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On Growing Up in a Small Town

(continued)

When I got home, I found Mom alone in the kitchen fixing dinner. “It’ll be just the two of us,” she said, vigorously stirring the vegetables in the fry pan, preparation for chop suey.

“Oh?” I asked, snitching a sliver of carrot from the pan and crunching it down.

“Your father’s being interviewed,” she explained. My stomach clenched. “Some guy is writing about Cow Chip Palace and wanted to talk to your dad about his experiences as an entrepreneur in a small town.”

“Everyone’s an entrepreneur in a small town,” I argued, for the sake of arguing, the sake of acting normal. I felt simultaneously sick and excited. Sick because I feared that Roy’s piece might some day see the light of day and that my father’s story, told in glorious black and white, might bring my family further humiliation. Excited because suddenly I had the impulse to run out of the house and find them, to spend more time with the man who had become so mysteriously glamorous to me. To convince him to take me with him.

My mother and I ate dinner nearly in silence. I kept my eyes on the sunset. Every time she asked me a question about my day, I was too distracted to answer properly. Plus the fact that I did not want to mention that Roy Henderson’s visit to The Goat had been the highlight of my day.

As soon as the dishes were cleaned up, I practically bolted out the door, calling over my shoulder, “I’m going to find Dad.” But I wasn’t. I was going to find Roy.

I circled the Palace first, since that seemed like a logical place for the interview to take place, but all was quiet there. Somewhere in town was the second best bet, so I began the walk toward Main Street. Maybe my father had bought Roy a beer at The Goat for the interview, or vice versa.

I met no one on my walk. The sky was still streaked with lilac and gold at the horizon. Main Street was quiet, most of the shops closed except for The Goat, of course. I didn’t want to go in to the restaurant and risk meeting my father, who would call my name, and beckon me to his table to introduce me, and ruin my chances of being taken seriously by Roy. Being with my father, my crazy father, would make me appear as even more of a child.

So I’d wait. I paced down Main Street toward Rosebud Grocery. Roy’s car was still parked in front of it, unnaturally shiny New York plates and all, which meant that he hadn’t skipped town already and that I still had a chance.

A figure rose out of the shadow of the grocery and I nearly screamed.

“Well, it’s you again,” Roy said. “What are you doing here?”

“Hi,” I said. I looked him over. He held his notebook open on his thigh and held a penlight in his other hand. His pen had fallen to his feet.

“Just out for a walk?” he asked. “It’s a good night for it. It’s gorgeous out here. All that open sky. All that nothingness.”

“You’d get sick of it after a while,” I told him. “You’d get bored.”

He shook his head, unconvinced. “Maybe.” He settled back down against the wall of the grocery. “Why don’t you sit down?”

I laughed hesitantly, instantly shy again. “Why?”

“What’s the matter?” he asked, gently mocking. “Don’t you want to be interviewed?”

“Fine,” I said, trying to sound casual, but secretly excited once more. We would talk, he and I, and I would be the one with the answers. “What do you want to know?”

“Well,” he said, retrieving his pen and positioning the notebook on his knee, “you seem pretty unhappy here. Why don’t you talk about what it’s like to be a modern young person stuck in the middle of nowhere? It would be a great perspective to use in my piece.”

“Will my name be used?” I asked.

“Not if you don’t want.”

“Better not,” I decided. “Not that anyone around here probably even reads your magazine, but I don’t want to take the risk of hurting anyone’s feelings or someone getting mad at me.”

“No problem,” he said. “Okay, first. What’s a small town like to you? Just generally.”

“Well, everyone knows each other, pretty much,” I said. “But of course you know that, everyone does,” I added, hoping the shadows hid my blushing.

“That’s okay,” Roy said. “I can edit out anything you say that’s boring.” I thought I saw him wink.

I took a deep breath. “Okay, well, knowing everyone is okay most of the time, because it’s really safe and comfortable. People will let you borrow anything because they know where you live.” I paused.

“Go on,” he said, scribbling. “So far, so good.”

“It’s bad when you want to get away from something,” I said. “Like if there’s someone at school you don’t like, you can never get away from them. There’s not enough room to avoid them. And if something embarrassing happens to you,” I said, summarizing my entire life in a sentence, “everyone knows, and you’re stuck with the embarrassment forever.”

“Good,” Roy said again, his pen catching up with my words.

I surveyed Main Street. The sun was truly down now. The moon and stars and the little lamps outside The Goat and the other businesses would be the only light soon. The street was still.

“Okay,” Roy said, “what about young people? Do you think that teens here are like teens everywhere else? Do you guys like the same kind of stuff, listen to the same music?”

I opened my mouth to answer when my breath caught in my throat. Just half a block away, my father stepped out of The Goat.

Roy followed my stare. “What?” he asked. I shushed him urgently. We sat silent as my father, not seeing us, turned and walked off on the road toward home. I breathed a sigh of relief, my heart still pounding.

Roy, with an expression of simultaneous dawning understanding and mild amusement, said, “Someone you know?”

My cover was blown, and rather than lie about it, denying my father and telling what would probably be an unconvincing fib, I confessed.

“I see,” he said, a grin spreading over his face. “So I guess you’d know a little bit about embarrassment, wouldn’t you?”

I didn’t like the slimy tone that had seeped into his voice, but I didn’t want to lose my chance to talk to him more. Nothing to lose and maybe this guy’ll be your ticket out of here, I told myself.

“You have absolutely no idea,” I told him.

“Then tell me.”

So I told him. I told him about Bud, how that was where it all began, when I was too young to be humiliated. I told him about the rise of Cow Chip Palace and how my life had been essentially ruined, how everyone at school — except Sarah — thought my family was hilarious, and how I’d be stuck here forever living with these same people. I told him how my father was totally oblivious to how embarrassing he was and to how unhappy he’d made me. I told him again how much I wanted to leave.

I talked and talked. It seemed like ages, but Roy kept nodding and writing and saying, “Go on.” When my story was over, it was properly night and the moon was out. Finally Roy shut his notebook and set it, with the pen and the penlight — now shut off, on the ground to the other side of him.

“You poor thing,” he said. “Stuck here. It’s too bad. The real world could use more people like you. You’re wasted out here.”

I nodded, and he patted me on the knee. My heart almost leapt out of my mouth, but I sat still. He took his hand away again.

“I really wish,” he said, a bit emphatically, “that I could get you out of here.”

“Why don’t you just take me?” I blurted. “I’ve got a little money, I could help pay for gas. You could just drop me off wherever you end up. I wouldn’t be any trouble.” I was scared, feeling like I was putting my life into his hands. But it was that or die of suffocation.

He put his hand back on my knee and this time just left it there, for two seconds, three, four, and said, “Maybe we can work something out.” Yet it didn’t sound like optimism in his voice, it didn’t sound like hope or any real sort of good will. His hand was still on my knee, and it was as if the world had frozen, and even if I had known what to do then, I don’t know that I could have done it. My muscles were frozen, too. The air felt very cold.

I had been waiting for so long for this — for someone to actually negotiate, for someone to yank my arm and take me away. Today, I had hoped that Roy would be this person. But now the opportunity was sitting in my lap, or on my knee, rather, and I was scared. I could just imagine Roy shoving me into the backseat of that Toyota and taking me God knows where and doing God knows what with me. Now I wished I hadn’t acted the way I had with Sarah. I wished I could have talked to my parents about the whole thing. I’d never found it easy to talk with them, though, and why? Why was it so difficult to tell my father how awful he made me feel, when I could tell everyone else?

It didn’t matter now, though. “I’m thinking,” I said in a low voice to Roy. “Just a second.” His hand didn’t move.

Then out of the darkness came a voice. My father’s voice. “My daughter doesn’t need you to go anywhere,” he said evenly. He sounded too calm not to be angry. How long had he been listening? He held a shotgun — not his — propped on one shoulder.

Roy jumped up, away from me. “I didn’t do anything,” he said, taking several steps back. “You think I’d take you or your daughter to the corner and back?”

“I don’t care, and I don’t want to hear any more about it. All I want is to see you hit the road and never come back.” My father stepped toward him, taking the gun in both his hands.

Roy sneered some choice words at us before yanking open his car door and leaping in. The car started up with a rumble and a screech, and he tore away down Main Street toward the freeway, his tires spitting gravel back at us.

My father uncocked the gun and slung it back on his shoulder again. “Oldest trick in the book,” he winks at me. “Can’t believe he fell for it, city slicker shmuck. I borrowed the gun from Todd Jones on my way up here. Need I even mention that it’s not loaded?”

I rolled my eyes, all nonchalance, but really I was too shaken to speak. Too overcome by what might have happened if my father hadn’t come, and yet the slightest bit angry that he had stepped in and ruined my plan.

“Come on,” he said gently, putting his free arm around my shoulder. The stars were out in their full brilliance, and it was easier to watch them than to converse. Guilt gnawed at me: the things I’d said to Roy about my father, the fact that I might have left without saying goodbye to anyone. I couldn’t bear to think how much of my conversation with Roy my father had overheard.

“Were you really planning to leave with him?” he asked quietly. Our shoulders knocked together slightly as we walked, like two boats at the same dock in a harbor.

I shrugged, disrupting the motion.

“Are you mad that I came by?”

I shrugged again. “It’s over,” I said glumly. “It doesn’t matter.”

“When I got home and you were missing, your mother and I got worried. We called Sarah. She didn’t know where you were, but mentioned that she’d been worried about you, too. So I headed back into town.”

I didn’t say anything, feeling the same sort of gratitude and anger at Sarah as I did at my father.

We walked on, and before long the ornate silhouette of the Palace rose before us. As we neared it, I started to pull away, toward the house. But my father took my hand. “Come with me for a minute,” he said.

I followed him into the shadow of the Palace and then around to the other side where the moon shone down. My father laid the gun against the wall and stood with his arms crossed against his chest, looking over the prairie, in the direction of the freeway. Then he turned back toward me, where I stood behind him, and toward the Palace. “Jenny,” he asked seriously, motioning toward the structure, “why do you think I did this?”

I looked down at my shoes, unsure of what to answer. “To make a living, I guess.”

I heard him let out his breath in a long sigh, and I knew that I had not answered correctly. Slowly I raised my eyes to meet his, then follow his gaze to the Palace. We looked at its magnificent arches, its magical gargoyles — for in the moonlight it did not look like a monstrosity. It did look magnificent and magical.

“It’s for fun, for one thing,” my father said, with only a shadow of fun in his voice. “I get a big kick out of the whole thing. It’s so much more interesting than running a restaurant or, God knows, a souvenir shop.” He glanced over his shoulder at the sky and prairie again. “I love it out here, away from the dirt and clatter of the city. But I miss the art of the city, the eccentricities that abound by virtue of there being so many people. I get a little of that back by creating my own eccentricities.”

I nodded, but his answer seemed insufficient. Perhaps it was fun for him, but what about me? “What about people laughing at you?” I asked.

“People in town, you mean?” he asked.

“Kids at school laugh at you all the time,” I said, my throat feeling thick and sore as I spoke. “Kids laugh at me.”

His face fell and I thought I saw his eyes get wet, though maybe it was just the reflection of the stars that gave them the extra shine. “I’m sorry for that,” he said softly. “Adults see things like Bud and Cow Chip Palace, and they might think it’s weird and laugh and roll their eyes. But those who know me know I’m a good man and that we’re a good family. But I forget about the kids. They just don’t get it. They don’t know enough to laugh and then forget about it.”

“Maybe I can’t forget about it,” I said angrily. “Maybe it’s hard to forget when it’s your own father and your own backyard.”

He looked saddened. “I’m sorry you feel that way, Jenny. I wish you said something sooner. It wasn’t in my plan to make your life miserable. Why didn’t you say anything?”

“I couldn’t,” I said, stumbling over the short words. No, I couldn’t have said anything. Not for the normal reasons a teenager doesn’t want to talk to her parents, not because I was afraid he’d misunderstand me. But because I was afraid he’d understand too well, like now, and that it would hurt him.

He sighed. “It’s okay. I guess our consolation is that you don’t have to live with the embarrassment forever.”

“What do you mean?” I said miserably. “I think it’ll take about forever to live down the reputation I’ve got. No one’s going to forget anytime soon. Not while you keep doing these things.”

“I don’t plan to stop, either,” he said, surprise touching his voice. “But I don’t expect you to stick around to deal with it the rest of your life.”

“Where would I go?” I said. “You’ve never talked about me leaving before. How could I afford to move?” He laughed, and my temper rose again. “What?”

“I’m not laughing at you. I’m laughing at how parents can be so blind. Your mother and I never talked about it with you because — well, for a couple of reasons. First, because it’s your future. You decide what happens, and we expect that you will do whatever you find in your heart. And second, because we’ve been saving up money to help you go away to school for so long. I guess we just took for granted that you’d go when the time came.”

I was stunned. “You’ve been saving money?”

He shook his head, a mystified grin on his face. “Didn’t you know? That’s the other reason for these — these little ventures of mine. Over the years, all your life really, they’ve been bringing in extra money, and we put the money in savings for you. I’m not saying it’s enough to put you through college. If you’re planning to go out of state, as I imagine you are, it’s definitely not. But with that and scholarships and some loans you’ll be fine, and you can go anywhere.”

“You want me to go?” I practically squealed.

“Don’t make it sound like we’re disowning you,” my father joked. Then he grew serious again. “Where do you want to go?”

“I don’t know,” I stammered. “Maybe New York. Maybe — I don’t know.”

“It’s okay,” my father said. “You’ve got time to figure it out.” He held out his arms to me, and I found myself halfway between a grin and a cry as I buried my face in the soft cotton collar of his shirt.

Knowing my father’s motivations did not erase the years of my unhappiness, but it salved the pain amazingly. Our blindnesses to each other had been revealed, and now what we could see didn’t so bad after all.

More than that, though, I could already feel the difference that my father’s blessing made. Yes, I would work, I would apply for scholarships, I would study hard, all those things that had not seemed sufficient when Sarah or even Roy had suggested them. With my father’s blessing, I would go far away from him, knowing that doing so would not disappoint him. It would make him proud.

“Dad,” I said hesitantly, when we finally let go of each other. “I’m afraid my grades won’t be good enough. I‘ve really blown off the last year.”

He glanced at me sideways. “You can gain back a lot of ground in two years,” he said dryly. “And besides, most college applications ask you for essays. Write a really great essay and there’s no way they’ll say no.”

He smiled at me from behind his whiskers, and then we stood side by side a long time, looking out at land beyond Francis, South Dakota. We couldn’t see the freeway, but we knew it was there. We saw the moon rise higher and turn the prairie to pure silver before us. It was the furthest thing from nothingness.

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