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“It’ll be over in a second, you can’t do just one, P.”
Diane, the doer. Jobs were not to be abandoned, not for weather, or laziness, or a throbbing ear, melted ice, and a scaredy kid sister.
Patty twirled her gold studs. The left one was off-center, her fault for squirming at the last minute. Still, there they were, twin markers of teenage brio, and she’d done it with her sister, just like she’d first applied lipstick or hooked elastic clips to sanitary napkins the size of a diaper, circa 1965. Some things were not meant to be done alone.
She poured Comet into the sink and started scrubbing, the water turning an inky green. Diane would be by soon. She always dropped in midweek if she was “in her car,” which was her way of making the thirty-mile drive out to the farm seem like just part of a day’s errands. Diane would make fun of this latest Ben saga. When Patty was worried about school, teachers, the farm, Ben, her marriage, the kids, the farm (after 1980, it was always, always, always the farm), it was Diane she craved, like a stiff drink. Diane, sitting in a lawn chair in their garage, smoking a series of cigarettes, would pronounce Patty a dope, would tell her to lighten up. Worries find you easily enough without inviting them. With Diane, worries were almost physical beings, leachy creatures with latchhooks for fingers, meant to be vanquished immediately. Diane didn’t worry, that was for less hearty women.
But Patty couldn’t lighten up. Ben had gone so remote this past year, turned himself into this strange, tense kid who walled himself into his room, kicking around to music that rattled the walls, the belchy, screaming words seeping out from under his door. Alarming words. She’d not bothered to listen at first, the music itself was so ugly, so frantic, but one day she’d come home early from town, Ben thinking no one was home, and she’d stood outside his door and heard the bellows:I am no more,
I am undone,
the Devil took my soul,
now I’m Satan’s son.
The record skipped and again came the coarse chant: I am no more, I am undone, the Devil took my soul, now I’m Satan’s son.
And again. And then again. And Patty realized Ben was just standing over his record player, picking up the needle and playing the words over and over, like a prayer.
It was Diane she wanted here. Now. Diane, settled down on the couch like a friendly bear in one of her three old flannel shirts, now chewing a series of nicotine gums, would talk about the time Patty came home in a minidress and their folks actually gasped, as if she were a lost cause. “And you weren’t, were you? You were just a kid. So is he.” And Diane would snap her fingers like it was that simple.
The girls were hovering outside the bathroom door—they’d be out there when she emerged, waiting. They knew from Patty’s scrubbing and mutterings that something further had gone wrong, and they were trying to decide if this was a situation for tears or recrimination. When Patty cried, it invariably set off at least two of her girls, and if someone got in trouble, the house got windy with blame. The Day women were the definition of mob mentality. And here they were on a farm with plenty of pitchforks.
She rinsed her hands, chapped, red and hard, and glanced at herself in the mirror, making sure her eyes weren’t wet. She was thirty-two but looked a decade older. Her forehead was creased like a child’s paper fan, and crow’s feet rayed out from her eyes. Her red hair was shot with white, wiry threads, and she was unattractively thin, all bumps and points, like she’d swallowed a shelf’s worth of hardware: hammers and mothballs and a few old bottles. She did not look like the kind of person you’d want to hug, and, in fact, her children never snuggled into her. Michelle liked to brush her hair (impatiently and aggressively, the way Michelle did most things) and Debby leaned into her whenever they were both standing (loosely and distractedly, as was Debby’s way). Poor Libby tended not to touch her at all, unless she was really hurt, and that made sense, too. Patty’s body had been so used up that by her mid-twenties even her nipples were knobby; she’d bottle-fed Libby almost immediately.
There was no medicine cabinet in the cramped bathroom (what would she do when the girls hit high school, one bathroom for four women, and where would Ben be? She had a quick, miserable image of him in some motel room, all by himself in a boy-mess of stained towels and spoiled milk), so she kept a small cluster of toiletries stacked along the sink. Ben had shoved all the containers into one corner—aerosol deodorant and hairspray, a midget can of baby powder she didn’t remember buying. They were now splattered with the same violet stain that dirtied her sink. She wiped them down like they were china. Patty wasn’t ready for another trip to the department store. She’d driven to Salina a month ago in a positive, bright mood to pick up some prettifying items: cream rinse, face lotion, lipstick. She had folded a $20 bill in her front pocket just for the trip. A splurge. But the sheer amount of options in face cream alone— hydrating, wrinkle-fighting, sun-thwarting—had overwhelmed her. You could buy one moisturizer, but then you had to get a matching cleanser, too, and something called toner, and before you were even ready for the night cream, you’d have blown fifty bucks. She’d left the store with nothing, feeling chastened and foolish.
“You’ve got four kids—no one expects you to look like a daisy,” was Diane’s response.
But she wanted to look like a daisy every now and then. Months back, Runner had returned, just dropped out of the sky with a tan face and blue eyes and stories of fishing boats in Alaska and the race circuit in Florida. He’d stood on her doorstep, lanky in dirty jeans, with not even a wink about the fact they hadn’t heard from him in three years, hadn’t gotten any money from him. He asked if he could board with them til he got settled—naturally he was broke, although he handed Debby half a warm Coke he’d been drinking as if it were a wonderful gift. Runner swore he’d fix things up around the farm and keep it all platonic, if she wanted. It was summer then, and she let him sleep on the couch, where the girls would run to him in the morning as he lay sprawled and stinky in torn boxers, his balls half out.
He charmed the girls—he called them Baby Doll, Angelface— and even Ben watched him attentively, swooping in and out of interactions like a shark. Runner didn’t exactly engage Ben, but he tried to joke with him a little, be friendly. He’d include Ben as a male, which was good, he’d say things like, “That’s a man’s job,” and give Ben a wink. After the third week, Runner rolled up in his truck with an old fold-out sofa he’d found and suggested he camp out in the garage. It seemed OK. He helped her with dishes and he opened doors for her. He’d let Patty catch him looking at her butt, and then pretend to be embarrassed. They exchanged a smoky kiss one night as she was handing him clean bedsheets, and he’d immediately been on her— hands up her shirt, pressing her against the wall, pulling her head back by her hair. She pushed him off, told him she wasn’t ready, tried to smile. He sulked and shook his head, looking her up and down with pursed lips. When she undressed for bed, she could smell the nicotine from where he’d grabbed her just below the breasts.
He’d stayed another month, leering around, starting jobs and leaving them half done. When she asked him to leave during breakfast one morning, he called her a bitch, threw a glass at her, left juice stains on the ceiling. After he was gone, she discovered he’d stolen sixty bucks, two bottles of booze, and a jewelry box that he’d soon discover had nothing in it. He moved to a decrepit cabin a mile away—smoke came from the chimney at all times, the only form of heat. Sometimes she could hear gunfire in the distance, the sounds of bullets shot straight up in the air.
That would be her last romance with the man who fathered her children. And now, it was time for more reality. Patty tucked her hair, dry and unwieldy, behind her ears and opened the door. Michelle sat on the floor right in front of her, pretending to study the floorboard. She assessed Patty from behind gray-tinted glasses.
“’s Ben in trouble?” she asked. “Why’d he do that? With his hair?”
“Growing pains, I think,” Patty said, and just as Michelle took a deep breath—she always gulped air before she said something, her sentences were tight, fast links of words that just kept coming til she had to breathe again—they heard a car coming up the driveway. The driveway was long, someone would pull onto it and they wouldn’t arrive for another minute. Somehow Patty knew it wasn’t her sister, even though the girls were shrieking Diane! Diane! already, running toward the window to look out. There’d be sad little sighs when it wasn’t Diane after all. Somehow she knew it was Len, her loan officer. Even his driving had a possessive sound to it. Len the Letchy Lender. She’d been wrangling with him since 1981. Runner had left by then, announcing this kind of life wasn’t for him, looking around like it was his place instead of hers, her parents’, her grandparents’.
All he’d done was marry her and ruin it. Poor, disappointed Runner, when his dreams had been so high in the ’70s, when people actually thought they could get rich from farming. (Ha! She snorted out loud, there in her kitchen, at the thought of it, imagine.) She and Runner had taken over the farm from her parents in ’74. It was a big deal, bigger even than her marriage or the birth of her firstborn. Neither of those had thrilled her sweet and quiet parents—Runner stank of trouble even then, but, bless them, they never said a thing against him. When, at age seventeen, she told them that she was knocked up and they were getting married, they just said: Oh. Like that. Which said enough.
Patty had a blurry photograph of the day they took on the farm: her parents, stiff and proud, smiling shyly at the camera, and her and Runner, triumphant grins, bountiful hair, incredibly young, holding champagne. Her parents had never had champagne before, but they drove to town and got a bottle for the occasion. They toasted out of old jelly jars.
It went wrong fast, and Patty couldn’t entirely blame Runner. Back then, everyone thought the value of land would keep skyrocketing—they’re not making any more of it!—and why not buy more, and better, all the time? Plant fencepost to fencepost—it was a rallying cry. Be aggressive, be brave. Runner with his big dreams and no knowledge had marched her down to the bank—he’d worn a tie the color of lime sherbet, thick as a quilt—and hemmed and hawed to get a loan. They ended up with double what they asked for. They shouldn’t have taken it, maybe, but their lender said don’t worry— boom times.
They’re just giving it away! Runner had howled, and all of a sudden they had a new tractor, and a six-row planter when the four-row was fine. Within the year there was a glinting red Krause Dominator and a new John Deere combine. Vern Evelee, with his respectable five hundred acres down the way, made a point of mentioning each new thing he spotted on their property, always with a little twitch in his eyebrow. Runner bought more land and a fishing boat, and when Patty had asked was he sure, was he sure? he’d sulked and barked about how much it hurt that she didn’t believe in him. Then everything went to hell at once, it was like a joke. Carter and the Russian grain embargo (fight the Commies, forget the farmers), interest rates to 18 percent, price of fuel creeping up and then leaping up, banks going bust, countries she barely heard of—Argentina—suddenly competing in the market. Competing with her back in little Kinnakee, Kansas. A few bad years and Runner was done. He never got over Carter—you heard about Carter all the time with him. Runner’d sit with a beer watching the bad news on the TV and he’d see those big, rabbit teeth flash and his eyes would go glassy, he’d get so hateful it seemed like Runner must actually know the guy.
So Runner blamed Carter, and everyone else in the rotten town blamed her. Vern Evelee made a noise with his tongue whenever he saw her, a for-shame noise. Farmers who weren’t going under never had sympathy, they looked at you like you played naked in the snow and then wanted to wipe your snotty nose on them. Just last summer, some farmer down near Ark City had his hopper go screwy. Dumped 4,000 pounds of wheat on him. This six-foot man, he drowned in it. Suffocated before they could get him out, like choking on sand. Everyone in Kinnakee was so mournful—so regretful about this freak accident—til they found out the man’s farm was going under. Then all of a sudden, it was: Well, he should have been more careful. Lectures on taking proper care of equipment, being safe. They turned on him that fast, this poor dead man with lungs full of his own harvest.
Ding-dong and here was Len, just as she dreaded, handing his wool hunting cap to Michelle, his bulky overcoat to Debby, carefully swiping snow from loafers that were too shiny-new. Ben wouldn’t approve of those, she thought. Ben spent hours grubbing up his new sneakers, letting the girls take turns walking on them, back when he let the girls near him. Libby glowered at Len from the sofa and turned back to the TV. Libby loved Diane, and this guy wasn’t Diane, this guy had tricked her by walking in the door when he should have been Diane.
Len never said hello as a greeting; he said something like a yodel, He-a-lo! and Patty had to brace for it each time, she found the sound so ridiculous. Now he yelled it as she walked down the hall, and she had to duck back into the bathroom and curse for just a second, then put her smile back on. Len always hugged her, which she was pretty sure he didn’t do with any other farmer that needed his services. So she went to his open arms and let him do his hug thing where he held her just a second too long, his hands on both her elbows. She could feel him making a quick sucking noise, like he was smelling her. He reeked of sausage and Velamints. At some point, Len was going to make a real pass at her, forcing her to make a real decision, and the game was so pathetic it made her want to weep. The hunter and the hunted, but it was like a bad nature show: He was a three-legged, runt coyote and she was a tired, limping bunny. It was not magnificent.
“How’s my farm girl?” he said. There was an understanding between them that her running the farm by herself was something of a joke. And, she supposed, it was at this point.
“Oh, hanging in there,” she said. Debby and Michelle retreated to their bedroom. Libby snorted from the couch. The last time Len had come all the way to the house, they’d had an auction a few weeks later—the Days peeking out through the windows as their neighbors underpaid and underpaid some more for the very equipment she needed to run a working farm. Michelle and Debby had squirmed, seeing some of their schoolmates, the Boyler girls, tagging along with their folks as if it were a picnic, skipping around the farm. Why can’t we go outside? they whined, twisting themselves into begging-angry outlines, watching those Boyler girls taking turns on their tire swing—might as well have sold them that, too. Patty had just kept saying: Those aren’t our friends out there. People who sent her Christmas cards were running their hands over her drills and disc rippers, all those curvy, twisty shapes, grudgingly offering half what anything was worth. Vern Evelee took the planter he once seemed to resent so much, actually driving the auctioneer down from the starting price. Merciless. She ran into Vern a week later at the feed store. The back of his neck went pink as he turned away from her. She’d followed him and made his for-shame noise right in his ear.
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