Homeland and Other Stories (11 page)

Roxanne looks upset. “That's enough to scare you out of marrying
any
body.”

“Honey, what I'm trying to say is, things generally work out for the best, whichever way they go. Don't do something just because you think it's going to be your last chance in the world at being happy. There's lots of chances. You've got time.” Roberta
believes this is good advice, though when she listens to her own voice it sounds doubtful.

In any case, Roxanne isn't paying much attention. “But that doesn't help me
now
,” she wails. “I've still got to decide.” She polishes off her glass of milk and wipes off her white mustache with the sleeve of her robe, looking so young it makes Roberta's chest hurt. “Mama, I'm just so petrified about the whole thing.”

In the years since her daughter developed a woman's body and a magazine-cover face, Roberta has seen Roxanne become self-assured, coy, serious, and occasionally angry, but never truly afraid, though she frequently claims to be petrified. Roberta suspects that this time it might be genuine.

“What would you do, if it was you?” Roxanne asks her.

Roberta has no idea what she will say. She feels as though a part of her is standing back with crossed arms, listening. “The way I've been feeling lately, I'm inclined to say I'd catch any train headed out of Elgin,” she says. “But you know I wouldn't mean it. Look at me, born right down the road, and after all these years of chasing my tail doing nothing, here I still am.”

Roxanne's lips are pursed. She is too absorbed in the difficulties of being seventeen to want to hear the confusions of forty-four. Roberta gives her daughter a hug, and feels like crying. By the time they ask you what they ought to do, she thinks, you're too old to know what to tell them.

 

On Thanksgiving morning Ed and his younger brother, Lonnie, watch football while Lonnie's wife, Aggie, helps in the kitchen. “Glued to the tube,” Aggie says, rolling her eyes. “You'd think two grown men could find something constructive to do.”

Roberta has no interest in sports either, and never has, except for the 1972 Olympics, which the women of Elgin watched with unprecedented eagerness. That was the year
Hampton Mill got the contract for the Olympic swimwear. It sent chills up their spines to think the swimsuit they were cutting or stitching would soon be on its way to Germany and could end up with Mark Spitz's privates in it. Later on, their husbands shook their heads in amazement when the women could not be pried away from TV sets whenever the Olympics came on. Roberta watched too, as he dived into the water, and she blew her nose when he stood with the ribbons and gold around his neck, dripping and smiling, in trunks made especially for him.

Thinking of this as she scoots the heavy turkey around in the oven, it occurs to Roberta that working at Hampton's wasn't so bad, even though all anybody ever talked about was how soon they could quit. But she remembered exactly the way her arms felt, steady and knowing, on the cutting and pressing machines. She liked the women she worked with, especially Dottie Short, who was the organizer of the Textile Workers at Hampton's and worked the pressers with Roberta. Dottie claimed to know a lot about history and was fond of saying peculiar things. She once told Roberta that the vacuum cleaner was invented to get women out of the factories and back into the home after World War II. Without a lot of new kinds of machines and gadgets. Dottie said, they'd have gotten bored stiff and wanted their old jobs back.

People often said behind Dottie's back that she was a Red, but Roberta saw what she meant about the vacuum cleaners. It was hard to imagine Rosie the Riveter in an apron and hair ribbon, sweeping with a broom, but you could just about picture her behind a big old Hoover.

Roberta's own kitchen has technology enough: the self-cleaning oven, the refrigerator with an ice maker. No dishwasher yet. Only last year did they finally replace the gas stove Ed's mother had cooked on when he was a boy. It was an antique with little enameled feet, and in a way Roberta hated to see it go,
but she needed something with even heat and better temperature controls. She has modernized gradually, simply by making it clear to Ed that these are things she needs. She wonders, though, if she is somehow replacing herself. Even a complicated thing like Thanksgiving dinner practically cooks itself. A kangaroo could do my job, Roberta thinks, amused by the picture in her mind.

Aggie is scooping out the insides of a cooked pumpkin for pies while Roberta rolls out dough for the crust.

“I ought to be making apple instead of pumpkin. With all those apples we got this year,” Roberta says.

“Thanksgiving with no pumpkin pie? The boys would have a conniption!”

Aggie, who has twin sons, is fond of saying “boys” in an emphatic way that suggests male children are her own special cross to bear. She rarely recalls that Roberta lost a son. Roberta can't blame her, really. Even Ed and Roxanne seem to have forgotten. It's so long in the past, a river that has gone underground, surfacing only rarely, at times when they intend to count their blessings.

“No,” Roberta agrees. “You can't always do the practical thing. We'll leave the apples sit for today.” They have a whole cellarful—mostly Red Delicious, although there are some very old trees in the orchard that bear a small, nonsalable variety Roberta calls “antique.” She's heard old people call them “witch apples.” For a long time she's been experimenting with new varieties, planting two new saplings each year. She orders them from a catalogue while the ground is still under snow, and they arrive so certain of spring: little switches of trees wrapped in paper, their buds aching to burst. They are Roberta's project. Ed is the type inclined to say, “Apples is apples.”

Lonnie comes into the kitchen to get a couple of Buds from
the refrigerator. He complains to Roberta about their TV. “I can't even tell the players on that little thing. The white uniforms looks just like the yeller ones. You ought to tell Ed to get a new set.” Lonnie manages a gas station, but he still talks like a boy who grew up on a farm.

“Tell him yourself,” Roberta says. “He won't listen to me. He says he can see the colors just fine.”

“Lonnie's just as stubborn,” Aggie confides after he leaves the kitchen. “You ought to have seen how we went round and round about getting another car, even after the old one got to where it wouldn't go three blocks without stopping dead in the street.”

Lonnie and Aggie are a good deal younger than Roberta and live in town, near Lonnie's station. It sounds peculiar to Roberta to hear distance measured in blocks. She's suddenly much too hot in the kitchen, finding it hard to concentrate on either cooking or conversation. She stands up straight with a hand on her back and feels a great weight moving through her, an enormous lifelessness. She has felt it before, but can't name it. All she can think of is the way she's heard people speak of whole rivers becoming dead, of something destroying all the oxygen.

She can see much of the family land through the kitchen window: a landscape of brown stubble fields, harvested alfalfa hay, fencerows of leafless hickories. She searches among them for some premonition of the killing frost that's predicted. If it comes, it will be the first. It has been an unusually warm fall. The tomato plants in Roberta's kitchen garden are still blooming, with a perky effort that makes her feel depressed. As if they intended to go on producing forever.

“I expect I'd better get out there directly and cover up that azalea by the front door,” she says to Aggie. “They're saying frost tonight.” Roberta is trying the decision aloud, to see how it sounds, though really she's leaning the other way.

“To everything there is a season.” Aggie says this in an offhand way, the way a farm-bred person could never do.

“I've kept that thing alive for twenty-odd years now. It'd be a shame to see it killed by frost; it's real pretty in the spring. But azalea bushes oughtn't to be growing this far north.”

“What do you mean, oughtn't to be?” Aggie, who is paring radish rosebuds now for the relish tray, seems indifferent to the azalea.

“Most of the azaleas aren't hardy. All the nursery catalogues say that white one won't survive north of zone seven. Right around the Mason-Dixon, in other words.”

“Well, how'd it get up here, walk?” Aggie laughs.

“Didn't I ever tell you? Ed's mother planted it when they first moved up here. She brought it with her from her people's place in Virginia. There were some other things that were here when Ed and I first got the place. Magnolias, I don't even remember what all. That azalea's the only one of them left.”

“I didn't know Lonnie and Ed's mother came from Virginia.”

“Didn't you? She was a Franklin.” Roberta checks the oven again, feeling better. The hot flashes have subsided. “You remember her, don't you? She was a good woman, but Lord help me, she was ornery as a tree stump. She'd come back and haunt me if I let that azalea die.”

“I'll have to tell the boys they had a grandma from Virginia,” Aggie says. Her twins, Benny and Andrew, are chasing each other around the circle of the kitchen, dining room, and what used to be called the parlor. Benny misjudges the kitchen door and bangs into the door frame, with Andy right behind.

“Come here, Ben, let me see you. Are your teeth all right?” Aggie takes his head between her hands and examines his teeth while Benny squirms. The boys are ten years old, but only during the past year, since Aggie stopped dressing them alike, has Roberta begun to see her nephews as separate people. She was
amazed when she realized this. That a mother had the power to make two people one, or vice versa.

“Your Aunt Roberta's house is no place to be running horse races,” Aggie says. “You boys go on outside.”

“We're not running races, Mom.”

“Whatever you're doing, then. Go do it outside.”

Ben pushes Andy against the refrigerator on his way out the back door.

“It would be okay with me if they wanted to play inside,” Roberta says. “It's too quiet around here now that Roxanne's grown up.”

“Count your blessings,” Aggie says. “Boys are so rambunctious.”

“Whatever you say,” Roberta says.

Ed and Roberta's old farmhouse truly is too large. In winter they have to move downstairs into the guest bedroom, next to Roxanne's, so they can heat only a small section of the house and close off the upstairs. There was a time when this inconvenience seemed romantic to Roberta. They were like the lovers in Dr. Zhivago, with snow all around and wolves howling. But over the years it's become just one more way of marking the passing seasons.

Aggie has made a green Jell-O-cottage-cheese mold that is shaped like a fish, and moves like one too, flopping on the plate when she turns it out.

“That's real pretty, Aggie. Something different.”

“Mama always used to make this for Thanksgiving, but it seems like nobody around here's ever heard of it. Mama just used a plain round mold.”

Roberta turns the pumpkin pies deftly, pressing a fork around the edges to pleat the crust. She remembers once watching Roxanne out the kitchen window, when she was four or five, pressing a plastic fork around the rim of a mud pie. Just a few years ago Roxanne would have been snitching fingerfuls of
whipped cream from the pies in the refrigerator, and fighting with her Daddy to watch the Macy's parade instead of football. Roberta finally settled that argument with a compromise: they would watch the parade until Roxanne got to see the Bullwinkle balloon, and then could switch over. It was a successful solution because it entertained them both. It was a gamble. Sometimes Bullwinkle's giant antlers were the first thing to come bobbing down the street between the rows of skyscrapers, while other years they saved him until nearly the end.

This year Roxanne is having Thanksgiving dinner at Danny's house, and she and Danny will drop by later. The shape of things to come, Roberta thinks. We're all Graviers here. Roxanne will soon be a Talmadge; or if not, then something else, most likely. Ed's sister is a Richie now, and usually spends the holidays with her husband's people across the river in Kentucky. Families swallowing other families, endlessly, like the Pac Man game Millie and Darrell gave Clay last Christmas. Ed, Lonnie, Roland Talmadge, Danny, one day even Benny and Andrew: they're all like the Pac Man, running around the blocks of Elgin and the county roads, gobbling up little dots of women.

But the women don't disappear, they only rearrange. Roberta doesn't believe she's changed much for being a Gravier. And Roxanne will still be Roxanne, even if she goes to Indianapolis. Maybe she'll go to college one day; she has always been quick to pick things up, doing passably well in school without half trying. Or possibly she'll work in a factory. Indianapolis is probably jam-packed with industry, big plants that make important things, TV sets and cars. Roberta knows for a fact, from reading the package, that Granny Brown frozen mince pies are manufactured in Indianapolis. As she polishes the Gravier china and sets the table, she imagines her pretty daughter in coveralls and a head scarf, like Rosie the Riveter, operating a big machine that turns out Granny Brown pies a hundred at a time.

 

Soon after they all sit down to dinner the telephone rings. It's Roxanne, explaining that she and Danny are going to be late. “We'll be there in an hour or two,” she says. She calls Roberta “Mom,” instead of “Mama,” which she tends to do if any of her peers are within earshot.

“That's fine. We're just sitting down now,” Roberta says. “Where are you?”

“I'm calling from the pay phone at the Tastee-Freez.”

“Well, Lord have mercy, didn't they feed you over at Talmadge's?”

“Oh Mom, sure they did, we're just out driving around.” She hesitates. “The Tastee-Freez is closed on Thanksgiving. Didn't you know that?”