“I went to college so I wouldn’t have to pick cherries,” Nell said.
“College is closed,” Joe said. “College can’t protect you now.”
3
“Good night, good night, good night,” they sing, knocking against one another purposefully on the stairs. The three of them are younger when they’re together. They regress.
“Mama’s going to California to be a movie star,” Nell says to her sisters. “And we’ll still be locked up on the farm.”
“At least someone got out,” Emily says.
I promise to tell them all about it tomorrow.
Maisie yawns, stretching up her hands to touch the doorframe, Hazel at her heel. Hazel is some kind of yellow terrier with a crooked front leg and fine, irregular hair that stands up in patches. Maisie got her from the animal--control shelter where she worked during her second semester of veterinary school. The staff labeled the cages with folksy names—-Opie and Sparky and Goober and Bear—-subliminal promises of how good these dogs would be. Hazel had long been kenneled in a row of enormous brutes who bit the metal bars day and night in hopes of eating her, and Hazel in turn picked up so many bad habits that one of the staff had scrawled the word “WITCH” above her name with a fat black Sharpie. Those bad habits, along with the bum leg and what appeared to be mange, had rendered her unadoptable, and after several weeks at the shelter, Maisie saw the tag on Witch Hazel’s kennel indicating her time was up. She kept going back to slip biscuits between the bars. Last biscuits.
“Watch your fingers,” her supervisor had said when Maisie announced her plan to take Hazel home for the weekend. But as soon as she reached into the kennel the dog began to howl, disbelieving that good fortune could arrive so late in an unfortunate life. Students were counseled against the dangers of sentimentality but for that day Maisie chose to ignore the lesson, and the mangy little terrier thumped a grateful tail against her.
Emily comes back downstairs with her book, some manual about branch grafting. She says it knocks her out, by which she means puts her to sleep. Emily lives in the little house at the edge of the north apple orchard. She picks up a flashlight from the basket by the back door, the basket of flashlights and sock caps and mittens and bug spray.
“I’ll walk you halfway,” I tell her.
She laughs. She comes back and kisses me. Emily kisses me. “Good night,” she says.
I watch from the window above the sink until I can no longer see her steady beam sweeping over the road, then I turn out all the lights and go upstairs.
Their father is sound asleep. Because he cannot wait for me, he’s left the lamp on the nightstand burning and folded back the covers on my side of the bed. One hand is on his heart, as if the last thing he did was check to see if it was still beating, the other is out of the bed, his fingers nearly brushing the floor. Nothing can wake him in the summer. After dinner, he goes back out to the barn, saying he has just a few more things to finish, then winds up putting in a second day. I picture the farm as a giant parquet dance floor he balances on his head, the trees growing up from the little squares. The fruit that must be picked, the branches that must be pruned, the fertilizer and insecticide （just try growing cherries without it）， the barn full of broken machinery along with the new tractor we can’t afford and the goats that seemed like such a good idea five years ago when Benny first suggested them for weed management and cheese, the workers whose children are sick and the workers who need money to go home to see their children and the little house whose roof leaks and the stacks of twenty--pound plastic lugs with Three Sisters Orchard printed on the side, and me and Emily and Maisie and Nell, all of it is on him. We try to be helpful but it is his head this place rests on. He carries it with him to our bed at night.
I put on my nightgown and crawl in beside him, covering the hand that covers his heart. Live forever, I say to myself.
Veronica didn’t get to go to the University of New Hampshire. She had to stay home because no one else was there to watch the boys. Her plan was to do two years of community college and then transfer her credits. Everyone has plans, and by the time we graduated from high school she wasn’t telling me hers anymore. She was the one who started out with Jimmy--George, by which I don’t mean sitting on the steps at the end of the hall, talking. He was older than us, twenty--two, though no one believed it. Veronica asked to see his driver’s license when he told her and she still thought he was lying, just like the guys in the outlet stores thought his ID was fake and then sold him the beer anyway. He lived two towns over and was doing his student teaching. He said the kids in his class had laughed that first day of school when he wrote his name on the blackboard. Jimmy--George was going to be a high school math teacher, and that in itself made him a valuable asset because he did our math homework for us. He did other things. Six years older would be nothing later on, but at the time it was an unimaginable distance. We couldn’t believe how lucky we were when he reached for us, an adult who played a kid onstage.
Veronica told me how she felt about him, and later she told me what they did. Two nights a week he came to her house after he’d finished rehearsal and she’d put the boys to bed. He would curl around her in her single bed so they could go to sleep like married people, then he would get up in the early dark and drive back to the room he rented and get ready for school, all before her mother finished her shift at the hospital. Veronica said that his eyes never left hers the entire time. She said she was pretty sure no one had ever really looked at her before, not in her entire life, and maybe that was true, but it was also true that that was just the way Jimmy--George looked at people. Onstage he looked at me like someone had dropped a giant Mason jar over us and we were alone in the world. He was the one who taught me how not to look away.
“We should be spending time together,” he said one night after rehearsal. “You know, be George and Emily, have a strawberry phosphate or something.”
But we were George and Emily and Veronica. “I don’t think so,” I said.
“I thought you liked acting,” he said. “I’m just talking about us being more convincing.”
I told him that I thought we were pretty good already, when what I should have said was, Back up. He stood much closer when we weren’t on the stage, when no one else was around.
He touched one finger to the side of my neck. “Chemistry,” he said. “That’s what George and Emily have.”
I couldn’t say he was wrong about that. I hedged for a couple of days before climbing into his car, telling myself this thing between us was all in the name of theater. We passed Mr. Martin in the parking lot one night while he was standing beneath a street light in a wool hunting jacket, smoking a cigarette. I could tell he was trying to calculate the potential for damage.
“Fifteen will get you twenty, Mr. Haywood,” he said finally, his voice neither leering nor scolding, just a helpful piece of information passed along. Jimmy’s last name was Haywood.
Jimmy--George removed his hand from my waist and laughed, so I laughed too, even though I had no idea what Mr.
Martin was talking about. Years later, I heard the expression again on a set and it made perfect sense. Mr. Martin had been concerned for Jimmy Haywood’s safety.