Miller's Valley - Anna Quindlen Page 0,16
wasn’t going anywhere. For a long time, when I was young, I tried to dream up ways to get her to leave the house, but after seeing her up in the attic during the big flood I was pretty sure it would never happen.
Donald used to visit her sometimes, too. He’d listen to her talk without starting to fidget or look at the door the way most people did. LaRhonda wouldn’t even go to her house. “She’s weird,” LaRhonda said. “She likes company,” Donald said. “He’s got nice manners, that boy,” Aunt Ruth said about Donald, “and I knew his mother so I can tell you they didn’t come from her.” She’d put out a glass of milk and two Oreos on a plate for each of us. Ruth’s rules, or one of them: she wouldn’t serve us tea, iced or hot, because she said it was a stimulant. She drank it all day long herself.
I spent a lot of time at her house over the years. We must have done a hundred jigsaw puzzles, pictures that the box said were by Monet and Degas or photographs of gardens and houses and barns like ours but nicer. As I got older the puzzles had more and more pieces, so that now we were working on the cathedral of Chartres with pieces so small that we kept losing them and finding them again in the folds of our clothes.
During the day when I was at school Aunt Ruth watched soap operas and read Reader’s Digest Condensed Books. She liked the ones by Mary Stewart and Taylor Caldwell. She said they were romantic. When I was in her house during the day, on weekends or if school was canceled because of snow, she turned off the TV and put her little bookmark, the one with violets pressed between plastic and a purple tassel at one end, into her book. I don’t know whether turning off the TV was her idea or my mother’s. My mother thought watching television during the day was as lazy as staying in bed if you weren’t sick. I never ever managed to get up early enough to bring my mother breakfast in bed on Mother’s Day. She’d wander in while I was putting a late daffodil in a juice glass and pour her own cup of coffee. “Just stay in bed until seven,” I told her once.
“Don’t be silly,” she’d said.
Aunt Ruth liked game shows, too. One day in second grade I hadn’t wanted to go to school because I realized at the bus stop that I hadn’t done the spelling homework. I pretended to run back for it and then I hid in the barn until I saw a flash of yellow pass by through the spaces between the warped old boards. Then I went up to Ruth’s house. She was watching The Price Is Right, yelling “twenty-nine cents” at a bottle of Windex. I don’t know why she thought she’d know the price of anything. She hadn’t been in the supermarket for years.
She startled when I came through from the kitchen. “No school for you?” She stood and peered out the window. “It can’t be a snow day.”
“It’s April,” I said.
“I’ve seen snow in April, smarty-pants,” she’d said as she clicked off the TV and the picture disappeared to a black dot. “I saw snow in May once. We built a snowman on the lawn, your mother and me. We gave him a tulip to hold, that’s how late it was.”
“Teacher conferences,” I said.
“I don’t have enough jam for both of us,” she’d said. My father usually brought Aunt Ruth her groceries. Sometimes there was a box of chocolate-covered cherries. Chocolate-covered cherries were my favorite things in the world. Later I figured out they weren’t so good—the cherries aren’t much like cherries, with a consistency more like a pencil eraser and that strange chemical sugary taste of the stuff that surrounds them. LIQUEUR, it said on the foil, but it wasn’t. I liked to bite off the top, suck that stuff out, then tap the cherry onto my tongue. They were special then, chocolate-covered cherries. Like shrimp were special. A shrimp cocktail was a big deal. Once LaRhonda’s parents had a party for their wedding anniversary. They had enormous platters of shrimp with hollowed cabbages filled with cocktail sauce, and Mrs. Venti had too many White Russians and called her husband a pig and tried to drive off in their Cadillac but couldn’t get it