Miller's Valley - Anna Quindlen Page 0,52
Aunt Ruth was watching The Beverly Hillbillies.
“You know, Buddy Ebsen was a big song and dance man when he was young,” Ruth said, reaching for the cake without taking her eyes from the TV. “He was supposed to play the Tin Man in The Wizard of Oz, but he got hives when they put that silver makeup on him.” Aunt Ruth said that every time she was watching The Beverly Hillbillies, just like every time she watched The Andy Griffith Show she said the little boy was cute and Andy Griffith should have won an Oscar for A Face in the Crowd, and every time she watched The Carol Burnett Show she said, “Honey, I love her but that woman has no chin at all.” Aunt Ruth subscribed to movie magazines, and nothing ticked her off more than when my father would forget to bring them back to her when they showed up in our mailbox. She had her own mailbox, right on the road next to ours, but the mailman knew better than to put her mail in it.
“This cake is a little dry,” Ruth said.
“Beggars can’t be choosers.” As I’d gotten older I’d refused to side with Ruth in her spite war against my mother.
“Just get me some milk before you go home, okay, honey?” she said, which was my cue to stop distracting her from some argument Jethro and Elly May were having on the television.
I was at our kitchen table taking notes for a history paper on the medical techniques developed during the Civil War when I heard a car door slam and my father yelling. When my mother yelled her sentences were sharp and tight, but my father did it seldom and his words got loose-limbed and ran together so he was hard to understand. From inside the barn you could hear the cows mooing loud but low, and that made the whole thing even more confusing, like when the school band tuned up in the practice room.
“Oh, for goodness’ sake, you know Eddie never intended any disrespect. The opposite. The exact opposite. You know that boy. You’re being ridiculous.”
“I feel goddamned ridiculous, I can tell you that. He’s twenty-eight years old and he thinks he knows every damn thing.” I kept my head low over my paper and pretended to be writing something. “To take us out there and start talking about ranch houses and bathrooms with two sinks and attached garages and all that—what the hell was he thinking, that I was going to say, Well, gosh, Edward, sign me right up?”
“He’s worried about you. If you’ve said it once, you’ve said it a hundred times: running a farm is hard work. And what’s wrong with living in a nice new house with wall-to-wall carpeting? You may not want to hear this, but I’d like some wall-to-wall carpeting.”
“Miriam, you want carpeting, I’ll have it installed tomorrow. In this house. Which, in case you’ve also forgot along with that snot-nosed son of yours, was built by my great-great-grandfather. Built good, too, with four-by-fours and plaster over lath, not this sheetrock crap they’ll be using for those houses out there. You imagine my customers bringing lawn mowers out there to one of those nasty little nowhere roads to get fixed? Or no, I guess they won’t be doing that because, as Edward James Miller says driving around in his Jap car, maybe I might want to retire.”
There was a picture in the book in front of me of a doctor dressed in a kind of cutaway jacket with a white apron over it. He was holding a saw. I just kept staring at the saw. It was bloody and looked dull. My father said a dull saw was worse than no saw at all. My brother must have lost his mind with this idea, or he’d forgotten where and who he came from.
“You made it clear where you stand on that, and on all the rest of it. Just put it to bed.”
“You put it to bed. You were the one standing there in an empty field, looking around and smiling and nodding like some goddamned beauty queen.”
“You’ve let loose with enough profanity to blow the roof off this place for the next ten years,” my mother said. “Put that to bed, too. Speaking of which, I’m going to bed.”
The door slammed twice, her, him. She didn’t even look at me as she stomped up the stairs.
My father sat down hard at the table and