Cloven Hooves. Megan Lindholm

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СКАЧАТЬ family she calls it “the little house.” I find this an interesting dichotomy. Lately I find interesting dichotomies in many things Mother Maurie says.

      It is like a cancer, growing in me, a constant hidden nastiness I can no longer control. A little secret anger, like red eyes in the dark. When I first came down to visit, and was shown the many ways in which the Potter women were vastly superior to me, I was willing to concede to them. It was the easiest path. It was also hard to argue. I cannot shop, I do not color coordinate, I have never ordered from the Avon Lady or hostessed a Tupperware party. I was willing to be unschooled and unsophisticated, the country mouse come down from her little Alaskan cabin to be overawed by the style and gaiety of the life in the Lower Forty-Eight. A week, a month, or even two, I could sustain the proper humility. But now it is all wearing thin. I am becoming defensive about my inferiority, protective of it. I will be as I am. I am also beginning to suspect their veneer may be only contac paper. The Avon fragrances are beginning to smell suspiciously like air freshener. My anger is a simmering acid thing, eating me from the inside out, whetting my tongue, putting cruel edges on my every thought.

      But that is my problem, not Mother Maurie’s. And this living room is also my problem. We have been guests here since March. It is a bright and cheerful little place, cuter than the cottage of the Seven Dwarfs. There are big windows with wispy white curtains that let the bright sun spill in onto the white tiled floors. The furniture is white wicker and yellow cushions. There is a little glass-topped table, too unbearably cute to be useful, homey little rugs scattered everywhere, and two kerosene lamps with colored water in them instead of kerosene.

      The kitchen is even better. There is a tiny white range, with a little red ceramic kettle sitting on it. The kettle is a masterpiece of Woolworth’s engineering, flawlessly useless, with a spout that dribbles and a body that holds less than three cups of water. Next to it, centered on the range, is a spoon holder shaped like a yellow ducky. The tiny kitchen table has a red-checkered oilcloth on it. There are plaques on the wall that say things about the Number One Cook, and For This I Went to College, and No Matter Where I Serve My Guests, They Seem to Like My Kitchen Best. There is a cookie jar shaped like a fat pink piggy. The dishes in the cupboards are sturdy plastic with jolly red roosters on every plate.

      The bedroom is okay. The patchwork quilt came from Sears, and the patches are only a pattern, but I can forgive that. I can even forgive the lampshades with the covered bridges painted on them, and the bases of the lamps that are shaped like old-fashioned pumps.

      What I cannot forgive is the bathroom. The theme seems to be that defecating children are cute. On a plaque over the toilet, a curly-haired cherub squats on a potty. There is also an adorable little statuette of a small boy with his bib coveralls around his ankles and a look of concentration on his pink-cheeked face as he sits on his little ceramic toilet. Even the toilet has theme clothing. The tank sweater and lid hat match, both depicting a little boy, his innocent bare butt toward us as he “waters mother’s flowers.” There is even an ashtray shaped like a toilet, with the motto “put your dead butts here” on it. The final touch is a tall book that hangs on a chain by the toilet. The cover proclaims it as Poems for the John. Few things are more excruciating than to be trying to make breakfast in a cutesy kitchen, and to have one’s spouse holler from the john, “Hey, honey, listen to this one.” Lately, Tom has begun to subject me to this.

      It is a trap I have fallen into, all unawares. Even as we carried our suitcases in, Mother Maurie painstakingly pointed out to me that the furniture was “practically new, not a scratch on it.” She walked me through the guest house, showing me all its marvels, and requiring me to chuckle appreciatively as she giggled over the “naughty but cute” bathroom things. Steffie did the decorating, she told me. Steffie may someday take some classes in interior decorating, she seems to have such a flair for it. Some of the ideas, she confided, Steffie got from magazines, but most of it came right out of her own head. And isn’t that amazing?

      And of course Mother Maurie knows she can trust me to keep it neat as a pin, and to make sure “that terrible Tom” takes his boots off before he comes in, and don’t let “that rascal Teddy” roughhouse all over the furniture, it would just break Steffie’s heart if anything happened to this place, all the work she put into it to make it just as cute as a doll’s house … And I nodded and blithely agreed, for such an agreement seems easy when you are only planning to stay a month and may not even unpack your suitcase all the way.

      But that was March and it is June. Useless to whimper for my sturdy little house in the woods near Ace Lake on the Old Nenana Road. Foolish to think of a place with painted plywood floors, and a boot-scraper driven into the ground outside the door. I miss my sagging couch with its ratty afghan that all three of us can cuddle under while Teddy hears his good-night 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 СКАЧАТЬ