Jewelweed (55 page)

“Would it be possible for Bee and me to stay there a couple days?” asked Nate.

“What?” said Uncle Dan, adjusting the little knob on his hearing aid.

“Could we rent it for a short time?” asked Nate again.

“I don't know,” said Uncle Dan, his voice rising with uncertainty. “I don't have anything to do with it anymore. Call the realtor.”

“Which realtor is it?” asked Nate.

“I don't remember. Look it up. How many can there be in Slippery Slopes?”

“We'll find it,” replied Nate.

“Who did you say this was?”

“Your nephew Nathaniel.”

“Oh, right. Is that boy of yours still in prison, Nate?”

“He's been out awhile now and he's doing real good.”

“No kidding. What do you hear from your cousin Beulah? I don't think she ever got married, did she? Cute girl she was, but strange as a one-eared donkey. Gave my sister fits. Anyway, I've got to go now. It's lunchtime.”

At work the following day, Bee talked to a woman at the real estate agency in Slippery Slopes. She agreed to rent the house short-term, though Bee said she had to talk to Nate before setting a firm date.

When she spoke to Nate, Bee explained that if they were going to do this—the two of them, really do it—she hoped they would try to get it right. There was no sense going to their grandparents' house to confront the hoary past and see if they could finally become lovers in the most unambiguous and consummated sense if they didn't intend to stay long enough to have a meaningful experience, ten days at the very least. Otherwise, they might as well not go at all.

“That means,” said Bee, “I'll have to find someone to stay with Mother, and you'll have to get that shipping company to give you a vacation.”

“Are you sure you want to do this?” asked Nate. “Ten days is a long time.”

“Not if you don't want to.”

“Oh, I want to.”

“So do I,” said Bee. “I can get Rufus to stay with Mother, or Gladys or even Margaret. Do you think they'll give you some time off?”

“No problem,” said Nate, though he knew it was a stretch. Ten days was a long time in the transit business. In this bloody-knuckled economy, shipping companies were constantly looking for excuses to hire new drivers who spoke no English and were willing to work longer hours for less money and no benefits. Unlisted contractors trained them, licensed them, marketed them, and whisked them out of the country if problems arose.

The agreement Nate finally made with the dispatcher and freight manager was for one week, but he also agreed to check his phone messages daily and be available for an unlikely emergency. He did not tell Bee about this improbable contingency though, and merely explained that he had the week off.

Bee didn't know if one week would be long enough, but she decided to go ahead anyway. If they were still bound by the old rules after that much time, then there was nothing to be done. The past would have its victory and she would go on living as she had for this long.

Nate and Bee drove up in Nate's pickup, and when they arrived in Slippery Slopes they discovered that the town had grown considerably since they'd last seen it. Excepting the downtown area, the streets had been widened and there were now four sets of stoplights instead of one. Pastel vinyl siding covered most of the homes, and only a few people kept gardens in their yards. There were also signs of encroaching tourism: antiques and gift shops, two motels, several B and Bs, and three restaurants on the six-lane strip leading to and from the interstate.

They parked behind their grandparents' house and stood in the backyard, reluctant to go inside. The backside of the steeply peaked house looked especially imposing, if smaller than they remembered.

“Maybe we should walk around town for a little while,” suggested Nate.

“No, we should go in,” said Bee. “We need to get these groceries in the refrigerator. Oh my, look at that.” She pointed to a bent iron hook on the door leading down into the cellar. “It's the same one.”

“I remember,” said Nate, opening the tailgate on the pickup. “It has an odd shape. And look up there.”

Halfway up the linden tree, a platform of rotten boards rested between three branches. “You helped build that,” said Nate.

“I didn't help build it,” said Bee. “I built it all by myself to give Rufus something to do, so he'd stop following me around.”

“He practically lived up there for a couple days, lowering strings to haul up things he needed,” said Nate.

“You were with him much of that time,” said Bee.

“I know. The strings were my idea.”

“And a dumb one at that.” Bee snorted. “Everything you pulled up there fell down at some point.”

Nate felt the more recent stages of his life unraveling, peeling off in irrelevant episodic scrolls. He and Bee were reverting to their younger selves, and they hadn't even gone inside the house yet.

“This isn't going to be easy,” he said.

“Come on,” said Bee in a commanding voice. “No time to waste. Let's get this stuff inside.”

The key they'd received from the real estate agent fit perfectly and turned smoothly in the lock. The back door opened silently. They walked into the kitchen, plugged the cord attached to the refrigerator into the wall, and stuffed it with food.

“You go get the luggage and boxes,” said Bee. “I'll open some of these windows.”

For the rest of the day Nate and Bee explored the sparsely furnished house. Many of the wood floors had not been carpeted over. The light switches, doorknobs, and electrical outlets were all the same, as were the basement, the attic, the windows, and the sink in the summer kitchen.

Two of the upstairs bedrooms shared a single large closet that could be entered by doors in either room. Like much of the rest of the house, the closet was empty, which made it seem remarkably different from earlier times, when moving through the secret passageway included a hanging jungle of aromatic old-people clothes, many of them with silky textures. Yet standing inside it now still brought a glimmer of the old enchantment. Nate and Bee put their clothes in this closet.

The bed in their grandmother's old room was the biggest one in the
house, and so they put the sheets on it, along with a green and red blanket. An empty silence surrounded them as they worked, the air monitoring their movements.

“I'm a little scared,” said Bee, sitting on the bed.

“Me too,” said Nate.

“After all those years of you lusting after me, what if I don't measure up?”

“You didn't know how I felt about you back then.”

“It was pretty obvious. Even when my mother insisted you couldn't have such feelings for me, I knew you did. The hands in your eyes were always on me.”

“You never gave me any sign,” said Nate.

“Of course not. What did you expect?”

“You might have encouraged me a little.”

“I was older, and every time I thought about letting you close to me I'd explode with shame. That would be taking advantage of you, acting out the part of the sodden farm girl drunk with incestuous impulses.”

“I know,” said Nate. “It was one of the reasons I got married so young—to force my feelings for you away.”

“You never should have felt guilty about me, Natie. You were younger. It was natural for you.”

“I didn't have the right to think about you in that way.”

“There are no rights, just feelings and the things that hold them in place.”

“You were older. I didn't have enough experience to look directly at you and explain how I felt. All I had were these emotions I didn't understand and couldn't tell anyone about. I wanted to please you, hurt you, be you, all at the same time. And the impossibility of that somehow made the desire even stronger. It was a lonely time, and it went on for years and years.”

“That's the way it works,” said Bee, resuming her vaguely superior voice. “Besides, everyone would have excused you and blamed me.”

Nate put sheets on the bed in the room on the other side of the shared closet while Bee made buttermilk pancakes. After eating them, they listened to several radio dramas and slept separately, restlessly.

The next day they walked around town, ate in restaurants, visited
Slippery Slopes Cemetery, put flowers on several graves, and talked about the obstacles preventing them from doing what they wanted to do. Who would disapprove, really? The names of several particularly righteous relatives were suggested, then cautiously dismissed. They had either been dead a long time and little was known about them beyond the frozen rectitude staring out from old photos, or developments in their own lives had sufficiently disqualified any potential criticism of what Nate and Bee were contemplating.

By the third day they agreed that it was their own habit of denying themselves to each other that rose up like chaperoning dragons between them. It seemed as if those fearful forces came from outside—the wider family and the community. But in truth these forces were less important. The cousins felt like separate individuals who had wanted to drink from the same forbidden fountain their entire lives, but when finally given the opportunity, they couldn't decide if they should or not.

They told each other that the most rigidly held family embargoes and societal norms meant absolutely nothing to them, and yet such brazen disregard for the rules seemed the wrong approach, like burning the ancestral home in order to enjoy the flames. Indeed, one of the most compelling features of Nate and Bee's love for each other issued straight from their shared associations and familial sensibilities, which both drew them together and kept them apart.

“I think it's against the law for first cousins to marry in Wisconsin,” said Bee.

“I know,” said Nate. “I looked it up when I was eight years old.”

“I have an idea,” said Bee. “You leave this to me.”

Nate watched Bee leave the house and drive away in the pickup. To pass the time before she came back, he took a long walk, lingered inside a few stores, bought a flannel shirt at a secondhand shop, dug out a nickel embedded in an asphalt parking lot with his pocketknife. He talked to one older man sitting on a park bench about the local fishing; then another man standing in front of the bakery told him how the human body completely replaced itself every seven years with new cells, except the teeth.

“That's hard to believe,” said Nate.

“I know it,” said the man, before stepping into the bakery.

When Nate returned to the house, Bee was in the kitchen.

“I hope you're hungry,” she said.

“Starving,” said Nate.

“Wait out there until I call you,” she said. “I have a surprise.”

Nate sat down in the living room. When Bee came out, she told him to close his eyes, then led him to the table and helped him sit down.

“Don't look yet,” she said, and put a steaming plate in front of him.

“I can smell it,” said Nate. “Can't quite place it though.”

“You can open your eyes now.”

Nate looked down on hot chipped beef in a white sauce on toast, with a side of canned peas.

“I want you to eat every bite before you leave the table,” said Bee.

She had even managed to find some nutrient-free white bread that closely resembled the brands they grew up with. Nate cut a piece of soggy toast and lifted it to his mouth. As he chewed, the salty yet bland taste invited memories of countless meals served to him as a child. This had been his most disliked food, and he remembered well the dismal combination of frustration and resignation required to get through it. Revisiting an often-thought but never-spoken question from childhood, Nate wondered how anyone could actually like this food.

Unlike years ago, however, Nate now knew the answer to this question: he and his sister were always hungry, and their parents were always busy. Chipped beef on toast was easy to make, and it provided calories, starch, and protein. And there were also more-limited choices back then.

The simple truth was that fifty years ago his family felt differently about eating. Their attitude was entirely appropriate at the time, but things changed and now Nate cared in a different way about food. The evolution from one attitude to another required a convolution of economic, scientific, and technological developments, all of which would be impossible to comprehend completely. Times changed.

Nate stopped eating halfway through these ruminations, and stood up from his grandmother's table.

“You sit right back down there, Natie, and finish your supper,” snapped his older cousin, her eyes flashing.

“I will not,” said Nate, coming toward her.

“Good,” said Bee.

W
hen the knock came, Dart had three suitcases and a cardboard box packed with clothes.