12/16/2001 Geoffrey Ashbrook
Samantha walked up to the table late, just as it was beginning. She slung her bag off her shoulder and put it quietly under the chair next to her mother’s and sat down, and exhaled, and looked around. The people were mostly busy, and didn’t look to have noticed her --or in the very least they didn’t seem bothered. One of her mother’s friends was leaving by one door and returning with something to eat or drink, over and over, until even the candles on the table had to be moved here to there to make room for all the dishes. She was the youngest woman there by far, and she wasn’t sure how she felt about it. The adults all around her seemed to be enjoying themselves. Maybe she would see that side of older people that only comes out when they’re alone amongst their own kind, when they can act like real people.
She started becoming very interested in everything going on around her. The clothes people wore, how they all talked slightly differently, how they all went about being nervous and excited slightly differently. She watched the arms and lips and eyes of the elder distinguished women, so different from eachother, and Sam wondered what she’d be like. And then the host took her seat.
“Ok,” she said, “go at it before things start getting cold.” And arms shot out all over the table, while the host scanned the table nervously, desperate to spot whatever might be wrong before anyone else could.
After people had filled and emptied their plates a time or two, she heard an older man at the other end of the table say, “But I think it’s good for young men to go into the Army.”
And a reply, “But, conscription?”
“Well, most of the people who that’ll affect couldn’t make that decision well for themselves, anyway,” and he shoved a thin slice of rare steak into his mouth with the end of his fork.
The table grew quieter. Sam looked up and saw a few people looking at eachother, but she couldn’t read them.
“I still think it’s a pity they don’t have a choice,” said the other voice she’d heard, resignedly.
“Well it’s, eh,” another voice chimed in after a moment from the opposite side of the table, “right enough that the country has the ability to defend itself. In this kind of a situation, I think it would be foolish to wager rights of the common against the commonwealth itself.”
“Do they have to be at odds?” Samantha asked. She was about to go on but the look the man who had just spoken gave her made her freeze. He looked at her at first with a kind of mildly perturbed surprise. Then he seemed to swallow something as hard to swallow as pride and his glance fell from her to the tablecloth and his expression became blankly calm, as it had been. And then he looked up across the way, his eyes sweeping the faces as he went on. “It isn’t even a sacrifice. It’s just how nations stand up in the face of time. And the people like a good war, I won’t believe they don’t. It’s in their sporting nature. Like a challenge.” He put a piece of potato and part of a slice of ham into his mouth and chewed, took a sip of tea, and then let down his fork on a carrot.
“Do you think the new ships will make a difference?” asked a woman sitting on Sam’s left side.
“They say they are faster, but I think they said that about the last ones and it turned out to be about the same.”
“I heard they got the design from trade ships.”
“A trade ship in battle? I don’t think so.”
She looked at the piece of bread that she didn’t remember buttering that sat at the end of her plate. A single green bean lay along its side. Her teacup was empty, and so was her water cup. She asked if someone would pass her the pitcher and they did and she filled her glass and then held it out for the person who had handed it to her to take it back. And they did. At times like this she thought about all the legs and feet under the table. She used to wonder if knees would chat, or critique the visible construction of the underside of the table. Today she just thought about them all lined up, and all covered up under so many layers. Even the table had two layers of cloth going down to the floor.
“But by the time she had found out what they were doing, they were already half way across the state.”
“Did she tell anyone?”
“We’ll, she wasn’t absolutely sure. But she’d seen all the payments when she was looking over the books and those windows never got fixed or cleaned.”
“What is that?”
“A loss, is what she said. It’s just the way the books come out.”
Sam watched as the lace cuff of a lady’s sleeve moved, again and again, what looked to her to be right through the flame of one of the candles as she handed out and took and passed different dishes to either side. Nothing came of it.
The voices drifted around, and she began to hear less and less of what they were saying. Finding a fitting for the chandelier and Howard looked all over the country for it. Getting a spot out of a sock. A noisy dog, and what that most assuredly tells you about its owner.
She put her fork down and looked again into her empty teacup. As much as she didn’t want to disturb anyone she simply had to pee. She excused herself quietly with a quiet, “excuse me, I’ll be right back.” And she paused as she pushed her empty chair in, but as when she had come in they all seemed too engrossed in what they were doing to be bothered by her.
She’d walked out from that room and halfway down a hallway before she realized she didn’t know where she was going. To either side were closed nearly identical dark stained wooden doors. She tried to think. She seemed to remember that whenever she was in a place like this and she’d asked where the loo was they’d say it was at the top of the stairs to the right or the left. So she set off looking for stairs.
After a few turns she finally found a flight of them, carpeted in just the way she ‘remembered’ and with that same overly excited curl of the banister at the base. She stomped with muffled steps up the first set of stairs and then walked up the rest of the way after she’d remember to question what she was doing. After the second flight she turned around into a hall and right enough there was a door cocked slightly open.
She shut the door behind her and turned the light up, and looked at herself in the mirror. If only there were something else behind her, than the interior of some stranger’s familiar house. That dark almost paisley wallpaper, the yellow or white fixtures, the mirror that somehow looked as though no one had ever brushed their teeth in front of it. What had they thought of her? And what did she care? She didn’t want to want to leave. She didn’t want to think this was all terribly boring, or worse, but she did. She thought about all the time and experience that went into all those blatantly stupid remarks and she just felt confused.
Was it her? She sat down. Could it be? She wondered if her parents really were enjoying themselves, chatting lightly with people they never had a kind word for at home. What would happen if they were honest? And which was dishonest, at home or here? She looked down at her shoe almost off her foot, the heel of the shoe notched between tiles on the mortar, and tipped, and the buckle almost off her own heel. She looked at the floor. She stood up and went over to the sink and washed her hands with a new bar of tan speckled soap and moved some stray hairs to behind her ears. Was she going to look like her mother some day? She moved side to side, exploring how a change in the light makes your expression and the whole shape of your face different. She dried her hands on a small black towel hung on a square brass whatever-that-is on the wall by the side of the door. She turned the lights back down, pulled the door nearly shut, and walked back toward the top the stairs.
She looked out the window directly in front of her that was right at the landing at the top of the stairs. It opened out to some part of a great tree that looked like it should be visible from most of the upper floors’ windows on this side of the house. Then she noticed there was somebody in it. She kept walking towards the top of the stairs. It was a boy, a few years younger than her, at least, sitting on a branch and looking off to her left with a straw in his mouth and a small branch in his hand that he was carving at with a small knife. It looked like he was stripping the branches off. He didn’t look dirty, or poor, or ‘wild,’ or whatever they said. His hair was clean. He worn thick green pants a bit mussed by the tree, no shoes. His sandy blond hair stuck out like straw in places. He had a button down shirt on, but no tie. And the top button wasn’t buttoned and one of the collar tips was sticking up a bit into the air. And the sleeves were rolled up. She stood there at the top of the stairs for a moment. He looked over at the window, and nodded once, almost without looking, and he went back to carving. One by one the long slivers of wood fell out of view. She turned and walked down the steps.
She took her place at the table again. It looked like she’d missed the first course of desert and now the hostess was bringing out cheesecake. All of the men, but one, was overweight, and every one of them eyed the cheesecake as though it were a sole life raft. It had blueberries on it. The thinner man with the bristly mustache, who’d been complaining about his daughter’s unfortunate habits of reading and asking him questions about his work, chewed his cheese cake as though his jaw were on a swivel. She turned and looked at the first other thing she saw, the water pitcher. She tried to invent questions about the water pitcher to replace what she had seen, but it was a water pitcher. The air was quiet, aside from the chewing, and she looked at her own plate. Where did it go? Her mashed potatoes and spinach had been replaced by a small plate with a small three tined fork to the side of it. Her stomach growled. They, had been, very good mashed potatoes.
A week later she was walking by that house, dropping off a letter for her father though she did not understand why it couldn’t go by post. She’d never thought of a postman saying, “No, we don’t take that kind. Gotta do that yous’ self. Money can’t buy everything, ya know?” The house just before had on old sycamore out front, that grew out of a sea of ivy, and that tipped the slabs to the side and up where the tree roots reigned under the sidewalk. She stepped carefully over and looked over at the tree, and it was beautiful...maybe an oak, and the leafs were starting to turn, and a few sparrows darted out from under a large branch and flew off, but no people were up in the branches.
She walked on, hoping she wouldn’t see any of the people who’d been there for tea. Because of course they’d all know her name, but she’d never been told theirs and it’s awful for someone to come smiling up to you, calling you by your first name as if you were somehow great friends and they know, with those bright eyes, that you have no idea what their name is. And they never tell. Or maybe it isn’t like that. And then up ahead of her on the sidewalk someone was approaching on a bicycle. She saw as he came further that it was the boy. He nodded again and smiled as he passed, pedaling hard and trying to keep that large front wheel steady as it bounced between the almost even slabs of slate. She stepped back onto the sidewalk and began to walk again, and felt the thick, fuzzy, filamentous paper of the letter between her fingers, and she heard a quick squeak and a “wwoooooo” and the sound of someone being pitched head first into a groundcover of ivy. She didn’t turn around, or stop. She felt the letter again, and smiled for a few blocks.