Lorrie Moore - 100 Years of the Best American Short Stories

Now, back in Oriskany, she would think of him no more.

A few minutes later her father came. Was that really him? she thought. Her heart beat furiously. If blood drained out of her face she would look mottled and sick, as if she had a rash… how she hated that! Though he had seen her at once, though the bus station was nearly empty, her father hesitated until she stood and ran to him. “Pa,” she said, “I’m so glad to see you.” It might have been years ago and he was just going to drive back home now, finished with his business in town, and Helen fourteen or fifteen, waiting to go back with him.

“I’ll get your suitcase,” he said. The sailor was reading a magazine, no longer interested. Helen watched her father nervously. What was wrong? He stooped, taking hold of the suitcase handle, but he did not straighten fast enough. Just a heartbeat too slow. Why was that? Helen took a tissue already stained with lipstick and dabbed it on her forehead.

On the way home he drove oddly, as if the steering wheel, heated by the sun, were too painful for him to hold. “No more trouble with the car, huh?” Helen said.

“It’s all right,” he said. They were nearly out of town already. Helen saw few people she knew. “Why are you looking around?” her father said. His voice was pleasant and his eyes fastened seriously upon the road, as if he did not dare look elsewhere.

“Oh, just looking,” Helen said. “How is Davey?”

Waiting for her father to answer — he always took his time — Helen arranged her skirt nervously beneath her. Davey was her sister’s baby, could he be sick? She had forgotten to ask about him the night before. “Nothing’s wrong with Davey, is there, Pa?” she said.

“No, nothing.”

“I thought Ma might come, maybe,” Helen said.

“No.”

“Didn’t she want to? Mad at me, huh?”

In the past her mother’s dissatisfaction with her had always ranged Helen and her father together; Helen could tell by a glance of her father’s when this was so. But he did not look away from the road. They were passing the new high school, the consolidated high school Helen had attended for a year. No one had known what consolidated meant or was interested in knowing. Helen frowned at the dark brick and there came to her mind, out of nowhere, the word adulterous , for it too had been a word she had not understood for years. A word out of the Bible. It was like a mosquito bothering her at night, or a stain on her dress — the kind she would have to hide without seeming to, letting her hand fall accidentally over it. For some reason the peculiar smell of the old car, the rattling sun shades above the windshield, the same old khaki blanket they used for a seat cover did not comfort her and let her mind get drowsy, to push that word away.

She was not sleepy, but she said she was.

“Yes, honey. Why don’t you lay back and try to sleep, then,” her father said.

He glanced toward her. She felt relieved at once, made simple and safe. She slid over and leaned her head against her father’s shoulder. “Bus ride was long, I hate bus rides,” she said. “I used to like them.”

“You can sleep till we get home.”

“Is Ma mad?”

“No.”

His shoulder wasn’t as comfortable as it should have been. But she closed her eyes, trying to force sleep. She remembered that April day they had come here — their moving to the house that was new to them, a house of their own they would have to share with no one else, but a house it turned out had things wrong with it, secret things, that had made Helen’s father furious. She could not remember the city and the house they had lived in there, but she had been old enough to sense the simplicity of the country and the eagerness of her parents, and then the angry perplexity that had followed. The family was big — six children then, before Arthur died at ten — and half an hour after they had moved in the house was crowded and shabby. And she remembered being frightened at something and her father picking her up right in the middle of moving, and not asking her why she cried — her mother had always asked her that, as if there were a reason — but rocked her and comforted her with his rough hands. And she could remember how the house had looked so well: the ballooning curtains in the windows, the first things her mother had put up. The gusty spring air, already too warm, smelling of good earth and the Eden River not too far behind them, and leaves, sunlight, wind; and the sagging porch piled with cartons and bundles and pieces of furniture from the old house. In that old dark house in the city, the grandparents had died — her mother’s parents — and Helen did not remember them at all except as her father summoned them back, recalling with hatred his wife’s father — some little confused argument they had had years ago, that he should have won. That old man had died and the house had gone to the bank somewhere mysterious, and her father had brought them all out here to the country. A new world, a new life. A farm. And four boys to help, and the promise of such good soil…

Her father turned the wheel sharply. “Rabbit run acrost,” he said. He had this strange air of apology for whatever he did, even if it was something gentle; he hated to kill animals, even weasels and hawks. Helen wanted to cover his right hand with hers, that thickened, dirt-creased hand that could never be made clean. But she said, stirring a little as if he had woken her, “Then why didn’t Ma want to come?”

They were taking a long, slow curve. Helen knew without looking up which curve this was, between two wheat fields that belonged to one of the old, old families, those prosperous men who drove broken-down pickup trucks and dressed no better than their own hired hands, but who had money, much money, not just in one bank but in many. “Yes, they’re money people,” Helen remembered her father saying, years ago. Passing someone’s pasture. Those ugly red cows meant nothing to Helen, but they meant something to her father. And so after her father had said that — they had been out for a drive after church — her mother got sharp and impatient and the ride was ruined. That was years ago, Helen’s father had been a young man then, with a raw, waiting, untested look, with muscular arms and shoulders that needed only to be directed to their work. “They’re money people,” he had said, and that had ruined the ride, as if by magic. It had been as if the air itself had changed, the direction of the wind changing and easing to them from the river that was often stagnant in August and September, and not from the green land. With an effort, Helen remembered that she had been thinking about her mother. Why did her mind push her into the past so often these days, she only twenty-two (that was not old, not really) and going to begin a new life? Once she got home and took a bath and washed out the things in the suitcase, and got some rest, and took a walk down by the river as she had as a child, skipping stones across it, and sat around the round kitchen table with the old oil cloth cover to listen to their advice (“You got to grow up, now. You ain’t fifteen anymore”—that had been her mother, last time), then she would decide what to do. Make her decision about her husband and the baby and there would be nothing left to think about.

“Why didn’t Ma come?”

“I didn’t want her to,” he said.

Helen swallowed, without meaning to. His shoulder was thin and hard against the side of her face. Were those same muscles still there, or had they become worn away like the soil that was sucked down into the river every year, stolen from them, so that the farm Helen’s father had bought turned out to be a kind of joke on him? Or were they a different kind of muscle, hard and compressed like steel, drawn into themselves from years of resisting violence?