Some Things That Stay Read online

  We file into the hall and down the steps to the first floor, where all the classes are jammed up together waiting to file down the steps to the basement. I am pressed up against a glass cabinet with the sports trophies. Dozens of trophies and plaques proclaim Mayville to be second or third place in baseball, football, and wrestling. Considering there are hardly enough boys in the tenth, eleventh, and twelfth grades to even make a football team, I guess they did pretty good. Plus with everyone missing practice for Boy Scout meetings, it’s amazing they placed at all.

  With a minimum of shoving and stepping on feet, we all arrive in the basement, lined up against the damp, clammy walls of the boiler room and hallways. We crouch down and cover our heads with crossed arms. Way down at the end of the hall I see my sister with her class. A few of the smaller children are crying, but not Megan. I don’t see my brother, who probably is crying. I’m not scared at all. It’s a drill, like all the rest have been. It had better be. It would be so embarrassing to die in this stupid town in a boiler room with a bunch of third-place football players and hiccuping girls in poodle skirts. This is not where I want to die. I don’t know where I want to die, but I’m not there yet.

  The siren stops. It stops so suddenly it’s as if we have gone deaf, and everyone holds their breath; I can feel lungs expand on both sides of me, right through the bodies pressed against mine. We wait as long as we can, listening for the whine of a falling bomb, then exhale, words tumbling out of our mouths, like “Oh,” and “Ah,” and “Told you so,” and for a minute I don’t even realize I have said something, until the girl next to me says, “Yeah, I thought so too.” She laughs softly, like little bubbles rising to the surface of water. All around me, kids are laughing and nudging each other. They are thinking about the rest of the day being right there for them, like a frosted cake on a platter. I get this funny feeling, like a rush of having too much, like I actually want to hug the hiccuping girl next to me, and it hits me, this weird thought: I don’t like anyone, because I’m only going to move away, but since I’m not going to let that happen ever again, I can like people if I want to.

  The teachers tell us to stand up and file back to our classes. I turn to smile at the girl beside me, but she is talking to someone else. I look for my sister, but she is gone. As I head up the steps, I see my brother. His eyes are all red and he turns away so I can’t see his face. Such a sissy. When we get to our classroom, the teacher tells us to sit down and finish our essay. We have ten minutes left. I finish it in five. These kids are pretty stupid.

  I listen to my parents talk when they don’t know it. Late at night, when they think we are all asleep, I creep to the top step and sit down carefully so the boards don’t squeak. Sometimes I can catch only a few words, other times their voices float right up to me.

  By the time I sit on the top step tonight, they are already in the middle of some conversation. The acoustics in this house are good, maybe because of all the bare wood floors. I can hear everything perfectly.

  “All I’m saying is this isn’t what I expected,” my mother says. She sounds weary, as if the words are an effort. She coughs, then goes on. “The house is fine, more than fine. I really like it. I’ve really liked them all. What I mean is, this isn’t what I expected when we left the city. Not that I miss it. It was full of stuffed shirts and stuffed minds—even those who pretended to disagree. But what I’m wondering is, haven’t we become … aren’t we now just like them? We were going to live in beautiful places, immerse ourselves in the land. We were going to live for the moment. In the moment. In the land. But that hasn’t happened. The cow, she’s just a pet really, and the beef cattle, we have nothing to do with them. We’re just like baby-sitters. That’s all we do. Baby-sit homes. It’s like baby-sitting somebody else’s children, Stuart. Finally you want your own. I want to have some effect on something. I don’t want to just move the furniture around, I want to buy some. I want to plant a perennial garden. I want to run for town council.”

  There is a long pause. My father likes to think before he speaks. Then he says things that sound final, and he thinks they are.

  “No,” he says. “It’s not like we planned. But it was your idea I give up teaching. If it weren’t for you I would never have believed I could earn a living from painting, that I could make money doing something I love. You said it never mattered if we owned a house, or a fancy car. You said I was a great painter. And I believed you, in everything, and here we are. I can’t go back. I couldn’t teach math anymore. Too much has changed. And I wouldn’t want to. I love what I do. What you showed me I could do.” My mother starts to interrupt, but he talks over her. “I don’t paint what’s popular. It’s a miracle I sell what I do. But landscapes are what I love. And not everyone likes this new modern crap. Splatter art. It can’t last. I paint what I see. I need to see the land, spread out, open, free from cities and smog. You can’t deny me that, can you?”

  She sighs. “That’s not what I meant. I mean, I just need to take a long, deep breath, and maybe here is the place to do that.”

  There is another long pause. His pauses drive me nuts. “It is beautiful here, Liz, but if I have to move on, find someplace new that will help me grow as a painter, you’ll come, won’t you? You’re not saying you won’t come?”

  “I’m just saying I’d like to talk about it.”

  “Fine. We will. But not now. Let’s just enjoy it right now. We’ll talk about it. I promise.”

  A long pause, then he speaks again. “Come, here. Come on over here.”

  From the lack of further conversation, I assume she does.

  The only other time I ever heard them disagree about anything other than politics was about a year ago. My father was trying to convince my mother to let him paint Megan. Nude. Megan had just turned seven. She has blond-white hair the color of the winter sun, and light-blue eyes. She has legs like a gazelle and a little heart-shaped butt. She is fragile-looking and plays this feature to the hilt. She is quite the actress.

  “She’s too shy,” my father said, as part of his argument. “Posing nude will help free her inhibitions. She hides from life. She thinks she is incapable of so much. Through my eyes she will see what a solid body she has, that she’s beautiful and …”

  “Crap,” my mother said. “Sometimes you can convince yourself of such crap, Stuart. You want to paint Megan because she’s at that perfect age. Flawless. Well, forget it.”

  “But don’t you see …”

  “I see enough. Not another word.”

  He was silent. After five minutes or so he asked her what she thought about something McCarthy had said. He knew that would change her mood. At least she’d be mad at someone else. Being atheists, with McCarthy pointing his finger at everyone, made us all angry, me more scared than angry.

  I didn’t like thinking about him being out there, making plans to have us put away. He was like the boogeyman. I tiptoed back to bed.

  I lay in bed, long after my parents had gone to sleep, wondering at what age my body left its flawless stage. I touched my breasts, trying to remember them flat. Our family never cared much about nudity. It was not a big deal if one of us walked from the shower to a bedroom without covering up. We sometimes peed with the door open, or walked around looking for a shirt. I knew what a penis looked like, both my brother’s and my father’s. I knew bodies changed, grew hairy, breasts sagged. Yet I could not figure out what was wrong with me, why he didn’t ask to paint me. I would have posed willingly.

  From that night on I covered myself up, never again walking nude around the house. I was embarrassed by my body. I imagined I had a scar that never healed right. You could see the sutures.

  Four

  Tuesday, the eighth of June, my birthday, is Spirit Day at school. You are supposed to wear your class T-shirt, the one you got last year, and green or white pants or skirts. If you weren’t here last year, you could have ordered a class shirt right before Easter break. Too late for us. Too bad. I bet the dead boy’s cl
ass T-shirt is upstairs, in our attic. I think about him a lot today. As my mother carries in the cake and everyone sings me “Happy Birthday,” I imagine him sitting on this chair to blow out his candles on his birthday, not knowing he would be dead before his next cake. I wonder what he wished for.

  As I blow out the candles I feel a puff of air on the back of my neck and turn around quickly, sure I will catch sight of him. But if he’s here, he’s stuck up in the attic with his stuff, packed up and waiting like a wish.

  “Shit and Goddamn!” Brenda swears constantly; like a heartbeat it keeps her going forward. When she isn’t swearing she looks stuck for words. Swear words are vowels to her, an intrinsic part of spoken English.

  School is over. It ended yesterday with a party on the school’s front lawn, the band playing, egg and tuna sandwiches for everyone.

  Brenda will flunk if she doesn’t attend summer school. I have offered to help her with her studies. It’s something to do. I tell her to go and get her math book.

  I don’t want to go into her house. It looks dim and dusty in there when I look through the screen door, and her father is in there. I tell her we’ll study at the picnic table, even though the whole thing is just one mass of splinters being held together by a prayer.

  “Every math equation has a formula to solve it, or a series of formulas. The trick is to memorize the formulas.” I write the formulas for finding the area of a triangle, a circle, and a square. Then I go through solving some of the problems in her math book, real basic stuff. She isn’t even looking.

  “It’s not so hard, Brenda. Just give it a try.” I write out a simple problem.

  “Fuck it,” she says.

  No one swears in my family. I take a deep breath, absorbing the sound of fuck into my throat, rolling it around in my mouth. I position my mouth for the F sound, then stop, too afraid to actually say the word. I touch Brenda’s arm and she jerks as if I hit her.

  “Brenda, math is like a code. A game. You just need to know the rules.”

  “And fuck you too,” she says. She knocks the math book onto the ground and walks into her house.

  Fuck you, I whisper. I like the sound. Brenda has a lot to teach me, I think.

  As I turn around on the picnic-table bench and stand, facing the woods, there is a flash of red hair and the pale white movement of an arm. Rusty. He’s hidden now behind an oak, but a shoulder shows like a soft fleshy bump on the bark. He must be wearing one of those T-shirts with the sleeves cut off. As if I can see right through the tree, I imagine his eyes, blue with white eyelashes, blinking in nervousness. I imagine the way his body must be tense behind that tree, like a deer, ready to bolt. It’s exciting to be watched like this; I can feel my lips grin. I can feel my body. It’s a funny feeling, as if I never really knew it was there, or as if I’m naked right out here in the open. I walk away, slowly, not looking back until I cross the road. Then I can’t help it. I catch Rusty’s eyes just before they disappear behind the oak.

  The next day, Helen sits at our kitchen table, breaking the ends off of string beans. Her long reddish-brown hair is tied back in a thick braid and she is wearing a simple homemade dress of blue cotton. She’s at least five ten, but seems bigger because her hair is so thick and she has shoulders like platforms. Her hands are callused and her nails short. She is the opposite of calendar girls, and most likely boys think her homely, but I can’t take my eyes off Helen. She has something special. I guess, even though she’s large, I’d call it grace.

  Helen is helping my mother, not because my mother needs help but because Helen needs something to do at all times, unless, I suppose, she is praying.

  The Murphys are Baptists, and even though Brenda uses swear words when her parents aren’t around, I know she believes in God. Helen has taken belief a step further. She is determined to save us. My mother must have told Helen we’re atheists, because for the last week, as they poked holes in the ground with the tip of a pencil, dropped in the seeds, then smoothed the earth back over as if they were tucking them into bed, you could hear my mother’s voice like a man hammering the same nail, and the murmur of Helen’s voice, like water rolling over stones. A few years ago I’d be betting on my mother, but now I’m betting on Helen. It strengthens Helen’s belief to have it battered by my mother. She leaves our house standing straighter, more pious for her effort, sure she has won a minor battle toward our salvation. The funny thing is that when she leaves, my mother is sure she has won the day. Belief, even nonbelief, is a mighty thing to break down.

  “I’d like to take Tamara, Robert, and Megan to church with us this Sunday,” Helen says. She snaps a bean and puts it into the copper bowl in the center of the table.

  “I don’t think so,” my mother says. She drops a bean in the bowl.

  Helen snaps another bean, but this time, she pops it in her mouth. “I know you don’t believe in God, Mrs. Anderson, but your children should be exposed to all the options, so they have a choice. I won’t preach to them, just take them to church.” She keeps her eyes on my mother’s face. They have both stopped snapping beans.

  I have been drawing, using charcoals, trying to capture Helen’s hands. What I’ve drawn looks like a deformed crab. I don’t know why I bother. I look at my mother. Her eyes look bruised. Tired as she is, she can’t resist a good argument.

  “You will preach to them, Helen. You always do. It’s part of your religion. It’s compulsive. They’ve bred it into you. You probably don’t even know you’re doing it.” She says this all kindly, but firmly. She likes Helen.

  “I merely point out God’s offerings to them, like these beans.” Helen scoops up a handful and holds them out, an obvious answer to all my mother’s doubts. “Just because you bought these in a store doesn’t mean they didn’t come from God. Surely, when your garden prospers, when you can pull the rewards from the earth, you must wonder at the miracle of food coming from soil.”

  My mother takes a slow breath and lets it out just as slowly. She has a gift for this; she has made an art form of the long breath and the sigh that follows. “Helen, everything is a miracle, I don’t deny that. It’s a miracle that amphibians crawled out of the oceans to live on land. It’s a miracle apes evolved into Homo sapiens. It’s a miracle that birds fly. But it doesn’t mean there’s a God who controls it all. There is scientific evidence for evolution. Everything you believe comes from a book of fiction, written by fanatical people decades after the supposed events. There is no proof.”

  “I disagree,” Helen says. “The proof is right here, plain as day.” She places the beans back in the bowl, and smiles at me, a warm, sweet smile. I smile back.

  Helen looks at my mother. “You have such bright children, Mrs. Anderson. It’s because you have allowed them so much knowledge. You and Mr. Anderson were teachers. You must believe in learning everything life has to offer.”

  My mother nods. She looks a bit nervous, as if she has missed a beat. Helen continues. “All I’m saying is I’d like them to learn something about my religion. Religion is a powerful force in the world today. They are going to be at a disadvantage if they know nothing about it. Certainly, it can’t hurt them to learn something new. They can make up their own minds what they think of it, can’t they? You’re not afraid of that, are you?”

  My mother looks at me. I try to look bored, indifferent.

  “Fine,” my mother says. “They can go with you if they want. No preaching. They are just to observe. I doubt they will want to go. You may not pressure them. Just ask.”

  “Thank you,” Helen says. She looks at me. My mother looks at me. “Would you like to come to church with me?” Helen asks.

  “Yeah. Do I have to wear a nice dress?”

  “Yes, you really should.”

  “Okay,” I say. I’m excited. God has been this big mystery. To my mother and father, God is a fraud, an impostor, a superstition for the masses. The word God is like a bad taste. But for a while now, I have wanted to see what God is all about for myself.
I could be missing out on something. According to Helen, my soul is involved. I don’t know if my mother believes in a soul. She’s never brought it up. But I like the word. I like the implication of it. I like the way Helen talks about my soul, as if it’s something she loves. I want to go to church to find out if my soul is real, if God is real. But if He is, it will break my mother’s heart.

  My mother begins to snap the beans again. Her face is calm, but she breaks the beans roughly. She has fought against God, time and time again. She has alienated us from our classmates all our lives, and now she has given in, all because Helen found the right argument. Helen is very smart. Or maybe God is helping her.

  “I’ll go ask Robert and Megan if they want to come too,” Helen says as she stands up.

  “I’m sure they won’t,” my mother says to the beans. “They aren’t quite as enamored of you as Tamara is.” This isn’t said with the same kindness the conversation started out with. My mother doesn’t like losing.

  Robert and Megan say yes.

  My mother stands by the fence separating our yard from the cow pasture. She’s looking away from the house, away from me. I walk over and lean on a post.

  The bull glares at us.

  “It’s okay I go to church with Helen?”

  “Look,” she says. “The cattle on the hill, they look like spotted clouds from here. Cows in the shape of clouds. How silly. That makes the grass a green sky. I guess it’s all how you look at things.” She laughs. It’s a sharp laugh, a little escape of something pent up inside her. I know how that feels.