Home Leave: A Novel (4 page)

“I don’t think you can write ‘crap’ in a letter to the editor,” I object, putting it down.

“Well, that’s what it is,” Frank says.

“What about hogwash?”

“Nothing with farm animals in it.”

“Trash?”

“Read the sentence to me out loud.”

“All right,” Frank says, nodding appreciatively as I read. “Trash. I like it.”

I continue.

“That’s nice you wrote about Sophie,” I say. “But shouldn’t you mention Beth, too?”

“What about her?”

“I don’t know, that she’s his sister?”

“Everyone knows that already,” he says, and so I leave it be.

The next week they run Frank’s letter (he refers to it as his “editorial”), and Beth brings us five copies. The editor has taken out “made-up trash” and put in “misinformation.”

“Censorship,” Frank says, darkly.

We take it with us to dinner and hand out the other four copies to the vegetables who can still read. You would have thought that Frank had won the Nobel Prize. Lina Bauer, who was known for letting boys touch her chest back in middle school, goes on and on about Frank’s “talent” and asks him to write her a poem from the voice of her late husband, which sounds fishy to me. John Hartmann, who has a funny shrunken left hand from a threshing accident, suggests that Frank start a regular column in the school paper.

“But Frank’s not in high school,” I protest. “It’s a high school paper.” The whole table stares at me, shocked, like I’m some kind of Judas.

“That’s the point, Joy,” Frank says, quietly, dangerously. “To give the teenagers another perspective on things.”

The high school journalism teacher says no, of course, just like I thought he would, but that doesn’t stop Frank. He was up two days after his knee surgery last year, and back when our farm was dairy, he milked the cows every day at four in the morning, even when it was pouring, even when he had a raging fever.

Frank decides to start a weekly paper at Wittenberg Village.

It lasts for three weeks, until the staff shuts it down for the anonymous editorial criticizing the lasagna and a scandalous column by Lina about the “Ten Most Irritating Habits of Residents” at Wittenberg Village. She comes out of the director’s office crying. “They called me unchristian,” she tells us at dinner that night.

I am relieved when the whole thing blows over, but Frank takes it hard. He starts watching a lot of TV, and his eyes leak at the littlest thing. I feel bad for not encouraging him more with his journalism. Frank’s always needed something to do. I haven’t minded, whenever I had a spare minute, just sitting on the porch at our old house, watching the corn, or the clouds, or petting our dog, Jenny, now long gone. It always got me in trouble as a girl, my habit of just staring at something, “dreaming,” as my mother said, “idle.” But on weekends, Frank wasn’t happy unless he was fixing something. If anything, he got busier when he retired. A lot of the old farmers were like that, up until a couple years ago: they still had breakfast at five a.m. together at PeeWees, down on Miller Street.

I mention some of this to Beth when she comes over to check on us and Frank is out playing cards with some of the guys in the fellowship hall.

“Oh, give it a rest, Mom,” she says.

“But I’m just worried—”

“You always have to make them look so good,” she says.

“What? Who?” I ask.

“Your men,” she says. “Chris, Dad. Why don’t you just back off? Let Dad fend for himself. And screw Chris.”

“Beth!”

“Forget it,” she grumbles, and starts gathering her things. “I’m making a trip to Walmart this afternoon. You guys need anything?”

“Sit down,” I say. “What do you mean ‘make them look good’?”

“So Chris made some baskets in high school and makes a lot of money now,” she says. “Who cares?”

“You know how important it is for your father,” I say.

“But why do you get caught up in it?” she asks, her voice tight, like I haven’t heard since she was a teenager. “You just encourage it.”

“Is this about the newspaper article?” I ask.

“Jesus, that’s what you think? No, Mom,” she says. “Never mind.”

“Do you want an article too?”

She stops and stares at me. “Do you really think I’m that pathetic?”

I don’t know what to say to that. I don’t think she’s pathetic, but sometimes Beth traps you into saying things you don’t mean. I learned a long time ago to be silent with her when it got to thin ice. She sighs and comes over and gives me a cold hug. “I don’t need an article,” she says. “Unlike Dad and Chris, and you, apparently, I’m not obsessed with my high school years.”

After she leaves, I write one anyways.

What else is there to say? That she almost wore my wedding dress? That I know she goes to the Mexican bar for salsa nights, because of what Gladys Maynard told me? I suddenly understand poor Jim Laurence’s predicament. I want to spice things up, to give Beth a husband and a volleyball medal and a great career. But that isn’t Beth, or it isn’t who Beth has become. I start over.

I hadn’t meant to make it so much about myself. But when I try to rewrite it I just come up blank, so I keep it as it is. The next day, when Frank is at physical therapy, I go to the director’s office and ask if I can make some photocopies, something I learned how to do when I used to help the church out with secretarial work. I make enough for every vegetable. Then I call up Jim Laurence and tell him I have extra-credit work ready for him; he just needs to pick it up. He starts blabbing about scanning again until I tell him to shut up and drive over here.

I meet him out front, so Frank won’t see. Jim is taller than I thought he would be, with dyed black hair. He sounded so weak on the phone I’d pictured a short, fragile kid with freckles and glasses. I ask if he plays ball, and he says he is more into video games. I hand over my article. Tell your teacher you interviewed me, I say.

“Who’s this?” he asks, skimming it.

“Chris’s sister,” I say. “Your librarian.”

“I don’t go to the library,” he says.

“Well, you make sure she gets a copy when it comes out.” I make him promise.

The article isn’t the big hit I imagine when I hand out the photocopies at the cafeteria that evening. People glance at it, then spill gravy all over it. Frank doesn’t like it one bit.

“You didn’t even mention her 4-H prize,” he says. “And you make me sound like a jerk.”

My media privileges are revoked for one month. “I thought she was photocopying songs for the choir,” the secretary explains to the director in the meeting I have to go to the next morning.

Even Beth hates it when it appears in
Tiger Tracks
a week later. “That’s what you think of me, Mom? Someone whose greatest talent is being obsessive-compulsive?”

I don’t ask her what that means.

Some would describe it as a disaster. But I feel oddly satisfied. I know that we can’t live on our own anymore. I know the farm is gone, that Chris has his own life, that his taking over the farm was never a possibility. As soon as I saw the whole crowd roar and rise to their feet as Chris sunk a shot from the half-court line, even the opposing team, I knew that he would leave Chariton soon enough. I know that assisted living is what’s done with old folks nowadays, even though I waited hand and foot on Frank’s mother when she was ill and bedridden.

Ever since we moved here, I’ve wanted to turn over the dining room tables, or let all the stupid canaries out of their cages in the lobby, or bite the nurse who comes to take my blood pressure. I’m too mad to cry like Frank.

In school, I never did a thing wrong. I didn’t pass notes, I never skipped class, and I didn’t drink beer at polka dances. But ever since I got in trouble with the article about Beth, I know what a thrill the bad kids must have had. I walk around the halls, and the residents regard me the way I used to look at the delinquents in high school. I think of Jim Laurence, I adopt his slouch, his sighs, his uncaring.

The only time I drop my new pose is out on the patio. I look at that empty lot, the maples that just turned red at its back border. It says,
Be nothing,
and slack-jawed, staring at it, I am.

C
hris rides his bike to work each weekday. Elise sleeps in, rises around ten, and tries to finish her German homework before class at three. The apartment is always cold. Sometimes she takes three baths a day. This gives her a chance to examine her belly’s growth. She spies on her nakedness with a curiosity that she would not have permitted herself back in Mississippi. This morning, a rare sunny winter day in Hamburg, she lowers herself into the steaming water. She craves the bath as much as breakfast. Shadows from the windowpanes—a fragile cross—play across her stomach and swollen breasts.

Last summer, when they’d traveled to Munich for a weekend, she’d spied naked sunbathers sprawled across blankets in the English Garden. She had felt repulsed and enticed. She could barely tear her eyes from the bodies, the way she had once stared at an older cousin dressing. Donna, in her early teens, had sensed Elise’s gaze and had turned her back to finish buttoning her blouse, prompting a flood of shame in Elise, one of her earliest memories (aside from the ones that Ada had insisted she forget).

The first time Elise visited Chris in Germany, the year he was studying abroad in Stuttgart and she was teaching in Atlanta, they’d attended a birthday party with some of his local basketball team buddies. The party had climaxed in naked swimming at Lake Bissingen, just outside the city. Sitting on a blanket by the shore, Elise had endured a drunken conversation with Sandra, the only other American in Chris’s study abroad program, which was surprisingly dominated by Koreans. The amount of Riesling that Elise, who rarely drank, had imbibed, plus the low-lit surroundings, hadn’t disguised the fact that Sandra was stark naked, which struck Elise as irritatingly exhibitionist. Elise had identified Sandra as an ally earlier in the night, given her compatriot status, but her nakedness now made her more foreign than any of the German women around them, who had generally put on clothes or towels once they’d come out of the water. Elise was shivering in a sopping-wet evening gown from one of Atlanta’s nicest boutiques. It had cost more than she could really afford on her teaching salary, but she’d justified the purchase by imagining where she would wear it: a sophisticated, candlelit restaurant in Stuttgart, which had turned out to be a laughable overestimation of the night’s trajectory. The silk was certainly ruined.

As Sandra embarked on an extended anecdote about the drugs she’d done during a road trip across America, in between semesters at Berkeley, Elise scanned the crowd for Chris. She didn’t want him coming up and talking to them—the last thing she needed was a memory of him trying to make out Sandra’s naked breasts in the moonlight—but he was at a safe distance, roughhousing in the water with friends. As Sandra continued her monologue, warming now to the theme of LSD episodes with her poetry professor, Elise reflected silently on her own years at Blue Mountain College, a Baptist all-women’s school. There had been streaking—it was 1974, after all—but that had been limited to girls running across campus in shorts, paper bags over their heads to hide their identities from the dean. Elise had never joined in, but she did get kicked out of the talent show for singing “All You Need Is Love” in front of a map of Vietnam, which had brought a swift end to her phase of political activism. She contemplated telling Sandra about the road trips she’d taken with her band, Jericho!, with Elise as lead singer, but didn’t want to admit to her that it had been a Christian singing group, and she didn’t feel sober enough to lie convincingly about psychotropic drugs she’d never taken.

During her Blue Mountain days, Elise would have seen Sandra as an “unsaved,” her naked body a cry for help. Elise would have felt her pulse rise, her eyes begin to warm with an empathetic glow, and she would have taken Sandra’s hand, walked with her to somewhere the two of them could sit alone, put a blanket around the woman’s narrow shoulders, and murmured to her about Christ’s unconditional love, His plan for Sandra, and Elise’s own journey. Next to singing, witnessing was one of Elise’s great talents. The other members of Jericho! had always teased her, claimed she could never last a Sunday service without responding to the preacher’s call to come forward and testify. But tonight Elise was drunk, and she didn’t feel the Holy Spirit; she felt tired and cold. As Sandra droned on, Elise held her cup out to a young man passing through the crowd with a bottle, and the secretive smile he gave her, as he filled her cup and toasted her with his own, felt as good as Communion ever had. After taking a long sip and looking around, marveling at her presence at such a party, Elise let out a wild, private giggle that made Sandra shut up and turn to her suspiciously. Elise suddenly felt a throbbing missing for Ivy, and threw her arms around Sandra’s bare frame, rubbing the woman’s bony, goose-bumped back before abruptly walking away.

Driving home that night, Chris was wildly enthusiastic about the party and about Germany. Elise, already consumed by guilt for her drinking, wasn’t so sure. The next day, sitting by the same lake, with a picnic basket filled with cheese, bread, and a bottle of Prosecco, Chris had proposed. Elise had a flash of the party the night before, a terror that saying yes now would mean a life of debauchery and drunkenness and scant-to-no clothing. Then she looked at Chris, in his buttoned-up shirt, and the gently lapping lake, so innocent in noon light, and the kind diamond resting in red velvet, and acquiesced.

Elise’s child will arrive in three months, according to her gynecologist, Frau Liebmann.
Drei Monate.
Elise knows these are the last three months she will have to herself and that she should be relishing them somehow, according to the advice of women’s magazines, but instead she craves the baby’s arrival like the promised visit of a best friend. In Hamburg she knows only a few people; it is nothing like London, where she and Chris lived prior to moving here. And the people in German classes don’t count.

Unfairly, the water is already cold. With her big toe, Elise turns the hot water faucet, then sinks lower and lower as steam rises from the surface, the way fog would sift over Wolf Lake, near Vidalia. She closes her eyes, slides deeper, although she must compromise for the melting mercy of bathwater covering her torso and stomach by sticking her knees out of the water in two Vs.

Why had she agreed to this move, away from what she loved in London, where she and Chris had lived for the first two years of their marriage? Away from British dinner parties filled with wine and dripping wax and pork roasts and the tiniest, exhilarating hint of misbehavior—much more subtle, and thus more dangerous, more delicious, than German nakedness. Away from Elise’s best friend, Mina; away from stubborn, fragrant sprigs of lavender and the dry, mischievous English humor that had shocked Elise at first and then been as warm and comforting as this bath. Away from the enormous old churches, the echoing whispers within them, the terrible bravery of what the pastor at All Souls had said from the pulpit, asking questions about God, belief, and goodness, unlike the Baptist ministers of her youth, who had only talked about the quickest way to get to heaven. “I don’t think there is a heaven,” that sad, elderly, wonderful British reverend had admitted one Sunday, as though the congregation were his oldest school friend, sitting next to him at the pub. Then he had read a dismal poem by Philip Larkin, “Church Going,” and sat down heavily, as the choir burst into flames of Bach.

Of course she had said yes to the move. It was going to be good for Chris’s career; he’d been miserable at the London office, and Elise could find ESL teaching work easily enough. The idea of discovering another country had excited Elise. She had imagined massive German castles on the Rhine and a plate piled high with mashed potatoes, for some reason. Both images had seemed simultaneously reassuring and thrilling. And she and Chris would be there together, with the baby on the way. But in her dreams of Germany she had excluded the fact that Chris would spend all day at work. And she hadn’t seen mashed potatoes once since their arrival.

Moving to Hamburg also meant leaving Mississippi again: putting another country, another culture, between the delta and herself. Elise’s southern accent is barely detectable now, though it floods back when she makes long-distance calls to her family. Five thousand miles from Vidalia, Elise misses the five of them more than ever, a longing that gently tugs at her each day and inevitably evaporates the second she calls home. With her mother a sharpness creeps into Elise’s voice, a dismissal that Ada, ever since Elise left, seems only too happy to accept. Her mother’s timidity never fails to fill Elise with fury. It is admitting guilt without saying sorry.

With Ivy, who is now nineteen, still living at home, Elise feels herself going preachy, doing a secular kind of witnessing, asking about college plans, expressing skepticism over an album that Ivy is thinking of recording with her high school friends. From her brothers, Elise knows that Ivy has been mixing with the wrong crowd: her boyfriend got picked up by the cops for drunk driving last month. But on the phone Ivy is breezy and evasive, and Elise doesn’t have the energy to demand a confession and exact punishment: Ivy has their father for that.

After these calls, Elise hangs up the phone blinking away tears. Chris assumes she is homesick, gives her a tight hug, but it’s not that, she mutters to him, pulling away, going to run a bath: it’s that home makes her sick. An hour later, flushed, dazed from the hot water, Elise steps from the tub feeling baptized and reborn, shed of home’s cloying insinuations:
How could you leave? You shouldn’t tell such tales, Elise.

When Elise is not in the bathtub, and when Chris is at work, she finds herself rackingly lonely, a condition she can compare only to a monstrous two weeks at overnight camp in Alabama when she was twelve, where her nickname was Snot because of how much she cried at night. These days she desperately looks forward to German class and then hates it when she is there because the words don’t come out right.

Plus there is the fact that the teacher, a handsome man in his midtwenties, perhaps even a bit younger than Elise, who is twenty-six, won’t look at her. Men like him—a little shy, a closeted r
omantic
—have been falling in love with her since she was ten, and it greatly unnerves her that this one stares at the unremarkable midthirties French student instead, who admittedly has much better German pronunciation. Elise supposes it is because of her pregnancy. It makes her feel grotesque and resentful of the baby, then ashamed. In the middle of class, while the rest of the students are declining verbs, Elise longs to be back home in Mississippi, singing a solo in First Baptist with everyone staring in wide-eyed admiration. After each German class, she rushes back to the apartment and runs a bath.

The doorbell rings. Probably a delivery service, Elise thinks; they’ll try at someone else’s. But it shrills again, insistently, petulantly, like a newborn woken from sleep, and she lifts herself from the now lukewarm water and wraps a towel around her dripping body.

“Coming,” she yells. How do you say that in German?
“Kommen!”
Something like that. Then she remembers the bell is downstairs, outside.

She puts her nightgown back on and runs a washcloth over the foggy mirror, glances swiftly at her image. She is sweating. Her hair is plastered to her forehead in small curls. Minus a world of pain, she looks as she will in three months, pushing her baby out.

She lifts the receiver. “Hello?”

“
Hallo,
Frau Kriegstein?”

“
Ja,
” she responds, her voice, as always, an octave higher in German. She tries to place the elderly female voice.

A flood of incomprehensible German follows. Elise buzzes in whoever it is, and turns to her bedroom to retrieve clothes. Shivering, her hair still wet, she returns to the door and opens it halfway. A small boy with white-blond hair, five or six years old, stands there. When she opens the door fully, he holds a letter out to her, on which
Liesel Kriegstein
is written in a lovely, flowing dark script. But this little boy is not the older woman who just spoke into the intercom below. Elise tries to frame her confusion into a German question but can only think of “
Warum?
” Why? Meanwhile, the boy has entered her apartment, politely removed his boots, and joined her in the foyer.

He lifts the letter up to her and says something in German she cannot understand. She shakes her head, shrugs, makes all the miming movements foreigners use to show they cannot follow. She sees with alarm that his lower lip is beginning to tremble, and she takes the letter from him to prevent the storm approaching on his brow. But the tears begin, with the embarrassment of a child who is too old to be crying.

“Tea?” she asks desperately. “
Heiße Schockolade?
”

He simply stands and shudders. Appalled, she leaves him there and runs down the stairs in her socks to the street. There is no one there. It looks emptier, in fact, than it ever has before. There is only a man walking a small dog in the distance, and the sound of traffic from another intersection. Back inside, a wail fills the stairwell, growing louder as she walks back up. She finds the boy hugging his knees in her front hallway, crying like a kid lost in Macy’s.

Not knowing what else to do, she hauls him upright and leads him gently by the hand, as she used to her little brothers and baby sister, into the living room, and brings him to the sofa. He clambers up like a sleepwalker, still sniffling. She takes him to her and rocks him awkwardly against her balloon-shaped belly. He continues crying, but softer, until it is just a wave every now and then of renewed misery. Then, eyes closed, he lies against her baby, and she smooths his hair.

The letter is still in her hand. Careful not to disturb the boy, she opens the envelope and removes the letter, one page of onion-skin-thin, old-fashioned stationery that the pen fairly bleeds through.