“Couldn’t find God, but probably more important, couldn’t locate my feet. Or my vocal cords. Not only my first existential crisis but my first stunning public display of ineptitude. If only I’d known how many more were to come.”
Gloria smacked her hand to her mouth. It seemed as if she might cry. We all knew how the story came out, how eventually the father was loaded onto an old door for a stretcher and put in the apple truck and taken to the emergency room, that he’d miraculously sustained only a few broken ribs. There was no reason to cry.
William and I also knew we were supposed to love the fumbling, sweet boy, young Stephen, just as everyone else did. But how could we? When Stephen talked about his childhood we got the feeling he didn’t actually believe that any child had come after him on the farm. For that reason we couldn’t laugh or feel very sorry for him. He hardly seemed to notice that we were at the table, that we, Mary Frances and William, were the actual, real true children.
When he’d finished the story, the father alive and hardly wounded, Stephen abruptly pushed back in his chair and stood up. “Thanks,” he said to my mother. “You cook lamb better than the Saudis.”
My mother, so pleased by the compliment, tittered girlishly. Gloria watched him hastily tie his shoes and land a short pat pat on Butterhead, the old yellow cat. She stared at the aged tom, both of them glazy-eyed, while Stephen crossed the yard and started out to the hay field. After a minute Gloria blinked away her dream, she looked at her full plate, and then—what did she do but go to the sink and scrape all of that bounty into the bucket for the chickens.
“Gloria?” my mother said. “You all right?”
“Fine!” Gloria said so brightly we knew she had to be ill. Nonetheless she was putting on the smock she wore at our house so she could wash the dishes.
What’s going on? It was my mother who first asked the question of my father with the look, eyebrows raised, the wide glare of alarm.
Next we knew Gloria was ripping off the smock, throwing it on the counter, and she was gone, out the door.
“Oooooh…sweeeet…” My mother’s oath was coming from her mouth, a slow leak. “…Geeeesus.”
“What’s the matter?” William said.
“Do not, Gloria, go after Stephen.” My mother spoke as if Gloria were still in the room.
“Is that what’s happening?” my father wondered.
She shook her head mournfully, which seemed to mean yes.
“Why are you doing that, Mrs. Lombard?” William had started using her formal title when strictness was required.
“It’s just that—it’s just that if, if Gloria likes Stephen—if she likes him very much—he just won’t—he just can’t attend to—”
“Is that what’s going on?” My father’s same basic question.
“Yes, Jim, yes it is.”
“Gloria likes Stephen?” I said.
“All the signs indicate yes,” my mother explained. Not only was she the person in the family who knew about the world in general, but she had also once followed Stephen all the way from her college in Ohio to the orchard. So she should know.
William looked at me, I looked at him. We were thinking about how Gloria had recently scooped up a batch of late-summer kittens from our barn, the mother, Piggy, having eaten the first two, the glutton Piggy feasting on her own young. In rushed Gloria to rescue the remaining babies from both Piggy and my murderous father, who, if given a chance, would slit their throats, a quicker, kinder death, he always said, than drowning them in a bucket. What remained were three blind little mewlers who required feeding with a syringe. So, right away, if Stephen and Gloria got married, they’d have something like an instant family.
“It’s not going to work out,” my mother pronounced, pushing back to clear the plates.
My father, always hopeful where love was concerned, said, “Maybe it will, Nellie. Maybe he’s ready.”
“Oh God, Jim.”
“He’s got this sabbatical situation. Maybe he’s ready for a new life.”
“You know Stephen is not domesticatable,” my mother said, going to her husband’s chair, standing behind him, draping her arms down his front. “You know you are utterly out of your mind.”
He smiled as if she’d given him a compliment, as if she’d said something factual.