Staggerford (15 page)

What I Wish

Binghams’ on the Badbattle. If that phrase reminds you of Browning’s “Bingen on the Rhine” and all the romance that goes with it, forget it. Binghams’ on the Badbattle is where I live, and it’s a dump. Our buildings are falling down. Rust from our dozen old cars has been seeping into the ground for so many years our drinking water tastes like metal. The cars are there from the days when my dad was around. My dad was fascinated by
cars. By anything that worked mechanically. He made a study of machinery without ever learning anything. Anything in working order he studied by the hour, and when he could get away with it he went at it with his screwdrivers and wrenches and tried to find out what made it work. Maybe it was the lack of order in his own life that made car engines a mystery to him. I mean, there should have been a sign at the end of our driveway warning people that the whole place was out of order. My mother was deranged (and she’s getting worse) and my sister was a hellraiser, and all you can grow on the land we own is chickens, plus a garden from the chicken manure—so that’s the kind of place it’s always been. Nothing ever seemed to work out for my dad. So the way I see it, he consoled himself by tinkering with cars. The twelve junk cars in our yard were not junk when he bought them. Each one he drove home under its own power, then after a few days of tinkering it never ran again. He pulled out wires and unclamped hoses and took apart switches and he never got any of it back the way it was. He unscrewed all the plugs and bolts from the engine block and then couldn’t remember where they belonged. When he got done with a car there was nothing left to do but sell the five tires. Anyhow, he’s gone now and so is my sister. It’s a worse place now than when they were around. It’s weird. My mother has spells which I won’t go into at this time. I will only say this: How would you like to have a mother on your hands who’s a little more deranged every day? How would you like to be known as the Bonewoman’s daughter? How would you like to live in a dump? So there’s a lot of things I wish. I wish my dad had had a normal sort of life and I wish my mother was normal and I wish I knew where my sister was and I wish I lived in a house where the birds didn’t fly around upstairs and I wish I knew what was going to happen to me in the future. Please help me, Mr. Pruitt.

Nov. 1

Don’t tell me I’m falling in love with the Bonewoman’s daughter. Don’t tell me that. It’s too absurd. A wily, middle-aged fart like me becoming infatuated with a messed-up girl half my age? It’s unnatural
.

There have been only two other girls in my life who made me feel this way. Thanatopsis Workman and Carla Carpenter. It seems so natural to be in love with Thanatopsis. Was there ever in history a woman better suited for marriage and motherhood than Thanatopsis? I should have asked her to marry me on our first date. She had a hope chest and a wealthy father and a huge collection of recipe books and a way of looking at small children that convinced you that she wanted and deserved
a dozen of her own. And what has Wayne given her? Nothing. Thanatopsis and I have always hit it off. We agree on what is funny and what is dumb (does she agree with me about Wayne?) and our classrooms face each other across the hall
.

And it seemed, years ago, so natural to be in love with Carla Carpenter. We were both in high school. We were the same age. We were planning similar futures (in music, of all things) and we both had all the confidence that ignorance bestows on eighteen-year-olds. I did ask Carla to marry me
.

But this. A man of thirty-five falling for a high school girl. I don’t believe it’s possible. What I am feeling for Beverly must be pity. It couldn’t be the same kind of thing I felt for Carla when she was eighteen. What did I feel for Carla? Love. Positively and without reservation, love
.

Carla was beautiful (Miles wrote). Carlo’s, like Beverly’s, was a dark beauty. During my high school days, Carla was the standard by which I judged new girls in town. When we were juniors and the braces came off her teeth I asked her for a date
.

“Let’s go see House of Wax,” I said. “They give you 3-D glasses at the door.”

“No,” Carla said, “I’ve heard it’s not good for the eyes. And besides, I have a vocation.”

That’s what a girl said in those days when she planned to become a nun. It didn’t surprise me because that was the year Carla was acting so distant. Everything she did seemed halfhearted. She never missed a choir concert, but neither did she open her mouth very wide when she sang. As a cheerleader she did the splits and punched at the air and spelled V-I-C-T-O-R-Y and T-E-A-M, but she didn’t look committed. Her beauty, in my opinion, was reason enough for her to be standing out there facing the bleachers. But Carla’s was the kind of demure appeal best admired in silence—and if it hadn’t been for the other two cheerleaders I’m afraid the fans would have lost heart, because Staggerford High School won only three games that year and you cannot shout the spelling of V-I-C-T-O-R-Y and T-E-A-M for very long in a losing came if your leader looks demure and skeptical both. In English class one day (Mrs. Cochran’s class) Carla said, after reading Poe, that she never believed her dreams, not even while dreaming them. She let her hair grow and by spring it was falling around her face like a mask. She was on my mind all the time. I remember that when her hair was at its longest I asked Dale at the dinner table on Sunday if he thought Carla was a mystic
.

Dale came home every weekend from St. Andrew’s College
.

He was a freshman and learning from the monks what seemed to me an astonishing lot about women. “Women are moody and very seldom mystical,” Dale said. “They rather enjoy a good languish now and then.” Dale always pointed his chin at everyone he spoke to, as though aiming his smugness down his nose
.

Mother said, “Like mother, like daughter. Mrs. Carpenter has always been … distant.”

Father said, “Not always. In her younger years Mrs. Carpenter was a great—friend, shall we say?—of salesmen and railroaders.”

“I believe we have discussed this quite enough, ” said Mother
.

As soon as our junior year ended Carla went to live in a convent somewhere, and I got a summer job as assistant caretaker at St. Isidore’s, and spent most of
my time cutting grass with a power mower that belched out clouds of gray exhaust. To ease the monotony of following the machine back and forth, I got into the habit of singing songs. I must have walked a thousand miles in the fumes ofthat Briggs and Stratton, trying to sound like the Four Freshmen. I sang “The Day Isn’t Long Enough” and imagined Carla walking dreamily through a convent garden at sundown, surrounded by butterflies and black-eyed susans. I sang “Slow Boat to China, “and sought the details of an exotic tale of love and peril that began when Carla, to her delight, discovered me at the rail of the ocean liner she was taking to the mission fields. I tried singing “The Little White Cloud That Cried” from beginning to end with my eyes closed because somebody had told me Johnny Ray was blind (untrue), and I ran into a rock. During the two days it took to have the reel of the mower straightened and sharpened, I was put to work caulking the huge rose window above the front steps of St. Isidore’s Church. Sixty feet above the sidewalk I stood on a plank suspended from pulleys, and when I wasn’t nearly fainting from fright I was imagining how Carla would receive the news of my death. She would doubtless take her final vows years early. She would keep to her cell and become a legend of purity. On her deathbed she would have a vision, and at her canonization her secret diary would reveal that I, in my untimely death, was the major instrument in her progress toward sainthood
.

Carla did not return to Staggerford for the beginning of our senior year. I asked the other two cheerleaders about her, but they didn’t know much. They said she was allowed to write only two letters a month and she wrote them to her pastor and her parents. I asked the pastor of St. Isidore’s—in those days old Father Trask—and he told me only that Carla would be St. Isidore’s twentieth vocation in its hundred-year history
.

I hated to ask her parents. Mrs. Carpenter always looked so grim, and Mr. Carpenter always looked so surprised that she looked so grim. In stores and on the street and at parish dinners you would see the two of them and you knew it was a miserable marriage. Mrs. Carpenter was tall and fat and she had a crook in her
nose like a knuckle. Mr. Carpenter was a barber without a hair on his head. He was always doing things to please her but never doing them right. He carried her purse while she shopped. She gave him hell in public. At duck-out counters and wedding receptions the would study him until she found something amiss and then she let him have it. Filing slowly out of church one Sunday, my brother and I heard her say, “I did not, you idiot!” each word twice as loud as the one before, “idiot” echoing off the vaulted ceiling. On the way home my brother made a pronouncement. “Mrs. Carpenter is food for thought,” he said. “I will not be quoted as saying that women are shallow, but they are often marked by an absence of emotional reserve. And as for poor Mr. Carpenter, what can you expect when a man marries someone twice his size?”

One day in October, meeting the Carpenters in the grocery store, I introduced myself and asked them what they heard from Carla. Mrs. Carpenter immediately turned to face the wall. She moved her jaw, grinding her teeth. Mr. Carpenter gave me his amazed look and said softly, “I don’t understand her.” He said nothing else. He probably meant Carla. He might have meant his wife
.

Then in November, the vocations from St. Isidore’s slipped back to nineteen and the high school had, once again, three cheerleaders; for Carla turned up in Staggerford, convent life behind her. Her first day in school she was slow to speak and she moved from class to class as though deep in prayer. Her hair was short, but she did not look pale and ascetic. She looked well fed. She was, in fact, voluptuous, and I asked her to the movies. She said, “Yes, yes!” and squeezed my hand
.

I walked to her house to pick her up. In the Carpenters ‘ front yard a half-dozen empty birdhouses were perched on long poles and several homemade lawn ornaments stuck out of a thin layer of snow. Carla was standing on the porch ready to go. Her eyes were large and lovely and she seemed to have grown accustomed to smiling. Gone was the brooding beauty of grade eleven. We went to High Noon but we saw only part of it, because after whispering through the newsreel and
cartoon we discovered we had a hundred things to tell each other and midway through the feature the manager asked us to be quiet or leave. It was impossible to be quiet. I hadn’t yet told her about caulking the rose window and she had only begun her convent stories. We left. We ate a hamburger at the Hub. Everybody crowded around our booth and told jokes and vied for our attention. We were the main attraction
.

As I walked her home the moon shone on the snow the way it does in movies. She said she was glad she had gone to the convent and glad to be back and she’d never go again. On her front walk I kissed her. I used the Howard Keel method. You bend the girl over backwards and swoop down on her lips, a method Howard Keel probably never used on an icy sidewalk. We tipped over in the snow and laughed so loud her mother turned on the porch light and sent her father out to see what was the matter. “Shush them down,” I heard Mrs. Carpenter say from behind the door. I got up and shook Mr. Carpenter’s hand. I said it was a nice evening. Without his wife at his side, he looked like a man you could talk to. Carla got up and began brushing herself off. I flicked some snow off her shoulder and let it go at that. It is hard for a young man to determine exactly where to stop in brushing snow off a girl
.

“Yes, “said Mr. Carpenter, looking around at his empty birdhouses, “it’s two below zero but you’d never know it.”

“No” I said. “It’s so still.”

“Yes,” he said. “No wind.”

Carla gave her father a little hug and I saw, in the light from the porch, something like happiness rise up in his big astonished eyes. “Will you come in, Pruitt?” he asked, apparently losing his good judgment, for I had never known anyone to be invited into the Carpenter house
.

“Oh, Daddy,” said Carla, “you should see how much homework I have. Let’s ask Miles over sometime when he can spend the evening. We’ll serve him dinner.”

“What a nice idea,” Mr. Carpenter said
.

“Thank you for the good time,” said Carla
.

They both shook my hand. As they crossed the porch the front door opened for them
.

The following weekend my brother called me into his room He had his name
,
DALE PRUITT
,
lettered on his door. He was born toward the end of an era in Staggerford when half the families named one of their sons Dale. Today you won’t find a Dale in Berrington County under the age of thirty. I went in and sat on his bed. He closed the door and settled in behind his desk and lit his pipe. At the age of nineteen Dale saw only the studious tranquility of bachelorhood ahead. His room was neatly packed with everything he wanted in life: a wall of books, a transoceanic radio, a typewriter, a cannister of his own mixture of tobacco. Pinned on the wall, between pictures of Pius XII in ermine and Alec Guinness in The Lavender Hill Mob, were rejection slips from journals like the American Benedictine Review, to which he sent scholarly articles I never understood about people I never heard of
.

“Mother tells me you had a date with the Carpenter girl.”

“She’s back from the convent,” I said. “She’s really looking good.” I went on to say that Carla was the girl for me. I tried to describe for him the buoyant feeling she gave me whenever I looked at her, whenever I thought about her, and I became buoyant in my brother’s room, bouncing on his bed. “I want to make her mine,” I said
.

When my brother finally spoke it was to say, “As for the way she looks, it’s only skin deep, you know.”

“That’s duty with me,” I said
.

“Don’t be impertinent. What I wanted to tell you is this. Carla’s mother has three strikes against her.”

“So?”

“One, she is unattractive. Two, as a young woman she was not known for her virtue, and three, she’s unbalanced.”

“I know all that,” I said
.

“If you know all that, you might consider restructuring your love life.”

“I’m not in love with Carla’s mother.”

By this time my brother’s pipe was red hot. He spoke
from a cloud. “All girls turn out to be like their mothers. And that’s what I called you in here to say. Now, my duty done, I can get back to Chesterton.” He turned to his typewriter
.

I told him he was crazy
.

“If you want to know what a girl will be like in twenty years,” Dale said to his typewriter, “if you want to know how her voice will sound, or how her knees will look or what she’ll be doing to amuse herself, look at her mother.”

“Bullshit,” I said
.

During December I kissed Carla twelve times, I took her to two movies and I took her Christmas shopping and when I was given the family car I took her skiing. In the Christmas issue of the school paper, it said CC and MP, ain’t love grand? I showed it to Dale
.

“Beware of woman’s beauty,” he said, ‘ for passion burns like fire.”

On New Year’s Eve Carla and I and Harvey Polk and his girlfriend went to Minneapolis in Harvey’s car and saw Burt Lancaster in
The Crimson Pirate.
Three of us thought it was a rotten movie but Carla insisted it was a spoof of pirate pictures. She said it was a masterpiece. After hamburgers and malts, Harvey took from his trunk a quart of gin and a half gallon of sweet wine which we mixed in paper cups and drank on the way home. We hadn’t gone far when Harvey got too dizzy to drive and I changed places with him. “I’m fine except for my head and my body,” he kept saying in his sleep. After making four wrong turns and parking next to somebody’s barn, I too passed out and when I woke up it was nearly noon and I was lying on the rug inside our back door. Mother was preparing duck for dinner, and when she saw me begin to stir on the floor she turned her back until I made my way out of the kitchen. I showered and vomited and put on a tie and took four aspirins and came out to dinner expecting to catch hell, ami there sat Carla. Mother had invited her to dinner. She looked fine
.

“Hey,” I said. My brain was all gummed up and “hey” was the only word I could think of I wanted to tell her how I liked seeing her at our table and if she
would just be patient my blinding headache would pass and we could become engaged and marry and have as many children as possible and bring them here to Grandmother’s every New Year’s. So much seemed possible in the world. Except speech, of course. “Hey,” I said again, and sat down
.

Carla’s appetite was ferocious, unsurpassed. Only by limiting myself to celery and water and keeping my eyes off the duck was I able to remain at the table. Carla told the story of
The Crimson Pirate,
and when she said it seemed to her like satire my brother stopped chewing and gave her a close look
.

“Fabulous insight for a high school girl,” he said. “Of course you were with the sisters for a while. St. Raymond’s, was it? Yes, I thought so. Did you read the reviews? No? You saw the satire on your own? One reviewer I read missed it altogether but five others agreed it was a parody. I wrote a little review of my own entitled ‘The Pirate’s Thrust.’ You see the pun? I’ve been mailing it here and there. Not a bad review but too late, I think. I have a copy in my room if you would care to read it after dinner. Yes, a good movie, a good parody. Didn’t you think so, Miles?”