Acts of God (15 page)

“Oh, my God,” said Samantha Crawford, who was always a little afraid. “What're we going to do?”

“She's fine,” I said, “she's just faking it.” I shook and shook her, but she didn't move.

“We should go get help,” Vicky said.

“I'll go,” Lori Martin, with her take-charge attitude, said. Just as Lori dashed off, Margaret opened her eyes and laughed that high-pitched laugh. “Fooled you, didn't I?” she said, laughing as blood trickled down her cheek.

“It's not funny,” I told her. “We thought you were hurt.”

“Oh, Tessie,” Margaret said, “you take things too seriously.”

One night, just a few days later, Margaret came to my window and tossed pebbles until I came down. I was still angry with her for the trick she'd pulled on the tracks and I told her so. “I'm sorry, Tessie. It's just that you guys seemed so scared.”

We sat down together on the grass and she picked a blade, made a whistle of it between her teeth. I plucked a blade and tried to whistle through it, but I couldn't get that high, piercing sound Margaret got with hers.

In the distance we heard the 8:35 rushing through, announcing my bedtime. “Have you ever had this sensation?” Margaret asked me. “You are sitting in a train in the station and the train next to you starts to move. You think you're the one who's moving when, in fact, you're standing still.”

I told her I couldn't remember ever having had that sensation.

“Well, when you have it,” she said, getting up to leave, “you'll know.”

*   *   *

Those were the last warm days of fall and then winter was upon us. It seemed an especially hard winter that year. The snow drifts were six feet high and we had to wade through them to school. I stayed inside more than I wanted and found it confining, as did my brothers. So we were relieved in January when there was a thaw. An unusual warm spell, you could never predict. The temperature rose and the snow melted. Big soggy pools of it. There was mud on the lawns. Puddles to jump in, splash through. For days we frolicked. Went to school in our shirtsleeves with just windbreakers on. We played ball, skipped, and the air had the green freshness of spring, as if the flowers would pop out of the ground, and the woods behind our house were carpeted in jack-in-the-pulpits.

Then one night it began to rain. We were asleep so we hardly noticed the rain or the temperature falling. It dropped steadily in the night so that before dawn a freezing rain was falling and by morning it was a glazed-over world. Everything white and shiny, slippery to the touch.

The power lines were down. There was no heat. Our father built a fire in the fireplace in the middle of the day, and we toasted wieners, marshmallows, whatever could be toasted over the flame. We huddled by the fire while my father thought about what we should do because it was all slick outside and nowhere to go.

When I pressed my face to the glass, my steamy breath made little snowflakes, and when I wiped it away, there she was. Skating on our lawn, up and down our driveway. “Look at that,” our father said.

I wiped the glass, pressed my face closer, and saw for myself. Margaret was skating across our lawn in long, even glides. When she saw us at the window, she beckoned for me to join her. “Well,” my father said, laughing, “you've got to go out there.”

At first I was reluctant, but then I put my skates on. Together we skated up and down on the lawn, then on the streets, my parents gazing at us through the frosty glass.

*   *   *

In the spring of that year when the air was fresh and there was a hint of leaves and grass—you could already feel things starting to grow—my mother told me that we were having company for dinner. She didn't say who, except that it was a surprise. She told me I should go upstairs and get cleaned up. Since we often had company for dinner on the weekends when my father was home, I wasn't particularly curious, though I always wanted to know what we were eating.

Soon the house was filled with the bustle of preparations. We had “help”—a grumpy older woman named Emma who came in a white uniform when there were parties—and my mother told her exactly what to do. My mother fluttered through the kitchen, her hands flying as she chopped something. She could whip up just about anything in half a second. She made creamed spinach I can still taste, buttery and smooth. She fried fish with almonds and brown butter so it came out so crunchy you'd never know it was fish. It wasn't like other houses, where you got meatloaf every night of the week. People loved to come to our house.

When I asked who was coming, Lily looked distracted. My mother always seemed to have a million things to do, but if people were coming over, she never stopped until the party was over. The freckles on her nose glistened with sweat as she pushed a strand of hair, which I noticed for the first time was turning gray, off her face. Her hands arched over whatever she was chopping. Nobody, she said, just a few friends.

I didn't bother asking how “nobody” could be friends, but I was surprised when I found Clarice Blair sitting in our living room with a cocktail napkin on her lap. She wore dark stockings and a short black cocktail dress. She had this funny hat on with a veil that looked ridiculous to me, as if she were coming to a funeral, not a dinner party. Her dress was straight and tight and she had difficulty keeping her legs together. She had great legs, legs Margaret would eventually inherit, and she kept swishing them back in forth in a single motion.

We had other people over as well—a golf partner of my father's and Mr. and Mrs. McKenzie from next door, who was blind as a bat, and Mr. and Mrs. Lerner, whose daughter was known for doing things with boys after basketball games, though these parents obviously didn't have a clue. While I was passing out a tray (my mother made me do stuff like this) with little cheese puffs, I heard Mr. Lerner say to Mr. McKenzie, “I can't tell you how many friends we have who don't even know they need an oil change.” This was hardly my mother's A list of friends, not that she exactly had an A list, but my mother was a good hostess and she treated everybody, even the man who mowed the lawn, like equals, no matter what she thought about them or said behind their backs.

There were many stories circulating about Clarice Blair. Everyone wondered who she was and where she'd come from. It had never made sense that a white woman with a child would come to town and live above Santini's. People hinted that there'd never been any husband. I'd heard mothers talking over coffee: She acted like a lady, but she didn't live like one. Some said she was running away. That she was a tramp. I'd heard women say that they should be careful with someone like that in town.

But as my father sat next to her, playing host, I saw a thin, small woman with an oversized laugh who put Hershey's Kisses in her daughter's lunch and gave me fresh-baked cookies and cold milk when I walked by her rented house. She had eyes like someone asking a judge for mercy. You couldn't help but feel sorry for her and I guess my mother did since she had invited her.

My father could be a very good host, offering people drinks, making sure they had cheese puffs and cucumber sandwiches on their hors d'oeuvre plate. “Clarice, would you like another martini?” he asked. “Clarice, more cheese and crackers?” He passed her a tray. He made small talk with her about the kids and school and those kinds of safe things adults talk about when they don't know what else to talk about. “Oh, yes,” I heard him say, “you really can't be too careful these days.”

Careful about what? I wondered as I watched Mrs. Blair cross and uncross her legs awkwardly as she tried to maneuver a little hors d'oeuvre plate and a drink. My father was talking to her about his work. About the disasters he'd seen. When the tornado chased him down the road; the river that carried an entire living room set, one piece at a time, downstream. At each disaster she put her hand over her mouth and said, “Oh, and then what happened,” over and over, still balancing her martini and plate on her lap.

My father went into great detail with each story as Clarice Blair listened intently, her eyes round as saucers. Then he paused and now he seemed to be watching her carefully, as if he expected her to topple over at any minute. From time to time she crossed and uncrossed her legs. Even from the other side of the room I could hear the sound of her silk stockings scraping together, a slick, whooshing sound like hockey skates turning on ice.

Later that night I sat on a chair in front of the mirror in my room. In the other room I heard my parents arguing through the walls. More and more common an occurrence, it seemed. My mother shouted something about how he had talked to that woman all night, telling her his lies.

I wasn't exactly listening as I tried crossing my legs the way she had, knees and shins tight together. First to the left, then to the right. Like a pendulum I moved my legs back and forth. Then I parted my legs and saw how dark it was. How you could hardly see what was inside.

17

Christmas is about the worst
time to be in Illinois if you don't like winter. I actually do like winter, but I have a fear of being snowbound, trapped. A fear that I can't get out. But shortly after Thanksgiving my mother had declared that she didn't have long to live and asked me to come home. “This will be my last Christmas,” she said. Of course, it wasn't, but since she hadn't asked me to come from California in a while and she often came to see me and the kids, I agreed to fly home.

Besides, Nick had been calling me almost every night and I thought this might be a good excuse to see him. I'd found myself waiting up for his late-night calls. I imagined him slipping out of bed, tiptoeing down to the kitchen in bare feet to the phone. He whispered into it when I picked up. I loved the way he said my name, with that silibant “s,” the way people once said his father's. “Tessie,” I'd hear. Some nights if I couldn't sleep, I'd wrap myself up in an armchair in my Winonah centennial blanket, hoping the phone would ring. Some nights it did; some nights it didn't. When it didn't, I was surprised at how disappointed I felt.

Often our conversations revolved around him, around his marriage to Margaret. How she drank too much and seemed indifferent to everyone except Danielle. How it was hardly a real marriage anymore, though once it had been. But slowly the conversations began to turn to me. He wanted to know more and more about me so I spoke of my marriage, never quite able to pinpoint what had gone wrong. I told him that there seemed to be something that stood between me and the world.

I pondered these conversations as the plane flew. Though it was the holidays, perhaps I'd get a chance to see Nick while I was in town. From the window of the plane I looked down upon those long flat stretches; the green farmland; the wheat from what were probably now cooperative farms blowing in the wind, but that from above still looked like the wheat of the prairie I had always known. Even as I flew above the floodplain in winter, the Mississippi was swollen, its banks flooded, pockets of the river looking more like small lakes. Land laid to waste.

I have seen what water and wind and disaster can do. When I was a girl, I had to get away. I could not bear the open expanses. Everything was flat. I had a feeling even then that anything could happen. There was nothing to stop the water, the wind. It could all be swept away.

*   *   *

For a few days I slept on my mother's hideaway sofa and helped her with things around the apartment. I wanted to call Nick but resisted the urge. He knew where to find me. He knew I was at my mother's and where she lived. But still I found myself thinking about him, wondering if he was shopping for holiday gifts, if he would get something for me.

The first morning my mother and I ate cottage cheese and crackers and she talked about her will and who was getting what. In the last five years or so she always talked about her will and who was getting what, and it hadn't changed all that much. But it made her feel better to go over everything with me again.

As she was discussing her will, I kept waiting for the phone to ring. It did from time to time. Always a friend of hers. That evening I picked up the phone and called Nick. A child answered. It was the first time I'd heard Danielle's voice and she sounded older than her years. I hung up quickly.

My second day there my mother handed me a book of Santa Claus stickers, the kind you put on gifts, and she told me to put one on whatever possessions I wanted when she was gone. My mother sat watching CNN as I wandered through her apartment with my box of stickers. I paused at her silver, a pewter plate I'd always admired, a painting done by someone who was briefly famous in Chicago. I glanced at these objects, but I did not put a sticker on them.

My mother was slowly unencumbering herself of her belongings, she told me, shouting above CNN. “Art's gonna come and take whatever you don't want,” she called. Silver trays, porcelain pitchers, antique tables. I could see them all in Art's collectibles shop on Walton. I moved from room to room.

I paused before a photograph on the wall of me and my brothers and my father and Lily. We are standing in front of a tepee and an Indian chief in full feather is doing a little dance. Jeb has a tomahawk in his hand, Art wears a silly grin, always the clown. I'm a bit crumpled, my long stringy hair falling in my face. But we are all smiling, mugging for the camera.

We are dressed like pioneers. Art and Jeb and I have on coonskin caps, my father is in a buckskin jacket, and my mother in a long skirt. I don't remember the trip we took to the Dells, where this picture was taken, except for one night.

We were sitting in a circle of bleachers around a campfire and the Indians were dancing. I did not know that this was for tourists; I thought it was for me. They were dancing and as they danced they dropped colored sand onto the ground. Blue and red and green, and they made designs on the ground—a lake, an eagle, a cornstalk, the sun.