It was as if, we sometimes thought, a spell had been put upon both Gloria and my father, so that they had to keep reviewing who had said what and insisting there were no sides. We’d come downstairs in the middle of the night to get a drink of milk, the plastic bottoms of our pajama feet slapping on the steps, and there they were, not even hearing us, Gloria often with a naked face, Gloria without her glasses, rubbing her eyes. In her canvas pants, her faded T-shirt, and, you could tell, no bra for her little titties—even in the same old work clothes—Gloria without her glasses went from looking like welder woman to Nordic princess. If her braids were pulling apart after a long day, and if she’d undone them all the way, her yellow hair fell in its unlashed crinkles to her waist. She was so uncommon-looking with that hair down we were afraid of her, unsure of who she was. She suddenly seemed as if she didn’t belong to the farm anymore.
My father and Gloria weren’t in love, nothing like that. For love, for romance, we knew you had to be beautiful all the time and also you had to have little else to do. Gloria, we thought, should not wear her glasses if she wanted true love, for one, and for another she had a boyfriend in North Dakota, an older man with a messy gray beard and smudgy eyes who visited every few months. When he wasn’t in the state we forgot he existed. This was a proper arrangement, Gloria enjoying my father’s company best, and mostly being too busy for other friends.
My mother used to joke to her library patrons that she liked my father having an alternate wife, a spare, Wife Number Two, that the setup allowed her to go to bed at a reasonable hour, to hog the mattress, to read as long as she wanted to, and Thank you, Gloria, it freed her from having to hear every detail of the apple business, year in and year out. Sometimes she’d make a peculiar pronouncement, as if her short sentence was a truth from out of antiquity. She’d say, “When you are married to Jesus Christ you become mean.”
Her patrons, the women, laughed.
She’d say next, “Gloria is Jesus’s nice wife.”
This, too, must have been funny because Mrs. Lombard’s fan club always snorted at her quips. They laughed even though it was not a humorous fact that Gloria was nice. She was quiet and steady in her jobs as the hired man and Wife Number Two and the lady-in-waiting, and additionally she was the nanny and the scullery maid. All those helpers in one woman. Nellie Lombard was always singing her praises and thanking her and from the kitchen window if Gloria was outside pushing a wheelbarrow full of manure or digging a deep hole or dragging a sheep by its hind leg back to the shed my mother cried, “Don’t strain your back! Gloria! Wait until Jim can help you.” My mother, always considering Gloria’s happiness and comfort.
But sometimes she also came downstairs in the night to get a drink and there Gloria and my father were at the table staring at the candle. My mother had to transform herself then, had to turn into the monstrous shape of a shrill housewife, a cupboard opening, we thought, and this ugly warty woman stepping out. “What is wrong with you people!” she’d cry. “You don’t have the sense to go to sleep?”
“Oh!” Gloria pawed around the table for her glasses. “How did it get so late?” And she scuttled away home for a few hours of sleep, Gloria always up at daybreak for the great work of the harvest.
The tangle in our minds, the Gloria problem, if laid out end-to-end, went something like this: As much as she put her time and strength and creativity into the picking and the cider making, the selling at the markets and at our barn, and sorting fruit, and trying to keep order in the storage barn, and doing her best to preserve the peace with Sherwood; as kind as she was to Dolly and even to May Hill; and as much as she slavishly went marching side by side with my father during the day and throughout the seasons; could it be that more than all that activity she wanted to find an actual husband—someone different from the bearded old North Dakotan—and have her own children? Years were passing while maybe she secretly held on to that wish, and then an entire decade had gone by. Through her thick glasses, with her steady gaze boring down into our wobbly selves, she watched us grow up. She put her arms around us, clasping us to her, kissing our hair. My mother did that to us all the time, which was right, which was something we didn’t have to hold still on purpose for. Gloria every year gave us handmade Valentines that said BE MINE, a message we knew she’d send us every day if the holiday calendar allowed her to. And sometimes she looked at us as if—if we weren’t careful—we’d get beamed up through her magnified eyeballs into some magical Gloria realm that might be an uncomfortable place. She bloodied her fingers sewing me a doll with braids and a wardrobe to go with her and for William she made a knight with knitted chain mail. All those gifts were items my mother was incapable of producing, Gloria, in technical terms, a superior mother.
Our concerns therefore: If she couldn’t have enough of us would she quit her post, abandon my father and the farm? Was it our responsibility to hold her? And if so, what did we have to do to keep her? That is, how much did we have to love her?
Always, when we were leaving her cottage, after doing an extensive cooking or sewing project, she’d solemnly give us one last instruction. “William. Mary Frances. Thank your mother for sharing you with me.”