Category: Fiction

I think I must like writing fiction that is too long to publish by itself but not long enough to be anything else useful. I’ve added a nice PDF of the story below, or you can keep on reading after the jump. I hope you enjoy.

There But For You

C.B. Crenshaw

1.

Dad used to come in from the fields around six o’clock. Whether grass-stained and muddy from tousling with the cows in summer, or humbled by cold in a threadbare coat and anxious for the fire on shadow-dark winter evenings, by six-thirty without fail he would call his girls down to the parlor at the back of the house. “Well, tell me all about it,” he’d say from the old wine-colored armchair in front of the TV, and the three girls, in order from oldest to youngest, would tell him about their day while he sipped on an Old Milwaukee.

Belinda, the heroically aged sister, would recount spring afternoons spent driving around the neighboring farms with her friends from over on the high school side of the town’s only school. Leaning against the jamb of the hallway door twirling a curl of chestnut blonde hair around her finger, she’d tell Dad about autumn apple cakes in home economics, basketball games in the gym. After dinner, she’d clear the table and work on alterations for the neighbors beneath the dining room’s harsh incandescent bulb, turning her social gifts, her attention to detail, into money she could spend on little treats—new clothes, makeup, records.

When Belinda graduated, fifth in a bumper class of twenty-six, she took a trunk full of beautiful skirts and blouses cut from Simplicity patterns over to the State university to study nursing the next fall. She valued the sweaters that Mom knit the most, though, spending a few lonely nights in her freshman year on the bottom bunk of a dormitory bed rubbing the purled stitches between her fingers for comfort, back and forth, back and forth.

Patti, the middle girl, shared Dad’s love of work. Where Dad saw money on the hoof, though, Patti saw life. She’d tell Dad about a splinter in Roderigo’s hoof, about how the great horse nearly pranced with relief down by the cow pond when she extracted the jagged pine shard from his burly hoof. Roderigo was born at the flooded pinnacle of a rainy June and named by the daughters collectively after they had spent the month inside passing around a copy of Little Women from the church sale. Ever since that rainy summer, Patti and the quarter horse shared a unique bond. She was his special person.

Taller than Belinda and thin as a rail, Patti towered over the girls in the junior high hallway. Desperately shy of the spotlight that always seemed to shine on her by virtue of her height, she suffered junior high more than most and preferred, as a consequence, the company of Roderigo or the cows to that of her few friends at school. One day the farm would be hers.

Little Ardene was dad’s favorite. Belinda and Patti knew it, with a sense of smoldering primal resentment they could never acknowledge but never quite escape. Mom knew it, too. She tried to make up for it with strict but loving equanimity, but she had her own preference, too. Ardene for mom was no Belinda, but neither, alas, was Patti a baby like Ardene. Mom made sure all the girls were treated equally at Christmas, though, and she kept a careful eye on their body language and their facial expressions to make sure they didn’t feel slighted. By junior high, Belinda and Patti were experts at obscuring their feelings in order to avoid mom’s awkward attempts to intervene on their behalf with dad. If they showed even the slightest sign of resentment when dad and Ardene shared a private joke, say, or when he made a bowl of ice cream for himself and gave half to Ardene while they served themselves, mom would cough and ask, “would you girls like some cake?”

Ardene knew she was the favorite, but there was nothing she could do about it. She reveled in dad’s attention, jumping onto his knee at the daily run-down, sitting in front of his armchair as though it were a place of honor, watching Ed Sullivan after dinner. He loved the other girls too, of course. Out in the fields he would think of them at times during the day—the look Patti would get when she pulled weeds in the garden would flash across his mind, maybe, or he might remember some joke Belinda told at the dinner table—and a sharp pang of joy would nearly double him over in the tractor saddle. Ardene was something else, though. A little soul to match his own.

His mind had been made up since Ardene was a baby, quietly nursing at the dinner table and looking around the room with an air of intelligence he hadn’t seen, or probably hadn’t looked for, in the other children. The others he had baby-talked when he took them in his arms, showering them with awkward goo-goos in front of the TV, but with Ardene he spoke as though showing an old friend around the house. He took her on the porch and pointed out the constellations he knew in the night sky. He pointed at football players on the screen and told her about touchdowns.

For her part, Ardene repaid dad’s care for her dignity with care for his. She did not cry. She did not make a fuss. She learned to read and use the toilet almost preternaturally young, as though these were both chores to be gotten out of the way as quickly as possible. She did her homework as joyously as Patti tended the horses and Belinda worked the world.

And so it went, while Ardene worked her way through the ranks of elementary school, Patti stacked 4-H trophies on the mantle, and Belinda pledged Delta Rho at State. She switched her major twice, from nursing to communications, first, where she spent a boiling hot summer semester in technical writing crafting machine manuals and corporate memos before finally settling on journalism, which dad couldn’t quite understand but thrilled mom to no end.

 

2.

Ardene was in seventh grade when she started to realize she wasn’t like the other girls in her class. They were positively “boy crazy” — a term she had heard mom use from time to time, as in, “Belinda’s gone absolutely boy crazy” — but she wasn’t, and this started to worry her. One Tuesday afternoon, for example, Sharon Mecklen passed a note across the aisle in English class confessing that she liked Ronnie McClendon. Ardene wrote “YUCK” on the paper and passed it back the way one should, but when Sharon asked “well, who do you like then?” in a swirly script Ardene couldn’t think of anyone. She circled YUCK with angry pencil strokes and passed the note back with a conclusive air. Always the dutiful friend, Sharon told her after class that she was better off anyway, because boys are nothing but trouble. Ardene wasn’t sure, though. Later that night she got a sheet of paper out of her bright orange binder and made a list of all the boys in her homeroom so she could tally up their pros and cons to determine if she liked them or not. It was an honest list, perhaps a little too nice to some of them–especially Brian Fischer, who asked her in the third week of school whether she had started using curse words yet now that they were in god-damned junior high school–but at the end of the page she could not settle on anyone to like. Not like that.

Over the next few weeks, Ardene was boy crazy in her own way. She made a list of all the boys in the school, not just her homeroom, carefully weighing the strength of their character against their poor sense of humor, perhaps, or their ability to play basketball against their ungainly hands and feet. Next to some of the names she simply wrote “???” to signify that she didn’t know them very well–hard but not impossible in such a small town–and this gave her some room to hope. Maybe if she knew them better, she thought, she would start to like someone.

So for a while school became a sort of anthropological experiment. As the autumn turned to winter, Ardene took mental notes on all the boys in her classes, collecting new data for the list and carefully tallying the results in her room after dinner. She made new friends, even, out on the wind-chilled foursquare court or in the far corner of the lunchroom where the kids who lived in town ate together. She introduced herself to strange ninth graders, determined to gather data from even the most introverted subjects on her list. After three weeks, the first snow had fallen and still there were no candidates.

Finished with the list, Ardene set down her pencil and puzzled over the results for a few minutes. Andy Williams Christmas songs drifted into the bedroom from the radio out in the parlor while she thought it all over. In spite of what the other girls in her school were feeling, her mother’s cryptic warnings, the exhortations of magazines on the rack at the IGA, and the clinical descriptions of the books in the library, she was not boy crazy. Convinced, though by no means satisfied, Ardene folded her anthropological notes into a neat little square and placed them carefully at the darkened bottom of the steel wastebasket in her bedroom. She joined mom and dad in the parlor.

The next morning, after Ardene left for school, her mother found the careful little square in the wastebasket while cleaning the house. She unfolded it on her daughter’s twin bed next to the desk and sat down on the corner of the bed. A smile stole across her face, warming the wintry silence of the daytime house, as she read up and down the list. Dad’s pet was growing up. She carried the notes downstairs, separate from the rest of the trash, and sat down with a cup of coffee to read them over again. She marveled at Ardene’s attention to detail, the naïve brilliance of her “pro” and “con” categories, and suffered from her own love pangs as she imagined the child seated at her desk, brows furrowed and pencil poised, gathering her thoughts by lamplight. She folded the notebook papers back into Ardene’s neat little square and placed the bundle thoughtfully beneath her own journal in the cedar-scented depths of her nightstand drawer.

So Ardene is boy crazy, she thought. Life moves forward. Mom smiled, basking in the warm glow of her daughter’s work on a cold morning. She finished her coffee. This was a secret she would share and not-share with Ardene. A mother’s special privilege.

 

3.

Having thoroughly investigated the situation, using the most scientific methods, Ardene was concerned about the results. If she didn’t like boys, then what, or who, did she like? She knew, in a vague way, that it was bad not to like boys. Lying on her bed one evening she had overheard her mom on the phone with Modelle Owen, for example. They were talking about Elizabeth Bright, who owned the farm store, and mom said, “you know, I saw her over in Walkerton wearing blue jeans and a flannel shirt last year. She looked like George.” Mom said Elizabeth Bright was “one of them, you know.” She was silent for a moment and said, then, “oh yes, I’m sure of it. It’s a shame too.”

The conversation moved on after that, but Ardene puzzled over what “one of them” could be. Maybe mom meant “one of the guys,” and that wasn’t actually so bad. Ardene imagined Elizabeth Bright–a young woman with blazing green eyes and a constellation of freckles on her forehead beneath her neatly pulled-back brown hair who worked down at the IGA–chatting with the men down at the lumber yard. Every once in a while in this fantasy Elizabeth Bright would press her finger against one nostril and blow air loudly through her nose, like Peter Wendtorf or Floyd Owen, while expressing strong opinions about the Vikings or the Twins. The thought made Ardene smile as she drifted off to sleep.

 

4.

Ardene and her mother both more or less forgot about the anthropological study as the pastures surrounding the house emerged, patchy and brown, from the snow. The family marked the Groundhog’s shadow on the calendar in the kitchen and moved on autopilot through blizzards and thaws, one after the other, for what felt like interminable weeks. Christmas was already a fading memory by the time the days started to warm enough for dad to take off his coat in the late morning.

Spring set in rapidly when it arrived, however. It displaced the winter overnight, it seemed, as though a celestial finger had snapped to set the world aright. New grass emerged, brilliantly green, from the thawing earth, and the cows jaunted out to the back fields in front of dad’s tractor, where they thrilled in the mid-day warmth and lolled beneath the myrtle trees in the afternoon. A little cloud hung over the family, however, dampening their spirits for the spring.

 

5.

The cause was an episode that played out over the Christmas break. Belinda’s Christmas break started in the second week of December. Dad drove down to the university, anxious and happy in his old pickup truck, on the day before. His plan, he said, was to go early and help Belinda pack. He would stay with an old FFA friend who had moved down there for school and never left. Everyone at home knew he was excited, though – just as excited as they were — and mom did not begrudge him the extra day he would claim with their elder daughter down at the campus.

Dad sat in the parking lot by the basketball gym while Belinda finished her final exam. He met her at the dorm where, after a long hug by the door, they packed her things upstairs. It didn’t take very long, so they decided to head home as the sun went down, early on that late autumn day, rather than stay the extra night. Dad called his FFA buddy from the road and promised to stop by when he came back down in the New Year. They ate dinner at a warm but lonely IHOP on the road north and pulled into the driveway around 10:00 that night. The porch light was on. Dad roused the family, and they sat around the kitchen table catching up until midnight.

Belinda seemed pretty much the same to mom and dad, maybe a little more withdrawn and preoccupied. Ardene was too young to notice a difference. To Patti, however, there was a significant and distressing change in her older sister’s behavior. She had developed new turns of phrase, new ways of holding her face, twisting her hair. She laughed at inside jokes from her friends at school, talked about professors like they were just adults, rather than teachers. She mentioned a new friend named Beverly, her roommate from the dorm, early and often, as though she were an everyday presence in the family’s life. Beverly thinks he’s dumb, she’d say, or Beverly said back home they put up their Christmas tree after supper on Thanksgiving Day. The more Patti heard about Beverly, the less she liked her sister’s roommate. Beverly was too worldly, it seemed, to share such intimacies with Belinda. Beverly was from a suburb of Milwaukee—a far cry from the farm world of the Betzolds.

Patti thought at first that Belinda’s change was temporary. Dad and Belinda got here so late, Patti thought later that night, lying in her bed. She’s just tired and overwhelmed by the change of scenery. This thought gave her comfort enough to fall asleep. Just before drifting off, she determined to help Belinda come back into her old self first thing in the morning.

When she awoke the next morning to help feed the cows and horses like every day at 6:00, Patti planned to invite Belinda along. Before Belinda went off to college, on winter break sometimes she would join her younger sister and their father out in the barn. Dad would pour mugs of dark, sweet coffee for the three of them out of his dented green thermos and they would stand for a moment in the gray gloom listening to the heavy breathing of the cows while the kerosene heater glowed to life in the corner. When Patti awoke this morning, however, she found Belinda’s door closed and the space beneath still dark. She knocked gently an immediately regretted doing so. When Belinda didn’t answer, she cracked the door ever so slightly and peered inside. Belinda was hard asleep. Patti held the railing on the way down the stairs. They walked to the barn together, bracing themselves against the icy cold as the sun rose reluctantly over the east pasture.

When Patti came back in with dad a half-hour later, she thought it would be fun to tell Belinda all about the gossip from the Farm Store over in town while they had breakfast. She was disappointed to find her sister’s door still closed and her room lit only by the pale gray light of morning. Sitting at the kitchen table while dad and Ardene passed the crossword back and forth, she listened for Belinda’s footsteps upstairs, waiting for her door to open. She listened while mom cooked eggs and mixed dough for biscuits. She listened while commercials blared on the TV in the living room and thought it might be fun later if they could watch the morning talk shows. She listened while the family ate breakfast and mom shared the latest news from a phone call with her sister in Missouri. Still, there was no movement upstairs. A little pit of frustration grew in her stomach.

After breakfast, Patti gave up on the idea and read sullenly in her bedroom until late in the morning. Commercials cut into talk shows on the TV downstairs beat the quarter hours like church bells. Last summer, morning talk shows had been a guilty pleasure for Belinda, Patti, and Mom. Mom had carried the talk show torch alone since then, but Patti found herself sometimes at school daydreaming of those carefree summer mornings. Now the dramas unfolding downstairs made her anxious, as though each commercial break multiplied the distance between those summer days and the dreary winter outside. Patti finally heard faint stirrings in the room next door around ten thirty. Belinda’s door opened with a squeak and Patti listened to her footsteps as she trudged down the hall toward the bathroom. She waited a moment and then padded quietly downstairs to wait.

When Belinda came downstairs, she smiled at Patti on the sofa and said “coffee” like a zombie as she stumbled into the kitchen. This unraveled somewhat the painful little ball in Patti’s stomach. After a few moments—not to appear anxious, of course—she followed her sister into the kitchen, where she found Belinda reading the newspaper at the table. Mom cleaned up around the sink.

“Hey,” Belinda said, looking up from the political news, “I might regret this, as cold as it is, but I was wondering if you wanted to take a walk down to the pond with me in a little bit.”

The ball in Belinda’s stomach unraveled completely. “Oh, yeah!” she blurted out, “I’d love to.”

“Ok,” Belinda smiled, “let me finish my coffee.”

A half hour later they were wrapped up in jackets and scarves and walking across the yard. Their breath billowed in front of them like thick clouds of smoke in in the arctic air. After all the waiting, Patti did not know what to say. She walked across the yard and out onto the tractor path beside her sister in silence. For her part, Belinda looked around as though seeing things for the first time. Something about this made Patti even more sad and anxious than she was before the walk. How could this place, her life, both of which the two of them had so recently shared, be a memory? They made small talk eventually, about mom and dad and school the way everyone does after a long time apart, but Patti was distant. Belinda, entranced by the winter morning and warmed by the presence of family, hardly noticed.

At the pond, the two sisters stood beneath the willow tree where the cows huddled from the sun in summer. In July, the willow’s long branches and leaves seemed to murmur and gossip as they wrapped around one another in the warm wind over the limpid water below. In winter the tree stood resolute, holding its secrets from the steaming pond. After a few moments, Patti and Belinda returned to the house. Patti went upstairs to think it all over. Belinda sat at the table and wrote a message to Beverly describing the harsh beauty of winter on the farm.

Ardene had taken an interest in cooking around Halloween. Mom was delighted to share something from what she saw as her domain with her youngest daughter. On weekends and holidays, the two of them would sit down at the kitchen table after breakfast and decide what to cook for dinner. Most days the menu was simple, consisting of staples like spaghetti, Hamburger Helper, pot roast, or some variation of those, but today they had decided to prepare a special meal in honor of Belinda’s return: country-fried steak and mashed potatoes with snap peas and rhubarb pie.

While Patti brooded upstairs, Belinda watched soaps in the living room, and dad napped on the recliner, Ardene dashed around the kitchen at her mother’s command, reaching far under the counter for mixing bowls, standing on her tiptoes for the flour, turning the spice rack for garlic powder and pepper. She peeled potatoes, hammered beefsteak, chopped onions. Around 5:00, the buzzer on the oven announced the pie, ringing like a fire alarm throughout the house. A moment later Dad’s eyes opened on the recliner. He looked at Belinda and said, “I think it must be about that time.”

Patti was last to join the table. When she came into the room, she was surprised by a change at the table. Normally mom and dad sat side-by-side on one side of the long oval table, and the sisters sat facing them on the other side. Now, for some reason, dad and Ardene had swapped places. Sensing her surprise, dad said, “we thought we would give Ardene the seat of honor tonight for helping your mom cook such a nice dinner.” Mom, dad, and Belinda laughed while Ardene beamed. Patti chuckled weakly and took her seat next to dad.

Something about the change, on top of everything else, was deeply distressing for Patti. Looking at the family there, having fun without her, she felt a sort of lonely anger she had never known before. It was like a cold, dark emptiness deep inside. The feeling was frightening. She wanted to lash out, to tell Ardene to pull her nose out of mom and dad’s asses. She wanted to tell Belinda to go back to school, where she could pretend to be grown up and no one would care. She wanted to make faces at mom and dad and turn the table over.

Instead of making a scene, she stared at her mashed potatoes while the rest of the family talked about college. She forlornly picked at her food and was dismayed to find that it was actually pretty good. Of course Ardene would be good at this too, she thought. I bet mom did all the work anyway. She ate the beef and potatoes and loathed herself for finishing the plate. Then, out came the pie.

The pie was remarkable. Rhubarb pie was an occasion food, a formal thing mom would make for funeral receptions. It arrived at the table like a diva in the spotlight, the ceramic dish wrapped in a towel like swaddling for the journey from the cooling rack in the kitchen to the lazy Susan on the table.

“Can I cut everyone a piece of this?” dad asked, sliding the pie on a towel from the center of the table to his place on the kids’ side. He started cutting too-big pieces and dropping them on little white plates with scalloped edges as the family murmured with delight around the table. Patti watched the order in which he handed out slices with the same loathing she felt for the rest of the meal. Guest of honor Belinda got the first slice, Patti noticed, a heaping slab he slid sideways off of the spatula onto the little plate. “I don’t know how I will ever finish this,” she said, cutting into the point with a fork. Mom got the second slice, a somewhat daintier piece placed carefully at the center. Ardene came next, grinning unreservedly at the golden crust and pink filling on the fine plate.

Patti came last, before dad himself. She poked at the pie with a fork, unsettled by the anger and frustrated by her inability to control it. The rest of the family was so absorbed in the day and each other that they did not notice, thankfully, but there was a dark edge to this grace. Patti wanted to be noticed and ignored. She wanted to change everything about herself and nothing about everyone else. For months she had thought of Belinda with a dull ache, longing for the family to be together like this again; now that it was here, she wanted desperately to be as far away as possible.

While these confusing thoughts and feelings shook Patti, the rest of the family was finishing up a pie they all agreed was the finest they had ever shared. Mom finished her slice and flashed an approving smile at Ardene. Belinda announced that she was positively stuffed and pushed the little plate toward the center of the table. Only a few crumbs of crust remained. Ardene chewed with her mouth wide open, giggling at the happiness of it all. For his part, Dad slapped his stomach and leaned back in the chair. There was a little morsel of pie left on his plate. “Finish this for me, Ardene,” he said, sliding the plate in her direction. “What a treat this was.”

Something about the little piece left on the plate for Ardene pushed Patti over the edge. She dropped her fork on the plate with a clatter and pushed her chair back from the table. “Sorry, I need to be excused,” she said, nearly whispering from the struggle to speak rather than scream. She rushed from the dining room, stomped up the stairs, and closed the door to her bedroom upstairs audibly. Stunned silence hung in the air over the dinner table in her wake.

Five minutes later or so Patti heard a gentle knock on her door.
“I’m OK,” she said, lying on the bed and staring at the ceiling. “No need to come in.”
The door opened about a foot and mom stood on the other side casting a worried look over her middle daughter.
“Yes, OK,” she murmured gently, “I just wanted to make sure. Did something make you sick?”
“No,” Patti said, fighting to hold back tears, “I just don’t feel good.”
“Do you want to talk about it?” Mom asked, opening the door a little further.
“No, I’ll be fine,” Patti answered, her tears flashing to annoyance. “I don’t want to talk about it.”
“Alright,” mom reassured her, unflappable. “Well, I’ll be back in a little while to see if you’re feeling better.”
Patti turned her back to the room as mom shut the door noiselessly. A few moments later she heard her mother go slowly back down the stairs. All was quiet below. She pretended to sleep when her mother returned later that evening.

The next morning, Patti woke up later than usual. She hastened to the barn, coat flapping and shoes untied, to help dad with Roderigo and the cows. After trudging through the soft, new snow that had fallen on the yard overnight, however, she found the haybales full and the stalls already swept. Roderigo sauntered up to the gate at his stall to say hello. Patti wondered whether he had worried about her, whether he thought about her at all. The two of them stood there together in silent communion for a few minutes. Patti rubbed and scratched Roderigo’s head distractedly, thinking of all that had changed in such a short time. Occasionally the tawny brown horse would move his head just a little, guiding his favorite person’s hand to some new delight.

Back up at the house, dad was stacking wood in the side yard. Belinda was watching television while mom and Ardene read magazines on the couch. Patti went back upstairs without saying a word and shut her door.

Belinda stayed two more weeks as Christmas came and went, but nothing was ever quite the same. Patti’s anger and confusion cooled, but she was uncertain and ashamed of what had happened. She camped out in her room or spent time in the barn to think it over. Dad worked and napped. Ardene drew pictures at the kitchen table, passively listening to Belinda and mom as they talked about anything and everything that came to mind.

Belinda was glad to return to school in January. Next year, she thought, maybe I’ll just go home for a couple days at Christmas. That’s how it goes.

 

6.

Patti spent the days after her dinner table meltdown in solitary agony. At first, sitting cross-legged on her bed the next morning, the blamed Belinda. It was she, after all, who had gone off to college and came back changed. It was she who chose to stay up late now, watching infomercials on the TV until the station played the national anthem and ended the broadcast day rather than go to bed. Before, they had been a family accustomed to fall asleep in early darkness and wake up in early light, a household of ticking clocks and wood crackling in the stove on long winter nights. Such a small change seemed so inconsequential from the outside, Patti thought, but it might as well have been a change in the orbit of the moon. She had a right, she thought, to mourn so momentous—so treacherous—a change.

Another part of Patti refused to accept this point of view, however. Isn’t that what people are supposed to do, she asked herself, especially when they go off to college? If someone a month ago had asked Patti how she felt about her sisters growing up, she would have told them, fine, duh, that’s what happens, but now here it was and it hit her like a broadside volley from a battleship in one of the World War II documentaries dad liked to watch downstairs. By the end of the first day, then, sitting by herself stiff-backed on the milking stool next to the kerosene heater in the barn, she wasn’t so sure that any of this was Belinda’s fault.

Patti was just about to go inside and put on a happy face when she felt a cold spot expanding at the bottom of her stomach. She went inside, back up the well-worn stairs, to her bedroom to puzzle it over. After a half-hour or so, in which the source of the spreading pain did not reveal itself, she fell asleep facing the wall. The light overhead blazed, casting the room into harsh relief. She slept fitfully.

Later that night, Patti woke up in a panic, as though falling. Blinking in the bright overhead light, she realized with crystal clarity: If Belinda was growing up, so was she. So was Ardene. And so were mom and dad. One day they would shrink, too—all of them—and there was nothing anyone could do about it.

Growing up on the farm, she had known this of animals. That was why she took such loving care of the cows, horses, pigs, and other fellow-travelers who made their way to the family’s land. It was important to smooth their time, she had learned, to ease their burden and bestow upon them the gift of health until that tragic moment when they were forced to depart. In contrast to the animals, however, the people were permanent. They seemed to take care of themselves. The grim truth of life on the farm reinforced this essential contrast. Animals died, people lived.

If the people also died, what was any of it for?

Patti spent the rest of night listening to the TV downstairs. First, she listened to Ron Popeil selling the Pocket Fisherman, “so small it fits in your glove compartment.” Later, she listened to Time-Life selling The Sounds of the Seventies, “an unbelievable decade of sights and sounds.” Neither Abba nor Don McLean could comfort her as she fell into a deep sleep to the sound of Belinda traipsing up the stairs.

Patti’s terrible knowledge hardened, by breakfast, to a grim determination to distance herself from the inevitability of pain. If everyone was going to be taken away, she reasoned—especially if they chose to hasten it along by packing up their clothes and books and moving two hundred miles away and making new friends—better to get in front of the whole thing and detach from them now.

This made her feel a little better. In a few days, Belinda carried her suitcase back down the old stairs and climbed in the truck with dad. Patti let the rest of the family do the goodbye work and went out to the pond to stare at the steaming ice.

 

7.

After Belinda returned to school and the excitement of her visit ebbed, mom noticed the profound change that had come across her middle daughter. Patti had always been reserved, she thought, but she had never refused to join the family in its little rituals. She ate her dinner in near silence, listening keenly (mom surmised), but more like an anthropologist taking notes than a member of the family. She used to leave for school in the morning awkwardly, tramping down the driveway with her lunch box clanging and one sock pulled higher than the other. Now she did so glumly, quietly, but more composed. We all go through phases, mom thought, that’s just growing up.

A week after Belinda left, mom extended an olive branch to Patti. If she wanted to start dressing up, presenting herself to the world as a young lady, mom could get behind the change.

“I have a hair appointment at the salon next week,” she told Patti at the dinner table. “I talked to Cindy and she said they could squeeze you in if you want to join me.”

Ardene gazed wide-eyed at the offer, her head moving from mom to Patti and back. Even Belinda had not joined mom on her hair days. For her part, Patti shook her head, practically reeling in horror at the offer.

“OK,” mom said, careful to appear nonchalant, “the offer stands anytime.”

We all go through phases, she thought. Sometimes they are cruel.

 

8.

A family is a complicated organism. Its parts are thickly interwoven, strands and linkages stretching across time. Most of the time this complex creature is loose and flexible, but sometimes it is pulled taut. When one of its members undergoes a change as sudden and profound as that which overcame Patti, the others have no choice but to react.

Mom tried to tell herself, on one hand, that the change was temporary, a phase that would pass like the weather. Dad, on the other hand, worried that he was the cause of the freeze. Perhaps he gave too much attention to Ardene, he feared, at the expense of the others. Seeing Belinda over the break and sharing time with her as a young adult—a person in the world, after all, jus tlike him—strengthened this conviction. The stakes were too high, the payoff too substantial, to get it wrong. He resolved to show Patti more attention, to draw her closer to his heart in addition to his work. When this meant sharing more of his daytime life, the stratagem worked well. Patti absorbed his philosophy of the earth, of animals, plants, and people coexisting through work, like a dry sponge. He saw bits and pieces of the girl he had known shine through the freeze when they walked the fields. When he tried to share jokes with her at the dinner table, however, or invited her to join him on the couch in the evening, it was as though she peered at him through a museum case. It was frightening and frustrating by equal measure. Why don’t you snap out of it? he wanted to shout, why don’t you just grow up already? Later, after cooling down, he would think, I don’t like this phase. I’ll be glad to get my girl back.

Ardene felt the change, too. Cut off from both of her sisters, now she sensed her beloved father pulling away. He listened to her stories less attentively than before, she thought. One afternoon, in the middle of a frustrated search through the kitchen drawers for some batteries, he even told her to go play outside.

She had found a funny picture in a magazine and ran into the kitchen to show him. Usually eager to share whatever she brought him, this time he didn’t look up from his work. “Sorry, I’m a little busy right now,” he said, throwing birthday candles and spools of tape on the counter. “Why don’t you go outside and run around before it gets dark?”

Ardene understood, but it was the only time she could remember anything like that happening. He was back to his old ways later that evening, passing her chocolates from the little glass dish he kept on the table next to the chair, but now that the breach was there Ardene felt—rather than thought—that it would only grow. Maybe I’m getting a little too old for this, she sensed.

Ardene had already been spending more time with mom. Maybe, she felt rather than thought, maybe I should get to know myself a little better, too.

None of them realized it completely, but the family entered the new year considerably altered from what it had been at Thanksgiving. Each one of its relationships was set on a new trajectory. The changes were subtle at first, almost imperceptible, but like the minute adjustments of spaceships in orbit they had the potential to lengthen to cosmic dimensions.

 

9.

There is one relationship we cannot see. It seemed to the Betzold girls, on the rare occasion that they paused to think it over, that Mom and dad guarded their feelings for one another like mysteries of the cloth. Because this is the daughters’ story, and not the parents, it is not for us to see what prevailed between them as their daughters felt their way toward adulthood.

 

10.

Shortly after returning to school from winter break, Ardene made a new friend. It happened in the quick and easygoing way that children make friends. Ardene was sitting in the cafeteria one day, picking through a container of grapes mom packed for lunch, when a girl from the other seventh grade class sat beside her.

“Purple grapes like those are my favorite,” she said to Ardene, hardly missing a beat as she took a place at the picnic table. “A lot of people think the green ones are better, but they don’t know what they’re missing.”

The girl, tall and lean, dark-haired with brown eyes and a green dress, told Ardene her name was Beatrice. “You can just call me ‘beet,’ though” she explained, “that’s what everyone calls me. Like, ‘Hey, Beet!’ they say, ‘take your shoes off before you come in the house!’ or ‘Beet, if you don’t get away from those cupcakes, you won’t have any after supper.’”

Ardene and Beet talked about what they had for lunch that day, then they talked about their favorite foods. From there the conversation moved to favorite books, favorite movies, favorite music. Then they talked about other kids at school, siblings, parents. The next thing Ardene knew, it was time for math class.

Ardene thought about Beet all afternoon. The way Beet laughed made Ardene smile when she thought about it. They liked a lot of the same stuff, but they were different in ways that made Beet interesting. Where Ardene had two sisters, for example, Beet had a single brother. Ardene lived on a farm; Beet lived in town. Her mother was the school librarian, and her father worked at the bank. Most of all, though, Beet had a sort of magnetism, an easy confidence that Ardene envied and quickly adored.

Even though they were in different classes, over the next few days Ardene and Beet discovered that their paths crossed often at school. Outside of the lunch room, they found that they shared P.E., for example. Then it turned out that their homeroom classes were right next door to each other. Soon they were spending time together before school, between classes, at lunch, and on the basketball court. They shared more and more gossip, jokes, ambitions, and secrets until, after a few weeks, each one would have called the other her best friend without hesitation.

“Who’s ‘Beet?’” Patti asked, crinkling her nose, when Ardene mentioned her new friend one afternoon in the living room with mom and dad.
“She’s just a girl,” Ardene told her. “My friend.”
“Her name is Beet?” mom asked, “like the vegetable?”
“Beatrice, actually,” Ardene explained. “Beatrice Owens.”
“Oh, okay, that’s Owens from the bank, his daughter,” Dad recalled. “Good people.”

Beet came up in their ritual “tell me all about it” conversations more and more. Dad didn’t pay much attention—kids make friends all the time, he thought—and mom wasn’t normally there for these meetings, but Patti found herself reacting to Beatrice Owens the same way she felt about Belinda’s friend, Beverly. Why wasn’t she making new friends like her sisters? Why couldn’t things just stay the same?

 

11.

Around the first of March, Ardene and Beet were walking to their separate classes when they noticed bright green and gold flyers hanging all over the school hallway. The word Brigadoon, printed in bright yellow letters, bold, over rolling green hills, caught their attention. It was a strange word, mysterious to the two girls. They walked to class whispering the word under their breath, replaying it in their heads, brigadoon, and by the afternoon it became an inside joke.

“Oh, do hand me the potato chips,” Beet would say at lunch, for example, and Ardene would retort, “Pish posh, you, you get them yourself, you old Brigadoon!” and then they would burst out laughing, bits of peanut butter sandwich lodged in their teeth.

After they said the word a few hundred times there was nothing left to do but audition for the play. Beet dared Ardene to write her name on the audition sheet. Ardene wrote her name with a flourish and gave Beet an imperious look and said down her nose, comically, “now you, you fiendish Brigadoon.” That was that.

Everyone knew there no chance a couple of seventh graders would ever be cast for anything more important than extras in the school play. Belinda, for example, had started her career on the school stage as a cowhand singing and dancing in an oversized ten-gallon hat with the ensemble in Oklahoma! The next year she got a couple of lines in Our Town. From there she took on the role of afflicted Susanna Walcott in The Crucible, a performance the school newspaper deemed “positively haunting.” She ended her career on the school stage playing Hermia in A Midsummer Night’s Dream and only forgot her lines once.

Ardene and Beet knew this gradual climbing of the ranks was the way of the world, but they each secretly allowed themselves to dream a little. Ardene knew nothing of the play beyond the poster, but she imagined herself in Tartan splendor, twirling through the fens of old Scotland and dazzling the audience with a perfect accent. That night at home she brought up the play at the dinner table.

“Oh, you’ve got the theater bug now, too,” mom said, “just like your sister.”
“I guess so,” Ardene said, “it just sounds like fun.”
“Why would they put on that old play?” dad asked between bites of mashed potato. “I remember the movie came on TV once when I was kid. It was a Sunday afternoon kind of thing.”
“Sounds boring,” Patti said, poking at her meatloaf. “I thought they would do something better this year.”
“Shakespeare is four hundred years old,” Mom snipped, “and I don’t think any of you would call him boring.”
“Speak for yourself!” dad snorted.
“Ardene, I think you’re going to do great in the play,” Mom said, and that was the last word.

Waiting for a prescription the next day at the pharmacy, mom dropped in next door at the Hope House thrift store to kill time. First she browsed the costume jewelry, smiling inwardly at the gaudy pieces recovered from behind the dresser or lodged in dusty drawers and rejected by sisters and daughters. Next, she thumbed through the clothing, absently picking over ten year-old blouses and sweaters thinking about the changes that had lately come over Patti and Belinda. She glanced quickly over the shoes, finding them all too beat up, too large, or too out of style to even pick up from the shelf. Blankets were out of the question entirely; there was little more than an old toaster and a set of hair curlers among the small appliances; and she was unmoved by a devotional print of “footprints in the sand” nestled among a forlorn menagerie of old picture frames in the corner. Just about ready to give up hope and wait at the pharmacy, mom picked through a cardboard box of video tapes by the counter. Shifting tapes near the bottom of the box, she stifled a delighted laugh. There they were: Gene Kelly and Cyd Charisse, locked in loving embrace on the green dales of Auld Scotland, a picture of the roaring MGM lion above their smiling faces. Well if that’s not a sign, she thought, I don’t know what is.

Mom left the Hope House with a smile on her face and a copy of Brigadoon tucked in her purse, still fresh in the shrink wrap. It was only later, some time before she presented the tape to Ardene in the foyer after school, that she remembered the prescription waiting at the pharmacy.

That night, dad dozed on the chair while mom and Ardene watched the film. This is so boring it actually hurts, mom thought to herself, but she smiled and made an attentive face when Ardene turned away from the screen to study her reaction to a scene. Looking over at dad—between snoring interludes—she mouthed the words, “please kill me” and he threw his head back like a man lost in sleep. Ardene was spellbound, however. About ten minutes into the film, Ardene leaped from her spot on the floor and tramped up the stairs, returning with a purple spiral notebook and a white pencil with Let’s Go Fishing! stenciled in blue reflective paint on the side. She took careful notes for the rest of the film, describing the sets and costumes, underlining dialogue she thought significant, diagramming the arrangement of characters, and so on.

The next day, Ardene delivered the tape, fully rewound, to Beet. “This is just what we needed,” she said, handing over the box that morning, “to get into the play.”
“Where did you get this?” Beet asked, thrilling over the bright yellow box.
“You’ll never believe it: my mom found it at the Hope House yesterday.”
“You Brigadoon, no way! Nobody’s ever found anything there.”
“Just watch it,” Ardene directed, “and then let’s practice. We’ll know the whole play, all the songs, before we even audition.”

Compelled as much by the luck of the thing as by Ardene’s enthusiasm, Beet loaded the video in the family’s dusty VCR in the wooden cabinet before dinner that evening. It was the most boring thing she had ever seen.

 

12.

As the date of the audition drew nearer, Ardene started to worry about how and where she and Beet could practice lines and songs and do vocal warm-ups. She had seen Belinda trooping around the house humming, trilling her r’s, and repeating “eat each green pea” in her school drama days, so she thought the two of them ought to give this a try if they wanted to get a part in the play. Obviously they couldn’t do this at school. What if someone heard them?

“Ah, who cares?” Beet asked when Ardene brought this up. “We already go around muttering like a couple of old cat ladies everywhere we go anyway.”

Ardene wasn’t so sure. “Now that the play is coming up,” she insisted, “everyone will think we’re being weirdos on purpose.” The very thought of it filled her with dread, but there was never a place or time otherwise for the girls to be alone, to make mistakes and belt out songs.

Beet’s house was only a little better than school. Her sister was too young to do anything but gawk at her sister, but her brother would never let the seventh graders hear the end of it if he caught wind of their plan. He had basketball practice sometimes, Beet said, but the high school kids kept bankers’ hours and they could never be sure when he would be there. That left Ardene’s house at the farm. When Ardene brought it up to dad, he said, “Sure, you two can sing as loud as you want out there and nobody but the cows will hear you.”

Patti had a good laugh about that with the cows out in the barn that night, but it was decided nonetheless. Beet would come out to the farm the following Saturday, and the two girls could sing and do tongue-twisters until their faces turned purple.

 

13.

Saturday the sun rose brilliant and unhurried over the greening field east of the house. Patti took her sunrise walk out to the barn with dad, the two sharing quiet knowledge of one another and the work they would share before breakfast as they trod the stone path from the back door to the barn. Mom and Ardene clanked around the kitchen, melting butter and cracking eggs. Ardene worked at a lump of flour and water in a Bakelite measuring bowl with a wooden spoon, her tongue protruding from the side of her mouth to aid in concentration as she circled the bowl vigorously. Mom poked at the eggs and bacon with more disinterest than Ardene, her mind ranging over the day ahead rather than the drudgery of breakfast. There were a few things to do before Viv Owens brought Beatrice to the farm later, but mom was looking forward to some time alone in the afternoon, reading on the couch while the family was outside or even just watching the birds down by the cow pond. First breakfast, then laundry, she thought, then vacuum, then freedom.

After a while the screen door thumped to a close. Dad came into the kitchen, announcing himself with a little cough and ruffling Ardene’s hair on the way over to mom.

“What’s this?” he asked, “Is this all for me?” It was a routine they knew well.

Patti climbed the stairs and retreated to her room to wait for breakfast.

which the family passed in companionable silence once it was on the table. Dad put down the newspaper, announcing “time to make the donuts” as he stood from the table. Patti carried her plate to the sink, thinking about taking Roderigo out for a little walk in the back field. Mom and Ardene gathered the rest of the plates. Mom stood at the sink, scrubbing and rinsing, while Ardene stood beside her with a dish towel, drying and stacking. It only took a moment to clean up, however, and then mom said, alright, get out of here, ruffling Ardene’s brunette hair.

With the rest of the morning still before her, Ardene was unsure what to do with herself while she waited for Beet. First she went up to her bedroom, to read a book or find some inspiration or something. She hard music coming from Patti’s room across the hall, the tinny sound of guitars and drums on the little radio’s speakers punctuated after a moment by a commercial louder than the music. She poked at the bookshelf, sat down at her desk and opened the drawers, pulled out a sheet of paper, but thought better of it and went back out into the hall, downstairs, and out into the chilly morning sunlight.

She heard dad out in the workshop tinkering, his hammer striking a nail clap, clap and the sound in her mind merged with the beat of the music up in Patti’s room. Then the song was in her head, planted firmly like a movie soundtrack for the rest of the morning until Beet pulled up in her mother’s station wagon on the gravel drive in front of the house. Later, the song for her would be Beet’s song, an important thing like an old friend’s name written in the cover of a book on the shelf or the scent of an old fragrance in an unexpected place.

When Beet arrived, their mothers kept them close while Ardene’s mom led the group on a little tour of the house and farm. Beet’s mother Vivian lived in town, but she had grown up in the country and thought the whole thing was just wonderful. “We had an old horse just like that,” she said of Roderigo. “His name was Buckley, and we used to ride him into town in the summer just to see our friend’s faces.” Patti, unable to feign disinterest in new people, even if they were there for Ardene, stroked the old horse’s nose with a proprietary air.

Dad was genial, holding the hammer still while Beet and Viv peered at the old calendars and posters and coffee tins in the workshop like tourists in a museum. Leaving him there to tinker, the group strolled down to the pond and then back up to the house. Having completed the pleasant ritual, Viv told Beet she would be back at 4:00 to pick her up and crunched back down the driveway. After she left, Mom said “you two have fun and don’t get into too much trouble.” Free at last, she returned the kitchen and waited a moment for the girls to settle in or wander off before settling into her true self, her alone self.

Though the ostensible purpose for the visit was to rehearse Brigadoon, now that the day was here, neither Beet nor Ardene were very excited about working on lines or learning to sing “Waitin’ For My Dearie.” Instead, they charged up the stairs to Ardene’s room. They heard Patti’s radio across the hall and Beet made a face that made Ardene laugh. Ardene pulled a record from a crate next to the bed, and dropped it gently it on the little turntable by the window. The girls started talking and laughing, and the next thing they knew, it was lunchtime.

After lunch, Beet said, “are you ready to sing, or what?” Ardene trumpeted, “you bet!” and they went running down the back hall, throwing open the back door and leaping down the stairs into the bright sunlight and out across the yard.

It felt good to run. Down by the pond, they stopped to throw rocks. Beet climbed a maple tree and problaimed herself Queen of the North.

“If you’re the queen, then who am I?” Ardene asked, slapping the bottom of Beet’s shoe on the branch above.

“You’re my trusty knight,” Beet said, dangling her shoelace over the edge of the branch in Ardene’s face. “You’re a knight of the realm, come before the castle for a token of your queen’s favor.”

Ardene laughed and Beet continued, “But you won’t have it, unless you prove you are a worthy champion.”

“Oh, is that so?” Ardene challenged, “how do I do that?”

“Simple! You must climb the tower and bring me a trophy.”

Beet picked a handful of Vervain and shouted, “My queen! Consider it done!” Up she went.

Seated on the branch, the girls watched the wind whip the surface of the pond. Ardene pulled a folded sheet of paper from her pocket. “What’s that?” Beet asked, looking askance at the lined notebook paper. “Let’s do some lines,” Ardene said, smoothing out the folds, “since you came all the way out here.”

A moment passed, and Beet said, “I don’t know if I want to do the play anymore.” She paused, picking at a piece of bark on the branch. “I think it’s kind of boring.”

Ardene held the paper very still, wordless for a moment, looking down at the water. Beet pressed, “I don’t know why they picked that play anyway. It’s about a thousand years old.”

Ardene felt something give way inside her. “Yeah, it’s pretty old,” she said, then, picking up steam, “what a bunch of weirdos to choose that old play for kids to do.”

“I know!” Beet exclaimed. She rolled over on the branch, hanging by her legs. “Save me, champion!”

Ardene rolled over too, and they both fell, laughing.

Now that Brigadoon was behind them, the girls had the rest of the afternoon to themselves. Ardene took Beet down the cows in the pasture by the road. Drawing near, but still separated by a fence on the other side of a little hill that shielded them from view, she signaled for Beet to hide. “When I say,” Ardene said, “follow my lead.” She peeked over the edge of the hill. Looking back at Beet, she slowly stood. “Ok, now!” she shouted, and sprinted over the top of the hill toward the cows, holding her arms in the air and yelling. Beet followed her lead, screaming moos and grunting. The cows set off at a gallop up the back side of the pasture, out toward the trees away from the pond and house. The girls fell to the ground, laughing until tears streamed down their face. Patti watched the whole thing from the bench by the pond, infuriated by the careless cruelty of the younger girls.

After a while, the shadows began to lengthen. It was still early in the spring, and the sun would go down before anyone was quite ready to see it go. Sensing that their great rehearsal day was drawing to a close, Ardene and Beet started walking slowly up to the house.

Beet stopped at a grove of oak trees where the cows took shade in the summer. “Hey,” she said to Ardene,”are you sure you’re OK about the play?”

“What, that dumb old thing?” Ardene said, catching a little lump in her throat, “Yeah, of course.”

“It’s just,” Beet said, “we were so excited about it, and…”

“We didn’t know,” Ardene said, cutting her off. “We didn’t know how stupid it was.”

Beet looked at Ardene a moment, searching her face. Ardene giggled, uncomfortable in the unfiltered light of Beet’s gaze. Beet leaned forward then and kissed her, on the lips, like boyfriends and girlfriends on TV. Ardene pulled back, shocked. “What?” she asked, dumbfounded, “what?”

Beet, eyes wide with surprise at what she had done, was about to answer when a rustling sound at the edge of the grove caught their attention.

Patti was there, her mouth hanging open. “Oh my god,” she said, “what are you doing?”

Beet’s cheecks blazed red and Ardene gasped. “Wait!” Ardene blurted, her voice shaking. Patti turned and ran off toward the house.

“Oh,” Ardene said, rubbing her hands across her body in a protective stance, “Oh, no.” Beet backpedaled, cheeks still blazing. “I’m sorry,” she said, “I thought. I don’t know.”

She set off running toward the house.

Ardene sat down at the base of a water oak and cried. She thought about what Patti would tell her mother and father. She thought about the Brigadoon poster at school, and mom’s face when she brought home the tape from Hope House. She cried for her own dumb excitement, her daydreams of starring in the old musical. She cried for her sisters growing up and growing apart. She cried most of all thinking about how dad would react when heard about Beet. What would he think? How could she face him?

After a few moments, Ardene’s tears were spent. She wiped her face with the corduroy sleeve of her jacket and got up. She could see Beet walking toward the house, her shoulders shaking. She set off after her.

Up at the house, Beet was sitting on the back steps. “Don’t talk to me,” she said, “I don’t want to say anything.” Ardene sat down next to Beet on the stairs. “Why’d you do that?” she asked.

“I said I don’t want to talk about it,” Beet answered, turning away from her.

“OK.”

They kicked at the dirt. Ardene chewed on her lip. “Do you think Patti’s going to tell?” she asked. Beet kicked at a clod of dirt and said, “I hope not.”

There was nothing more to say.

Viv pulled into the driveway a few minutes later. The solid sound of the gravel beneath the tires gave Ardene a comfortable feeling, like everything would be OK as long as there are cars and rocks and things made of wood and steel.

“Well, how’d it go?” Viv asked, slamming the door behind her. “Are you ready for the play?”

“Fine,” Beet said flatly, twisting her hair between her fingers while Ardene nodded along, “it was good.”

Viv thanked Mom in the kitchen and made sure Beet had all of her things. “Let’s do this again,” she said. “I absolutely adore this place!”

“We would love to do it again,” mom said. “We’re so glad these two are friends.”

Ardene looked at Beet. Her cheeks were red again.

“See you Monday?” Ardene asked, trying to sound forgiving.

Beet heard the note of forgiveness and smiled. “Ok, you old Brigadoon.”

When they left, Ardene climbed the stairs and fell on her bed. Her heart raced, a step or two behind her mind. Her stomach fluttered. What had just happened? What did it mean? What did Patti see? Had she told anyone?

After what felt like a nervous, lip-chewing eternity, Ardene heard Patti come up stairs. The radio in her room blasted to life and the door slammed behind her. It was only then that the most important question of all occurred to her: How do I feel about this? Somewhere, she sensed, it was good.

 

14.

The sun was sinking behind the field where they scared the cows as dad made his way up the brick path to the door. Ardene knew the sound of his steps, the rhythm of his gait. He pulled back the screen door, pushed open the wooden slab, and stood for a moment there in silhouette while his eyes adjusted to the gloom. A light shone in the kitchen, where he could see mom reading a John Le Carre novel at the beaten old table. She grabbed a handful of peanuts from a blue Planter’s can on the table, her eyes riveted on the page. Patti’s radio upstairs was the only sound in the house.

Dad sighed and sat down on the wooden bench next to the door to untie his boots. The sky turned from crimson to blue through the open door and mom said, “soup will be ready in a few minutes. I just need to finish this chapter.” He wrapped an arm around her and kissed the top of her head. He grabbed a Pabst from the refrigerator and flipped the switch in the living room. A small lamp on the table next to the chair lit up, turning slowly from yellow to white as he took a seat and pressed the power button the television remote.

“Well,” he said to the empty room, “tell me all about it.”