In Grace Lutheran Church the minister, Reverend Fluck, is talking again about the communists who are going to try to take over America. There was something in the news just the other week. A man named Walter P. Reuther, president of CIO United Auto Workers, was shot through the kitchen window of his home in Detroit and everyone knows that communists shot him. Before too much longer they are going to assassinate every public official who refuses to go along with their plans to dismantle everything this great nation holds most dear. Especially the right to worship God and Jesus Christ, the son of God.
Lifting her eyes, Peggy can see the heads nodding in agreement with the minister. Not just the old white heads and bald heads in the congregation, but many heads that are not much older than hers. Her father’s head is nodding but her mother is staring out the windows of the church. Jack is leaning against her, placated by a pack of Life Savers, as she gazes serenely out the windows at an empty blue sky. She looks like she is at peace with the world, unthreatened by the communists, or anyone else. The minister’s warnings are falling on deaf ears; communists, war, the Russians digging entrenchments in Korea, the man on Cow Path Road digging a bomb shelter in his backyard. All of this is beyond her immediate concern; she is a mother with children to take care of. And once you are a mother in this world, it is something that can never be taken from you. No one can take this from you, and it can surround you and separate you from the rest of the world, enclosing you within an order and a shape so completely defined by its necessity that the great troubles of the world will not matter anymore.
After church she asks her mother what she was thinking about. The farm, she tells Peggy. The farm in Souderton where she grew up.
They have driven by only a few times since the family lost it during the Depression, but her mother has spoken of it often.
An hour later Peggy has made up her mind and arranged everything. She makes a picnic lunch, asks her uncle Howard to drive them there, and then walks her brother, Jack, across town, to leave him with the mother of one of his friends. It is another sunny day, the summer has been a succession of bright days. There is a gentle breeze.
Peggy sits in the back seat with the picnic basket so her mother can ride in front with Howard. He is wearing one of those ditchdigger T-shirts, white with straps over his shoulders. He is tanned and strong, her father’s brother, but different from him in small important ways. Howard is carefree, always down on the floor roughhousing with his three little boys. Always putting his arms around his wife, Muriel. She is just a few years ahead of Peggy, still a girl herself, and a source of information about the important things in life that must be explained by someone. What is it like to be in love with a boy? Muriel had responded frankly: When he’s away, when he’s not in bed with you, you ache for him, I mean you feel this physical pain right through your bones.
Howard drives with the window down, one arm hanging out, his hand cupping his cigarette against the rushing wind. The hard muscles in his tanned shoulders rippled.
At the farm Howard pulls to the side of the road and stops.
What are you stopping for? Peggy’s mother asks.
Howard replies with a big grin. I was in the service long enough to learn to do what I’m told to do.
Peggy tells him, Go on up the driveway.
Yes, sir, Howard says, saluting her.
Oh, we mustn’t do that, Peg. Her mother worries.
It takes a while for Peggy to coax her mother out of the car.
This is the bank’s property, Peg.
Big deal, Mom. Who cares about some stupid bank! The bank didn’t live in these rooms—you did.
Peggy is walking ahead when they cross the wide front lawn. The wind is to their backs. When Peggy looks back at Howard he has taken off his T-shirt, lit a cigarette, and is lying across the hood of the car like he owns the place. Peggy laughs and tells her mother to look at him. A smile comes to her mother’s face and it is so full of surprise that for a brief moment Peggy glimpses her mother as a younger woman, a girl really. It is such a pleasure to see, such a rare and precious thing. This woman, her mother, if only Peggy could have known her when she was a girl. How unfair that she couldn’t have been a friend to her in her youth.
Now, with every step her mother is afraid that someone will come by and see them trespassing. Peggy takes her hand and tells her to stop worrying. It is such a splendid day, such a beautiful moment when the two of them stand before the wood-frame house. The place seems to be waiting attentively for them to climb up the front stairs onto the porch. The windows are not just full of light, but of music, some song that seems to convey itself in her mother’s voice.
Their faces are pressed against a window. This is where her grandmother Swan used to do her quilting. And here is where their old dog used to take his naps.
A secret part of her mother is being restored; Peggy doesn’t understand it completely, doesn’t grasp its whole meaning. At age eighteen she is too young to comprehend fully what the experience of this day means to her mother, how it will manifest itself in her own future. But for now she is trying to delight in her mother’s pleasure as she inspects the house through every window.
The kitchen! Oh the marvelous bright kitchen with windows along the front and back walls so you can see straight through the house here. The porcelain cookstove that took either coal or wood. The cabinets with their glass doors. Here is where they spent most of the summer canning food, she tells Peggy. There was a big table right there. Someone has taken the table, but I remember. We would pickle red beets and can them. We put newspapers on the table so we wouldn’t stain the wood. When we went to church my mother would make us wear white gloves to hide the stains on our hands.
A picture for Peggy. An image of herself in a sundress, sitting at a table with children of her own, their palms stained red.
They eat the picnic lunch behind a tiny outbuilding which was once an ice shed, in a meadow of juniper and Indian paintbrush. Howard can dispose of a sandwich with three bites. Then he lights a cigarette, lies back in the wildflowers, and blows smoke rings that float above their heads.
You have to eat more than that, Peggy, her mother tells her.
She is eating only carrot sticks and she tries to change the subject. Lately what she eats has become an issue. She has begun to feel that her mother and father, and even her grandmother and grandfather, are trying to fatten her up for somebody’s Thanksgiving table. She thinks, What business is it of yours? It’s my stomach! Why don’t you leave me alone!
She has been around long enough to know how the world works, how a girl who grows up to be heavy will hear the same sound over and over in her life, the sound of doors closing just ahead of her. If she’s beautiful enough, she can do anything. Maybe she can marry a banker rich enough to buy back her mother’s farm!
And one thing she has learned just recently about her beauty is that it is vulnerable. She has lovely hair and fine features in her face, and piercing green eyes, but she can gain weight easily in her legs. She has to be careful. And it doesn’t seem fair either. Men are lucky; her father is losing his hair so he has started slicking it down and combing it straight back and he looks as handsome as a politician or a dean. A man gets a fat belly and he just loosens his belt a few notches and takes on the posture of a Supreme Court judge. So easy for men. Not for a girl.
Her beauty is important to her. A validation. Something she can hold between herself and the world, something that lets her off the hook.
It’s a man’s world, her aunt Sue has told her. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. And in this world few things count more than beauty does. It can save a farm. Or carry you to Venice to stand at the grave of John Keats.
There is a tire swing hanging from the branch of an apple tree. It takes a long time for Peggy to persuade her mother to sit on it. Kick your legs, Mom, you remember how to swing. Soon she has her mother sailing through the air. Each time she flies forward her dress blows back in the wind and she has to tug it down between her knees. Finally she takes the rope in both hands and her dress flies up around her face. Howard turns to face the road—I didn’t see anything! he calls to them.