Anywhere But Here (43 page)

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.

I’d seen the trailer once or twice. I always told Merry I’d baby-sit for Tina when she was busy and a few times she called and said could I come pick her up. Merry had a job at the canning factory then and that is hard work. They all say it. Hal was on at the paper mill. I think she had a shift so she was working most evenings, too. I was glad to take Tina. I was glad to get her out of there. The trailer was truly filthy. I don’t think she ever cleaned. There were candles burnt halfway down on the table and they’d just let the wax go right into the wood. And anywhere you’d step there were clothes all over the floor. I bet they just picked their clothes up off the floor in the morning and put them on.

Now Hal says all that time they were in the drugs, so that explains a lot of it. Things got real bad. Hal said sometimes they’d each go out to bars separately, he and Merry, and leave Tina next door with the neighbor. Oh, that still makes me mad. We would have gladly taken her. We would have loved to and I hate to think who those neighbors were, I saw them once, they were no better than Hal and Merry. The husband had such long wavy hair and those tiny little glasses they used to wear on the bottom of his nose. It still makes me mad to think of it.

But he said they’d each find somebody else at one of those bars and bring them home to the trailer. He said whichever got there first, that one got the bed. And the other couple had the couch. So it wasn’t good. And who knows when they remembered to go next door and get Tina—then, in the middle of the night, or in the morning with four people milling around that little trailer. He says when she was still in diapers, just learning to talk, Tina knew the word peyote. I guess they had to tell her when they took her over here or to Gram’s just what she could and couldn’t say. I asked him lot of times if he gave her anything to take and he says no, but I wouldn’t be surprised. Or if Merry did during the day to keep her quiet, while she was tired, from the night shift. They
say Bub Griling’s mother used to give Bub whiskey when he was a baby to make him sleep. But Tina’s all right, she’s a smart girl and a good girl, so I guess that’s the main thing, whatever happened.

We didn’t find out until everyone did. You were lucky you weren’t here then. It was all over. Election year and the drugs had been coming in and the kids with the long hair, the hippies, and people got fed up. People had had enough and they wanted to crack down. And wouldn’t you know, Hal was the one who got caught.

He says now he was set up and I believe him. But he admits that he was breaking the law. He was taking the drugs and he was selling them. He says they were in it for the money. He thought he could make money fast. And sure, look what happened. But he always had to have a scheme to get rich quick. He couldn’t just wait and save like everybody else.

We saw it on TV at the store. It was the whole front page of the
Press Gazette
that night and the big story on the local news.
FOUR BAY CITY BOYS ARRESTED IN DRUG TRAFFIC
. Hal says one of the people who gave the drugs to him was caught for something else, assault with a deadly weapon, and so they really had him, and he was the one who told.

Gram was down in her kitchen, playing solitaire, and she heard it on the radio and she had the stroke. That was her first stroke. We found her right away because Jimmy drove over from the store to tell her, we were scared she’d see it on the television. Really, that was one of the worst things of my life, seeing Hal on the television. Jimmy said he thought the same thing. We recognized him and we heard it and we just couldn’t fit it all together. We were really in a daze then.