Rev. Ellerbroek isn't a ball of fire, but Shari's parents like him--just like mine would--because basically he's conservative as heck. Shari and I saw him on and off last summer, when I worked out there on her uncle's dairy. We're getting married in a couple weeks now, in January, and Ellerbroek is marrying us.
He's dry as sticks from the pulpit, but in his study he's all there. When he talks about the Lord, his face is lit as if he's in love.
He was telling us how when we plan the wedding we ought to think that it's not just for us but for all the people who attend. I don't think he knows about Kenny and Sally.
He was saying how the people who attend hear the vows when they're sitting out there listening to us, and how just listening in again to the commitment people make is important, no matter how many years you've been married. He says that repeating the vows means everybody else renews them.
I told Shari it was hard for me to think of my parents actually repeating vows again, as if through the years they may have forgotten they were married.
She said she thought when you're a kid you don't know everything--maybe not even when you're an adult. You still I don't know all there is to know about your own parents, even though they brought you into this world.
I suppose she's right. The older you get, the more you know that there's mystery in life, balances in the way we get along. Sometimes, I suppose, a very fragile truce.
"I'm scared anyway," I told her. "Going to be a hot time in the old town with Sally and Kenny there in the same church as my old man."
"Maybe Ellerbroek's right, honey," she told me. "Maybe we can be a blessing."
A blessing's one thing, I thought. This one'll take a miracle.
*
I worked in California last summer because I wanted to be with Shari and I didn't care to sit alone at home selling ten-penny nails. Sometimes I think it's hard on my dad to know that I'm not taking over for him. The store has been in the family for three generations, ever since the late 1800's. Don't ask me why I want to be a teacher, but I do. Actually, I think it has something to do with the way my parents raised me, to aspire to something noble, like teaching. It's been my father's undoing, I suppose, to make me think that being a teacher or a preacher is a kingdom calling. I took him seriously. But then, who knows? Maybe someday I'll run the store. Stranger things have happened.
Santa Cruz is more than just a couple hours' drive from Shari's place. It's like a whole different world. The tree-lined streets downtown are full of VW buses and jeeps and old woodies, surfboards strapped up-top. Bearded guys with graying hair tie it up with farmer's handkerchiefs. They sit on downtown benches and play chess in the soft sunlight that falls between the trees.
*
Santa Cruz is more than just a couple hours' drive from Shari's place. It's like a whole different world. The tree-lined streets downtown are full of VW buses and jeeps and old woodies, surfboards strapped up-top. Bearded guys with graying hair tie it up with farmer's handkerchiefs. They sit on downtown benches and play chess in the soft sunlight that falls between the trees.
You see the strangest things. I bought a tape one day from a place where the guy who took my money wore a Fu Manchu mustache and silver-flecked orange glasses with the wildest butterfly rims.
I met Shari at college. She lives in Denton, a California town that would look just like Apple Valley if it weren't for mountains whose sloping shadows rise from the horizon. It's a small town, where the Coast to Coast has a big quadrangular desk and the men come in on Saturdays to lean up against the edge and talk--just like they do at the old man's place. The only difference is that in Denton's Our Own you can't buy an icepick.
Shari's along with me one weekend, when Denton comes up in the conversation at my sister's place. It's Saturday night, and we just got back from this dive where we had terrific Mexican food, not just your standard taco. Shari's playing with the boys on the floor and we're all laughing, when Kenny tells her that he's made deliveries in Denton before and he knows what kind of place it is. "I been there," he says. "You're a California girl all right, but you're from Denton, really."
In the way he says it, I feel this blade across my neck, and I figure Shari feels it too.
"Sometime I want to stay up there overnight and party in that white town, party big-time," he says, rubbing his palms together as he sits there on the couch, his elbows on his knees. "All night long," he says, looking at Sally.
He's talking about all the stiff old farmers in Denton. I know what he's saying, and so does Shari. But he doesn't mean it for us, he means it for Sally. He keeps looking at her.
"You party up there and you're dead," my sister says. She's pointing her finger at him. "They'd hang boys your color." And then she laughs.
I didn't know how to react, but the thing is, he laughed at Sally. I thought he would have kicked her. I thought he never would have let her say that, but the two of them sit there laughing at each other's poking.
The way they laughed together about what Sally had said about Kenny being black--as if she he just let her talk that way to him--it's just something I didn't forget right away because it said something about them together. I can't find words for it exactly, but it felt different being around them after that.
Shari takes the boys on the tramway down at Santa Cruz' Boardwalk down on the oceanfront. She's up there floating over the whole amusement park, and Sally and I are sitting down beneath them, sharing a gyro sandwich. Mark and Bryant poke their hands out when they're right over top of us, and al 1 I can see is their pink flattened palms against the pale blue skies.
Sally is almost ten years older than I am, and Kenny's not the first man she's lived with. She works for the county social services, investigating abuse cases. She takes referra1s from people she calls "mandatory reporters"--doctors and teachers and other school officials--and tries to check them out. It puts her in places you wouldn't bel leve. I think my father would be proud of her. She works hard and she gets tired because sometimes she says the pain won't go away. To me, what she does is a kingdom cal ling. The stories are enough to make you weep, seriously.
Anyway, we're sitting down there on a bench along the edge of the beach, Bryant and Mark right above us in the tram car with Shari, and Sally's got a mouth full of gyro.
"Why don't you get married?" I say, just getting it right out there in front of both of us. "I don't understand."
"You got Dad in you," she says. "So do you," I tell her.
She nods at me as if truer words have never been spoken. She's got that gyro in both hands so it doesn't leak all over, but she pushes it at me. I take the sandwich, but I don't want to take a bite Just then.
"Te1 1 me," I say.
"Listen, little brother, whyn't you mind your own business?" she says, wiping the juice from the corner of her mouth with a napkin, still trying to laugh it off.
"It is my business," I tell her. 11You1re my sister." "Shuttup and eat," she says.
It's a Saturday, but Kenny's off working somewhere, making a delivery.
"You never go to church, do you?" I said, this big glob of sandwich right between us.
11What1s ln me for faith is between me and God," she says, "not you or Dad or Mom or anybody else."
Lines are drawn in around her eyes. I sometimes wonder if she didn1t lie out in the sun too long because her skin seems almost cal loused, hard and edgy, spotted, but not with freckles. Her hair falls off her face and is pulled back behind her ears, tied there in a style popular years ago. She's getting older.
"I1m going to have to tell Mom something," I said to her.
"When I get back, she'll want to know about you."
"Easy enough," Sally says. "Tell her we"re all fine."
"Are you?" I said.
"I don't need your super righteousness, Arlan," she tells me. "You lived all your life in that little burg. Only thing you know is the store."
Like I say, she's my big sister, and I didn't grow up with her; but I saw her slay my father's spirit. "Dad's had more pain about you, Sally, more than I'd ever hope to see anyone have," I tell her.
"He"s screwed up my life," she says.
There the both of us are, this messy sandwich between us, little kids running all over spending money, a big Jog-ride concession splashing down lnto the water. not fifty feet from where we slt.
"How/d he ever hurt you?" I said.
"You/re a tail-ender, Arlan. You don/t know what it was like to be first in 1 ine, breaking ground."
I took another bite of the gyro because I didn/t want her to know how serious I was. "You sti 11 be!ieve in God?" I said.
With that, she stood up, walked over to the calling, and looked out over the quarter-mile of beach toward the ocean. The wind pulled at her skirt. Her legs were whiter than I/d ever seen them.
I threw the sandwich in a barrel and looked up at the tramway. Shari and the boys had to be on their way back. I had to get something down in my mind.
"Tell me, Sally," I told her. "I don/t care about Mom or Dad. I got to know myself. Tell me."
She pulled her arms back from the railing and stood there as if she were chi 1 led. "Mom knows," Sally said. "Mom knows wel 1 and good. She knows everything. I write her."
1/d been gone to college for three years, of course, so maybe Mom had never had the opportunity to tell me what Sally told her in her letters. I wasn/t even aware of Sal Jy/s writing anyone. As far as I knew, it had been years since Sally/s name was even mentioned.
"What do you write?" I said.
"Ask her," she said. "She knows.11 "I didn't know you wrote her." "She does."
"I'm sorry," I said.
Both of us watched a gul I float by and beg for popcorn.
"I wrote her already last spring that I enrolled Bryant in a Christian school," Sally says. "I wrote that. It wasn't easy.
She knows it, Arlan. This little Baptist school a couple blocks away. Light and Life, it's cal led. Bryant goes to a Christian schoo I . 11
I didn't know what to say.
"Shoot, what do they want from me? Blood? She told me how wonderful it was. I got a letter back that wasn't like anything I'd ever received before--almost as if I were back in the fold." Then she laughed, the same as when she told Kenny they hung blacks in Denton--same mocking laugh. 11But she can't even tel 1 him," she said. "She can't tell Dad because he won't hear of the black sheep. To him. I'm lost eternally." She twisted her pu se back behind her shoulder. "You ever think of what that man does to her? You ever think of her, Arlan?"
The beach was ful I of people, but we couldn't have been more alone.
"You send Bryant there for her sake?" I said. "Is that why you dld i t?11
She looked at me as If she hated me. 11You.are so much like
Dad," she said.
11Te l l me ," I sa i d.
"The only difference between us--between him and me--is that he thinks he knows why he does things. I don/t.11
Maybe I was asking for myself only right then, I don/t know. "Sally, you still pray?" I said.
She pulled her shoulder up to her face, as if to wipe away something that might have sl lpped from her eyes. 11You/re such a kid,11 she said, pulling the back of her wrist through her eyes, and looked down as if gyro sauce were running down her fingers. Then she looked at her watch, turned it around on her arm so she could read it clearly.
"Lately I think He won/t let me go," she said. "It/s like something sticky is between us--rubber cement. The other day I was thinking it was rubber cement. Isn/t that nuts! But it/s like God won/t let me alone. He won/t.11
11 Hey, Mom," the boys ye1 1 ed from above. 11 Look ,·a here."
11That/s all, Sally," I said. "I just had to know."
*
In three weeks we/11 be married, Shari and I, and I really believe that I/rn better off knowing what I do now about Kenny and Sally, and about my own parents. Shari/s from such a model farnlly--everything/s perfect. At college she gets these tapes her dad records of Sunday dinner, and it/s all so nice. Besides, Shari/s the oldest.
It;s December now. We decided that I/d spend some time alone with my parents when the semester ended and before we all headed out to Califor·nia for the wedding. So 1/rnback home now,
in my childhood bedroom, where the pennants are still tacked to the wall because my mother won't let that bedroom belong to anyone other than her little boy.
Yesterday, when Dad was at the store, I told Mom what Sally said, how she'd claimed she wrote her about Light and Life. "How is it you can't tell Dad?" I said.
She'd been sitting at the table with both arms up, but they dropped right away. Then she looked up at the chandelier as if an angel might suddenly descend from all the light, and her hands came back up to her eyes. "If you would know the hurt that girl gave us," she said. Then she breaths in deeply, as if what was coming would take more than words. "You can't ever know how much we cried. You wouldn't believe it, Arlan. You wouldn't."
I reached for the radio and turned down the volume. "I don't understand how you can keep that from him. It ought to give him hope," I said.
She breathed deeply again. "Who knows what goes on in the corners of his mind, Arlan? I don't doubt your father prays fifty times a day for that girl. I don't doubt right at this moment, when some mother is buying Lincoln Logs in your father's store and paying for it at the counter--! don't doubt that he's thinking about two grandsons he's never seen."
She pulled her hands down slowly and surrounded her coffee cup. "But it's a subject that we can't talk about anymore. We just can't. There's just so much hurt somebody can take and that's it. Something else has got to break through the silence."
hDo you love him, Mom, or are you scared of him?" I said.
I met Shari at college. She lives in Denton, a California town that would look just like Apple Valley if it weren't for mountains whose sloping shadows rise from the horizon. It's a small town, where the Coast to Coast has a big quadrangular desk and the men come in on Saturdays to lean up against the edge and talk--just like they do at the old man's place. The only difference is that in Denton's Our Own you can't buy an icepick.
Shari's along with me one weekend, when Denton comes up in the conversation at my sister's place. It's Saturday night, and we just got back from this dive where we had terrific Mexican food, not just your standard taco. Shari's playing with the boys on the floor and we're all laughing, when Kenny tells her that he's made deliveries in Denton before and he knows what kind of place it is. "I been there," he says. "You're a California girl all right, but you're from Denton, really."
In the way he says it, I feel this blade across my neck, and I figure Shari feels it too.
"Sometime I want to stay up there overnight and party in that white town, party big-time," he says, rubbing his palms together as he sits there on the couch, his elbows on his knees. "All night long," he says, looking at Sally.
He's talking about all the stiff old farmers in Denton. I know what he's saying, and so does Shari. But he doesn't mean it for us, he means it for Sally. He keeps looking at her.
"You party up there and you're dead," my sister says. She's pointing her finger at him. "They'd hang boys your color." And then she laughs.
I didn't know how to react, but the thing is, he laughed at Sally. I thought he would have kicked her. I thought he never would have let her say that, but the two of them sit there laughing at each other's poking.
The way they laughed together about what Sally had said about Kenny being black--as if she he just let her talk that way to him--it's just something I didn't forget right away because it said something about them together. I can't find words for it exactly, but it felt different being around them after that.
*
Shari takes the boys on the tramway down at Santa Cruz' Boardwalk down on the oceanfront. She's up there floating over the whole amusement park, and Sally and I are sitting down beneath them, sharing a gyro sandwich. Mark and Bryant poke their hands out when they're right over top of us, and al 1 I can see is their pink flattened palms against the pale blue skies.
Sally is almost ten years older than I am, and Kenny's not the first man she's lived with. She works for the county social services, investigating abuse cases. She takes referra1s from people she calls "mandatory reporters"--doctors and teachers and other school officials--and tries to check them out. It puts her in places you wouldn't bel leve. I think my father would be proud of her. She works hard and she gets tired because sometimes she says the pain won't go away. To me, what she does is a kingdom cal ling. The stories are enough to make you weep, seriously.
Anyway, we're sitting down there on a bench along the edge of the beach, Bryant and Mark right above us in the tram car with Shari, and Sally's got a mouth full of gyro.
"Why don't you get married?" I say, just getting it right out there in front of both of us. "I don't understand."
"You got Dad in you," she says. "So do you," I tell her.
She nods at me as if truer words have never been spoken. She's got that gyro in both hands so it doesn't leak all over, but she pushes it at me. I take the sandwich, but I don't want to take a bite Just then.
"Te1 1 me," I say.
"Listen, little brother, whyn't you mind your own business?" she says, wiping the juice from the corner of her mouth with a napkin, still trying to laugh it off.
"It is my business," I tell her. 11You1re my sister." "Shuttup and eat," she says.
It's a Saturday, but Kenny's off working somewhere, making a delivery.
"You never go to church, do you?" I said, this big glob of sandwich right between us.
11What1s ln me for faith is between me and God," she says, "not you or Dad or Mom or anybody else."
Lines are drawn in around her eyes. I sometimes wonder if she didn1t lie out in the sun too long because her skin seems almost cal loused, hard and edgy, spotted, but not with freckles. Her hair falls off her face and is pulled back behind her ears, tied there in a style popular years ago. She's getting older.
"I1m going to have to tell Mom something," I said to her.
"When I get back, she'll want to know about you."
"Easy enough," Sally says. "Tell her we"re all fine."
"Are you?" I said.
"I don't need your super righteousness, Arlan," she tells me. "You lived all your life in that little burg. Only thing you know is the store."
Like I say, she's my big sister, and I didn't grow up with her; but I saw her slay my father's spirit. "Dad's had more pain about you, Sally, more than I'd ever hope to see anyone have," I tell her.
"He"s screwed up my life," she says.
There the both of us are, this messy sandwich between us, little kids running all over spending money, a big Jog-ride concession splashing down lnto the water. not fifty feet from where we slt.
"How/d he ever hurt you?" I said.
"You/re a tail-ender, Arlan. You don/t know what it was like to be first in 1 ine, breaking ground."
I took another bite of the gyro because I didn/t want her to know how serious I was. "You sti 11 be!ieve in God?" I said.
With that, she stood up, walked over to the calling, and looked out over the quarter-mile of beach toward the ocean. The wind pulled at her skirt. Her legs were whiter than I/d ever seen them.
I threw the sandwich in a barrel and looked up at the tramway. Shari and the boys had to be on their way back. I had to get something down in my mind.
"Tell me, Sally," I told her. "I don/t care about Mom or Dad. I got to know myself. Tell me."
She pulled her arms back from the railing and stood there as if she were chi 1 led. "Mom knows," Sally said. "Mom knows wel 1 and good. She knows everything. I write her."
1/d been gone to college for three years, of course, so maybe Mom had never had the opportunity to tell me what Sally told her in her letters. I wasn/t even aware of Sal Jy/s writing anyone. As far as I knew, it had been years since Sally/s name was even mentioned.
"What do you write?" I said.
"Ask her," she said. "She knows.11 "I didn't know you wrote her." "She does."
"I'm sorry," I said.
Both of us watched a gul I float by and beg for popcorn.
"I wrote her already last spring that I enrolled Bryant in a Christian school," Sally says. "I wrote that. It wasn't easy.
She knows it, Arlan. This little Baptist school a couple blocks away. Light and Life, it's cal led. Bryant goes to a Christian schoo I . 11
I didn't know what to say.
"Shoot, what do they want from me? Blood? She told me how wonderful it was. I got a letter back that wasn't like anything I'd ever received before--almost as if I were back in the fold." Then she laughed, the same as when she told Kenny they hung blacks in Denton--same mocking laugh. 11But she can't even tel 1 him," she said. "She can't tell Dad because he won't hear of the black sheep. To him. I'm lost eternally." She twisted her pu se back behind her shoulder. "You ever think of what that man does to her? You ever think of her, Arlan?"
The beach was ful I of people, but we couldn't have been more alone.
"You send Bryant there for her sake?" I said. "Is that why you dld i t?11
She looked at me as If she hated me. 11You.are so much like
Dad," she said.
11Te l l me ," I sa i d.
"The only difference between us--between him and me--is that he thinks he knows why he does things. I don/t.11
Maybe I was asking for myself only right then, I don/t know. "Sally, you still pray?" I said.
She pulled her shoulder up to her face, as if to wipe away something that might have sl lpped from her eyes. 11You/re such a kid,11 she said, pulling the back of her wrist through her eyes, and looked down as if gyro sauce were running down her fingers. Then she looked at her watch, turned it around on her arm so she could read it clearly.
"Lately I think He won/t let me go," she said. "It/s like something sticky is between us--rubber cement. The other day I was thinking it was rubber cement. Isn/t that nuts! But it/s like God won/t let me alone. He won/t.11
11 Hey, Mom," the boys ye1 1 ed from above. 11 Look ,·a here."
11That/s all, Sally," I said. "I just had to know."
*
In three weeks we/11 be married, Shari and I, and I really believe that I/rn better off knowing what I do now about Kenny and Sally, and about my own parents. Shari/s from such a model farnlly--everything/s perfect. At college she gets these tapes her dad records of Sunday dinner, and it/s all so nice. Besides, Shari/s the oldest.
It;s December now. We decided that I/d spend some time alone with my parents when the semester ended and before we all headed out to Califor·nia for the wedding. So 1/rnback home now,
in my childhood bedroom, where the pennants are still tacked to the wall because my mother won't let that bedroom belong to anyone other than her little boy.
Yesterday, when Dad was at the store, I told Mom what Sally said, how she'd claimed she wrote her about Light and Life. "How is it you can't tell Dad?" I said.
She'd been sitting at the table with both arms up, but they dropped right away. Then she looked up at the chandelier as if an angel might suddenly descend from all the light, and her hands came back up to her eyes. "If you would know the hurt that girl gave us," she said. Then she breaths in deeply, as if what was coming would take more than words. "You can't ever know how much we cried. You wouldn't believe it, Arlan. You wouldn't."
I reached for the radio and turned down the volume. "I don't understand how you can keep that from him. It ought to give him hope," I said.
She breathed deeply again. "Who knows what goes on in the corners of his mind, Arlan? I don't doubt your father prays fifty times a day for that girl. I don't doubt right at this moment, when some mother is buying Lincoln Logs in your father's store and paying for it at the counter--! don't doubt that he's thinking about two grandsons he's never seen."
She pulled her hands down slowly and surrounded her coffee cup. "But it's a subject that we can't talk about anymore. We just can't. There's just so much hurt somebody can take and that's it. Something else has got to break through the silence."
hDo you love him, Mom, or are you scared of him?" I said.
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