.