Stony River (26 page)

Stony River sits on the peninsula of I'm Better Than You
, she wrote.
White vs. colored. Christian vs. Jew. Catholic vs. Protestant. The married sit in judgment of the divorced. People who live on one side of the highway think they're better than us on the other and those in the big houses near the high school think they're best of all. Patients in private hospital rooms feel superior to those in wards. Some fathers think their jobs are more important than others. Teenagers are no better. Jocks think they're cooler than hoods and nobody wants to be a freshman.

She struck the last. She was looking forward to being a freshman come September.

Richie was different. He might decide to stop being a hood but he'd never want to be a jock or go to college like Daddy. Why should he? He was going to be an artist. Mother and Daddy didn't like his looks and “the company he kept.” They'd told her to stay away from him. They believed she was at the library after school every Wednesday, the only weeknight Daddy “rustled up” dinner, as he liked to joke, giving his legs-apart thumbs-in-belt cowboy impression. But she'd be in Richie's attic studio, posing for a comic strip about a wisecracking husband-and-wife detective team named Glenn and Gilda Daring. The deception pricked her conscience, but her parents' prejudice against Richie bothered her more.

With the world far away and your lips close to mine
.

On Wednesdays, she'd stay until the five o'clock blast of the Bartz Chemicals factory whistle. Richie didn't smoke in the studio so she wouldn't have to explain the smell when she got home. He was surprisingly thoughtful like that. She suspected it was her positive influence.

He wanted Gilda to be “zaftig,” like Peggy Lee—she loved it when he used a word you wouldn't in a million years think he'd know— and pronounced Linda's figure perfect. He drew Glenn thin as a snake. Linda would have preferred to be less hourglass and more six o'clock, like
Seventeen
model Carol Lynley, but she'd never survive on the single head of lettuce, pound of grapes and three green peppers Lynley claimed was all she ate every day.

Tonight, while our hearts are aglow
.

Richie's mother was off shift on Wednesdays. She let Linda wear her trench coat and Richie's father's old fedora when she posed. She took Polaroid pictures of “Glenn and Gilda” for the panels in which they appeared together. She often popped in while Linda was there to ask if they wanted a snack. All on the up-and-up, Linda would tell Daddy if he found out.

Oh tell me the words that I'm longing to know.

Richie sketched Linda leaning against the wall, climbing a step stool he drew as a ladder, and in profile, holding a pistol his father had brought back from the war as a souvenir. “Is it loaded?” she'd asked the first time and he'd said, “Natch. How else you gonna feel authentic?” Palming it made her nervous but a little proud, too, remembering Tereza calling her Goody Two-Shoes. Daddy had a smaller pistol he'd acquired as a volunteer policeman during the war; a hernia saved him from the draft. He kept it, unloaded, in a bedside table. Linda had never even tried to cock it. But Richie's father had taught him how to
fire
their pistol.

My prayer and the answer you give …

Richie drew her hair a brighter blonde than it really was, with her curls peeking out from under the fedora like fringe. He gave her pointy breasts that made her blush. He did the drawing and she did the speech bubbles. Glenn called men “cats” and women “dolls.” Gilda, whom Linda envisioned as an older Nancy Drew—outspoken and fearless—said things like “You big lug” and “Cigarette me.” They were working on a story Linda thought they should call “The Case of the Cry in the Night” in which two schoolgirls suspect that a sinister man holds another girl prisoner in a creepy old house, but their parents don't believe them. So they contact Glenn and Gilda, who take the case for free because they're secretly wealthy and on a mission to help the disadvantaged. “Privilege demands social responsibility,” Gilda tells the mayor in one panel.

May they still be the same for as long as we live.

Linda removed her glasses and stepped to her bedroom window. She cupped her hands and pressed her nose against the chilly pane. She studied the snowflakes that swam in streetlamp light before sinking to the ground. The snow was too fresh for footprints. She thought of Miranda and Tereza. To disappear with so few people caring seemed sadder than to die.

She returned to her desk and wrote:
Stony River is the ground
asleep under snow
,
its secrets imperceptible from behind a thick pane of glass
.

Miss Firkser had begun teaching them about metaphors. Linda didn't know how to extend hers or whether it was even the right one. Maybe it described her own home more than Stony River, with Mother both sleeper and snow. She wished she could tell friends that Mother was terminally ill and she and Daddy were making her last days as comfortable as possible. But Mother wasn't dying. Periodically she'd rise from her bed and take charge with such firm resolve you could hardly believe she'd ever been sick. She'd make beef stew, starch and iron Daddy's shirts, drag Linda out for new shoes. Insert herself into Linda and Daddy's routine as though they were incompetent and needed to be rescued. Eventually Linda or Daddy would say or do something (they were never sure what) to make Mother untie her apron and go back to her room.

That you'll always be there—dadadadadadadadada wah—at the end of my prayer
.

“She claims she wanted to go to England during the war and drive an ambulance,” Daddy said one night. “She says I wouldn't let her. I don't remember even discussing it.” He looked so lost. Linda was confused: Mother didn't even know how to drive, for goodness' sake.

Linda heard a shovel scrape. The snow was falling more thickly, piling in the windowpane corners and turning her room into a cocoon.

In
Our Town,
the Stage Manager said that as far as they knew, nobody remarkable had ever come out of Grover's Corners. Linda intended to be remarkable. She was going to leave big footprints in the snow.

ACROSS THE HALL
, Betty Wise sat in bed, propped up with pillows, trying to ease the throb in her neck and shake the dizzy feeling from those dang pills. Over her shoulders, against the room's chill, was a yellow and white afghan she'd knitted back when she felt like knitting.

Roger thought she should be able to “snap out of it,” whatever “it” was. When the appendix came out, they'd found scar tissue— the fancy word was
adhesions
—gumming up the works from the hysterectomy the year before. The surgeon claimed that would have accounted for the pain. But Doctor Pierce disagreed. He'd told Roger it was in her head. He and Roger didn't know beans from apple butter. As if she could spunk right up just because they said so.

Linda was across the hall right now, playing her music without a thought that her mother could use some company. The only time she visited Betty's room was after school to ask if she wanted anything. An act of duty, not love. It got Betty's goat that Linda didn't call her Mom. She'd never signed a birthday or Christmas card as Mother. Roger said, “You have a voice. Tell her what you want,” but it wasn't the same if you had to ask.

Betty could hear them as they watched their shows at night, their laughter drifting up through the register. Their morning voices were full of hurry. She envied them a place to go each day. She'd stay in bed until she heard Roger backing down the gravel driveway, fix a cup of tea and wander the house picking up after them. She didn't suppose they noticed.

She swung unsteady legs over the side of the bed and shuffled to the window overlooking the backyard. The snow was streaked with light from the house of a woman who came out when the moon was full and ranted in German. Betty steadied herself on the windowsill, fighting nausea. The Bible said a good wife was tolerant and understanding, didn't complain, didn't provoke her husband's anger.
When Betty disagreed with Roger he'd tell her she was wrong but he wouldn't say
wrong
. He'd use words like
emotional, irrational
or
impractical
. He could gnaw an argument to the bone. If Betty went to college she'd learn to argue better, but even if they could afford it, Roger said one family didn't need two degrees.

If he ever raised a hand to Linda, she'd be on the next train home to Mom. But he worshiped her, didn't see her faults. If Robert had lived, Roger would have doted on him and not stolen Linda away from her. Mom had told her countless times to put the boy behind her and love the child God gave her, but three people wasn't much of a family, not like the eight kids her own parents had. The plain truth was that Roger and Linda didn't need her.

She sat back down on the bed and turned her pasty face toward the dressing table mirror. If she had the energy she'd rouge her cheeks. Being with Mom last summer was swell, despite Roger having ruined Linda's birthday by forgetting to get the car serviced beforehand and then spoiling Linda's chance to spend time with a decent boy instead of that hoodlum she seemed to have a crush on. Betty wanted to warn Linda against giving herself away too easily, but she didn't think Linda would listen. She reached for the glass of water on the bedside table and knocked it over. Got down on trembling knees and wiped it up with the afghan.

She was sure she'd get well if they moved closer to Mom and had more land. Betty would plant a vegetable garden and raise a few chickens. She'd tried rhubarb, raspberries, carrots, lettuce and tomatoes over the years, but their postage stamp of a yard didn't yield much.

Roger would never move away from the house he was born in. Betty accepted that. Those first few years she didn't mind sharing a home with Mother Wise, as she insisted Betty call her. She didn't mind taking care of her when she was dying, even though the woman called Betty a hick. After she died, Betty wanted Roger to give some
thought to living near
her
mom for a while. But he said, “You're the one who came out here and decided to stay.”

True enough. She just wished he'd try to make it more worth her while.

THIRTEEN

MARCH 9, 1957
. The air was bitter at two in the morning when Herman drove Tereza home. She let herself in, closing the front door softly so as not to wake Dearie and Buddy. Dearie had begged off work the night before, complaining about her back. She'd planned to take some aspirin and get an early night. Tereza slipped off her shoes, tiptoed across the parlor and turned off the lamp Dearie had left on for her. She was surprised to see light coming from the kitchen and hear Dearie's voice, firmer than usual, fierce even. “Not a word more about it ever again. Ain't nothing to do with us.”

Tereza found Dearie and Buddy at the kitchen table, Dearie wrapped in a blanket. Buddy, his leather jacket still zipped up, sat slumped and teary-eyed like a scared little kid.