Miller's Valley (16 page)

S
ometimes you don't know who in the world to ask for help and then you just run into the right person by accident, like some stranger who comes down the road when your car won't start and has jumper cables in his trunk. My lab partner, Laura, who looked like the kind of person who would someday be a Girl Scout troop leader, who someday would actually turn out to be a Girl Scout troop leader, always went to the ladies' room right after class was over because she had a long drive to the hospital where her mother was being treated for breast cancer. Three days running she found me in the stall on my knees, and on the fourth she said, “Are you expecting?”

“I think so.”

“Do you want to be?”

I looked up at her and I figure it was written all over my face. It was written all over hers, too. I never asked and she never told me, never in all the time I knew her, but there was something about the way she lifted her chin and narrowed her eyes that made me know she'd been kneeling where I was and had found some way out of it. We went out to her car and she wrote something on a sheet of loose-leaf and tore it out of her binder and handed it to me.

“Are you okay for money?” she said.

“I think so,” I said.

This is all I have to say about that because it's pretty much all I recall:

I took the day off work. I called in sick to school. Laura made an appointment for me so the long-distance number wouldn't show up on my mother's phone bill. She would have noticed. Before dawn I drove an hour to a grubby little bus station with a wire newspaper stand and a candy machine in one corner.

I rode for almost two hours on a dirty bus with candy wrappers on the floor in the back, which was where I was sitting. Fifth Avenues and Baby Ruths. It was early in the morning and it was a good thing I had a plastic bag in my purse, because I brought up the Cheerios I'd had for breakfast.

I fell asleep for the last ten minutes and woke when the bus went up a big loop-the-loop ramp that felt like a carnival ride in the worst way. I left the plastic bag on the floor of the bus, next to the candy wrappers. I was past caring.

I walked fourteen blocks through the city streets to an office building with an elevator that seemed to take a long time to come. I took it to the sixth floor.

The waiting room was filled with women but I can't tell you anything about them because none of us looked at each other. There were two men and they seemed to make it worse. Both of the women they were with were crying.

We all pretended to read magazines. I don't know why they had
Highlights for Children.
Maybe some women brought their kids, although I couldn't imagine why, or how the rest of us would have felt if there had been a child in the waiting room. I read “Goofus and Gallant” in
Highlights,
just the same as I always did at the dentist. Goofus chewed with his mouth open and used his hand to wipe his mouth. Gallant chewed with his mouth closed and used his napkin. I felt like I was waiting to have a tooth filled. The smell was the same as the dentist's office, too, that sharp chemical combination of whatever they used to clean the floors and whatever they used on the patients. The carpet was somewhere between tan, brown, and grubby. The way we all stared down at it, you would have thought it had the secret of life woven into the pile.

“Ruth Kostovich,” one of the nurses said, and I didn't move at first. “Ruth?” she repeated, and I put down
Highlights.
The girl next to me picked it up. Somebody had already done the puzzles in pen.

The doctor was a woman. I had never seen a woman doctor before. She asked me if I had ever had an internal. When she saw the look on my face she explained about a speculum. She said it would be cold. I put my arm over my eyes. The lights were bright.

“Count backward from one hundred,” the nurse said. I remember ninety-seven.

I woke up and had orange juice and an Oreo. Then I threw up into a basin. I had two Ritz crackers and fell asleep for an hour. A nurse led me to a chair in the waiting room, but there were no magazines on the table right next to me and I didn't want to try to walk across the room. I just sat and thought about nothing for a while. The nurse at the front desk said I had to wait for a friend or relative to pick me up before I could leave. When she was on the phone I slid out the door. The elevator took even longer and I was afraid the nurse would come looking for me, but there were plenty of women to keep her busy. I leaned against the wall while I waited for the elevator.

On the bus back I started to cry because I remembered the doctor putting her hand around my ankle as she left the room and whispering, “I'm glad I was able to help you.” I started to cry because I realized I was free. I was one of those people who read the papers every morning, at first because we had to for social studies, later because I just liked to do it to remind myself that there was a world outside of where I was. I already knew that a year ago there wouldn't have been any doctor, any waiting room, any anesthetic. I wondered how you found someone to do this before, and what it felt like. I was glad I didn't have to find out. Maybe Laura knew.

If anyone had asked me how I felt, I would have said, scared and relieved. Scared that someone would find out, relieved that it was over and I was done. I never for one moment thought of it as a baby, even when I was reading
Highlights for Children.
I thought of it as an anchor, dragging me down. I thought of it as my mother's disappointment like a living thing, more of a living thing, more real, than whatever had been inside of me. I thought of it as a lifetime of mornings spent listening to Steven's stories at the table, of mopping kitchen floors and folding ragged towels, of going to dinner at the diner and maybe the steak house on my birthday and looking around and thinking, No, no, no, this is not my life, this is not my life. I didn't know what my life was, or would be. I just knew it couldn't be that.

I never told anyone beforehand, especially not Steven, because he would have started making plans, a two-bedroom house with a tiny bedroom for a baby, a small ceremony with LaRhonda and Fred standing next to us. You were supposed to be so smart, Mimi, I could hear LaRhonda thinking as she stood next to me holding a bouquet. Steven would have tried to stop me. No one was going to stop me. I paid with cash from the corn can. Then I folded the whole thing up and put it in a sealed envelope in my mind, and that's where it stayed.

“How are you?” Laura said two days later as we walked into class.

“I'm fine,” I said.

We had a test. I got an A. After that I never got anything but an A on anything, even statistics. And I never, in my whole life, ate an Oreo again.

E
xcept for sex and school I lived like what Ruth called a spinster, cooking, cleaning, taking my father for hospital appointments and long drives with no destination. Somewhere nineteen-year-old girls were going to parties, but I wasn't one of them. It was like everyone and everything had moved on, and I was standing in place, shifting hay bales and making stew. Even Donald had stopped writing to me. His last letter said he'd decided to major in history, and that he had given up on the golf team because it took too much time. It could have been a dispatch from the moon, as much as it had to do with what I was doing, or not doing, or never doing. I didn't write back. What would I say? That the feed corn in the back bin got moldy and I had to shovel it out and ditch it? Every once in a while I went over to play chess with Donald's grandfather. “What do you hear from our college boy?” he would say. “He sounds good,” I would say. That's how life is, I guess. You know your lines.

I went over to see LaRhonda, who was living with Fred in her old room while they looked around for a house of their own, but I only went after her mother grabbed me outside the diner and told me how lonely LaRhonda was, all her friends back at school and no one home for another month. I guessed I was what was left.

I brought over some homemade cookies and a copy of a book about infant care, and LaRhonda's mother put the cookies on a plate and then ate three of them. I was pretty sure Mrs. Venti was over the two-hundred-pound mark, but she still favored stretch pants and a snug sweater. You could see a sharp line where her girdle ended and her real thighs began, and another one where her stomach made a donut below her bra and above her waistband. LaRhonda, on the other hand, pretty much looked like herself except for the kind of belly I'd seen before when she'd eaten half a pizza at a pajama party. From the back she didn't look pregnant at all. From the front she looked annoyed, which was normal, too.

“What do you think, Mimi? Gramma or Nana or Grandmom? I've only got a couple of months to decide.” Her mother had started talking about LaRhonda's pregnancy the moment LaRhonda and Fred had gotten back from Puerto Rico on their honeymoon.

“Aren't you working tonight?” LaRhonda said to her.

When we went to LaRhonda's room it looked almost exactly the same as it had before except that the twin beds had been pushed together. They hadn't even changed the spreads. Then we went back out to the kitchen and sat at the breakfast bar. Mrs. Venti kept calling in to us from the living room, maybe because LaRhonda would barely speak to me. I was just waiting for her to pull out a sheet of paper and read me a list of my transgressions, Leviticus by way of LaRhonda Venti, or LaRhonda Nesser, which was her new name. She'd done that once when we were in middle school and she thought I was being a bad friend because I wouldn't forge an excuse note saying she'd been too sick to do the English homework. She'd written out her accusations in her diary and then read them to me right off the page.

“Fred says she keeps saying how disappointed she is in you, that you've turned your back on God's plan,” Steven had said to me one day in the car. “You know what she's talking about? Which plan of God's does she mean?”

“She's crazy,” I said. “She's pregnant.” And I wasn't. That was what she meant. I could tell it was all she could do not to say something to me. Instead she kept folding her hands over her stomach with a sigh, shaking her head until her hoop earrings rattled. What that meant was that she wasn't buying my bad clam story before and she wasn't buying it now.

“And how are you doing?” she finally said in that snotty voice after going on for ten minutes about her bad back. But I wasn't going to talk to her about that, either. She didn't really want to hear what I had to say: that my father had been up a couple of times the night before, wandering outside and burning himself on the stove somehow, and I'd overslept and missed half of my history seminar and the professor had said, “I'd appreciate your taking attending this class as seriously as I take teaching it, Miss Miller,” and I'd caught my mother the day before just sitting in her car, staring out the windshield, like she didn't know how to start the car and didn't know where she was going when she did. “You okay?” I'd said, knocking on the car window with my filthy hands, all caked with the dirt from the barn and smelling of cows. “Oh, honey, I just lost track of things for a minute there,” she'd said, which coming from my mother was one of the scariest sentences I'd ever heard, right up there with “Yes, you're around three months along” from that nurse in the city.

I looked at LaRhonda and listened to her stories about her heartburn and her swollen ankles and her shoes that didn't fit anymore, hundred-dollar shoes and if her feet didn't go back to normal what was she supposed to do with them? And, as sad as my life was, I knew that I wasn't eleven years old anymore, and somewhere along the line I'd turned into a person who wasn't going to let anyone push her around. If there was a bad Mimi list I wasn't going to wait to hear it. I held on until LaRhonda finally drew breath, and then I said, “I have things to do,” and shoved past her baby belly and walked out.

“You girls have a nice visit?” Mrs. Venti said as I passed through the living room, but I didn't answer.

The Langers came over the next day and I made a coconut cake and when Cissy saw it on the kitchen counter she started to sob. She was a crier for sure, but I'd never known her to cry at cake before. “Miriam, we need to talk to you and Bud,” Mr. Langer said, sitting down at the kitchen table.

My mother patted Cissy on the arm. She'd started crying so hard that her nose was running, and I handed her a paper napkin. “There's no need, Cis,” my mother said, and I could tell she already knew what the Langers were going to say. She was good at that, knowing but not saying. For years I thought it was pretty remarkable that I'd managed to hide from my mother what I'd done that winter, but later on it occurred to me, maybe because I knew so much about my own kids that they didn't know I knew, that my mother had known all along. There's a way you can let things happen without acknowledging them and so having to act as though you approve of them that comes in handy for a mother.

Mr. Langer looked around and my mother said, “I don't think we need to have him here. It might upset him, if he understands what's going on. He's over at the other place, watching television.” The other place. In her whole life I'd never heard my mother call Ruth's house Ruth's house.

I cut the cake and put on the coffeepot. Mr. Langer and my mother passed around the cream and sugar, and then Mr. Langer cleared his throat and said, “We're selling.” My mother just nodded. He went on and on, that way people do when they're saying something they feel bad about, as though the more they talk the better it will get, although it's usually the other way around. Cissy cried her way through a couple more napkins and finally took a big forkful of cake. She ate three slices out of sheer upset.

They'd sold their house to the state, put a down payment on one of the new places Ed had taken my parents to see. It had a sunporch and a patio. Cissy would have a big room to work on her dolls. Henry wasn't sure if he would still sell bait. I didn't think it was a bait shop kind of neighborhood. The town council had approved the whole development in record time, and while the paper didn't say so, and neither did the council, they'd done it because of a deal with the state to offer the houses with a lower mortgage rate to people from the valley who were willing to move fast.

Steven had driven me out there one day, and while it was mostly a mess of foundations, cinder blocks, piping, and piles of plowed snow and gravel, you could see how many houses there would be. Steven talked a lot about buying in bulk, about how much money you could make if you were ordering a hundred new toilets instead of two, but I'd started to tune out a lot of his business talk. For four weeks after I'd taken the bus to the city I wasn't supposed to have sex, and I'd kept making vague medical excuses, and he kept saying he felt like some dumb high school kid, feeling his girlfriend up in the backseat of the car. By the time I finally let him slip inside me with a big grin and a “worth waiting for, babe,” two things had happened: I'd filled the prescription for birth control pills the doctor had given me, and I'd noticed how annoying he could be when we weren't both naked.

At the building site he kept saying, “Nice, very nice,” about the size of the foundations and how they'd laid out the roads. But all I'd noticed was the trees. I'd hiked through the woods there a couple of times for Girl Scouts, for trailblazing and to classify leaves. The trees had been so thick that if it started to rain you barely felt a thing. They were all gone now. Thirty-five acres had been clear-cut. They'd done what developers always did, turned it into a tree desert. After the houses were built, they would put those spindly saplings along the curbs. It was like those girls in high school who took off their real eyebrows and then drew fake ones in with pencil. When I was doing my water project research I learned that clear-cutting was terrible for water maintenance. A couple days of real heavy rains, and all these people, the Langers, too, would have silt in their wells and brown water in all those new toilets. I told Steven, but he just said, “That's how they do it, babe.”

“Don't be mad at me, Miriam,” Cissy told my mother, wiping her eyes again. Clifton colored in the flowers on the paper napkins with crayon the way I'd done when I was a kid, but he was still too little to get them right. They didn't look like mine had. My mother said it was one of the differences between boys and girls. It seemed like there were a million of them.

My mother put her hand over Cissy's. “It's the right move, Cis,” she said with a smile, and I almost dropped my coffee mug.

After the two of them drove away I put what little was left of the cake on a smaller plate. When Cissy got upset she cried first and then ate, and between her and her husband they'd managed to eat almost an entire coconut cake. Without turning around, I said to my mother, “Are you selling the farm?” Ten of the houses in the valley were already sold to the government. Two of those were empty, and the families in the rest were looking for another place to live or waiting for Winston Bally to stop by and give them a moving date.

“You can see the handwriting on the wall,” Donald's grandfather told my father, but he swore he would never sell, would fight until, depending on the day, the bitter end, the moment of truth, or the last dog died. Donald's grandfather, not my father. My father said, “Fell one. One. Fell. Fell.” The doctor who had said my father's speech would come back slowly now said nothing. His right side was still barely along for the ride. He liked to sit out in the cold with no coat on.

“The farm belongs to your father,” my mother said. “It's never been in my name. The family always made sure of that whenever a Miller got married.”

“You could get some kind of power of attorney, I bet.”

“I probably could,” she said. “Why don't you take what's left of that cake over to the other house? I've got laundry to do.”