The Tie That Binds(63)
I don’t suppose the details matter. It’s just that his back-slapping attempt at salesmanship didn’t leave the Goodnoughs much. They had been finished with driving, and now any thought of night life was out too. About all they had left for themselves was a trip every six months to Doc Schmidt and a weekly drive to the grocery store. But that didn’t last long either. About a year later, when old Doc Schmidt retired after more than forty years of service to the community, closed his practice and moved himself and his wife to Tucson, Lyman decided he was through with doctors; he wasn’t ever going to another one. That left only the grocery store. You understand what I’m saying?—the goddamn grocery store. Here he had traveled all over this country by himself for twenty years; afterwards with Edith he had seen more of this Rocky Mountain region in six years than I’ll see in a lifetime; and now, in no time, he was satisfied with a seven-mile excursion into town—after cabbage and macaroni and beans.
Well, it didn’t take long for even that to be too much for him. He shuffled a little closer to the edge. That’s right, he refused to step outside for any reason. He wouldn’t leave the house. He was too busy traveling in the parlor.
About four years after his last Pontiac was wrecked, Lyman began to retrace his transcontinental trip. He sent off to Los Angeles and Boise and Omaha and Mobile and Cleveland for brochures, for chamber of commerce pamphlets, for bus schedules and train routes. Without once leaving the house, he was seeing the country again. He was traveling. He had his own old man’s travel bureau established with boxes and maps and a desk in the parlor. He could tell you what train to take from Boston to Chicago, what connections you had to make, what there was to see in the Windy City once you got there, where to stay—do all of that even if he was never going to take that train, make those connections, or see the Sears building himself. He didn’t want to. It was out of the question. If you had offered to pay his way and to sink him in luxury on a chartered jet, he would not have gone. He had limited his world to a space twenty feet square at the west end of the house. There he sat every day beside a lamp, poring like a travel clerk over road maps and glossy city flyers. To protect his eyes, Edith finally bought him a green visor, which he wore loose on his bald head, propped on his old man’s, hair-filled ears. It still about makes me sick to think about it. Not just for him—for her too, I mean.
I BELIEVE Edith’s one compensation during those last awful years was Rena Pickett. Edith loved that little girl, still loves her, and so do we. Why hell, Rena fills us all up, ornery as she is, bullheaded and independent as she is.
She favors my dad. She has his straight black shiny hair, his way of standing with one leg cocked and a hand on one hip, his manner of listening to you while you talk. And when you’ve finished talking, come finally to the end of your adult speech, when you’ve run down at last, believing for once that you’ve persuaded her to see your side of sound reason, she jumps up and goes ahead and does whatever it was she intended to do in the first place, before you started filling the air above her with words, before you ever got it into your head that you might make progress this once towards some form of mutual agreement, or at least obedience, or anyhow the willingness to wait long enough for you to turn your back and get out of the way before she disregards everything you’ve just said and runs off to do what she was going to do anyway. She’s always been like that.
For example, when she was about two, we tried pretty seriously to impress upon her how she had to stay in the yard. We told her that she was not to cross the gravel road in front of the house. But that same afternoon when we missed her and looked up, there she was in the native pasture across the road, high-stepping down the hill. In one hand she was carrying her soggy diaper like it was something of herself that she was not about to leave behind; she had an elm stick in her other hand. She was following her little pot belly through the tall grass and sagebrush. There were cows and calves in the pasture, too, the cows all bunched up on stiff legs, watching her pass. But the dog was with her. She and Jack had been hunting prairie dogs on the hill. It was the reason for her stick.
Or another time: when she was older, about six, I was trying to make her see the correct side of things, giving her the benefit of considerable wisdom and experience— until she interrupted me.
“Oh, Dad,” she said. “Dad, you don’t know anything and you know it.”
Then, having straightened me out, she flounced off to play dolls or to discover kittens in the hayloft. And how was I supposed to argue with what she said? I was wrong on both accounts.
In that way she favors her mother. While she may have a band of round orange freckles pocked across her nose like I did when I was a kid, she still has her mother’s and her Grandpa Pickett’s eyes. Those green eyes that look past you or through you like you weren’t there, as if you didn’t amount to anything more than smoke—a minor obstruction, say, a kind of highway mirage, between her and the thing she intends to see. She will see the thing, take it in, accomplish it, no matter. The girl has backbone, and I’m damn grateful she does.
She was born on August 3, 1969, with no trouble. After burying what should have been her older brother in a box above the barn, Mavis and I saw to that. We took precautions, did nothing rash, curbed any thought of Ferris-wheel rides or drives home afterwards that would have been too late. We believed we were being given another chance and were not about to lose it. Of course it made for a long, slow nine months of housebound waiting, but it was worth it, because if Rena Pickett was compensation to Edith these last seven years, she has been more than that to us. She’s our daily satisfaction.