Kimberly Stuart (5 page)

Among the Natives

When we sat down to eat, I received my first good news of the day. Despite earlier worries to the contrary, the Hartleys had only three children. Their eldest was the ax wielder, Andrew. The gun shooter had been a school classmate who'd since been returned to town and to his own unfortunate family. That left the squirmer who couldn't seem to decide whether he wanted to be on Jayne's hip or not. This one was named Joel. The baby was parked once again in the high chair, the only girl and named Emmy.

“Her real name is Emmalie Rose Hartley,” Andrew said. “But we call her Emmy for short. Short names are nicknames. My nickname is Drew. Joel's nickname is Joey. Daddy's nickname is Cal but his real name is Calvin. My mommy's nickname is Jaynie. What's your nickname, Miss Sadie?”

I was watching him and marveling. The child had mastered circular breathing.

“Drew, join hands with your brother and sister. Let's pray over our meal.” Cal's deep baritone made even famous singers submit. I took Jayne's hand and bowed my head.

“Daddy, she's not holding Emmy's hand,” Drew said in a stage whisper.

I looked up.

“That's all right,” Cal said. “She's still getting used to us.”

“Not at all,” I said, clearing my throat. I put out my hand and hoped babies weren't capable of scratching off very expensive fingernail polish. She looked at me and banged both hands down on her tray. I jumped.

Jayne tried to hide her smile. “Cal, go ahead.”

“Heavenly Father, we thank You for this day. Thank You for the winter that allows the land and those who take care of it to rest. Thank You, dear God, for starting everything over again from scratch. I suppose we all could use a fresh beginning now and then. We are grateful to You for noticing.”

My heart started pounding like it did witnessing crazy hairy man on Christmas Eve. I told it to stop it already, worried about what could happen should I start making important life decisions every time crazy hairy man came to mind. Soon I'd be wearing a loincloth in the Amazon and teaching the natives how to read treble clef.

“Now please bless the food we're about to eat and bless the hands that prepared it. In Jesus' name, Amen.”

“Amen!” the kids shouted, and mealtime commenced.

I'd grown up an only child so this kind of culinary experience was not unlike watching a PBS special. Jayne was so occupied with the feeding frenzy, I don't believe she ate a bite. I certainly didn't see it. Her children were just so
needy
.

“Mommy, milk,” Joel said, holding his plastic cup up and letting it down with a bang.

“Mommy, milk, please,” Jayne parroted, reaching for the cup.

“Pweeeeeeese,” Joel said, then took the cup and spilled all of its contents.

“So, Ms. Maddox, tell us about what you all like to eat up in New York City.” Cal was reaching across his plate to cut Drew's slice of ham, likely butchered on the back porch before he came to retrieve me from the airport.

I patted my mouth with a paper napkin. “Well,” I said, shrugging, “New York was and continues to be built by people from all over the world. You can buy any kind of food imaginable, and often at all hours of the day.”

Jayne reappeared from below the table where she'd been mopping up milk that had dripped between the cracks. She blew her bangs off her forehead and turned to me, eyes shining. “Like what? What's your favorite?”

I took a gulp of cold milk and wondered if these people milked their own cows, too. Much more disturbing, I wondered if touching udders would be required of guests. “For example, the block on which I live has restaurants serving food from Morocco, Ethiopia, northern Italy, Greece, and India. And that's just one block among hundreds.”

Cal looked at me across the table, chewing thoughtfully. “What about normal food?”

I swallowed a mouthful of cheddar-bombed potatoes. “Well,” I said, “to many people that food
is
normal, Cal.”

The house hummed in Cal's silence. A furnace clunked around in the basement as it roared to life. Cal nodded slowly. “Not to me,” he said, slicing off a wedge of ham that would have been the weekly protein allowance for a fashion model. “I want to know where I'd go if I wanted meat and potatoes. Normal food.”

I glanced at Jayne. She was mired so deeply in the care of her children, Cal and I could have been discussing the strengths and weaknesses of the UN in the former Yugoslavia for all the opportunity she had to participate. I watched her butter three slices of bread rapid-fire and cut one into halves, one into fourths, and one into bite-sized chunks, all within the time in took Cal to finish his mouthful of ham.

I returned my gaze to the man of the house. “If you came to New York, Cal,” I said, “I'd send you straight to Times Square for a neon-lit, bright lights, big city meal at ESPN Zone. Perfect for your appetite, I would imagine.”

“Excellent,” he said through a smile. He took a swig of milk. “Now you're speaking my language.”

“Mommy, I'm finished.” Drew slumped in his chair. “My tummy is
sooooo
full.”

“Too full for dessert?” Jayne asked. She was feeding the baby spoonfuls of yogurt.

“No, I think I can fit some dessert,” Drew said slowly, weighing the gravity of the task before him.

“If that's the case, you'll need to finish your dinner.” Jayne pointed at the boy's half-empty plate with her spoon. “Five more bites of ham and three more of your potatoes. And finish the broccoli.”

“Mommy,” Drew whined. “I'm only hungry for dessert.”

“You heard your mother,” Cal said. “Dessert is only for people who eat the good stuff first.”

Words to the wise, those were, because by following Cal's advice, the rest of us were granted a piece of Jayne's apple streusel pie.

“Jayne,” I said, only one bite in and already breathless, “this is magnificent.”

She blushed. “Thank you, Miss Sadie.”

“Please, call me Sadie,” I said, filling my fork with pastry.

“Okay,” Drew said. “Sadie, would you pass the milk?”

“Not you, sir,” Jayne said. “Sometimes grown-ups call each other by their first names but you stick with ‘Miss Sadie.'”

“All done,” Joel said from his position on the bench he shared with Drew. “'Ssert!”

“Please,” Jayne said. Her dinner plate remained untouched.

“Pweese,” Joel said, his eyes trained on her as she dished up a small slice of pie. Drew slumped in his chair and munched on a tree of broccoli.

“I'm serious, Jayne,” I said. I had my nose down near the plate and was tempted to lick the remaining crumbs. “This crust would be worthy of a five-star restaurant in New York.”

“Oh, you're just hungry for some home cooking,” she said, cheeks red and eyes glistening.

Cal put down his fork. “Jayne comes home with blue ribbons from the state fair every year.” He pushed back his chair. “Wait 'til spring and her rhubarb crisp.” He leaned down to smooch her loudly on the cheek. The kids giggled.

“I'm not a very good cook,” Jayne said, sawing into her now-cold ham. “But I've always loved to bake. My mother taught me how to make a piecrust when I was little and it just kind of grew from there.”

I couldn't argue with her about the cooking, at least based on this evening's ho-hum performance. But I could swallow a great many bland calories on my way to a pie like that.

Drew reluctantly finished his “good stuff” and was given his reward. We passed some quiet minutes together, each of us reveling in the joy of a successfully flaky crust.

“May we be excused?” Drew spoke for both boys, who had become very efficient eaters when faced with their dessert.

“You may,” Cal said.

“Bring your plates to the sink, please,” Jayne called as they ran out of the room. They made a wide arc in the dining room and returned to the table.

“Your children obey you,” I said, watching their plates wobble precariously until Cal intercepted them near the sink.

Jayne laughed. “We'll see what you have to say about that after a few weeks here.” She stood to lift the baby out of her chair. “They've had lots of time-outs to get to this point.”

“And bare-butt spankings,” Cal said as he followed the boys into the family room.

Corporal punishment. Fantastic. I looked around for some more pie to comfort me.

Jayne rounded the table, jostling the baby on her hip. She reached to clear my plate and I thanked her. “I need to put Emmy to bed, but would you like some coffee or tea? I can put it on now before I go up.”

“Tea would be lovely, thank you. But I can make it myself. Just point me to your teapot.”

Jayne showed me the pot and then turned to go. When she got to the threshold, she turned and smiled. “Thank you for your compliments about the dessert, Sadie. It means a lot coming from you.”

“It was the perfect end to a trying day,” I said. I watched her go and wondered how long the glow from a piece of pie could be expected to last.

Maplewood

The amplified noise of my own breathing awakened me. I tugged gingerly on my velvet eye cover and squinted into pitch-blackness. During the night, primal instincts must have prompted me to flee the cold and burrow further and further under the quilts until I woke, my body pulled into a ball at the foot of the bed. I crawled back toward my pillow and braved one arm out of the cocoon in order to feel around on the bedside table for the alarm clock. My hand knocked off a tumbler of water. I cursed and pulled my entire upper body out of the covers. My lungs hurt, the air was so cold. The room was still dark, but the clock read seven-thirty. I groaned and pulled the covers back over my head. I must have fallen asleep because the next thing I remembered was a knock on the door at the foot of the stairs.

“Sadie?” Jayne said timidly when she'd opened the door a crack.

“Hmmm?”
I said, forcing my eyelids open.

“I'm going into town pretty soon if you'd like to catch a ride to campus. Didn't you say you wanted to stop by the music building sometime today?”

“Yes,” I whispered and then cleared my throat to say it more loudly. “I need an hour.”

“An hour?” she asked. “Right. Okay. I'll just do some more laundry and get a meal in the Crock-Pot. Emmy will help.” I could hear the baby babbling. “Emmy's coming, too, aren't you, sweetie?”

All right,
I thought.
No baby talk before coffee.

She shut the door and I willed my feet onto the cold floor. Frost lined the
inside
of the attic windows. I whimpered on my way to the bathroom and immediately turned on the shower to scalding. I stood in front of the mirror and waited for it to fog up before getting wet. The bags under my eyes had grown overnight. So much for fresh air being the victor in the fight against aging. I growled at my reflection, sneering at the idiot who had agreed to move out to the freezing little house on the forsaken prairie.

Because some sense of mercy still remained in the world, Jayne did not drive a truck. She drove the equally alien but more physically accessible minivan. I shuffled down the walk as quickly as my Ferragamos would take me and slammed the door against the cold and the stench.

“Do you get used to that smell?” I asked Jayne through my scarf. I tried thinking of happy scents, like vanilla and cinnamon, but to no avail. Pigs put up a fight against even the wildest of imaginations.

“Smell?” Jayne clicked the final of seventeen buckles on Emmy's car seat. “Oh, the pigs. Yes, I suppose I am used to it.” She positioned herself behind the wheel and we started up the driveway. “The summer is always a challenge. Heat's never a good thing for a manure pile.”

My stomach turned at the thought. The scarf stayed right where it was, even though we were whizzing down the highway and away from the farm.

“It's too bad you're seeing Maplewood at this time of the year.” Jayne nodded toward the pale expanse of fields that surrounded us. The wind howled against the car, blending in with Emmy's whimpers and making Jayne grip the steering wheel with white knuckles. “Spring is much prettier. You probably can't imagine it right now, but everything becomes green. Green so bright you have to squint.”

She tossed a stuffed animal to the baby in back. Emmy looked a bit stunned but stopped crying and clutched the spotted dog that had been hurled to her rescue.

“You're right,” I said, looking out my window. “It's very hard to imagine now.” Sunlight would have helped. The sky was a transparent white, almost an absence of color. No clouds, no difference in texture or hue from one side of the horizon to another. “Did you grow up here, Jayne?”

“Yep,” she said, signaling to turn right onto another endless stretch of highway. We'd been in the car ten minutes and still no sign of a convenience store, much less a college. “Cal and I started dating in high school. He's two years older, so he left first for State and I followed him when I graduated. We got married when he finished and moved back home two years later.”

We crested a hill and saw the town of Maplewood below us. On the left a large limestone sign proclaimed Maplewood to be the home of Sauerkraut Days, Moravia College, and the Girls' State Basketball Champs of 1987. Jayne slowed as we entered town, turning north as soon as we reached the stop sign by Bud's Feed. I felt a sinking in my chest and thought of the sad migration of those pathetic people in
The Grapes of Wrath
. If Steinbeck had been alive, I would have called him to commiserate.

“How many people live in Maplewood?” I asked, barely resisting the urge to let my forehead fall on the window glass.

“Just a sec. Would you mind giving this to Emmy?” Jayne handed me a graham cracker. I turned in my seat and held it out for the baby. Emmy snatched it from my hand and made a sound that, in New York, would have meant she was getting mugged.

Jayne returned to my question. “Ten thousand or so. I think they say twelve thousand, counting the students and surrounding areas.” She waved to a woman passing us on the sidewalk. “That's Anne Marie Morris. She owns the flower shop down the way.”

I thought of the buckets of fresh flowers perpetually stocked and ready for the taking in my corner grocery in New York. A pang of homesickness flooded over me. I looked out my window, knowing my face would betray my misery. After all, it wasn't Jayne's fault she knew nothing better. Born a Maplewoodian, destined to die one as well.

The center of town, labeled
Downtown Historic District
by helpful signs, offered a smidgen of promise. No need for subway plans, but at least I could see signs of life. We passed a hardware shop, a barbershop, and the town library. Students lined the steamed-up window seats at Wired, a coffee shop representing a sliver of hope. At least it wasn't Denny's. Most storefronts displayed Moravia's mascot, which looked to be a close cousin to the meerkat. The blocks right off the town square marred the view. Strips of seedier looking businesses—a grouchy looking gas station, an auto repair shop, a Subway badly in need of paint—hovered just outside the perimeter like a group of social misfits at the senior prom.

Perhaps it was the cold, but the people of Maplewood appeared to move in slow motion. Jayne would have been killed by now should she have driven like that down the streets of Manhattan. I glanced at the speedometer: We were racing through the historic district toward Moravia's campus, hovering the whole way just above six miles per hour. I didn't know the official speed limit, but none of the cars in the other lane seemed to be going any faster than my chauffeur.

“That was city hall. And there's the courthouse. Jill's Book Nook is on the corner, in case you're looking for some pleasure reading.”

“Who's the man on the horse?” I pointed to a statue on the edge of an abandoned park. A flock of swings danced a jagged waltz in the wind.

“Oh, that's Josiah Woods. Town founder and inventor of the safety pin.”

Did I detect
pride
in her voice? “Very useful, the safety pin.”

She nodded. “Isn't it, though? Believe it or not, I used to be so embarrassed about it. Other towns around here make fun. During ball games in high school, the other teams would call us the Maplewood Pinheads.” She laughed. “Isn't that hilarious? I think it's funny now, but that was the beginning of a long phase of hometown-hating that I had to go through before coming back here.”

We passed another stately limestone sign reading “Moravia College, Established 1894.” The minivan crawled up a wide boulevard lined with trees, student housing peppering spacious lawns on either side. The windows of the dorms sported various levels of free speech, ranging from leftover strands of Christmas lights to a triumphant Bob Marley flag bedecked with marijuana leaves circling Marley's head. I stared at the buildings and the students returning from winter break, who lined the sidewalks and made it a sea of parkas, heads ducked into the wind and cold.

“It's been a long time since I was coed myself.” I took a deep breath. “They'll probably eat me alive.”

Jayne pulled to a stop in front of the Kjellman Fine Arts Building. She shifted into park and turned to me. “You'll be perfect.” She smiled. I noticed light brown freckles that dusted her nose and cheeks. Jayne could have passed as a coed herself. “I'm sure of it.”

I pulled on my gloves and braced myself for the walk to shelter inside a looming set of engraved doors. “Thanks for the ride. Ms. Ellsworth said she would take me back to your house when we're through.”

I opened the door and took my first teetering steps back to academia.