News from Heaven (5 page)

Almost imperceptibly he shook his head. “I'm leaving,” he said. “I'm eighteen now. I don't need a diploma. I can go live with my sister in Washington and get a job.”

No, Viola thought. Alan was a good student, and his family owned a profitable business. Unlike his classmates, who'd be swallowed up by the mines or the steel mills, he had an actual reason to stay in school.

“You can't,” she said.

“What choice do I have? I can't live in this town.”

The words had the terrible bite of truth.

“Alan, listen to me. If you drop out of school, you'll be drafted immediately.”

He shrugged. “Now or six months from now, what's the difference? At least I'd get out of here.” He opened the passenger door. “Thank you, Miss Peale. You've been very kind to me. I wish I had something to give you.” He held the hatbox to his chest. “I won't even show you what they did to your hat. It would break your heart.”

Viola watched him climb the back stairs to the shop.

In a daze she drove down Susquehanna Avenue—past the Polish church, the company store, the sign her cousin Chessie had erected, with typical grandiosity, near the train depot, so that no visitor could avoid seeing it.
BAKERTON COAL LIGHTS THE WORLD
.

I can't live in this town.

Viola's cousins were the only boys she had ever loved. One August afternoon they'd abandoned her to go swimming. Lonely, dejected, she had taken Edgar's horse on a hard ride. She rode out to the end of Deer Run Road, to where the Maxwell was parked. Through dense trees she'd watched them, naked but not swimming, Bronson and Edgar as tender as girls.

She was unsure what exactly she'd seen, or if she had even seen it, until the day of Edgar's funeral: Bronson standing at their cousin's grave, weeping like a widow.

C
lasses resumed the second day of January. In homeroom Miss Peale took attendance. Two desks were conspicuously empty. Joseph Poblocki had turned eighteen; now beyond the grasp of Roosevelt's law, he'd dropped out to work in the mines. Peggy Schultheis had dropped out, too, to do God knew what on the family farm. It happened every year: seniors disappearing in the final semester, a few short months before graduation; young people pulled away by family obligation or need, constraints Miss Peale would never understand.

To her relief, Alan Spangler was present. His eye had healed, his lip nearly so. He sat a little apart from the pretty girls—off to the side, in the desk abandoned by Peggy Schultheis. At the final bell he rose without speaking, the first pupil out the door.

In May the school year ended, and one by one, the boys were drafted: Henry Eickmeier, Chauncey Hoeffer, Richard Dickey, Jerry Bernardi, John Quinn. Bakerton, more and more, became a town of women—a place that might have suited Alan Spangler, except that he, too, was called up to serve. Like Edgar and Bronson, like Viola, he was a child of the century. Silently Miss Peale blessed him, and hoped.

Broken Star

I
met my aunt Melanie in the summer of 1974, an August of high bright days, so dry that my father had to oil our front lane to keep the dust down. I was fifteen, midway through high school and deadened by its sameness. I could scarcely remember what had preceded it, or begin to imagine what might follow.

“You don't remember me, do you? You were so little when I left.” Melanie climbed into the front seat of our station wagon, next to my father. It was my mother's usual place, surrendered out of courtesy since Melanie was a guest. She had arrived with her stepdaughter, Tilly, on the Greyhound bus from Pensacola, Florida. Tilly, who was eight, shared the backseat with me and my mother.

“Not exactly,” I said, though I had heard about Melanie my whole life: my mother's sister, the youngest of seven, the midlife baby who'd surprised my grandmother after two miscarriages.
I was an “oops,”
Melanie would tell me later, a confession that shocked and thrilled me. I'd never heard an adult allude to such matters. We were not that kind of family.

There was a rustling as she rifled through her shopping bags. “For Regina,” she said, handing me a small unwrapped box. Inside was a pair of earrings, the dangling kind I admired, decorated with tiny seashells. These were made for pierced ears, so I wouldn't be able to wear them.

“They're beautiful,” I said. “Thank you.”

My mother glanced at the earrings. She didn't care about jewelry but feigned interest to be polite. “Very nice,” she said. “But Melanie, you shouldn't have.”

She greeted all presents this way—
you shouldn't have—
no matter how worthy the occasion or how trifling the gift. It was a habit born of embarrassment. No gift—even one she'd always wished for—was worth drawing attention to herself.

Melanie seemed not to have this problem. On the ride home, she talked nonstop: the difference in weather from Florida to Pennsylvania, the assortment of characters she and Tilly had met along the way. She imitated the bayou accent of the bus driver, so thick that the names of cities where they'd stopped—Savannah, Georgia; Raleigh, North Carolina—were completely unintelligible. My father chuckled appreciatively. My mother giggled like a schoolgirl, covering her mouth with her hand.

M
elanie had been gone for twelve years, the only one of my relatives who lived away.
Away,
in my family, meant anywhere outside rural Pennsylvania, the quiet stretch of country, bordered by highways and Amish, where we'd farmed for four generations. Philadelphia was away. Pittsburgh, a grimy city of immigrants and steel mills, was—emphatically—away.

Melanie had left after graduating high school. She attended secretarial school in Washington, D.C., and worked as a typist at the Department of the Interior before marrying Uncle Dan and moving to a naval base down south. I knew her face only from photographs, the half dozen that decorated my grandmother's parlor. One in particular impressed me, her high school graduation portrait: Melanie in an off-shoulder blouse of glamorous black, a color nobody much wore in those days, certainly not young girls. “It's a drape,” my mother explained. “They made all the girls wear it. Don't ask me why.” She said it in the impatient tone I recognized, the one that meant I was interested in the wrong things.

I never mentioned the drape again, but I thought about it a great deal, Melanie being draped by someone, a photographer presumably. It seemed a reverent gesture, exquisitely romantic. In the photo Melanie's dark hair was spread across her shoulders, her chin tipped at the unnatural angle favored by school photographers. The whole presentation was theatrical, and Melanie smiled as though she knew it but was simply playing along. Her attitude, though I didn't yet know the word for it, was ironic, and it was this quality that delighted me.

Now, in person, Melanie looked much the same as she had in the photo, though she had just turned thirty-one, an age I did not consider young. By thirty, my female cousins were stout matrons: large bosoms firmly corseted, hair cut and permed into helmets of tight curls. Melanie's hair hung nearly to her waist, and she wore the kind of wide-bottomed blue jeans I saw in magazines but didn't own, since they were impractical for farm chores. She looked the way girls my age were supposed to look, while I—in my sleeveless blouse and homemade skirt, the flowered pattern not quite matching at the seams—looked like a younger version of my mother.

Night was falling as we left the bus station, an amenity that, until then, I hadn't known the town possessed. I went to high school in town—this involved a half-hour ride on a rickety school bus—but apart from the main streets, I'd spent little time there. The bus station was located on a side street next to the pool hall. My father had escorted us at my mother's insistence, though he grumbled that it was unnecessary. The neighborhood was perfectly safe.

I was beginning to notice how often they had such conversations: my mother asking for protection, my father reluctant to provide it. At home she was a model of efficiency, a take-charge housekeeper who structured my free time around endless daily chores, but in the outside world she was timid. My father had taught her to drive early in their marriage, but she refused to go any farther than the grocery store. She drove slowly, nervously, and only on the back roads. The Pennsylvania Turnpike, with its three lanes in either direction, scared her witless.

Back at the house, my father carried Melanie's suitcase upstairs to the sewing room, where the couch opened into a bed. Tilly would sleep in my room. “Give your cousin the bottom bunk,” I was instructed, though Tilly wasn't really my cousin, being Uncle Dan's from a previous marriage. This was how my mother said it: “from a previous marriage,” as though there'd been more than one.

I helped Tilly unpack her shorts and T-shirts. She was a skinny little thing, red-haired, with a sharp chin and a dark band of freckles across the bridge of her nose, so that from a distance she seemed to be wearing a Band-Aid. “Why do you have bunk beds?” she asked.

“For sleepovers,” I said, though technically that had never happened. In the third grade, I'd been allowed to invite Barbara Vance to spend the night. Homesick, she had cried all evening, until my father drove her the fifteen miles back to town. After that, no more sleepovers.

Tilly considered. “Maybe,” she said judiciously. “Or maybe they wanted to have more kids.”

“Nah,” I said, as though the idea had been discussed and dismissed. In fact, the possibility had never occurred to me.

“Anyway, it doesn't matter,” she said, climbing into bed. “They're too old now.”

I turned off the light, and in a few minutes I heard Tilly snoring in the bunk below. I lay awake a long time thinking about what she had said. I couldn't imagine my mother pregnant, let alone doing what was necessary to get that way. Like any farm girl, I understood the mechanics of reproduction. I'd once sneaked into my uncle Wilmer's barn while Lassie, a beautiful little mare, was being bred, a polite term that doesn't convey the brutality of the operation. I was squeamish about applying that model to any human couple, let alone my parents. At that age I was more interested in the runway leading up to such intimacies, the kissing and ardent glances, none of which I had experienced myself.

Drifting off to sleep, I found myself thinking of Melanie and Uncle Dan, who had met on the beach at Ocean City, Maryland. I'd been to the shore only once, on a rare family vacation, but I still dreamed of it. Not the ocean itself, but the human tableau running alongside it, the hundreds of strange, bare bodies on display, decorated with bright bathing suits. It was easy to place Melanie on that beach. I'd never seen Uncle Dan, not even a picture; but I imagined him tall and dark, with a hairy chest, like Burt Reynolds.

I was nearly asleep when I heard Tilly sniffling.

“What's the matter?” I whispered. “Did you have a bad dream?”

“I miss my dad,” she wailed.

This surprised me, because Tilly seemed older than her years. In fact, she was the same age Barbara Vance had been at the time of our sleepover, and much farther from home.

“It's just temporary. You'll see him soon enough.”

“No, I won't.” Tilly inhaled wetly. “We're never going back.”

“Don't be silly,” I said, because that was what my mother would've said.

For a long time Tilly didn't speak.

“Why would you think that?” I whispered. “Did Melanie say that?”

“No,” Tilly said. “I just know.”

I
kept quiet about what Tilly had said. It was easy to do, since I rarely saw my parents during the day. August is busy on a farm, and we were all occupied with separate chores. I would see my mother at suppertime but not my father even then; most nights he had meetings at the Grange Hall, to prepare for the county fair. That year he was a judge in two categories, Swine and Youth Dairy Cattle. He felt out of his depth with the swine—we hadn't raised piglets in years—but with the calves, he was more than confident. I'd heard it said my whole life, by neighbors and uncles and men from church, their grave inflection giving it the weight of a proverb: Bert Yahner knows cattle.

The fair had been a fixture of my childhood, as thrilling as Christmas, as anticipated and beloved. For six days each September there would be crowds and commotion, the Ferris wheel, the sweet greasy aroma of frying potatoes and funnel cakes. As a little girl, I'd walked the midway flanked by my parents. Holding their hands, I kept up a steady chatter, enjoying their nearness, their protection from the unaccustomed crowd. When I got older, I entered animals in the youth competitions. I showed rabbits three years in a row and, at twelve, a Jersey calf named Buttercup, who took second place in her class.

Three years later, my father still pestered me to raise another calf. “Someday,” I told him. The truth was, I had no intention of doing it; given the choice, I would skip the fair altogether. I was embarrassed now by the cowboy music, the livestock smell, the farm boys in their stiff new dungarees, hair slicked back as if for church. Last year I'd stayed close to the booth where I sold raffle tickets to raise money for the 4-H Club, keeping a nervous lookout for my schoolmates, the town girls in their sundresses and pretty sandals. How I coveted those sandals! I loved them precisely because they were so impractical, bound to get ruined in the gravel and muck. The girls came in groups of three or four, whispering and sometimes breaking out in loud laughter. They might have been laughing at anything, but I felt with a deep certainty that they were mocking people like my parents. My mother in her housedress and dark lipstick, flushed with excitement, clinging to my father's arm.

“It's about that time, isn't it?” Melanie asked at supper. “The fair. God, I used to love the fair.”

“It's a lot of aggravation, if you ask me,” my mother said, passing a platter of fried chicken. “Bert will be relieved when it's over.”

“I think he likes it,” I said.

“It's too much for him. Since his heart attack.”

“What about you, Gina?” Melanie had taken to shortening my name, which delighted me. I'd never had a nickname before.

“I probably won't go,” I said, avoiding my mother's eyes. “I'll have homework then. It's the first week of school.”

“You've got to be kidding.” Melanie took the platter. “Won't all your friends be there?”

My mother stared at me in bewilderment. “I don't know what's come over you.”

“Don't listen to her, Peg.” Melanie heaped her plate with potato salad. For a small person, she had a huge appetite. “She's going to the fair.”

M
elanie was a late riser. It was ten, ten-thirty by the time she wandered into the kitchen in her nightgown. Even Tilly slept until nine. My mother tolerated this for two days. The third morning she enlisted them to work in the kitchen, putting up bread-and-butter pickles. She and Tilly picked the cucumbers, brought them in from the garden, and scrubbed them at the sink. Melanie had the best job, slicing them into thin rounds, and I had the worst, sterilizing the Ball jars. Using metal tongs, I placed them four at a time in a huge cauldron of boiling water, a steamy, miserable operation that kept me in front of the blazing stove in the August heat.

“Your mother runs a tight ship, Gina.” Melanie sat perched on a high stool in front of a breezy window. “Jesus, you'll be glad to go back to school.”

“Ten more days,” I said, grinning. I'd forgotten—it was easy to forget—that Melanie had been a farm kid, too.

“Do they still make you write that essay? ‘What I Did on Summer Vacation'?”

“Some vacation,” I said, mopping my forehead with a towel.

“My vacation was just super,” Melanie said in a simpering voice. “I watered two hundred head of dairy cattle.”

“I hauled manure a quarter mile to the garden,” I added.

“I sat by the highway all day in the blazing sun,” said Melanie, “and I sold six ears of corn.”

I laughed so hard no sound came out, a feeling both delicious and frightening. Through the open window, I saw my mother come up the garden path with another bushel of cucumbers.

“I put up a million quarts of bread-and-butter pickles,” Melanie continued. “For God's sake! Does anybody like bread-and-butter pickles?” Then she noticed my expression. “Gina? What's the matter?”

My mother stood in the doorway, her cheeks flaming. The screen door spanked shut behind her. She glanced around the kitchen: the steam rising from the stove, the counters, covered with old towels, where I'd set the jars to dry. “You don't have to help if you don't want to,” she said, an odd tremor in her voice.

“Peg,” said Melanie, turning to face her. “We were just having fun.”