Bill Clegg - Did You Ever Have A Family

The first call from Winton came in December. There are a few things to remember about that day, and she’s tried, but the one thing she doesn’t struggle to recollect was that the phone hadn’t rung for weeks. It’s an old, beige thing with thick buttons that make loud beeps when you press them, mounted on the wall by the door in the kitchen. It came with the rental she’s living in, and carved into the doorframe next to it are phone numbers. She recognized a few when she moved in a little more than six years ago. Gary Beck’s, for one; he had a funny relationship with her mother and would come by every once in a while with schnapps they’d drink in the kitchen. They both loved country music and listened to a station out of Hartford that played Loretta Lynn and Conway Twitty songs. When Lydia was a teenager, and even later, she thought their nights in the kitchen were the grimmest she could imagine. Smoking cigarettes, drinking peppermint schnapps, and turning up the radio when some sad song came on. Funny, she thinks now, remembering those nights, how things change when you look at them with older eyes.

She wonders if Gary Beck is even still alive. As far as she can remember, he never had a wife or kids or any relations. He wasn’t involved in the volunteer fire department or church or any of the organizations that host spaghetti-and-meatball dinners at the elementary school to raise money. She never saw him outside of her mother’s kitchen. He ran the post office in town until he had a stroke and was put in a state home for the elderly in Torrington. That all happened sixteen years ago, the year before her mother died. She’d told Lydia about Gary one morning on the phone but didn’t convey any emotion, just enough interest to relay the facts. She doubts her mother ever went to visit him in Torrington. She never could quite figure out what their relationship was, but as attractive as her mother had been, and as much as she always dolled herself up each morning for work at the bank, she was pretty sure she’d shut the door on men after Lydia’s father died. Still, she and her mother had never been what anyone would consider close, and so she wondered if anything more than companionship had gone on with Gary. He was harmless and he brought booze and always had a flattering thing to say when her mother opened the door to let him in. Looking good tonight, Natalie was as specific and flirtatious as he ever got. He was still coming around when Lydia and Luke moved in with her mother the year he was born, but after that she never saw him. It was hard for her to imagine who might have needed Gary Beck’s number often enough to carve it into this wall. Maybe someone who worked at the post office. Maybe some other old gal he’d bring schnapps to and listen to country songs with. When she looked at the numbers gouged into the pine doorframe, she hoped so. She hoped he had a different one every night.

The other names could be anyone’s— Lisa, Matthew, Evelyn . Only Gary Beck had the honor of his last name carved into the wood. And then there’s the one number she can never forget. Her former mother-in-law’s, Connie Morey. The Moreys must have had that same number since telephones were first installed in Litchfield County. The family had been in their old, broken-down house off Main Street since the late 1800s. They built it themselves, as they were all quick to tell you, and were still there. On the wall it just says Connie and those same digits Lydia used to dial when she was in high school, when Earl Morey was, for a short time, the only person she wanted to speak to or see. He was jumpy and mischievous, a soccer player with a big bush of red hair on his head. He loved the Grateful Dead and ice fishing and smoking pot and could mimic anyone he laid eyes and ears on for more than a minute. His favorite target was his older brother, Mike, who had a lisp and was not very bright. He also did a blistering impersonation of Lydia’s mother, which it took her only one time to overhear from her bedroom to run him out of the apartment. Still, she loved him, but more than him she loved the idea of his family, which was not by any stretch of imagination wealthy — most of them electricians and housepainters and groundskeepers at Harkness, the boarding school just over the town line in Bishop. It was and is their size and longevity that made them formidable. There is safety in numbers, Lydia’s mother would say as she blew clouds of menthol smoke through the kitchen from behind the Formica table where she sat each night with her schnapps, like a general at her battle station making speeches to the troops. I know because I’ve been out on my own for so long. Even before your father died a hundred years ago, it was just us. Just him and me against the world .

Safety was not what attracted Lydia to Earl Morey. What she loved about him was that he made her laugh. Sometimes she’d laugh so hard she couldn’t breathe, which would egg him on more. In high school, he had a short fuse, was a bit of a bully, and more than a few times was called off the soccer field for instigating fights with players on the other teams. That mean streak made Lydia nervous sometimes, but she told herself he was all talk, harmless, a showboat. And besides, no one could make her laugh as hard as he could. She experienced that laughter as a kind of exorcism. It quieted the voices of the girls at school who whispered behind her back and drowned out her mother’s tipsy rants, and for a brief spell there was nothing but heaving lungs, pounding heart, and tears running down her cheeks.

She laughed with Earl for a while before they got married and not much after. After high school Earl went to work with his brothers on the maintenance crew at Harkness and joined the volunteer fire department. Within a few months, he stopped coming home for dinner. He’d go straight from work to the firehouse or to the Tap, where he’d eat beef jerky and potato chips. He’d come in after ten, drunk and cranky about something or someone. He’d pinch Lydia’s ass and tell her to lay off the snacks. And soon he just called her Snacks. First at home and then in front of his family. His father thought it was funny. Toughen up, girl, he said to her at Christmas dinner that first year, you know how he is . And then there were the nights, in the beginning once every six weeks or two months, and then later every weekend, when he’d come home smashed and wake her up, speaking gibberish. Whether she responded or not, sat up in bed or curled into her pillow pretending to sleep, the result was the same. A hard blow either to the side of her head or her body. Usually, it was just one. Two at the most. And sometimes afterward he would grab her by the shoulders and shake her violently. Mostly it would be dark, so she wouldn’t see him, but the few times he turned on a light or the moon outside would brighten the room enough, she would see a face so tortured and far away it was as if he were possessed, like some kind of zombie demon. She knew by then that the only thing capable of driving a demon away was another one; so when she recognized something that could drive Earl and most likely the rest of the town away, she didn’t hesitate. That their demon would be her son was the awful consequence, but she didn’t think she had a choice. Which was not how other people saw it, certainly not her mother or Connie Morey, who is long dead and whose number is still, like some threat from the underworld, carved into the wood next to Lydia’s phone.

She’s turned the ringer down as low as it goes, but she still jumps every time it rings. Ever since the morning when she got the phone call from Betty Chandler. He’s done it now, Lydia, is what she said, clipped and cold and distant as if she were reporting that the high school football team was on a losing streak. You need to get over to June Reid’s house right away, she added before hanging up. Betty Chandler and Lydia grew up together, went to the same kindergarten, elementary, and high school. They were even best friends one summer and fall when they were twelve — making barrettes with pink and blue ribbons and selling them for a dollar each — but when Betty’s chubby older brother, Chip, tried to kiss Lydia, unsuccessfully, after the eighth-grade dance and then told people she let him go to third base, Betty turned on her and spread rumors that she was loose. Just like that, based on so very little, she became her enemy and managed to stay so for more than thirty years. Later, when Luke was born and Earl had thrown Lydia out, her mother said she’d heard Betty telling people she’d been accepting money to have sex with the migrant workers at Morgan Farm across the state line in Amenia, the ones who came from Mexico or the Caribbean every season to pick apples, and that’s how she’d gotten pregnant. Her mother asked her if it was true. As painful as that was, Lydia never blamed her mother or any of them. She knew when she realized she was pregnant that if her baby’s skin was even half as dark as its father’s, she would be cast as the hussy. She never refuted any of the stories, never told anyone the truth, not even Luke, and when he was old enough he didn’t want anything to do with her, let alone a father who had been kept a secret all his life. There were good reasons for keeping his father a secret. And if they weren’t good, they were, she believed for a long time, necessary. Only one marriage would be upended by this baby and it would be hers.