Miller's Valley Read online

  “Can I get some corn?” yelled Mr. Brown, who lived down the road, as though he’d been waiting forever even though his car had scarcely stopped moving. Twice that one summer he’d come back the next day with one of those odd ears you get sometimes, the ones where the kernels don’t run in a straight line, like somebody with bad teeth. “I want my money back on this one,” he’d said. My mother came out of the house the second time. “We’ll be happy to give you a refund, Bob, but if we do it’ll be the last time you buy corn from us,” she said.

  Winston Bally didn’t stay long. “Nice talking to you,” he said to my father as he came back to his car, but you could see the feeling wasn’t mutual. My father was standing in the doorway of his shed with his arms crossed on his chest and his chin down.

  “I’m going,” said LaRhonda, getting on her bike. Her father’s diner was only two miles away, and she’d get a ride home from there. When I went in there with LaRhonda we could have anything we wanted free: a cheeseburger, lemon meringue pie, Mason Mints from the candy bin by the register. It felt rich.

  “I don’t know why she calls me Duckface,” Donald said, fingering his upper lip. I would have felt sorry for him except that he was so good-natured that lots of times he didn’t even recognize meanness when it was coming right at him. Plus when I looked at how tall and square-shouldered he was turning out to be, I thought he might be one of those guys in high school who played a couple of sports. No matter what those guys were like, things went okay for them.

  I stayed at the table for two more hours, coloring some more napkins, reading Nancy Drew, and watching a green caterpillar do tricks on a strand of shiny silk from a big oak branch above my head. Sometimes I went out into the cornfield and walked between the rows with my eyes closed, pretending I was blind, feeling the stalks reaching out to brush me like a pat on the back. But it was too hot for that. LaRhonda swore there was one summer when it got so hot the corn started to pop in its silk, and Donald said that was a lie, and I didn’t say anything. You couldn’t pay attention when LaRhonda said things like that.

  My mother opened the side door a little after five o’clock. “Anybody who’s buying corn for dinner bought it already,” she said. She was balancing a plate on one hand with a pot lid on top of it. “Take your aunt her dinner,” she said.

  I was so used to the sump pump that it was more likely to wake me when it went off than when it came on. It was off when my mother woke me that Saturday night. At first I thought it was Sunday morning and she was waking me for church, so I made a noise, a groan and a whine combined. I’d grown four inches in less than a year between my twelfth and thirteenth birthdays, and my legs hurt all the time. The doctor said they were just growing pains. My mother said if I shaved my legs before I turned sixteen I’d be cleaning the bathroom on Saturday for the rest of my life. We only had one bathroom but I wasn’t taking any chances. The hair on my legs wasn’t that dark anyway, not like LaRhonda’s. She had a pink electric shaver she’d gotten for Christmas.

  “Up,” my mother said, pulling on my arm, hard. “Get your waders on.” I couldn’t really figure what was going on, so I stood up and started to arrange the flowered coverlet on my twin bed, but she shook her head. “Now,” she said.

  My mother had two rules: no leaving your room without making your bed, and no leaving your room unless you were dressed. She and Tommy were always fighting about what amounted to making a bed, and what amounted to being dressed. I was leaving my room in my pajamas, my bed all tumbled, so I knew something bad was happening. I couldn’t smell smoke and I couldn’t hear the sump pump and I knew that if something had happened to Tommy even my mother would be emotional. All I could hear was the sound of rain. It sounded like a truck was dumping a load of gravel on the roof. It had been raining hard for two days, but nothing like this.

  The front door was open, and just outside it was one of the volunteer firemen in a black slicker. There were a couple of inches of water in our front hallway, so that the runner looked like it was going to float up and down like the magic carpet in the cartoons.

  “Hurry up,” my mother said, handing me my waders. And to the fireman, “My sister’s back in the house up the drive.”

  “She won’t budge, Mrs. Miller!” he yelled over the sound of water. “She’s up in the attic, and when I stuck my head up those stairs she let out a scream. I tried to calm her down but she says she’s not leaving.”

  “Let me go up there,” my father said. “She’ll listen to me.”

  “No you don’t,” my mother said. “No you don’t. If she wants to behave this way she can drown.” I started to sniffle, but my father heard me and put his hand on my head. “Your mother’s just blowing smoke,” he said. The water was lapping at the steps.

  “Let me try,” I said.

  “We got to get going,” said the firefighter.

  “I need my slicker,” I said. My mother took it from the hook and put it on me carefully, the way she had sometimes when I was heading to the bus, going to kindergarten. She bent and zipped it up the way she had then, too.

  “Go ahead,” she said, she and my father standing halfway up the hall steps. I ran back and threw my arms around my father’s legs the way I used to when I was a little girl, buried my head in the slippery fabric of his work shirt.

  “Don’t drown,” I muttered.

  “Don’t be silly,” my mother said.

  “Not a chance, chicken,” my father added.

  “It’s not safe to stay here,” the firefighter shouted over the sound of the rain. He had a good-size aluminum boat, but it still looked flimsy to me.

  “We’re fine,” my mother said as I climbed in, and my father waved. He had his arm around my mother’s shoulders. They looked like one of those Norman Rockwell pictures that someone had hung up on the bulletin board of the home ec classroom at the high school.

  “Just give me a chance to talk to my aunt,” I said as we rowed off into the darkness. “She’ll listen to me.”

  But she wouldn’t. Her house wasn’t as bad as ours, anyhow. Except for the runoff from my waders her little living room was dry. It was a one-story house, and the ladder to the attic was down. She was up there sitting on a stack of suitcases, her legs pulled up under her nightgown. My mother was forty-five, which meant Ruth was thirty-eight, but sometimes she looked like a little girl, maybe because she didn’t give life a chance to wear her down. I’d always wondered why she had those suitcases. She’d never gone anyplace.

  “Just go back down there, Mary Margaret,” Ruth said sharply from the half dark, and for just a moment she sounded a lot like my mother.

  “Come on with me. The water’s getting really high.”

  “It won’t ever get up here. This is the highest spot on the whole farm.” I thought she was right about that. My father once said that the little house was built on a kind of ridge so that his grandmother could look down and keep an eye on everyone.

  “Then I’ll stay here with you,” I said.

  “I got to get going,” called the fireman from below.

  “You go with him,” my aunt said. “Your mother won’t be pleased if you don’t.” I knew she was right about that, too.

  The water was deeper as I climbed back into the boat and we sailed, like a dream, down our underwater driveway and onto what I knew was normally our road. It was hard to see much, no house lights, no streetlights, no moon. What I could make out, it looked as though someone had mistakenly put an ordinary midsize lake in the middle of an area filled with things that had no business being there. The firefighter maneuvered the boat around power lines that came up suddenly like black snakes spitting and skittering along the surface, and pieces of things, of roofs and fences and strange unidentifiable brown chunks that in the dark might be floating firewood, or a drowned raccoon, or a piece of someone’s house. We stopped at the McEvoys’, but they were already gone, and we floated past the Derwents’ barn, where the cows were standing in the hayloft, mooing loudly. We helped M
r. and Mrs. Bascomb into the boat and they wanted to bring their shepherd dog, but the firefighter said we couldn’t take the weight. The dog barked from inside the house. We picked up Mrs. Donovan, who lived alone and was on her front step holding an umbrella that was already in tatters from the wind. You could tell she was afraid, trying to step into the boat, and finally the firefighter took the umbrella out of her hand and laid it down carefully on the edge of her kitchen steps, as though she was going to be back to get it soon. He put out a hand to help her in, but she stumbled, and the boat rocked and a little bit of water slopped in. Mr. and Mrs. Bascomb both opened their mouths but because of the rain I couldn’t hear the sound they made. It was probably the same one I did, like a little goat noise.

  When we got to the church hall at First Presbyterian, Mrs. Bascomb opened her coat and took out a bag she’d wrapped in plastic and tucked in there. It was full of knitting. “It’s the boredom I can’t stand,” she said as Mr. Bascomb went off to get coffee. Mrs. Donovan found her sister in the robing room. I could hear her crying all the way down the hall, saying she almost fell in and drowned, which I guess was technically true.

  Mr. and Mrs. Langer were there because their house was a single-story ranch with a slab foundation; my father used to shake his head sometimes at the foolishness of building that way on low land. Cissy Langer was my mother’s best friend from grade school, which I had a hard time imagining even though they had the pictures to prove it, black-and-white photographs with white edges crimped like a piecrust of the two of them in Sunday dresses standing outside of one or the other of their houses, squinting. Cissy and Mr. Langer, whose name was Henry, weren’t surprised that my parents weren’t there. Cissy said the last time we had a bad flood my parents sat upstairs in their bedroom eating baloney sandwiches and playing Go Fish. I was a toddler at the time and my parents had let Cissy take me and my brothers to the firehouse.

  “It wasn’t anywhere near as high that time,” Cissy said. “Tommy was nine, I think, and he taught the other kids to play poker. I think Eddie did his homework or something.”

  Donald was in one corner, holding a sandwich in his hand and pulling at his lip with the other. He waved with the sandwich.

  “Were you scared?” he said.

  “Why?” I said. “You can swim as well as I can.” My father had made sure I could swim when I was so little that I couldn’t really remember it except the first time I tried diving and got water up my nose. Donald’s grandfather taught him, and Donald had such long arms now that he was always ahead of me if we went to Pride’s Beach and swam out to the foam bobbles that kept us netted in, away from the deepest part.

  “That’s just stupid, Mimi. That’s not the kind of water you can swim in. The current was strong enough to suck you under. You should have been scared.” He stuffed the last corner of his sandwich into his mouth, so his one cheek puffed out like a chipmunk’s.

  “What’s the matter with you? Don’t be so mean.”

  “Where are your parents?”

  “They stayed at the house.”

  “And you’re not even a little bit worried?”

  “Where are your grandparents?” I asked, and then I could tell by the strange, pinched look Donald got that that was why he wasn’t acting like himself.

  “They took a different boat. There wasn’t room in the one boat for them and me and Taffy, so I took Taffy and they took the next boat.”

  “You brought Taffy here?” Donald’s grandparents had an old beagle who breathed like she was gargling gravel. Donald’s grandfather said he didn’t know what his wife would do if anything happened to her, but my mother said that was the kind of dog that lived forever, that lived so long she forgot her housebreaking and made everyone miserable.

  “They made me put her in the choir room. There’s a goat there, too, and a cat in a cage.” Donald looked at the door. “My grandparents should be here soon.”

  “Maybe they stopped at our house and they’re upstairs with my mother and father playing cards,” I said.

  “Maybe,” he said.

  “You want to play cards? I bet somebody has a deck. Or checkers. I’m pretty sure there’s a set in the supply room.” Donald liked to play games and I figured it would take his mind off his worries. He was really attached to his grandparents. The couple of times I tried to get him talking about his life away from Miller’s Valley, his other school, his other friends, his mother, he hadn’t said much and I just let it go. I didn’t even know what his mother looked like. His grandmother had a heart-shaped locket she wore all the time, but the only picture in it was one of Donald.

  “Mimi!” LaRhonda yelled.

  LaRhonda’s father and mother were setting up the big steel dishes they used at the restaurant for wedding receptions and christening parties. LaRhonda’s father let me and LaRhonda light the little candles underneath, that kept the chipped beef and the mashed potatoes warm. “Who eats chipped beef?” LaRhonda said.

  “I like chipped beef,” Donald said, just like I knew he would. He and LaRhonda, oil and water, as my mother liked to say.

  The older men were already digging in, ladling chipped beef on slices of toast. “There’s more where that came from,” Mr. Venti said to each one. Everyone was suspicious of him; he’d blown into town after the Second World War to visit a buddy and just stayed on. “Like he fell from the sky,” Donald’s grandfather liked to say, shaking his head, as though the sky was a bad place to be from. Besides, there weren’t any other Italians in Miller’s Valley. There weren’t really any new immigrants in Miller’s Valley at all. You could tell by their last names that people who lived in the area were originally from Germany or Poland or some of the Slavic countries, but they’d been Americans long enough to have flat vowels and made-up minds. When I got older I realized that the majority of people in Miller’s Valley were the most discontented kind of Americans, working people whose situations hadn’t risen or fallen over generations, but who still carried a little bit of those streets-paved-with-gold illusions and so were always annoyed that the streets were paved with tar. If they were paved at all.

  Maybe that was what annoyed them about LaRhonda’s father, too, that it looked like Mr. Venti had showed up out of nowhere and pulled off that American dream. He’d opened a diner, then a steak house two towns over, then a pizza place in the new shopping center. After ten years living in a cinder-block house behind the dumpster behind the diner, he’d married LaRhonda’s mother, whose name was LaDonna. He was thirty-nine at the time, and she was sixteen. She finished up at the high school and hustled home from classes every day to do the four-to-midnight at the diner, which actually didn’t make her much different from some of her classmates.

  Now, though, she was different from almost everyone in town. The Ventis had saved their money, and expanded their businesses, and done well enough to live in the biggest house in the county. It was the only ranch house I’ve ever seen, to this day, that had columns in front. LaRhonda’s mother didn’t want a house with stairs, but she did want a house with what she called presence. It had a sunken living room and a kitchen with a wall oven and one wing with Mr. and Mrs. Venti’s bedroom and a big bathroom with a round pink tub, and another wing with four bedrooms for the children. But there was only LaRhonda. That was sad to me, because Mrs. Venti seemed like the kind of person who would have liked to have a whole mess of kids. Maybe it would have taken her mind off of Mr. Venti, who liked to make comments about the size of her behind and then, when she started to cry, say that she couldn’t take a joke. My mother said she felt sorry for her. “With that big old house?” Tommy always said.

  “A house doesn’t make a home,” my mother said.

  One of the cooks from the diner took us from the church back to LaRhonda’s house for the night. “What about school?” I said when I heard I wasn’t going home.

  “Oh, honey, there won’t be school for I don’t know how long,” LaRhonda’s mother said as she settled us in the station wagon. “With how
bad the flooding is there’s no way for half the kids to get there. They’re going to have to do something about the valley now, after this.”

  “You ready to move out, little lady?” Mr. Venti asked me.

  “We’re never moving,” I said.

  “I meant you ready to get going? That’s military lingo. Move out means get going.”

  “Hey, Johnny, turn on the radio,” LaRhonda said. She leaned into the front seat of the station wagon. In the middle of a natural disaster LaRhonda was flirting with the grill guy. He was kind of disgusting, too, with greaser hair and grubby pants that smelled like bacon and cigarette smoke.

  “I’m worried that my parents are going to drown,” I said that night as we lay with a white-and-gold bureau between us in the twin canopy beds in her room.

  “Your parents are the last people in the whole wide world anything bad will happen to,” LaRhonda said, turning off the light. LaRhonda’s room was three times the size of mine, and everything matched—the bedspreads, the curtains, the little chair at the dressing table, all covered with the same pattern of big blue and yellow flowers that didn’t actually look like any flowers I’d seen growing anywhere. I liked my room better than hers. In my room you could hear my mother humming dance tunes from when she went to the high school and see Ruth’s living room light through the arms of the trees. LaRhonda’s room was quiet and kind of lonely, with a view of a boring lawn that seemed to go on forever. I lay awake there for hours, listening to the rain thrash angrily against the windows, thinking that a few miles and a few hours could make all the difference between an ordinary day and disaster.

  My parents didn’t drown. Donald’s grandfather didn’t drown, either. His grandmother did. I’ll remember that date for the rest of my life: August 21, 1966, the day Donald’s grandmother died and the day my brother Tommy enlisted in the Marines.

  “In a damn canoe,” my mother said when my father picked me up and brought me home from LaRhonda’s house. That’s how I knew it was bad, because my mother swore in front of me. “A goddamned canoe.”