“You’re not crazy, Papa!” I cried.
My parents laughed, the way they did when, without warning, they were in their own realm where everything was funny. If anyone was crazy it was Gloria. She had flung down her smock. She’d torn away. So that’s how it happened, not eating any of your dinner, abandoning the dishes, having to run to try to catch, maybe not even the man, but the love itself? None of it seemed like a good idea, but we weren’t going to worry about Gloria’s disappointment in the event it didn’t work out. We wandered off upstairs to our room. We got to wondering whether, if it did work out, if she and Stephen would then have real children instead of cats. If they did, those children would be our cousins. Because Gloria was a knowledgeable gardener, unlike my mother, whose plot was a tangle, and because Gloria was interested in farming, those children might want to live on the orchard. They might want to take it over. Those future relatives would be our rivals, our enemies, and furthermore they would have extensive knowledge, something we had neglected to get. We would then be sorry we hadn’t loved Gloria more, so that she would have been satisfied with just us.
That night, though, we forgot as usual everything that was going on around us, forgot to worry. My father always lay on the floor in our room in order to tell us a continuing story that came out of his own head. He could only do it lying down. The story featured a hero named Kind Old Badger. Kind Old Badger seemed doddery and was sometimes baffled but, surprising to some, he was remarkably strong and wise. Not to mention shrewd. The story highlighted William and Mary Frances, too, we who performed feats of astonishing bravery with the dearest of Badgers. We were always having to run swiftly over hill and also over dale, the two of us run, run, running like the hobbie-a, my father said. We knew what that meant and also couldn’t have explained it. Neither Gloria nor my mother ever made an appearance in Kind Old’s kingdom. They never had to run like the hobbie-a; they would have been unable to. My father also read us the stories about queens being in prison for years, and wife after wife getting her head chopped off. All King Henry wanted was for the right boy to be born, that child standing at the ready to take over when the time came. If my father temporarily ran out of steam with Kind Old we loved second best hearing about the princes and princesses wearing sables and golden gowns, studying the countries on the globe, realms that would be theirs once they assumed the throne.
5.
The Four–Five Split
In addition to the romance situation out in the orchard, Stephen and Gloria almost literally sitting in a tree, k-i-s-s-i-n-g, there was another crisis that summer that, although I didn’t know it right away, also involved true love. At the end of July the thing William and I had feared for at least a year came to fruition. Time, we could see, was beginning to run as if it were leading somewhere, as it had not exactly done when we were very small, time occurring back then only in bursts. At any rate, the dread event took place, a radiologist and his wife moving not only to our town but into a house on our side of the road, next to Velta. Dr. and Mrs. Michael Kraselnik. They had two teenagers, David and Brianna, hard to think how students with KRASELNIK on the backs of their gym shorts would manage at high school, although we were hardly concerned with their problems. The prospect of their coming was at first so alarming William and I couldn’t stand to imagine it.