The Excellent Lombards(65)

But my mother wasn’t done yet. She felt the need to say more. Of course she did, because in her blackhearted way she’d been dying to speak about the money, to rub it in, ever since she’d given up her treasured chunk. “I know that May Hill has completed the transfer,” she said, “that the land contract is legal, and that we have to accept it. I know she didn’t consult us, which is too bad, but it’s over. I so wish, Dolly, that you’d understand that May Hill has saved us. For the time being. Saved the farm for now. We need Philip. Surely you do know that.”

Then Dolly did something I couldn’t believe even though it was happening before my eyes. She picked up a book on the counter and threw it as far as she could across the room toward the stacks. That’s how she made her exit, back to the hedgerow path.

My disks were forgotten, the cloth having fallen to my feet.

“My God,” my mother said, staring at the door.

I got up from my chair in the nook, walked out onto the floor, across the carpet, past the magazine rack, a short distance to the book, a thick Elizabeth George mystery. It was a heavy book to have thrown so far. I didn’t want to touch it, to pick it up. The book Dolly had thrown.

Nellie was pressing her fingers into her eye sockets. “Oh God,” she moaned, “I’m such an idiot.”

As much as it was true I almost for just a second felt sorry for her, that she herself had to know it and say it. It would have been better on my end if I’d been able to point out that fact to her. I kept looking at the book and thinking of Dolly’s soft drooping face, the openmouthed frown. How pretty she’d looked at her entrance. My mother started to talk in her hokey, preternaturally calm tone. Whatever she was stumbling around saying, though, she wasn’t anywhere near the root of the matter. Because, the thing is, I knew precisely what she’d done. Be still, Mrs. Lombard, so I can tell you. The following, in case she didn’t realize, had occurred: My mother in the showdown had won. She had pulled up the prizewinning fact. She’d obliterated her opponent. Good for her in the moment. Score for the librarian. Congratulations.

But now in the aftermath? Now and forever? She maybe was coming to see it, the error slowly revealing itself. Oh no. She should have let Dolly think Dolly herself was the winner. A trick so simple. Let Dolly, who did not have the advantages, who had not gone to college, who did not have any spare family money, let her at least have the satisfaction of prevailing at the library.

I no longer wanted to be in the nook. My feet were moving toward the door. It was cold outside and I’d left my coat behind but I didn’t care.

At dinner no one said much of anything. It was as if somehow William and my father understood that Dolly had thrown a book across the library. My father did say obligatorily, “How was your day, Marlene?”

Sherwood had once told Jim Lombard to shove grass up there. And Dolly had thrown a book. Those adults from across the road in Volta were the people who had to be violent in the face of my nice, even-tempered parents, so nice and polite and generous, so selfless, giving up their money, the couple of Velta, the upstart Lombards who had come to the farm from the outside world. On my walk home from the library I’d switched over to their side, to Dolly and Sherwood’s side. I could clearly see their position, could see why you’d have to shout unpleasant things and throw heavy books. Those hateful nice people, Jim and Nellie. The small acts of rebellion against them. It was all you could do, the book, the grass.





22.


The Fruit Sale




The next morning when I woke up the sunshine was too bright to bear. The sun had hardly risen and already in my window it was terrible. “Francie!” my mother screeched from the kitchen. “It’s late!” The Elizabeth George novel was presumably still on the floor at the library, no one daring to move the object that spelled our doom. “Francie! The bus in twenty minutes!” In my room the daylight at once glowed red. It was difficult to open my eyes to such luridness. To keep them open. In the night I’d started to understand a few other unspeakable facts, most especially that everything was ruined because of me.

The story was back to MF Lombard. It was I who had unraveled the place I loved more than anything else in the world, I, who had steadily been at work not only at my own wreckage but at Dolly’s and everyone else’s, too. It was I who, from the day of the interview in fifth grade, so long before, had started May Hill plotting, May Hill determined to keep the farm from me. The interview during the four–five split was her first hint about my character, and then there was the capture in her room, followed by any number of indications that MF Lombard was the silliest of persons, MF crying in the shed, MF dressed in an outlandish costume going to a school dance, a girl of no substance. A…mongrel. And now it was done, Philip a part of us, Philip the foreigner on our very soil.

With great effort I pulled myself to sit up in bed. MF, a pie dog, destined to roam, bloodied ear, hungry. A cur. It was almost impossible to assemble my Future Farmers of America uniform. To pick up my books. The Norton Anthology for AP English, the heaviest. Everything supposedly important in one volume. Putting it in the backpack. Scowling at my mother about breakfast. I could hardly manage the rudimentary motions. Going out, step after step, as the bus made the bend in the road, rattling toward me. No William, because he had departed early for one of his clubs. I would have stayed home if the FFA annual fruit sale, of which I was in charge, hadn’t been taking place at school. I did know—I was aware—that William was waiting to find out if he’d been accepted Early Decision at the college of his and my mother’s choice in Minnesota. It was one of any number of schools that claim to be the Harvard of the Midwest, a school that had aggressively courted him.