tale from Just So Stories. I miss the high bunk that Tom built for Teddy, with all the shelves under it for toys and books. I miss my wood stove, and the sound of pinecones falling onto the corrugated tin roof at night. I want to go home.
But we can’t. Not just yet, but soon, Tom tells me. As soon as Bix is better. Bix, Ellie’s husband, is a very slow healer. Ellie is the eldest daughter in the Potter household, seldom spoken of, but there, nonetheless. And Bix is her sturdy hired-hand husband, as practical as a strike-anywhere kitchen match. A good son-in-law, none too bright, but handy around the place. Until he broke his collarbone. It’s hard to run a tractor with a broken collarbone, and the fields have to be tilled and planted. The farm has to look prosperous and well run, for in front of the farm, less than an acre away, is the farm equipment dealership that fronts onto the highway. Tom’s father owns it and runs it, with Mother Maurie and Steffie to do the bookwork and order parts and dust the shelves. Tom’s older sister, Ellie, keeps the big house in order for them all. And Ellie’s husband, as big and good-natured and farmy as she is, does his best to help out anywhere he can. But he’s not the same as a real son, Tom has confided ingenuously to me, not to his dad. Dick Potter likes to know that the crucial work of the farm is in family hands. It’s just like that fool Bix to have broken his collarbone in spring, the busiest time of the year. And so Tom must stay, just a little longer, to get the fields tilled and planted, to move the irrigation pipe that waters the tender young plants, to mechanic on the equipment that does the work, and to be Dick’s son. It is his family. Family is important. I understand.
Sometimes.
Sometimes I am sweetly reasonable. Sometimes I understand all that Tom tells me, about how important his family is, and that they expect and need his loyalty. There is something all-American about the concept of the extended family and the old family farm, and pulling together to get through the hard times. Sometimes it is a thing I want Teddy to learn, and sometimes I want him to grow up remembering early mornings on the farm, feeding the chickens, riding the tractor behind Bix or Tom, going to town in Grandpa’s red truck, sitting by Grandma’s feet and watching television in the evening.
And sometimes I want them back, all to myself, my Tom, my Teddy. I don’t want to be Tom’s wife. I want to be Evelyn, in the cabin Tom and I built, in a place more forest than farm. I want to go home to my own house, to my own furniture, to my books and garden and woods. I don’t want to be careful of the rattan furniture and the bright cushions that show every smear of dirt. I want to flop down on my own couch and sigh heavily, and let all the tension out. I want to be home.
Lately, when Tom speaks of home, he means this farm. “Let’s go home now,” he said to me yesterday when I had stolen him away, to have him to myself for a few guilty moments on a spurious errand. I wanted to stop at a cafe, to have a cup of coffee and talk with him. But he was restless, his mind full of uncompleted chores. “I have to get home,” he repeated, and my heart sank. Is my home now different from his? Sometimes I see it all as an elaborate con worked upon me, as when I was in grade school and there were cliques I could never belong to, no matter what I did, no matter how hard I tried. I am no different from Ellie’s husband, I will never be as good as a real daughter, never part of the real family. And sometimes the Potter family farm reminds me more of a Japanese corporate structure than Old MacDonald’s Farm. Sometimes I suspect them of shaving and shaping Tom, like a faulty cog that doesn’t quite mesh, machining him to fit into the gear chain instead of causing it to jam. I think they will steal Teddy from me, will teach him that he is a real grandson of the real family, and therefore belongs with them, not with his mother who is only a married-on artificial part of the family.
If I think about these things, I can work myself up into a frothing rage. How dare they! I won’t let them! Mine, all mine, Tom and Teddy are mine and they shall never have them!
Sick. Selfish. Sad. I know. But there is so little else for me to do. Tom goes off to work and Teddy trails off with him, or is “borrowed” by Grandpa to be shown off while he sits in Hanks Diner and has his morning coffee with the other good old boys. I stay here, in Snow White Steffie’s enchanted cottage, and try to deal with an oil smudge on a yellow cushion, Teddy’s sticky fingerprints on the glass-topped table, and the increasingly obvious sag of the rattan chair that was never intended for a man of Tom’s size. I know Mother Maurie will quietly mention these signs of wear to other family members as evidence of my waywardness and inferiority to a real daughter. And I experience the amusing dichotomy of watching myself mutter that I never wanted to be treated as a real daughter even as I try to get peanut butter out of the weave of a rattan armrest.
When I run out of hopeless housework to occupy myself, I can fill my days with endless paperbacks. Passion’s Proud Fury and The Angry Heart and The Elegant Suitor and Flames of Desire. Steffie has a wall of them in her room, and she has told me that I can borrow them whenever I like. They are all romances, in different series, and she keeps them arranged by number. She marks a little X inside the cover of each one she has read, so she doesn’t accidentally start reading it again. It’s easy to forget, she tells me, which ones she has read, and she used to get deep into one before she realized she had already read it once before. The X’s, she tells me, keep her from wasting her time. The other books in the big house are technical manuals for tractors; Steffie is the family bookworm, all the Potters agree, and they are proud of her endless reading.
There is an alternative to rattan maintenance and Passion’s Proud Fury. I can go visit the big house.
In the day I can go over and watch Ellie work. She is a big rawboned woman, Dick Potter’s frame accidentally bestowed on a female child. Both seem ashamed of the error. Ellie minimalizes it by hunching around the house, wearing her plaid housedresses as if they were a clever disguise, like a tablecloth thrown over a packing crate. Ellie does only one thing. She works. She mops tile floors and sweeps hardwood floors, she scrubs walls, she pounds yielding white dough into loaves, she chops vegetables and tumbles them into simmering pots, she polishes windows and dusts shelves. She never stops. If I arrive during the day, she assumes I have some purpose there and ignores me. She is not one to stop and have a cup of tea and chat. Conversation with Ellie is a difficult thing, a trailing net of words that follows her from room to room as she straightens and tidies, snagging on feather dusters and Pledge cans and sponges and Comet cleanser. How is she? I am fine, and excuse me, I have to mop where you’re standing. And how is Bix? Bix is better, save for a crick in his back, serves him right for trying to work in his good boots while his shoulder is still banged up, and excuse me, I have to go get the Pine Sol.
What else can I do with myself? Once I got up early and fed all the chickens, ducks, and pigs. I gave the chickens too much, the ducks too much, and the pigs not enough, and the poultry food is expensive, almost seven cents a pound now, and the pigs will break out of their yard if they get hungry during the day, and of course Mother Maurie knew I was only trying to help, but it’s not like farming’s in my blood, like in Tom’s, so I’m bound to make mistakes, but the wrong amount of feed can put the poultry off their laying, and of course that’s critical this time of year, so maybe I should let Ellie do it like always, but thanks for trying to help, it was so cute of me.
Is it me?
Sometimes I think it’s just me. I think there’s something wrong inside me, something mean and selfish and small that puts the worst interpretation on anything that’s said to me. When I try to tell Tom about what happened, he looks at me, puzzled. “Well, the wrong amount of feed can put the chickens off their laying,” he says, as if that explains everything, and goes back to reading his tractor manual.
It is evening, night in the little house, but not at all peaceful. My nerves are trembling inside my body, I want to explode, to shriek and scream. And Tom, once so tuned to me he could answer my unspoken questions, does not even notice. So I will be good. I will be patient. I will be a good wife, and contain this unreasoning anger. I will think of something worthwhile to do.
“I think I’ll go get Teddy,” I say. “It’s getting late, and I think he’s had enough television for one night. This time of evening, there’s probably nothing on that will interest him, anyway.”
Tom grunts, flips back to the index, turns more chunks of pages,