Anywhere But Here (43 page)

We probably shouldn’t have said a thing. Adele used to call us and yell, DON’T tell him not to go out with her, that’ll just make him REBEL. Say, Hey, she’s a great girl. Have fun!

And then when he graduated, we thought at least he’d go to college and meet other people. You were still here, when Hal finished high school. We were all at the graduation in the gym, when he was number 563 in his class. Merry wasn’t going to college. She was
going
to stay at home and work in a shop. I think she ended up at McDonald’s. Whitewater wasn’t much of a school, but we thought he could at least get on his feet there. If he applied himself for a year he could transfer to the University of Wisconsin. But he drove back home almost every weekend and partied with the kids from high school. And that was all during Vietnam. So lots of them were signing up. Their parents couldn’t pay for college, so they went in and then when they came back, they had the GI Bill. Griling’s boy and all those Brozeks went into the service right after high school. Most all the kids around here signed up—the kids you and Benny played with, too. But see by then there wasn’t a war.

Well, in April or May, Hal came home and said he wanted to drop out. After Gram’s already paid for the whole semester. We tried to talk him out of it, we all did, Adele came over and talked to him for hours about college education, college education.

“So where did a college education get you?” he said. “It got you married to a college professor who left you with a kid to raise by yourself.”

Now God forbid if I said that, but when he did, she laughed.

We found out then, too, that he was flunking—Adele got that out of him, he didn’t say that to us, so that pretty much had to be the end of it. So we thought, he could come home and work for a
year or two and when he’d
grown
up a little he’d miss the fun of school and then he could go again and maybe apply himself more.

Then he let out the real bombshell. He wanted to get married to Merry. They were in a hurry. Well, that was almost worse than dropping out. That was permanent. Oh, did we fight. We did everything we could to talk them out of it. And for once we all agreed—your mom and I and Jimmy all thought it would be just dumb for him to marry her so young.

Gram didn’t like her either, but she wouldn’t say anything. She said he was hearing enough bad from all of us, she could just keep her mouth shut. But she hoped too that we could talk him out of it. “At least wait,” she used to say when I’d complain to her. I went over lots during that time and had coffee with her in the middle of the day. Hal was at the store, helping Jimmy. Jimmy thought if he wasn’t going to be in school and if he wanted to get married too yet, he’d better learn to earn his keep. And I think Jimmy worked him hard. Every morning, they were yelling and fighting before they even left the house. Oh, it wasn’t nice. It was really awful. Benny got real quiet. I suppose he didn’t know what to do, he liked his brother and he liked his dad, so he’d get up real early and I’d fix him breakfast before they were dressed. He sort of snuck around, he was afraid to get caught in someone’s way.

So I tried to be extra nice to Ben. I’d be up early, anyway. I really couldn’t sleep, so I’d get myself up and make a cup of coffee and pretty soon Benny’d come down to the kitchen, all dressed with his books ready. I’d fix him cinnamon toast or an egg and he’d eat it real fast and gulp his milk and then he walked over to Gram’s. And Gram would feed him a second breakfast. He had such an appetite and he always stayed thin. It would just be a boy to have those long legs.

We all went over there to her house when it got rough. I’d go in the middle of the morning to have some peace. Jimmy and Hal called me to complain about the other one during the day. Jimmy called from his office and Hal called from a pay phone, but if I didn’t answer, they hung up. They wouldn’t call me at Gram’s. And Gram would fix a pot of coffee and we’d eat a little some
thing. She had her house so nice, she had the two bird feeders hanging, one outside each of the kitchen windows. And every once in a while when we were talking a bird would come. We’d stop and watch.

I told her about how dirty Merry was. You’d think if you were going to meet the parents of the boy you wanted to marry, you’d at least wash your hands, wouldn’t you? Even if she wasn’t going to take a bath. Her fingernails were so dirty, I can’t tell you. There was a black line under each one. And I told Gram that the once I’d gone over to her house with Hal, there were dishes in the sink, and in the drawers, when she went to get a sweater, I saw everything mixed up, scrambled like in a washing machine.

Gram’s teeth rubbed together the way they did when she was nervous. She told me old Tinta Griling, Bub’s mother, was like that. She kept her clothes in the drawers rolled up in little balls.

Well, your mom drove over with Ted and talked to Hal. That didn’t work. Finally, we had everybody together. We had the priest from Saint Phillip’s, your mother, you and Benny were back playing in Benny’s room.

Jimmy and I had practically given up. We’d tried everything. They were lots calmer than we were. She sat there on the couch with her short, funny hair and her dirty nails and just acted polite. Can you imagine sitting in your fiancé’s house with the parents and everyone telling you they think you’re too young? But she wasn’t the least bit affected. No, they both said the same thing, they were in love and they wanted to get married.

“So how do you think you’re gonna make a living?” Jimmy must have yelled that ten, fifteen times.

And Hal just said he was ready to work, he’d go out and find a job. Merry had been working now a year already. We could see the priest gradually coming around to their side. And we couldn’t really stop them. They were both of age. They didn’t need our permission.

But Adele wasn’t going to let it drop. She always thought Hal was like her and she wanted him to go to college and really make something of his life. I suppose we’d already given up on some of that. I couldn’t picture him going back to school, really. He hadn’t
been paying attention most of high school. He’d have so much to catch up. And then we didn’t go to college either.

Jimmy and I sat with the priest in the kitchen, I fixed coffee, Jimmy stood looking out the glass doors to the backyard. He was on his second vodka gimlet. We were exhausted. Adele was talking to them in the breezeway. We could hear her, her voice was still energetic after all this time. She seemed so young to me, always.

“So, tell me why, really, you have to get married. Why can’t you just keep dating? What’s really the big deal?”

“Say we want to go to bed together.”

I put my hand over my mouth. That was our Hal. I’m sure the priest heard, but he didn’t move, he stared down at his coffee mug. It was still empty. Right away, I poured. Then, for sure he heard the next thing my sister said. When she gets excited, her voice is like a bell.

“So why don’t you just go to bed together? Let’s face it. It’s 1968 and people go to bed together before they’re married. Plenty of people. You know that. So why the charade? Go on and go to bed together. Take a roll in the hay.”

My sister. With a priest in the house. I said, “Oh, crumps, you never know with her.” I thought I had to say something. Jimmy turned from the window, slow and grinning, looking at the priest. I think we were both waiting to see if the priest would say anything.

“Leave it to Adele. She’s not shy.” Jimmy’s grin got bigger. “I say she’s right, let ’em go ahead. I wouldn’t say the same if it was my daughter. But she’s not my daughter.”

“Oh, sure, and just wait then till she gets pregnant. That’d be real nice, sure.”

The priest looked up at the wall telephone. “Let’s hear what they say.”

“It’s a sin,” Merry said.

“We want to be okay in the church.” That was our Hal.

“Oh, come on, the church looks the other way. Don’t you think plenty of people at Saint Phillip’s are going to bed together? Why, sure they are. You should hear the half of it. And the church’ll
change its mind. A few years ago we couldn’t eat meat on Friday, now we go to McDonald’s. That’s no reason to get married.”

She went on and on, long after we stopped. She wanted to write Hal recommendations to the University of Wisconsin, Madison, where he hadn’t a chance of getting in. She ran all around town, she lined up an appointment for him to go to a psychiatrist. I don’t remember anymore what all she did. She did try to help him. But he wasn’t going to listen to anyone. We all said we wouldn’t go to the wedding if they had one and so they took the bus up to Escanaba one weekend and got married there.

Jimmy went around saying they were living in sin because they weren’t married in the state of Wisconsin, but six months or so later, it wasn’t long, when she was pregnant, they had another wedding in the backyard and Gram baked a cake and we all went. So that was the end of it. Hal was working at Fort Adams paper mill then, she was still at McDonald’s and they had a trailer over by the airport in that lot the Indians own. Those Indians want to put up a hotel there now. Yah! That’s their land, they say. Can you imagine?

And then Hal had to go into the service. It was really one thing after the other. He never had any luck. He ended up enlisting because his lottery number was fifty or sixty something—high up. It was 1969 and he knew five or six boys who’d been killed already. He thought in the air force he had a better chance of staying here and fixing engines or something. Jet mechanic. I don’t know, maybe he thought being married would help. It didn’t, I don’t think. He thought he’d like the air force better than the army or the marines. A lot of his friends from high school were already in. Lot of Bay City boys fought in Vietnam.

Hal had to go to boot camp with Merry still pregnant and that seemed real sad. We thought he wouldn’t even see the baby or only once or twice, before he left. Adele had a fit again, oh ye gods, she was on the phone with us every day with a scheme. First she wanted to get some kind of student deferment, then she heard somewhere that you could get out of it if you had them put braces on your teeth, she thought of everything.

But we didn’t know if it would even be such a bad thing for him
to be in the service. Jimmy thought it might make him grow up. I didn’t really know, one way or the other, but he was out of the house and I thought it wasn’t our business anymore, so I didn’t interfere. But this time Hal went along with Adele. He wanted to get out too. They tried the whiplash and the flat feet and the allergies, and whatever else they could say, but it didn’t work. He had to go in.

And after all that fuss, he was only gone nine weeks. He went to the Lackland Air Force Base in Texas at the beginning of the summer. And I guess the boots there didn’t fit him quite right. Hal was always flat-footed. I’ve read now that that could have been helped some if we’d gotten a certain kind of shoe with metal arches when he was little, but we didn’t know about that then. Your mom read up on such stuff. So you and Benny had good shoes, Stride Rites, all the most expensive. But then Shaefer said your arches got ruined anyway with some red pumps, real fashionable, that your mother bought you in Milwaukee. So, she might as well have let you wear shoes from K-Mart. The ones from Milwaukee were just as bad.

I guess in Texas they were all marching along in some field. He was overweight then. And they shaved his long hair off right away and put him in something called Motivation. They made them march and march. He lost fifty pounds in that nine weeks. Hal with his flat feet in boots that didn’t fit him right and pretty soon he tripped over a pothole and I think he even bumped his head with the rifle. So he wasn’t there a week even, and we got a telegram that he was in the hospital, he’d torn a ligament in his leg. And then I guess they let him out and made him march again too soon, before he was really better, and so the leg got worse and he fell again, from walking on that bad leg, and that time he slipped a disk, too. And so there he was in the hospital again. He was in for a week or two and then they had him out marching. Every time the leg got worse. They were doing something wrong or maybe just making him march too soon before it was healed, but he said at night his leg would swell up over the knee, as big as a basketball. Finally, the doctors said they wanted to operate on the leg—that was the same leg he’d broken skiing—and he
said no, he wasn’t going to let them. Well, we wouldn’t give permission either, not with what happened to Granny, so he stayed in the hospital there and then they finally let him out. He got honorable discharge, medical deferment. They decided he was costing them too much money.

I often wondered if Hal didn’t feel bad about being home. I’ll tell you, I was glad, and Gram, too. Jimmy was a little ashamed, he didn’t say it, but I knew. I hope to God Hal couldn’t tell anything. But with Jimmy it was that he’d been in the war and that he’d always tried to get Hal going with a sport all his life, and it just never took. Hal probably should have been the bookworm type, but he got off on the wrong track with that, too. We didn’t talk about it once he was home, but I know there were people who probably teased him, because all around here I could tell from the way they asked that they didn’t respect us for it. We told them it was honorable discharge, but they still thought less of us. Chummy had two over there, one in the army, one in the marines. And Bub and Chummy had high school boys planning to sign up right away when they graduated.

You and your mom were gone before our real trouble started. We were worried about you still, thinking you’d be all alone with her in California.

I thought maybe that was where Hal got started with the drugs, down in Texas. You read so much now about the soldiers getting hooked on dope. Lot of them got killed because they were over there high on drugs. The Vietnamese wasn’t high, so he shot our boys first. Sure. And now all those little Vietnamese we were fighting against are here in Bay City getting money from the government.

But Hal says they were already in the drugs before he left. We didn’t see, we just heard about it later. That’s the worst part of being a parent. All the dangerous, important things happen to your children without you. You hear about them later, too late. Apparently, he and Merry were in it together. No, it wasn’t just the marijuana. We didn’t know anything about it. He had his hair long and wore those dirty jeans, but then they all looked like that. And we didn’t go visit the trailer. For one thing, she never invited
us, for dinner or a housewarming or anything, so we saw them when Gram had something doing and we all went over there. On Christmas and Easter, we did something. Either at our house or we’d take everybody out. After you and your mom left, there wasn’t much of a family.