Perfection, A memoir by Patricia A. Stuart

PERFECTION
A Short Story published in DENSE GROWTH, 2003

She was gone, laughter wafting behind like a happy tail, galloping the bay across the fields, sailing over make-shift jumps built into the fence lines. Out there on the far forest boundary of our farm, she looked tiny enough to pick up and play with, like one of the pretty figures gramma kept behind glass.

Laughter returned, growing and slowing as Momma came into the yard for one final leap over a pair of sawhorses holding one-by-sixes, put there as part of her latest building project. The bay came to a stop near my place on the stairs. They led to a platform porch of the small house she had designed and built. I had helped.

My giggles reached up for her smile of recognition. “Let me, Mommy. Let me.” I held up my arms,

trying to capture her eyes with mine. They were a marvelous color, one I called ‘horsy blue’ because they turned a particularly vivid shade when she rode.

She reached down, the smell of lavender and leather, wood shavings and horse coming with her, to hook one of her arms under mine and to swing me high through the air. I knew what to do and threw my leg over the back of the cantle, landing lightly behind, wrapping my arms tight, feeling the sun-dried cotton and the steady beat of her heart. Warm breath touched me as she turned to say, “Comfortable?”

She was slim, then, and lovely in the jodhpurs and open-necked white shirt. Her naturally curling hair was kept short and made a dark frame around her delicate features. My memory says she wore no make-up, but it could be wrong. I once had a black-and-white picture of her on that bay horse, and it showed nuances of shades that might have been artificially produced. Might have been. What was clear was the radiant smile - the smile that disappeared when the bay horse left. Neither bay nor smile came back.

1946. The war was over and, after years of self-reliance, women were expected to retreat to the house, to be homemakers for their husbands who had returned from the war. Women were supposed to know their places, and children were to be ‘seen and not heard’. Seen or not, I eavesdropped, and I heard one thing over and over. “You really should act more like other women,” my father would say. “For the sake of the children.”

He meant me and my baby sister.

“I wish you would spend more time in the house,” he would say. “For the sake of the children.”

The farm was a wartime purchase - ten acres of good Oregon land. I later suspected my father, a civil engineer, used up a lifetime of compromise agreeing to a rural home base, but he went along on the assumption he would live on the farm and commute into Portland. The rest was up to her. She was a wife and mother, and she had a role-model, his mother. Gramma cooked splendidly and produced sparkling white shirts. Gramma ironed her sheets and kept a spotless house, at the same time maintaining a showcase garden of flowers and vegetables. She also went to church and did her charities. Momma didn't.

Momma looked beautiful. She designed and built things. She raised rabbits. She rode the bay horse. She produced fried Spam and sliced tomatoes for dinner. And she laughed.

I thought she was perfect. I thought life was perfect, except I really wanted a horse of my own. Perfection would be life as it was plus a white pony with a black mane and tail. My definition of perfection was to lift my feet from the ground and fly, to see grass blurring under hooves, was love and laughter. I suspect my mother agreed, but my father had other ideas. Did he care about the laughter and Mommy’s ‘horsy blue’ eyes? Maybe he did. Later.

First, Queenie died. Queenie was a curly-coated, chocolate-colored Chesapeake Bay retriever who took care of the farm. She spent her days nosing around the buildings or trailing after my mother, although she was supposed to be my father’s hunting dog. I can remember him dressed in a red and black-checked Jantzen wool jacket with a matching cap, its flaps down over his ears, and a shotgun resting across his arms. I remember Queenie didn’t want to leave Momma and had to be shoved into the car.

But Queenie died, was run over by a school bus on the tiny dirt lane that passed our farm. No one understood how it could have happened, even after the driver said she jumped out of the raspberry thicket alongside the lane and ran under his wheels. That day I was too involved with crying to think much about it, but later I remembered. I went out into the lane and tried to get down on my belly and push under those vines. Even wearing a coat and gloves I got scratched and didn’t manage to do more than wiggle in a few inches. Those vines grew out of the ground right up to the edge of the gravel track. I reported back at dinner, ending with my conclusion that the driver should be arrested and put on trial for murder. No one laughed.

It would be easy to think I lost my belief in the word ‘fair’ then, but probably not. By the time I gave up pushing my murder theories, our young bull was gone, too, and my mind took another turn. As with Queenie, there was no warning. My sister and I were sent to Gramma’s in Portland for the day, and, when we came back, bull, pen, and shelter had disappeared. There was nothing left but manure-imbedded ground.

Could this be ‘for the sake of the children’? I lost sleep eavesdropping or fell asleep eavesdropping because there wasn’t much to hear. I think I cried a lot, as well. Did ‘for the same of the children’ mean it was my fault? My sister’s? As for the bay horse, he stood in his paddock or grazed on his pasture. If Momma rode, I don’t remember it. Maybe she did. Maybe she just killed rabbits. That’s what I remember. One by one the rabbits disappeared out of their hutches and their skins appeared on stretchers, drying on the clothesline.

“Your mother’s going out of the rabbit breeding business,” my father said.

I cried when my buck-toothed rabbit, Cupcake, became a victim to Mommy’s ‘going out of business’. I cried when Leroy, a magnificent silver and black buck, joined the demised. Then, at some point, I got tired of crying and began spending more time at the neighbors’, playing with their children. Our farm was not a very fun place to be, although dinners improved mildly. At least there was some variation in the menus.

Did I notice when the bay horse left? I don’t think so.

Did I notice that china appeared on the table and flowers in the garden? I did. Not that it mattered, particularly, for Momma had stopped laughing and my definition of perfection had changed.