Читать книгу The Butterfly House - Marcia Preston, Marcia Preston - Страница 7

Shady River, 1974

Three, six, nine, the moose drank wine,

The monkey chewed tobacco on the streetcar line.

Line broke. Monkey got choked.

All went to heaven in a little blue boat.

I was pretty good at jumping rope, Cincy was better, but Samantha never missed. Never. We had to make a new rule for her, or else it would have been her turn the entire recess. Lean and tall, with long red curls that thrashed about her head in rhythm to her pounding feet, Sam called out her own cadence without even panting. She said that after high school she was going to play ice hockey for a pro team in Canada.

Sam’s best friend was Patty Johnson. Patty had no coordination, but she had a wide, freckled face that laughed at everything, and besides, she brought the rope. The four of us met on the playground every recess of fifth grade. We’d chant the cadence, then count each rope-skip until the jumper missed—or Samantha reached a hundred. We knew half a dozen rhymes, but the moose one sounded so sophisticated and subversive it was our favorite. Years later, in college, I heard a jazz musician sing the same words and felt a thrill of kinship.

Occasionally, other girls joined us. When six or more of us stood in the circle, sounding off in unison like an army cadre, our blended voices drew a crowd of watchers. Those times were exciting, like having company. But I loved it best when it was just the four of us, carefree and comfortable together.

On the rare days I couldn’t go home with Cincy after school, my stomach began a queasy rolling as soon as the dismissal bell rang, as I wondered if my mother would be home yet, and in what condition. Usually she drank wine, which made her mellow and affectionate. If I targeted my requests for the third glass, I could do pretty much whatever I wanted. Waiting past the third was successful but risky; the next day she’d deny giving permission. But on the rare occasions she drank whiskey, she got mean. Later on, as a budding high school scientist, I deduced that the different effects of wine and whiskey must be psychosomatic; alcohol was alcohol once it entered the bloodstream. Probably she drank wine when she was feeling gentle and whiskey when she felt mean. But in grade school, all I knew was that the only times Mom struck me were accompanied by the yeasty aroma of bourbon.

In the seventies, nobody thought a parental palm across the mouth of a sassy child constituted child abuse. Not even the child. Nevertheless, by age ten I’d learned to search the house when she wasn’t home and pour any hard liquor down the drain. I washed away the odor with plenty of water and replaced the empty bottle where I found it, so she’d think she drank it all the night before.

I left the wine alone. She was rather cheerless when she was sober, and she worried too much.

Even the wine didn’t help during the holidays. Mom began to get irritable around Thanksgiving and by Christmas she’d progress to morose. I had one hazy memory of a merry Christmas—Mom, Dad and me beside a sparkling tree; their laughter as I careened back and forth on a spring-mounted rocking horse necklaced with a red bow. The last Christmas we spent together, I was three. Every year, when the first tinsel and fake snow appeared in department store windows, I called up that memory and turned it over and over in my mind to keep it alive.

Mom always feigned good cheer as we opened our gifts, but there was no light in her eyes and they sagged at the corners like the cushions on our secondhand sofa. The only sparkle came when she opened my handmade gift.

Since I never had money to shop, I’d continued the tradition initiated by my first grade teacher, who helped us make a felt-wrapped, glitter-spangled pencil holder from an orange juice can. Mom had made a fuss over it—after I explained what it was—and her fate was sealed. In second grade, the homeroom mother provided red-and-green strips of polyester which I dutifully wove into a pot holder, perhaps the single ugliest handicraft ever committed. In third, we framed our school photos in plaster of paris, painted gold, and in fourth grade Mr. Burns helped us tie-dye T-shirts and print them with autumn leaves. Our fifth-grade teacher, an unartistic sort, abandoned us to our own devices. I panicked.

Cincy, as usual, provided the answer. From a high shelf in her cluttered closet, she produced a sand bucket full of tiny seashells. “I picked them up at the beach one summer when Mom and I went to the ocean,” Cincy told me. She dumped them onto the bedspread, sand and all.

In her mother’s sewing box, Cincy found a gold metallic string left over from the sixties when Lenora strung love beads. Cincy often wore them to school. Digging deeper in the box, I claimed a piece of thin black cord, soft and shiny like satin. It was the perfect contrast to the delicate chalkiness of the shells.

Every day that autumn, as the afternoons shortened and the evenings chilled, we sat cross-legged on Cincy’s bed and strung the scrolled, pastel treasures into necklaces for our moms. The project went slowly. Most shells required tiny holes bored with the tip of a screw before we could string them. Lenora accepted her banishment from the room with good humor, and I saw her only when we arrived after school or when she called us out for supper. It was that December, when we were almost eleven, that Cincy told me about her father.

Accustomed to an all-female world, I hadn’t thought to wonder about the missing male in her family. At my house, fathers were a taboo subject. But one evening as we prepared to work on the shell necklaces, Cincy moved a pile of rumpled clothes on her dresser and knocked over a picture of a man in camouflage clothes.

The picture bore an inscription at the lower right: “To Lenora, with love. PFC Harley Jaines.” I picked it up. “Who’s that?”

“That’s my dad,” Cincy said matter-of-factly. “He was killed in the Vietnam war.”

The young man in the photo was dark-complexioned, and even with his military haircut, I could tell his hair was ink-black. He stood against a backdrop of foliage as dense as the wilderness on Lenora’s sunporch.

“He kind of looks like you,” I said.

“He was half Cherokee. Which makes me one-quarter.”

“How did he get killed? I mean, was he shot?”

“Nobody knows,” she said. “He was reported missing in action. His body was never found.”

She laid the picture on the bed beside us while we bored and strung the tiny shells. PFC Harley Jaines smiled up at me, proud and straight, and I wished my father had been killed in a war, instead of deserting us. I had no photo of him.

“They went to college together, in California,” Cincy told me. “Mom’s parents divorced when she was in high school, and she got a job and lived by herself. She had a scholarship for college but she had to work, too. She was a waitress in the Student Union.”

I’d never heard of a Student Union, but I could hear the echo of Lenora’s words in the story Cincy told, so I kept quiet, craving this glimpse into her past.

“My dad worked there, too,” Cincy said, “only he wasn’t my dad then. He worked in a big room where they had pool tables. He’d come over to the café and talk to Mom and drink Cokes, and they fell in love.”

In my mind, the image rose up in black and white, like an old movie. “Then what happened?”

Cincy slipped a shell on her string and reached for another. “Harley didn’t like school, so he dropped out and got a job building houses. Then he got drafted.”

“What’s drafted?”

“Called into the Army, to fight in the war. Mom didn’t believe in it—the war, I mean—and she tried to get him to run away to Canada. But he wouldn’t. He went away to get trained, then came back for three days. Then he got on a ship and went to Vietnam.” Her voice turned confidential. “She never saw him again.”

“Oooh. That’s so sad. But if she never saw him again, how—”

“Pretty soon she found out she was pregnant.” Cincy’s eyes flashed up at me, mischievously. “So guess what they’d been doing those three days!”

My face turned hot and Cincy giggled, bouncing the bed. “She wrote to him and they were going to get married when he came home. But Harley was reported missing in 1963, the year I was born.”

My mouth fell open. She seemed pleased that I was properly impressed.

She leaned forward, whispering. “I’m illegitimate. A love child. Mom says not to tell anyone because some people wouldn’t understand.”

“I’ll never tell anybody,” I promised.

“The same year I was born,” Cincy said, “Mom’s father—my grandfather—committed suicide. Shot himself right in the ear! He left her some money, so she loaded me and all her stuff in the old Volkswagen—the same one we have now—and started driving.”

I pictured the two of them, alone on the road—just like my mom and me. Only Cincy had been just a baby.

“When she came to Shady River, she bought this house with the money my grandfather left. People thought she was a war widow and they were real nice to us, so she used Harley’s last name and pretended they’d been married.”

My chest ached with a sweet, sad longing. Haltingly, I explained that my mother and I, too, had come to Shady River alone, looking for a place to settle.

Cincy grasped the parallel at once and embraced it with characteristic vocabulary. “Fate brought us both here!” she said, her dark eyes shining. “We were destined to be best friends forever.”

The power of my emotions embarrassed me, and I averted my eyes.

“Yeah,” I said. “Forever.” And concentrated on boring a hole into the peach-colored shell in my trembling hands.

On the Thursday before Christmas we had snow. Cincy left school early to visit her grandmother in Seattle. She wouldn’t be back until Sunday, the day before Christmas Eve.

My mom had to work Saturday and Sunday, so I spent the long, gray days home alone, wrapped up in a blanket with my Laura Ingalls Wilder books. The evenings were even lonelier, with Mom at the lowest ebb of her holiday funk.

On Sunday evening Cincy phoned. “I’m back!” Her voice was bubbly, full of adventure and holiday spirit.

Mine was envious. “Did you have fun?”

“The airplane ride was cool. Grandma’s kind of a pain—she’s always nagging at Mom. But she gave me lots of stuff. Some of it’s weird, but there’s this hood with a long muffler attached, and it’s lined with fur. Wait’ll you see it.”

She paused, as if noticing my silence. “So what’ve you been doing?”

“Absolutely nothing.”

“Is your mom home?”

I had no secrets from Cincy. “Three, six, nine …”

“Your mom drank wine,” she finished, giggling. “Good! Then she’ll let you come up! Ask her and call me back. I’ll meet you at the bridge.”

The night was crystalline, with diamond-nugget stars and a crescent moon bright enough to illuminate the snow. Bursting from the oppressive bungalow into the sharp beauty of the night,

I felt like a prisoner set free in a fantasy land. I couldn’t keep from running.

I had stuffed my pajamas in one pocket of my blue car coat and my toothbrush and hairbrush in the other. With the hood buttoned under my chin and Mom’s black boots over my ten-nies, I felt snug and insulated from the cold. The air bit my lungs as I whooped and howled huge puffs of steam toward the moon.

After a block I slowed to a walk, tired out by the extra baggage of boots and padding. On a rise I turned and looked back at the lights of the village. Red and green dotted the edges of scattered roof lines; a church steeple ascended in tiny white sparkles. All was silent. As I stood panting warm air onto tingling fingers, a carillon began its wistful chime: “O come, all ye faithful, joyful and triumphant …”

Somewhere far off a dog barked, and my vision shimmered as I turned toward the river again, my boots crunching through the snow.

The steel arches above the bridge framed it in a latticework of white. From my end, I could see Cincy entering the other, a dark red blotch against the snowy rise beyond. On the darkened hillside, Rockhaven’s sunporch glittered with holiday lights like a jewel nestled in black velvet.

“Merry Christmas! Ho, ho, ho!” Cincy shouted. Her husky voice echoed from one riverbank to the other.

I laughed aloud, delight welling up until I thought I’d explode in a shower of stars.

Neither of us ran to the center of the bridge. Instead, we paced off the distance like graduates, or soldiers bearing the casket of a fallen friend. At the center of the bridge Cincy opened her padded arms and mitten-clad hands and we bear-hugged, two snowmen giggling with the secret of life. She was wearing the fur-lined hood her grandmother had given her and she looked like a snow princess.

We turned and looked out across the slow-moving water. It was too beautiful to talk about, and too cold, so we leaned on the railing in silence.

Finally, Cincy clapped me on the back with her red wool paw. “Let’s go home before we freeze, Gwendolyn. Your teeth are chattering.”

She was always making up dramatic names to call me. “Quite so, Alexandra,” I said.

“Follow me, Rapunzel.”

“Lead on, Sarsaparilla!”

Holding our sides, we laughed and stumbled all the way up the hill to Rockhaven.

When my mother opened the tissue-wrapped box and saw the pale swirls of salmon and ivory nestled on their bed of cotton, her mouth dropped open. After so many crude and childish gifts, this one was a shock. She glanced at me quickly.

“I made it. Cincy gave me the seashells.”

Her fingers lifted the necklace slowly, touching each unique link. “It’s beautiful, Roberta! Like something from an expensive jewelry store.”

I beamed, my ego bursting. This must be what people meant when they said it was better to give than to receive.

Mom slipped the necklace over her head, lifting her frizzy hair so the shells wreathed her neck and hung down over the sweatshirt she wore for pajamas.

It was Christmas Eve, our traditional time for exchanging gifts. We had eaten supper, put on our pajamas and made hot chocolate, then come to the tree. We never did play the Santa game. After the rocking horse year, Mom always put my gifts under the tree early. Maybe our ritual let her avoid memories of Christmas mornings with my father. Whatever the reason, I liked opening gifts after dark much better than in the cold light of morning, when the tree lights looked pale and hungover.

As usual, three gifts waited under the tree for me, only one for Mom. Before we moved to Shady River, she used to get something in the mail from her sister Olivia, the only relative she ever admitted to having. But we hadn’t heard from Aunt Olivia in years.

The Christmas of the shell necklace was special for another reason, too. After I’d opened my two boxes of clothes and one containing a new mystery book, Mom told me to put on my shoes and coat.

“What for?”

She smiled and leaned toward me, her eyes wide. “You have one more present, and it was too big to get in the house.” She seemed excited while we scrambled into our wraps.

Cold wind sneaked under the tail of my nightgown, molesting my bare legs as my mother led me out through the carport to the backyard. It was a small area, unfenced, that bordered an alley used by garbage trucks. I never went out there in wintertime. In the snow-lit night I saw next to the house a large shape covered with a sheet of plastic and an old quilt. I gasped, hoping beyond hope that it was what I thought it was.

Mom helped me pull away the covering. There in the moonlight stood a bicycle. Even in the darkness I could tell it was metallic red.

“I can’t believe it! This is so cool!”

“It’s not new, but it doesn’t have a scratch on it,” she said. “Look.” She reached over and squeezed the rubber bulb on an old-fashioned horn attached to the handlebars. It made a sound like a lost Canada goose.

The horn would have to go, but I didn’t say so then. Stamping my feet in the snow, my teeth chattering, I ran my hands over the silver handlebars, the red fenders. I still couldn’t believe it was real.

I never asked for specific Christmas presents because we were always short on money, but I wasn’t above hinting. For three years I’d dropped hints about a bike and finally given up. This year I’d started on contact lenses, though the eye doctor said there was no sense getting them until I was fifteen. I figured a four-year head start was none too soon. The bike proved my theory.

“Are you sure we can’t get it in the house?” I said.

Mom shrugged. “Maybe the two of us can.”

She brought the quilt while I rolled my new bike through the carport. We hefted it up the two steps and into the kitchen, where it left wet marks on the linoleum. The kickstand was missing, so I leaned the handlebar against the kitchen cabinet and inspected every gleaming inch of my incredible gift. Mom watched me, smiling.

I didn’t know how she’d managed the money, and I didn’t care. I didn’t want to know anything that might diminish my joy.

“Thanks, Mom. I love it.”

I hugged her, still looking at the red bike and thinking I could hardly wait to show Cincy. I’d learned how to ride on her bike.

But I couldn’t do that tonight, so we popped corn and Mom opened a bottle of wine while I wiped the bike tracks from the floor. We curled up in blankets on the sofa and watched television together until we fell asleep.

When I awoke it was light and a church program was on TV. Mom’s blanket lay empty at the other end of the sofa. I smelled bacon and waffles, and then I remembered the bike.

I wrapped my blanket around me and shuffled into the kitchen. “Merry Christmas,” she said. “Breakfast’s ready.” She ate her waffle dry, like toast, and had wine instead of apple juice.

By midmorning, Mom was beyond caring when I put on my coat and rode my new bike through quiet streets toward the river. Leftover snow lay in brownish-gray heaps along the roadside. Not a car was stirring, the children still inside playing with their Christmas toys.

O little town of Bethlehem, how still we see thee lie, the church bells played. The hopes and fears of all the years are met in thee tonight.

On my new bike, in the crystalline morning with my friends’ house in view, I couldn’t have said why I was crying.