Miller's Valley - Anna Quindlen Page 0,40

like primary sources.”

I knew that. Judges in these contests always liked primary sources. I was already using one. “Tell me about Andover,” I’d said to Cissy Langer, sitting in her back room with a wall full of piggy dolls staring at me.

“Oh, my goodness, Mimi, what a question,” she’d said.

I took the glass of iced tea, and I took the plate of chocolate chip cookies, and I set my tape recorder between them. I’d borrowed it from the school librarian.

“I’ve already got some primary sources,” I said to Winston Bally in the conference room.

We all pick and choose the things we talk about, I guess. I’d listened to my mother and Cissy talk about growing up together for maybe hundreds of hours, about sharing a seat and red licorice ropes on the bus, about getting licked for wearing their Sunday dresses into the woods one day, about the years when they both moved back in with their parents while their husbands went to war. And somehow I’d never really noticed that all the stories started when they were ten, that there were no stories about the four-year-old Miriam, the six-year-old Cissy, about the day when they were both seven when Ruth came home from the hospital, a bundle of yellow crochet yarn and dirty diaper. It made sense, I guess, since it turned out Cissy had grown up in a place whose name I’d never even heard because it had been wiped off the map before I’d ever even been born.

“My whole family lived in Andover,” Cissy said. “My mother and father were both born there. There wasn’t a real church, or a school, either. My grandfather used to say Andover was nothing but a wide place in the road. The next biggest place to Andover was the valley, if you can believe it. But we had a little store that sold all kinds of things, pots and pans and cheese and newspapers, you know, and there was a little chapel that some Shakers built in the woods and that’s where my parents were married. I’ve got pictures somewhere.”

She’d gone off and came back with a shoe box. “White patent,” it said, “size eight.” There were photographs of a family group standing in the woods, the men in white shirts and dark pants, the women in dark dresses and big hats. Cissy pointed at a woman who looked just like her. “Mama,” she said.

“I don’t have a whole lot to tell you, Mimi,” she said. “I don’t even really understand why you’re dredging this all up in the first place. Andover wasn’t like Miller’s Valley. There was hardly anyone who lived there, maybe a hundred people or so, and there weren’t any farms. The ground was terrible for planting things. My mother would force petunias from seed on the dining room windowsill and when she went to plant them outside she’d get herself a spadeful of rocks every time. She always got those flowers to grow but it was hard work. I love the soil in Miller’s Valley. When my mama lived here she did a beautiful job with the garden. I remember one day, you were real little, and you were out at their place looking at the hollyhocks. You kept putting out your little finger and saying ‘flower.’ It was the cutest.”

She put the lid back on the shoe box. “We moved here when I was ten, after they built the dam and backed the river up so it flooded Andover. It was sad to leave, and then the very first day here I met your mother on the road, and that was that. I was content.”

“What about Andover?”

“What about it, sweetie? It’s gone. Even when there’s drought the water’s too deep to see any of what’s left. Or maybe there’s nothing left at all. I’m fifty now, so it’s been down there under all that water for forty years. You know what water does. It gets to where it makes things just disappear.” She picked up the last cookie, held it out to me, then popped it in her mouth when I shook my head. My mother said Cissy had always had a sweet tooth.

“You know what they call a place like that?” she said. “A drowned town. It’s a drowned town, Andover.”

“But when you go past there what do you think?”

“I don’t go over there no more, Mimi. I don’t go anywhere near that place.”

“Who is your primary source?” Mr. Bally said in the water offices.

“I’m