At dinner no one said much of anything. It was as if somehow William and my father understood that Dolly had thrown a book across the library. My father did say obligatorily, “How was your day, Marlene?”
Sherwood had once told Jim Lombard to shove grass up there. And Dolly had thrown a book. Those adults from across the road in Volta were the people who had to be violent in the face of my nice, even-tempered parents, so nice and polite and generous, so selfless, giving up their money, the couple of Velta, the upstart Lombards who had come to the farm from the outside world. On my walk home from the library I’d switched over to their side, to Dolly and Sherwood’s side. I could clearly see their position, could see why you’d have to shout unpleasant things and throw heavy books. Those hateful nice people, Jim and Nellie. The small acts of rebellion against them. It was all you could do, the book, the grass.
22.
The Fruit Sale
The next morning when I woke up the sunshine was too bright to bear. The sun had hardly risen and already in my window it was terrible. “Francie!” my mother screeched from the kitchen. “It’s late!” The Elizabeth George novel was presumably still on the floor at the library, no one daring to move the object that spelled our doom. “Francie! The bus in twenty minutes!” In my room the daylight at once glowed red. It was difficult to open my eyes to such luridness. To keep them open. In the night I’d started to understand a few other unspeakable facts, most especially that everything was ruined because of me.
The story was back to MF Lombard. It was I who had unraveled the place I loved more than anything else in the world, I, who had steadily been at work not only at my own wreckage but at Dolly’s and everyone else’s, too. It was I who, from the day of the interview in fifth grade, so long before, had started May Hill plotting, May Hill determined to keep the farm from me. The interview during the four–five split was her first hint about my character, and then there was the capture in her room, followed by any number of indications that MF Lombard was the silliest of persons, MF crying in the shed, MF dressed in an outlandish costume going to a school dance, a girl of no substance. A…mongrel. And now it was done, Philip a part of us, Philip the foreigner on our very soil.
With great effort I pulled myself to sit up in bed. MF, a pie dog, destined to roam, bloodied ear, hungry. A cur. It was almost impossible to assemble my Future Farmers of America uniform. To pick up my books. The Norton Anthology for AP English, the heaviest. Everything supposedly important in one volume. Putting it in the backpack. Scowling at my mother about breakfast. I could hardly manage the rudimentary motions. Going out, step after step, as the bus made the bend in the road, rattling toward me. No William, because he had departed early for one of his clubs. I would have stayed home if the FFA annual fruit sale, of which I was in charge, hadn’t been taking place at school. I did know—I was aware—that William was waiting to find out if he’d been accepted Early Decision at the college of his and my mother’s choice in Minnesota. It was one of any number of schools that claim to be the Harvard of the Midwest, a school that had aggressively courted him.
After the weary day going from class to class I found myself standing at the banquet table in the cafeteria, surrounded by boxes of Florida oranges and grapefruits. The Sunshine State. Invaded by pythons. I was looking at the list to see who had yet to show up when my brother appeared with a large white envelope in hand. The collar of his Oxford shirt was carefully folded down over the neck of his respectably drab sweater. He was a boy who was going to go out of state, a place very few students at our school dared to venture.
“What are you doing here?” I said to him. He was not ordinarily in my FFA world.
“I got the letter.” He put it on the table in front of me. “The fat envelope.”
Although there had been little doubt that William would be admitted I hadn’t expected to learn about it at the fruit sale. He had gone home to check the mail, and he’d returned to tell me, as if for some reason he needed to do so in public.
“Are you going to go?” I knew even as I was asking that it was a terribly stupid thing to say. You don’t apply Early Decision to the college you most want to attend because you’re thinking you might not matriculate. In fact you are honor-bound to show up.
“I think I will,” he said.
“Oh,” I said. I said next, “When does it start?”
He laughed a little, a small hiccup escaping his mouth. Currently it was November, ten months before college would begin. But the thing is he knew; he knew the exact date without even looking. “September ninth,” he announced.
“September?”
“If I was going to be on a team or something, I’d probably go earlier.”
“What kind of team? You’re not on teams.”
“I don’t know. Cross-country, maybe?”