Homeland and Other Stories (12 page)

“Sure, honey, I knew. I was teasing.”

“Oh.” Roxanne's voice is up in her nose. Roberta can tell she has been crying.

“Are you all right?” she asks.

“Yeah.” Roxanne pauses. “I guess so. We're having a fight.”

Roberta waits for her to go on.

“I told Danny I might not go to Indianapolis right away, that I might want to stay and work at Hampton's, and he's real mad. He says he won't go without me. I feel awful. It's his one chance to play college ball.”

“Well, try not to get too worked up about it. You'll get it straightened out. You've got six months or better to decide.”

“No we don't. He's got to let them know pretty soon about the scholarship.”

“That's his decision, Roxanne. He's got his to make, and you've got yours.”

“Mom, it just isn't that simple.” Roxanne is lecturing now. “Everything depends on everything else.”

“Well, if it helps any, I imagine he's just as scared as you are.”

“I know it.” She hesitates again, and Roberta can tell from the change in Roxanne's voice that she's smiling. “He is, and he won't admit it.”

“Don't be too long, now,” Roberta says. “And be careful. The roads might be freezing up.”

“Okay.”

Roberta waits for her daughter to hang up, listening to the quiet static that is swimming in the few miles of wire between her house and the Tastee-Freez.

“Mama? I was thinking about what you said.”

“About what, hon?”

“When you said you'd been in Elgin all this time chasing your tail. It isn't like you've been doing
nothing
. Maybe it's not like a job that, well, like the jobs people have, you know. But it's something. To me it is.”

When Roberta comes back to the table and sits down, the landscape of white linen and silver has been transformed into a war zone. The turkey looks more like a carcass than a bird, and the Jell-O fish is gutted and beheaded like a bluegill ready for the skillet. Already there is gravy on the tablecloth. She helps herself to some cornbread stuffing. The twins are trying to pull the big turkey wishbone, but it's rubbery in their greasy fingers, and won't break. It becomes a contest to see who can jerk it out of the other's hand.

“You boys can be excused now,” Aggie says.

Roberta is always amazed that a dinner that took days to prepare can be eaten in minutes. “Come back after while for pumpkin pie,” she tells them, before they vanish. “If you've still got room for it.”

“They'll have room,” Lonnie says. “Them two has hollow legs.” He reaches across the table to refill the glasses from the second of two bottles of wine he brought. Ed and Lonnie had a
strict Methodist upbringing, but their wives have been an influence. They're more relaxed about things than their parents were. And, although none of the Graviers is accustomed to much drinking. Thanksgiving is clearly a time when excesses are forgiven.

Roberta sips the wine happily. It's too sweet, but she likes the way it warms the inside of her chest as it goes down, and numbs her lips. Her cheeks feel flushed, like Roxanne's after she and Danny have been necking.

Lonnie is telling a complicated story about a man with three dogs named Larry, Curly, and Moe, which he takes to the grocery store with him. Aggie corrects him on factual points several times, but Roberta is uncertain as to whether this is just a joke, or a real story about someone Lonnie and Aggie really know. In the end she decides it must have been real life, because the story just fades out without a punch line.

“I've got one for you, Lonnie,” Roberta says. She touches her tongue to her numb lips to make sure they're still in working order. “Why did the punk rocker cross the road?” Lonnie says he doesn't know.

Roberta starts to laugh. “Because he had a chicken stapled to his ear. For an earring, see? And the chicken…” she can't stop laughing. “The hen is the only one of the two that knows where she's going.”

“I don't get it,” Lonnie says, but Aggie is laughing.

“Now I can just see that,” Aggie says. “That hen flapping, and the man trying to keep up. ‘Come on, boy, time to get across this road!'” She gets the giggles so badly that when she takes a drink of water it goes down the wrong way, and Lonnie has to slap her on the back.

“That's an old one,” Ed says. “I've heard that one before.”

“Oh, I expect you have,” Roberta says. She smiles out over the expanse of gristle and balled-up napkins and the cage of bird
bones sitting in the place of honor, a bedraggled centerpiece. It's really more meat than bone; only a few magnificent slabs have been carved from it. Roberta imagines the army of women across the country marching into their kitchens with turkeys like this, preparing to pick the bones clean for sandwiches and soup stocks that will nourish their families halfway to Christmas.

A sunbeam slants through the west window looking weak, as though it has had to pass through a great ordeal to reach this dining room. It's late. Roberta catches Aggie's eye and feels a secret between them that neither could own up to if they were asked. Possibly it's just that. That no one will ask.

“Aggie,” she says, “come help me throw a quilt over that azalea bush. There's no point letting it stand out there and die.”

A
NNEMARIE'S MOTHER
, Magda, is one of a kind. She wears sandals and one-hundred-percent-cotton dresses and walks like she's crossing plowed ground. She makes necklaces from the lacquered vertebrae of non-endangered species. Her hair is wavy and long and threaded with gray. She's forty-four.

Annemarie has always believed that if life had turned out better her mother would have been an artist. As it is, Magda just has to ooze out a little bit of art in everything she does, so that no part of her life is exactly normal. She paints landscapes on her tea kettles, for example, and dates younger men. Annemarie's theory is that everyone has some big thing, the rock in their road, that has kept them from greatness or so they would like to think. Magda had Annemarie when she was sixteen and has been standing on tiptoe ever since to see over or around her difficult daughter to whatever is on the other side. Annemarie just assumed that she was the rock in her mother's road. Until now. Now she has no idea.

On the morning Magda's big news arrived in the mail, Annemarie handed it over to her son Leon without even reading
it, thinking it was just one of her standard cards. “Another magic message from Grandma Magda,” she'd said, and Leon had rolled his eyes. He's nine years old, but that's only part of it. Annemarie influences him, telling my-most-embarrassing-moment stories about growing up with a mother like Magda, and Leon buys them wholesale, right along with nine-times-nine and the capital of Wyoming.

For example, Magda has always sent out winter solstice cards of her own design, printed on paper she makes by boiling down tree bark and weeds. The neighbors always smell it, and once, when Annemarie was a teenager, they reported Magda as a nuisance.

But it's April now so this isn't a solstice card. It's not homemade, either. It came from one of those stores where you can buy a personalized astrology chart for a baby gift. The paper is yellowed and smells of incense. Leon holds it to his nose, then turns it in his hands, not trying to decipher Magda's slanty handwriting but studying the ink drawing that runs around the border. Leon has curly black hair, like Magda's—and like Annemarie's would be, if she didn't continually crop it and bleach it and wax it into spikes. But Leon doesn't care who he looks like. He's entirely unconscious of himself as he sits there, ears sticking out, heels banging the stool at the kitchen counter. One of Annemarie's cats rubs the length of its spine along his green high-top sneaker.

“It looks like those paper dolls that come out all together, holding hands,” he says. “Only they're fattish, like old ladies. Dancing.”

“That's about what I'd decided,” says Annemarie.

Leon hands the card back and heads for fresh air. The bang of the screen door is the closest she gets these days to a goodbye kiss.

Where, in a world where kids play with Masters of the
Universe, has Leon encountered holding-hands paper dolls? This is what disturbs Annemarie. Her son is normal in every obvious way but has a freakish awareness of old-fashioned things. He collects things: old Coke bottles, license-plate slogans, anything. They'll be driving down Broadway and he'll call out “Illinois Land of Lincoln!” And he saves string. Annemarie found it in a ball, rolled into a sweatsock. It's as if some whole piece of Magda has come through to Leon without even touching her.

She reads the card and stares at the design, numb, trying to see what these little fat dancing women have to be happy about. She and her mother haven't spoken for months, although either one can see the other's mobile home when she steps out on the porch to shake the dust mop. Magda says she's willing to wait until Annemarie stops emitting negative energy toward her. In the meantime she sends cards.

Annemarie is suddenly stricken, as she often is, with the feeling she's about to be abandoned. Leon will take Magda's side. He'll think this new project of hers is great, and mine's awful. Magda always wins without looking like she was trying.

Annemarie stands at the kitchen sink staring out the window at her neighbors' porch, which is twined with queen's wreath and dusty honeysuckle, a stalwart oasis in the desert of the trailer court. A plaster Virgin Mary, painted in blue and rose and the type of cheap, shiny gold that chips easily, presides over the bar-becue pit, and three lawn chairs with faded webbing are drawn up close around it as if for some secret family ceremony. A wooden sign hanging from the porch awning proclaims that they are “The Navarretes” over there. Their grandson, who lives with them, made the sign in Boy Scouts. Ten years Annemarie has been trying to get out of this trailer court, and the people next door are so content with themselves they hang out a shingle.

Before she knows it she's crying, wiping her face with the
backs of her dishpan hands. This is completely normal. All morning she sat by herself watching nothing in particular on TV, and cried when Luis and Maria got married on
Sesame Street
. It's the hormones. She hasn't told him yet, but she's going to have another child besides Leon. The big news in Magda's card is that she is going to have another child too, besides Annemarie.

 

When she tries to be reasonable—and she is trying at the moment, sitting in a Denny's with her best friend Kay Kay—Annemarie knows that mid-forties isn't too old to have boyfriends. But Magda doesn't seem mid-forties, she seems like Grandma Moses in moonstone earrings. She's the type who's proud about not having to go to the store for some little thing because she can rummage around in the kitchen drawers until she finds some other thing that will serve just as well. For her fifth birthday Annemarie screamed for a Bubble-Hairdo Barbie just because she knew there wouldn't be one in the kitchen drawer.

Annemarie's side of the story is that she had to fight her way out of a family that smelled like an old folks' home. Her father was devoted and funny, chasing her around the house after dinner in white paper-napkin masks with eye-holes, and he could fix anything on wheels, and then without warning he turned into a wheezing old man with taut-skinned hands rattling a bottle of pills. Then he was dead, leaving behind a medicinal pall that hung over Annemarie and followed her to school. They'd saved up just enough to move to Tucson, for his lungs, and the injustice of it stung her. He'd breathed the scorched desert air for a single autumn, and Annemarie had to go on breathing it one summer after another. In New Hampshire she'd had friends, as many as the trees had leaves, but they couldn't get back there now. Magda was vague and useless, no protection from poverty. Only fathers, it seemed, offered that particular safety. Magda
reminded her that the Little Women were poor too, and for all practical purposes fatherless, but Annemarie didn't care. The March girls didn't have to live in a trailer court.

Eventually Magda went on dates. By that time Annemarie was sneaking Marlboros and fixing her hair and hanging around by the phone, and would have given her eye teeth for as many offers—but Magda threw them away. Even back then, she didn't get attached to men. She devoted herself instead to saving every rubber band and piece of string that entered their door. Magda does the things people used to do in other centuries, before it occurred to them to pay someone else to do them. Annemarie's friends think this is wonderful. Magda is so old-fashioned she's come back into style. And she's committed. She intends to leave her life savings, if any, to Save the Planet, and tells Annemarie she should be more concerned about the stewardship of the earth. Kay Kay thinks she ought to be the president. “You want to trade?” she routinely asks. “You want my mother?”

“What's wrong with your mother?” Annemarie wants to know.

“What's wrong with my mother,” Kay Kay answers, shaking her head. Everybody thinks they've got a corner on the market, thinks Annemarie.

Kay Kay is five feet two and has green eyes and drives a locomotive for Southern Pacific. She's had the same lover, a rock ‘n' roll singer named Connie Skylab, for as long as Annemarie has known her. Kay Kay and Connie take vacations that just amaze Annemarie: they'll go skiing, or hang-gliding, or wind-surfing down in Puerto Peñasco. Annemarie often wishes she could do just one brave thing in her lifetime. Like hang-gliding.

“Okay, here you go,” says Kay Kay. “For my birthday my mother sent me one of those fold-up things you carry in your purse for covering up the toilet seat. ‘Honey, you're on the go so much,' she says to me. ‘And besides there's AIDS to think about now.' The guys at work think I ought to have it bronzed.”

“At least she didn't try to
knit
you a toilet-seat cover, like Magda would,” says Annemarie. “She bought it at a store, right?”

“Number one,” Kay Kay says, “I don't carry a purse when I'm driving a train. And number two, I don't know how to tell Ma this, but the bathrooms in those engines don't even
have
a seat.”

Annemarie and Kay Kay are having lunch. Kay Kay spends her whole life in restaurants when she isn't driving a train. She says if you're going to pull down thirty-eight thousand a year, why cook?

“At least you had a normal childhood,” Annemarie says, taking a mirror-compact out of her purse, confirming that she looks awful, and snapping it shut. “I was the only teenager in America that couldn't use hairspray because it's death to the ozone layer.”

“I just don't see what's so terrible about Magda caring what happens to the world,” Kay Kay says.

“It's morbid. All those war marches she goes on. How can you think all the time about nuclear winter wiping out life as we know it, and still go on making your car payments?”

Kay Kay smiles.

“She mainly just does it to remind me what a slug I am. I didn't turn out all gung-ho like she wanted me to.”

“That's not true,” Kay Kay says. “You're very responsible, in your way. I think Magda just wants a safe world for you and Leon. My mother couldn't care less if the world went to hell in a hand-basket, as long as her nail color was coordinated with her lipstick.”

Annemarie can never make people see. She cradles her chin mournfully in her palms. Annemarie has surprisingly fair skin for a black-haired person, which she is in principle. That particular complexion, from Magda's side of the family, has dropped unaltered through the generations like a rock. They are fine-boned, too, with graceful necks and fingers that curve outward slightly at the tips. Annemarie has wished for awful things in her lifetime, even stubby fingers, something to set her apart.

“I got my first period,” she tells Kay Kay, unable to drop the subject, “at this
die-in
she organized against the Vietnam War. I had horrible cramps and nobody paid any attention; they all thought I was just dying-in.”

“And you're never going to forgive her,” Kay Kay says. “You ought to have a T-shirt made up: ‘I hate my mother because I got my first period at a die-in.'”

Annemarie attends to her salad, which she has no intention of eating. Two tables away, a woman in a western shirt and heavy turquoise jewelry is watching Annemarie in a maternal way over her husband's shoulder. “She just has to one-up me,” says Annemarie. “Her due date is a month before mine.”

“I can see where you'd be upset,” Kay Kay says, “but she didn't know. You didn't even tell me till a month ago. It's not like she grabbed some guy off the street and said, ‘Quick, knock me up so I can steal my daughter's thunder.'”

Annemarie doesn't like to think about Magda having sex with some guy off the street. “She should have an abortion,” she says. “Childbirth is unsafe at her age.”

“Your mother can't part with the rubber band off the Sunday paper.”

This is true. Annemarie picks off the alfalfa sprouts, which she didn't ask for in the first place. Magda used to make her wheat-germ sandwiches, knowing full well she despised sprouts and anything else that was recently a seed. Annemarie is crying now and there's no disguising it. She was still a kid when she had Leon, but this baby she'd intended to do on her own. With a man maybe, but not with her mother prancing around on center stage.

“Lots of women have babies in their forties,” Kay Kay says. “Look at Goldie Hawn.”

“Goldie Hawn isn't my mother.
And
she's married.”

“Is the father that guy I met? Bartholomew?”

“The father is not in the picture. That's a quote. You know Magda and men; she's not going to let the grass grow under
her
bed.”

Kay Kay is looking down at her plate, using her knife and fork in a serious way that shows all the tendons in her hands. Kay Kay generally argues with Annemarie only if she's putting herself down. When she starts in on Magda, Kay Kay mostly just listens.

“Ever since Daddy died she's never looked back,” Annemarie says, blinking. Her contact lenses are foundering, like skaters on a flooded rink.

“And you think she ought to look back?”

“I don't know. Yeah.” She dabs at her eyes, trying not to look at the woman with the turquoise bracelets. “It bothers me. Bartholomew's in love with her. Another guy wants to marry her. All these guys are telling her how beautiful she is. And look at me, it seems like every year I'm crying over another boyfriend gone west, not even counting Leon's dad.” She takes a bite of lettuce and chews on empty calories. “I'm still driving the Pontiac I bought ten years ago, but I've gone through six boyfriends and a husband. Twice. I was married to Buddy twice.”

“Well, look at it this way, at least you've got a good car,” says Kay Kay.

“Now that this kid's on the way he's talking about going for marriage number three. Him and Leon are in cahoots, I think.”

“You and Buddy again?”

“Buddy's settled down a lot,” Annemarie insists. “I think I could get him to stay home more this time.” Buddy wears braids like his idol, Willie Nelson, and drives a car with flames painted on the hood. When Annemarie says he has settled down, she means that whereas he used to try to avoid work in his father's lawnmower repair shop, now he owns it.