Miller's Valley - Anna Quindlen Page 0,3
of The Dick Van Dyke Show.
There was a heating vent right behind the head of my bed, and if you followed it down it stopped at the heating vent behind the kitchen table before it ended up at the old cast-iron furnace in the basement. When I was five I thought my room was haunted because just as I was dropping off to sleep I would hear a moaning sound underneath my bed. Years later my brother Eddie told me that Tommy had put his mouth to the vent and made the noise and Eddie made him stop when he caught him, and all of that made sense, including Eddie saying he hadn’t mentioned any of it to our parents.
The thing was, listening to my parents through that vent was like a bad radio broadcast, one of those where you’ve got a song on you really like but it’s from fifty miles away and it drifts in and out and you have to fill in the gaps by singing along. I was good at filling in the gaps when my parents talked, and I probably heard a lot I shouldn’t have. If it had been LaRhonda listening, the whole town would have known, too. You could close that heating vent with a little chain at one corner, and I always did when LaRhonda slept over. But the rest of the time I paid attention to whatever I managed to hear.
She’s got cancer in that breast, my mother might say.
That’ll be hard on Bernie, my father would say.
Bernie? It’ll be hard on her, is who it’ll be hard on. From what I hear Bernie has plenty of female companionship.
Gossip, my father would say. Then silence, and I would fall asleep.
Or, That baby is going right into the state hospital, no questions asked, my mother might say.
That’s a sad thing, my father would say.
Sadder to keep it at home, my mother would say.
Guess so, my father would say. She was always sure of things. He almost never was, except maybe about the government people and their plans for Miller’s Valley. Over the years there was a lot of talk about that at night in the kitchen.
Talked to Bob Anderson yesterday, my mother might say.
Got no business with a real estate agent, my father replied.
Asking for you, my mother said.
Fine right where I am, my father said.
Clattering pans in the sink. Tap running.
Why I even bother, my mother said.
“Meems, you up?” Tommy whispered, pushing open the door. When he wanted to he could move through the house like a ghost, even when he was drunk. Maybe especially when he was drunk.
“How come you’re home?” I said, sitting up against the headboard.
Not listening to one more word on the subject, said my father.
“Oh, man, not again,” said Tommy. He sat down on the edge of my bed and canted his head toward the vent so that a piece of hair fell down on his forehead. It was confusing, having a good-looking brother. I tried not to think of him that way, but LaRhonda wouldn’t shut up about it.
“What are they talking about?” I said. “Who’s Bob Anderson?”
“Did the water department guy stop by here today?”
“Who?”
“Did some guy in a Chevy sedan come by to see Pop?”
“There’s somebody who came by and had some kind of business card from the state. Donald says he talked to his grandfather, too. He says he went to the Langers’ house and some other places.”
“That’s what they’re talking about, then. The damn dam.”
“Mr. Langer says that all the time,” I said.
“Yeah, that’s the problem for sure. The old guys say that when they built the dam, when they were all kids, there was a big fight about it. They figure now they put it in the wrong place, or the water’s in the wrong place, or something. They want to flood the whole valley out.” And both of us looked out toward the light in Ruth’s window.
“What about us?” I said.
I knew about the dam. It was named after President Roosevelt, but the one with the mustache and the eyeglasses, not the one with the Scottie dog and the wife with the big teeth. We’d gone to the dam on a field trip. The guide told us it was made out of concrete and was for flood control, which didn’t make sense because we had flooding in the valley all the time. A lot of the kids were bored by the description of cubic feet and gallons, but we