Six Figures (Harvest Book), page 19
Their house was bright, with large windows everywhere, red carpeted stairs and hallways for the children to make a racket on, blond-wood floors in all the rooms. Everyone had their own bedroom, the kids had their own bathroom with a tub. In the basement was a tacky long-ignored bar with waist-high vinyl stools mounted in the floor. It was just as Megan had said. It was wonderful.
“Well,” she said, still grinning. She couldn’t seem to stop. It was at least twice as big as the town house at Crape Myrtle Hill and five times as bright. “You could take the kids somewhere, and I could start unpacking.”
“Children?” he called, loving the sound of the word. He dimly remembered passing orchards where you could pick your own fruit not far from town, near the Maryland border. “Let’s go find some blueberries!”
“Blueberries?” Sophie came running. He ran to the stairs in time to catch Daniel taking them one step at a time on his butt. “I love blueberries.”
They kissed Megan good-bye, trundled through the breezeway, and disappeared into the garage. A garage! A breezeway! A home! It really was some kind of town.
From the kitchen she watched them back carefully into the street. How oddly happy everyone looked. It might be the happiest they’d ever been. She felt strangely terrified. She got out the Swiss Army knife and went to the first kitchen box, cut it open, felt her way in through the Styrofoam chips and bubble wrap. Nothing apparently broken. She’d kept an eye on the movers. They hadn’t been especially careful, but they hadn’t been careless either.
It struck her, unpacking that first box in the almost too-bright kitchen, stopping to pull down the venetian blind over the large bay window, it struck her for the sixtieth or seventieth time that the week before in Pittsburgh when he’d screamed and shouted about the hammer, how he’d attached “invitation” to it—it lay on the floor like some kind of invitation—and in a way the invitation had been to her and she had taken it. She could turn it around in her mind as many times as she wished—the terrible emotion of the moment, the deliberate phrase of his admission of where he thought the hammer had been, the fact in question that could have been known even by those who didn’t know—and still she had accepted his invitation. What was the truth anyway? It seemed to her that the truth became hidden behind a scaffolding so delicate and elaborate and entwined—a scaffolding constructed between oneself and the other and between the two of you and the world—that to try to remove it was to risk discovering that the truth could not actually exist apart from it. Perhaps she was just being cynical. Perhaps she was just being perceptive. It was a fine line, and she’d watched him for twelve years straddle it himself, the most negative person she had ever known. She brought out the espresso machine and set it on the counter. It, coupled with the house, made her feel almost embarrassingly rich. Across the street, behind the elementary school that Sophie would attend, was a shopping center sunk in an asphalt valley, half of its windows boarded shut, offering only a discount supermarket and an optometrist’s office. The Realtor had told her that a flood last summer had wiped out a drugstore, a video store, a women’s boutique, and an office supply store. There were no plans to reoccupy the space. It was good for the property values, she had observed to Megan, to keep the center half shut. It would cut down on the street traffic. Perhaps eventually even the school would close, but that was years into the future.
Megan wiped clean the espresso machine and set it on the corner of the expansive kitchen counter, between the stove and the sink. She felt uncertain, unpacking into so much space. For the first time since they’d been living together there wouldn’t be a question of what to unpack and what to keep in storage. The challenge, instead, would be to fill all the cabinets. Even the wedding china could come out, and she hadn’t seen that since Somerville. They used to have mock discussions about whether its trim was red brick or deep orange. The pattern was Colorado. As graduate students they once had gone camping in Colorado, at the Frying Pan River. One night they’d driven into Aspen and tentatively entered its trendiest restaurant under recurring patterns of a neon-lit moon. They were seated, and for twenty minutes they waited. Finally Warner had stood and gone to the server station and asked for service. The few staff had looked him up and down and one waitress with bright red lipstick and a black Gucci skirt had said something and he’d returned red-faced to the table. “What’d she say?” Megan asked, as he led them from the restaurant, pocketing a logoed ashtray on the way. “She said,” he remarked as dryly as he could, “‘Maybe.’” They’d eaten at a bar where one of the patrons discovered a baby rat in a can of beer he was drinking, and a local TV news team almost instantly converged. Was it planted or was it real? It was hard to believe that guy. He was muddy and fat with a beard down his belly so snarled the rat could have come from there. They wanted to believe him, and besides they got to drink free the rest of the night. On the way back to the campground along the swirl of road by the river they’d been nearly sideswiped by a car, which then crunched over a raccoon. They stopped and watched it struggling in its own heap. It slunk to the side of the road. “Thank god,” she said. “I don’t think I could have moved it.” “Neither could I,” he admitted. Who was to say why some people stayed together and some didn’t? Who was to say there was any necessary truth? She finished unwrapping the china and set it in his grandmother’s antique bar, latched it shut against the children, then climbed the wide red stairs to begin on their rooms.
By the time Warner reached the Mason-Dixon line Daniel’s head slumped peacefully against the wing of his car seat and Sophie’s eyes were shut, their faces composed and sealed by sleep. His brother-in-law had once told him that having kids was so wild and astonishing because they were so dependent on you, and he had mumbled assent even though he was not sure he agreed. At first it was wild because of the loss of control, that you gave up so much of your life to them, that some days you could barely make it to the refrigerator or the bathroom because their demand was so constant. And then maybe it was wild because of how you could sense they loved you and trusted you unconditionally; that even if they fought or tried to undermine you, they still wanted you. Now he couldn’t quite see why it was wild, but he knew it was. Maybe the why didn’t matter. Maybe you could never know the why. Maybe it was better just to stop asking. He was a parent, and that gave him such a fullness and focus, not only about them but about him, about what he wanted, about what he had. Those first weeks after Sophie was born, he had felt that the three of them were on a great ship together, just like the ship that he and Megan had been on, but this ship drifted taller in the water and felt large enough to cross an ocean, and this ship sailed night and day. Occasionally he or Megan would cast out for diapers or food, but in those first weeks that was the only reason why one of them ever left the other two. Then his leave had ended, and every day he left for work, and he lost his sense of the ship. He didn’t know if the ship was home or work or going out with his buddies to a bar or if there was a ship. Then Megan returned to her job, and a baby-sitter came to the apartment, and sometimes Sophie was dropped at daycare, and he was certain that home was not a ship. In Boston when Daniel came, Sophie kept going to school, and it was never always just the four of them. Now at least, with school close by, with their work close by, with evenings and weekends, with the simple fact that he even got to live with them, he could feel the ship. The ship was the car, the ship was the house, the ship was wherever and whenever they were. He wished Megan could have come with them for blueberries.
As a child he had always been terribly homesick whenever he’d been sent away to camp. He wrote letters to his parents begging them to come get him. When they refused, he wrote “You bitch” to his mother, and said he would slash his wrists or hurt her. He checked himself into the infirmary and refused to leave. They finally came for him. Two summers this happened, and during the school year he felt the loss of home so much that often his mother or father came and sat in the lobby just to keep him attending class, and on the eve of the third summer, when his mother told him how he needed to grow up, how he disgusted her, he hit her. And then he understood. He understood that if he could not be with her always, he would just have to hate her. He hated her because he could not be with her all the time, and so he made sure he was with her less and less. He had no time for her, and when he was with her he had no patience.
It was too easy to see—that he struck whenever he was wounded. That it wasn’t about money and it wasn’t about work. It was about love and how work and money and just living ate into any warmth and solace you could find. He was sorry about his mother. He was sorry about Megan. He was sorry about Daniel and Sophie. But he would stop being fucking sorry about himself. He would have to take the wounds as they came.
In Catoctin at the orchard he unbuckled the sleeping children, loaded Daniel on his shoulder, and led Sophie by his free hand to a clapboard stall where they were given a two-pound plastic bucket.
“Over here,” a woman called to him out from one of the rows of low leafy bushes. “Here’s good.” She pointed him past groups of quiet pickers to a stretch of bushes ten yards in front of her. “Now don’t pick the green berries,” she added, almost scolding. “We still have to charge you for them and they won’t ever turn and that’ll be a waste.”
In an overcast damp stillness they stood before the bushes pocked with fruit. He held the bucket for them.
“Okay,” he said softly. He took Daniel’s hand and led him to a blueberry. “Pick the blue one, the dark one. Okay. Not the green ones.”
‘“Kay,” Daniel said. “Boo.”
“Look, Daddy.” Sophie showed him several plump blueberries. “Right?”
“Right.” He gestured with a flattened downturned hand to tell her to keep her voice low. She shrugged but nodded.
The sun popped out, and he wished he’d put lotion on them. At least in the silence they were steadily filling the bucket. Soon he’d get them back to the car, back on the road. He had some lollipops in his pocket for the ride, and the air-conditioning was working. The hills between them and home were so green they looked blue, and the road back was bare and bleached. There were sheep and horses, and just across the state line there was a deep-red barn; his father had taught him that most barns were red because it was the cheapest paint color that could be kept relatively clean. Sometimes his father knew a lot, and Warner wished he could remember that more often.
“Hey,” Sophie cried piercingly. “Hey, Daddy!”
“What?” he said. “What is it?”
“Look.”
Daniel was picking all the berries he could get his hands on and slapping them in the bucket. Not too many were blue.
“They’re green,” Sophie whined londly.
“It’s okay, honey, it’s okay.” He tried to smile reassuringly as he felt the other pickers and the two women who ran the orchard eyeing them through the broken calm.
“But Daddy, we’ll get charged for them and they’ll never turn and we won’t be able to eat them and they’ll waste.” She frowned and glared at her brother.
“Een,” Daniel was crowing. “Ween!” He threw more and more green berries in, and they thwacked against the sides like pellets.
“Daddy!”
“Really, Sophie,” Warner said gently, and held her wrist as she stared at him questioningly, “it’s not a big deal.”
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Fred Leebron, Six Figures (Harvest Book)
