Saying Grace (17 page)

“I’m not dead yet,” said Henry, “and I want to feel like that again.”

She turned to meet his eyes. What was this? It was serious.

“But you
do
make a difference…think of your patients.”

“I think of them. I think that there are two people in my own practice who could do exactly what I’m doing as well as I’m doing it. But I could use my training in places where it’s really needed. I’m sick of conversations about health plans. How about going where there isn’t any health plan because there aren’t any doctors?”

Rue didn’t know what to say. She felt as if she
was
making a difference. She didn’t think that teachers were interchangeable, or that schools were. She thought that what she did could change people’s lives. You could argue all day about whether it was less noble to affect these lives than the lives of children starving in Somalia. She was doing what she was trained to do. Children were children. The ones at Country were hers. They had lives to live, and gifts to give.

Saying Grace / 121

“What about Georgia?” Rue asked. “If we left the hemisphere?”

“She’d be fine,” said Henry. “A kid who doesn’t remember her mother’s birthday is not pining for home.”

“That doesn’t mean she doesn’t need us to be here when she needs us.”

“You’ve got to give her up, Rue. She’s gone.”

“I know she’s gone, Henry,” said Rue, slightly annoyed. She didn’t think Henry was any more blithe than she about admitting Georgia was gone. In fact, she thought he was looking for drama and romance as a way of distracting himself from the loss. Not just of Georgia but of that whole part of their life together. At that moment, she realized that she profoundly did not want to go to Somalia. She wanted to finish the work she had started, in her own time and her own way, until the pattern of the life work she had chosen emerged from the background whole, so she could see its meaning and carry that forward into the next part of her life. Whatever that was, whenever it was time. It wasn’t time yet. Rue did not like to have change thrust upon her.

“I think about those days before we had Georgia,” she said, “and I don’t feel like a different person. I feel older, but I don’t feel as if I had dreams and then forgot them. I feel as if I’m doing what I was meant to do.”

“You are very lucky,” said Henry.

The sun was high in the afternoon sky, and they chose another path and walked on.

W
ork Day was a sort of family outing at The Country School. Parents would bring their own tools and paint, rake, build fences, level brick paths, or weed the flower beds. Emily was delighted to sign up, since what she should have been doing was ripping up the linoleum in her own kitchen so she could put down a subfloor and lay some decent tiles. She had promised to do this to show Malone she loved her, even though Malone said, when she had to miss Jennifer Lowen’s birthday party, that she thought her mother was a complete turd and would think so till the day she died.

Even on your wedding day? Emily had asked. Yes, said Malone.

Emily would be allowed to attend the wedding and could stand in the receiving line, but inside Malone would still think she was a complete turd.

When the Work Day dawned sunny, Emily decided her floor would wait. She gathered up the kids and took them up to school.

The children went off to help Manuel in the garden. Emily found herself assigned to help Henry and Chandler Kip build a picket fence at the preschool.

They had a great time, after Henry and Chandler straightened out what kind of music they were going to listen to. “You’re kidding,”

Henry bellowed. “You don’t know ‘There Ain’t No Instant Replay in the Football Game of Life?’” Chandler seemed unsure how to take Henry’s sense of humor.

Henry insisted that to be politically correct they would have to let Emily use the Skilsaw while the men hammered. (This was probably the safest course as well as the most correct, since Chandler did not appear to have much experience dealing with the physical universe.) Then they tried to get Emily to mix the concrete to hold the uprights, but she said it was entirely too domestic, all that measuring and stirring. She
liked
the power saw. “Measure twice, cut once,” Henry kept saying. He said that was the way they Saying Grace / 123

did it in the operating room, when they started on the skulls.

Late in the morning, Malone appeared with David, who was weeping.

“What happened, Lovie—are you hurt?” she asked David, who burrowed into her arms, sniffling.

“Lyndie decided to torture him,” said Malone. Malone was upset.

“What do you mean?”

“She found this file thing that was pointed, and she asked me what it was for and I didn’t know, so she went over to David and started poking him with it.”

“Had he been bothering you?”

“No! He was just digging a hole! He went ‘Stop it, that hurts,’ and she just kept on, and I went ‘Stop it Lyndie, you’re hurting him!’

But she didn’t stop!”

Emily studied Malone’s indignant face. She stroked David’s hair.

“Poor you,” she said to him. David nodded. Malone looked to her mother as if there must be an explanation for this, but Emily didn’t know of one.

“Thank you, honeybunch. David can stay and help us. Will you help us?” she asked him. He nodded. Malone shrugged and went off. Emily went back to work, troubled. She had noticed Lyndie wasn’t very patient with David, but this was like pulling the wings off flies.

Rue had spent the morning gardening with some new kindergarten parents in the shrubbery beds around the gym, and together they walked to the outdoor barbecue hosted by the Lowen and Malko families. Bradley Lowen was cooking hamburgers, Corinne Lowen and Margee Malko were dishing up pasta and potato salads. As Rue was joined by various campus pets and the young mothers were joined by their happy dirty spouses and children, converging from other parts of the campus, Rue was surprised to see Sondra Sale standing by herself in the lunch line.

During registration this morning, Rue had seen Sondra drop off her children and drive away, as if she thought the point of the day was free Saturday babysitting. Surely she couldn’t have thought 124 / Beth Gutcheon

Jonathan was going to be of substantial assistance laying brick or planting pear trees, or Lyndie either, with her arm in a cast. Corinne Lowen had had to delegate two eighth graders to babysit Jonathan.

He had walked off between them, licking away at the palm of his hand. Lyndie had gone off to find Malone and Jennifer.

Now, as Rue looked around for a table full of parents she didn’t know well, so she could join them for lunch, she noticed Sondra Sale standing silent with a plate in her hand. She was dressed in spotless white denim; Rue wondered if she had come to work and those were indeed her work clothes. Then her attention was taken by Terry Malko, who put an arm around her shoulder and said, “Chandler just told me a joke. Want to hear it?”

“I didn’t know he knew any,” said Rue.

“What’s the definition of a preppie?”

“What?”

“Someone who was born on third base and thinks he hit a triple.”

They both laughed.

“I knew you’d like that,” said Terry. He hurried off to make sure there was enough ice in the washtubs full of soft drinks. Terry and Chandler both had achieved enough success in business to become more Republican than the Social Register, and certainly their children were being raised to expect the best of everything. And yet she knew that if anyone was supposed to feel the butt of that joke, it was Henry, and by extension she herself.

She chose a table with two young couples and their preschool children, and asked if she could join them. Happily they cleared a sleeping infant in a car seat off the table to make room for her. “I’m Rue Shaw,” she said. “We know!” they caroled. And there began happy talk about what each adult had been working at for the morning, and what a nice day it was, and how at their old school there was nothing like this, no sense of belonging, no way to help or to feel that the school was your own. As Rue ate, she noticed Henry and Emily in line, with paint on their hands and clothes. And to her surprise, she also noticed Sondra sitting apart on a stone wall, picking at a plate of lettuce leaves and talking to Bonnie Fleming.

Saying Grace / 125

“How can you eat that cake and keep that figure?” were the first words Sondra addressed to Bonnie. It had none of the flavor of an opening gambit signaling a wish to make an acquaintance. Bonnie felt it was a literal request for information. She looked at her plate piled with salads and bread and a slice of coconut cake.

“I don’t eat meat or cheese,” Bonnie said. “Maybe that’s it.”

Sondra looked at Bonnie’s long-boned willowy figure, a flat ap-praisal. It was like the look of a child who has not been told that it’s impolite to stare. Or ask personal questions.

“You’re so thin,” she said to Bonnie, almost as if it were disagree-able of Bonnie to be so.

“I think a lot of it is genes,” said Bonnie. “My mother is very thin as well.”

“I was real fat when I was a teenager,” said Sondra, putting a leaf into her mouth.

“You have a beautiful figure now,” said Bonnie.

Sondra nodded, chewing. “I work at it. I have to take about four aerobics classes a day or I blow up like a cow. Lyndie could get fat when she gets the curse. That’s what happened to me. I watch her diet, but I see the signs. She could really blow up.”

“Are you Sondra?” Bonnie asked.

Sondra nodded. It was as if she thought everyone here must know who she was, since they all seemed to know each other. That’s what the world had kind of seemed to her for her whole life, like a big group of people who already know each other and you don’t.

“I’m Bonnie.” Sondra said, “Nice to meet you,” and for a while they both chewed, like horses side by side in their stalls.

“I used to dance,” said Bonnie, “so I got a lot of exercise. Now I don’t get as much as you. But I have today; Mike Dianda and I have been double-digging a plot for a kitchen garden, so the science classes can grow vegetables. Whew! that’s hard.”

Sondra looked at her with that flat gaze. “Mr. Dianda? The one in the office?”

“Yes.”

“What is he, is he her secretary?”

“Mrs. Shaw’s? No, he’s the assistant head.”

“I thought assistant was secretary.”

126 / Beth Gutcheon

“It’s more that she’s the president and he’s the vice president.”

“Oh,” she said. “So he’s important?”

Bonnie nodded. She wanted to say that in the great scheme of things they were all important, secretaries and presidents, but she hadn’t sensed in Mrs. Sale any sense of humor, let alone any sense of her own affect. Lacking that, she was unlikely to take any pleasure in even the gentlest teasing. Alas, they would share no bonding laughter.

“Isn’t he a fairy?”

Bonnie was so surprised that she didn’t react. Sondra was looking at her in the usual flat way, again seeming unaware of any possibility of giving offense. Bonnie wondered if this disconnected manner had to do with living with such a frightening man as her husband. Had she retreated into childishness? Or had she married him because she was poor at reading nonverbal clues and thus had not noticed what seemed so obvious to others, his angry arrogance, the way his knotted body seemed to announce his discomfort in the universe.

Bonnie said, “Yes, he is.” That seemed to satisfy Sondra, who then reverted to her primary topic, which seemed to be food.

“My mother was a cook,” said Sondra. “Once she won a Pillsbury bake-off, you know you send in your recipe to the magazine and it’s a contest?”

“Did she really?”

“Yes, but she couldn’t go get the prize because you have to tell your name and what you do, and they check, because there are rules, you can’t be professional, you can’t work for the magazine, things like that.”

Bonnie was lost. “It was a chicken recipe,” Sondra went on, “that you rolled in cornflakes, and then you cooked it with pineapple.

Hawaiian. We had lived in Hawaii once. But we were in St. Louis by the time she won.”

Bonnie suddenly remembered something Mike had said about his first conversation with the Sales. “Your father was in the FBI, wasn’t he?”

Sondra nodded. “He was an agent. He’s retired now. We moved a lot, and we kept changing our names.”

“Because he did undercover work?”

Sondra nodded.

Saying Grace / 127

“It sounds very interesting.”

Sondra said nothing.

“Was it?”

“No. It was lonely.”

Bonnie nodded. “Of course. I should have thought of that. I hope you have brothers and sisters, at least, to keep you company?”

“I had a brother, Craig.”

“Oh, I’m sorry,” said Bonnie, sympathetic.

“Why?”

“You said ‘had.’ Did he die?”

“I don’t think so. He was kind of an asshole, and he and my dad fought a lot. So he joined the navy when he was sixteen and we never saw him again.”

Bonnie stared at her, searching for signs of anger or distress. But Sondra was very matter-of-fact. So she had a violent father? So a violent husband seems normal?

“You couldn’t find him if you wanted to?”

“I tried once. After he left we moved a few more times. And changed our names. So he couldn’t ever come home. But when I got to Chicago a man told me how to get the navy to help me find him.

And we tried, but he’d been discharged six years. They had an address and I wrote, but it came back.”

“This is a sad story, Sondra. It makes me feel like crying.”

Sondra looked at her, surprised. And then it seemed, grateful.

“Yeah, I was sad.”

After lunch Chandler said to Henry and Emily that he had to be going. Driven mad, no doubt, said Henry, by having to listen to “All My Exes Live in Texas.” Henry and Emily and David painted their fence by themselves. At one point Henry went to get cold beer. When he came back he said, “Do you know that fart Chandler didn’t go home at all—he’s over at Primary helping make a rock garden?”

“That hurts my feelings,” said Emily, opening her beer.

“I thought it would.”