Mislaid

Everybody turned to laugh at Byrdie. The memory branded itself on his brain: the gales of laughter, everyone offering him their cookies, the slave woman with her eyes on the floor.

The second time Lee rubbed Peggy’s nose in an infidelity, she drove the same route she had years before, inexorably drawn to the college where her life had first jumped the tracks. It was about four years after the visit to Stratford.

By that time Byrdie had a little sister: Mireille. Lee didn’t seek sex often enough for Peggy to think she needed birth control. Sex only happened when Lee was in a certain strange, dramatic mood, acting out something Peggy could not grasp.

Then there she was. Born into ambiguity and ambivalence, an incontrovertible baby. Mireille at three was a sallow blonde with downy hair so white it was almost invisible. She clung to Peggy like a baby monkey most of the time. When she said “Daddy,” it didn’t sound like a request for love. She said “Daddy!” as though unpleasantly surprised. Two clipped syllables that seemed to encapsulate all her mother’s resentment, as if it had been passed along in utero. He would fill her bowl with applesauce and she’d say “Daddy!” and he had to add applesauce until she had more than Byrdie. Then she’d eat just the extra piled on at the end and push the rest away. Lee disliked her, but he expected her to grow on him sooner or later. She would get old enough to be more than just a reproachful bundle of petty envy that had grown on Peggy like a tumor. She might turn out to be a pretty, playful tumor that moved about under its own power. There’s something appealing about a narrow-minded, scheming blonde who plays with boys like a cat, Lee thought.

One day Peggy came home from the Safeway and walked in on a wasteland. Arms full of groceries, she scanned a little forest of pottery figurines at her feet as she walked through the living room to the kitchen. There was more pottery next to the trash can. She had made these statues at the college art center and considered them emblematic of her frustration as a housewife. They were pinched pyramidal figures with tiny round heads, done in dull shades of blue. Their necks were very thin and easy to break. Most of the heads were gathered in a pie tin on the floor.

“Lee!” she yelled. There was no answer. She set the groceries down and walked out the back door. And there he was, in a net muscle shirt, getting in the canoe with a boy. Making his getaway as soon as he heard the car, right in the middle of letting some teenager help him turn her sewing room into a weight room because she didn’t have time to do any sewing.

It was a betrayal of just about everything—her privacy, her pottery that was a cry for help intended to be heard by no one, her struggle to be a good mother and sew little dresses for Mireille. The intimacy she and Lee still shared. The vestiges of heterosexuality she occasionally saw in him and cosseted like rare orchids. All of it gone. The more sacrifices she made for her family, the more he took his power for granted. He got all the love in the world, and she got none at all.

She drove to the college. She had a vague notion of storming into his office and breaking something.

As she rounded the main building, she spied the grassy slope under the tulip poplars going down to Stillwater Lake, and she followed a mad impulse.

She stopped the car and said, “Byrdie, could you take Mickey and stand over there by that tree?”

He said, “Yes, ma’am,” and toted his little sister and her blanket over to the tree, warning her with a gesture to stay put, came back to close the car door, and rejoined her in the shade.

The lake made Peggy angry. It ought to be bringing Lee to her, on his knees in the canoe, to offer her an explanation and an apology. But the lake was empty, because Lee was not alone and would never come to the college dressed as his true self. He was back at the house by now, sweeping up her art with no pants on.

“Don’t move, Byrdie,” Peggy said. “This’ll just take a second.” She put the car—more precisely, Lee’s irreplaceable VW Thing—in second gear and drove slowly and deliberately into the water. She watched the water pour in around her feet and kept going. She revved the Thing until the wheels were in mud up past the axles, even up past the lower edge of the doors.

As the engine died she heard a sucking sound. The car was still moving forward and tilting.

Peggy felt an anxiety she had not anticipated. She had expected it to be like driving down a boat ramp. She floundered to shore, up to her knees in mud that ripped her shoes right off her feet, and turned to watch the car settle into place nose down, rear bumper in the air. Around it, a maelstrom was forming. It didn’t look like it would be easy to get back out.

A security guard ran up behind her to ask if she was all right.

“Where’s my kids? Byrdie, Mickey, c’mere. Come on, honey. It’s all right. I love you, baby. I just didn’t like that car.”

“You’re crazy, Mom. I’m going to tell Dad.”

“Now, sweetie, ain’t nobody crazier than your dad. We’re all crazy!”

The campus security officer asked, “Mrs. Fleming, are you saying that was not an accident?”

“Nope. That was theater of cruelty.”

The officer sighed and said, “Mrs. Fleming, you’re a card,” and they went together into the administrative building to call Lee. That was one advantage of being a wife. It was Lee’s job to discipline her, not that campus security would have involved the police in anything short of murder.

A week later, they got the car out with a farm tractor and some oak planks. It was doable only because the water in the lake had fallen to the level of the car’s submerged front axle, leaving a wide and hideous beach of glutinous brown slime. Mrs. Fleming was firmly established as a legend on campus, and Lee was …

… livid? Was he livid? Are there words to describe how Lee was? Less privileged men sometimes fancy themselves egotistical sociopaths, but they don’t know the half of it. They don’t even know how it’s done. In most cases they’ve even apologized for something at some point in their lives.

Lee had never been hot-tempered. A lesser man might strike his wife. A man who trusts in the rule of law files a formal complaint. For example, “My wife is a danger to herself and others.” A hearing is conducted. Fees are paid. A judge issues an order. The order’s execution makes the wife kick and scream, undermining her credibility. Seeing the force necessary to crush an annoyance he merely wanted rid of, the complainant heaves a sigh of regret.

That was Lee’s reaction when faced with the desirability of having Peggy locked up for a while. As a wife and mother, she was impossible. The theatrics! Who attempts suicide in a convertible in a lake ten feet deep? She was in hell. He was in hell. Yet she refused to leave him. She couldn’t leave him. She hated both their families, and she knew no one else well enough to get invited to their house. Thinking about it made him melancholic. Lee found depressive feelings unpleasant. He saw that something needed to be done. He conveyed the reality to her many times, repeating it like he thought she was slow: “I’m going to call a doctor. You’re not well.”

With every repetition he could see her edging toward the door. That was where she belonged: the door. The closer she got to it, the more his heart brightened with clarity. He threatened her in a low, friendly voice, pitched so as not to alarm her.

In exchange for leaving, she would have more options than she’d ever had before. She would be free.

But behind his tone of concern, Peggy detected her true choices: find somebody to take you in, or spend an indeterminate amount of time behind bars enjoying tranquilizers and electroshock. She had read enough lives of the poetesses to know all about inpatient psychiatric care. She knew he would be able to get her committed with no trouble at all. Driving a motor vehicle into a lake in front of your kids is not against the law—on private property it’s not even littering—but it’s madness.

Lee’s feelings were more complex than he let on. When he met Peggy, he’d thought his homosexuality might be a great big cosmic typo. He told himself, Listen, it’s not like sex with men was your idea. He had been an exceptionally good-looking boy. He scored his first blow job for attending a show-jumping competition. Soon his penis was buying entire weeks on skis. An unbeatable deal, and habit-forming.

At heart he knew he was normal. No more conflicted than any other married man. He was a sexual being. He couldn’t give that up on account of a three-month fling with his wife ten years before. Like many a married man before him, he took the deal they had hammered out—you give me your life, in return you get my kids—and canceled both ends. He didn’t want to be privy to her martyrdom, and he didn’t like her influence on his kids.

Lee truly did adore his son. He would kill time in the evenings with a glass of rye whisky and romantic fantasies of dropping Byrdie off at boarding school in his own father’s matte gold Mercedes while vivid orange maple leaves swirled every which way. The other boys would be squirming, their elegant mothers adjusting their little tiger-striped ties, while Byrdie in fuck-you-Nantucket red pants would swagger up the brick walkway already a man, raised by a cool single father, the coolest boy at Woodberry, with the longest skis, most outré collection of French porn, best way with horses, etc.

He could allow himself these fantasies on his small salary because his parents were not averse to Byrdie. Genetic and other contributions made by Peggy to Byrdie’s makeup were beneath their notice. They weren’t conspicuous, anyhow. He had Lee’s face. It was only from the back, if one of them was out in the yard in the dusk, that he had trouble telling his son and his wife apart, though Byrdie was still a little smaller. Same narrow build, same style of dress, same curly brown hair. If Peggy ever cleared out she might haunt him for a while that way, but only until the resemblance faded.

Byrdie’s loyalty was tested in a remake of the dog scene from Henry Huggins: Peggy by the open driver’s-side door of the Fairlane, Mireille on her hip like a limpet, calling for Byrdie to come get in the car. And Lee on the porch saying, “Don’t you get in that car!”

Byrdie said, “You’re crazy, Mom,” and walked back to his father.

“You’re scaring Byrdie,” Lee said.

“Fear is part of life for all sentient beings,” Peggy said. “I’ll come back for you, Byrdie. Don’t be scared.”

“Like hell you will,” Lee said.

Mireille began to cry and Lee came down from the porch. “Come on, Mickey,” he said, using the name Peggy used for her. He held out his arms. “Come to Papa. You’re not going anywhere.”

“Shut your trap, asshole,” Peggy said. “I’ve heard just about enough of your bullshit.”

Mireille wailed and Byrdie said, “Mom!”

“I love you, Byrdie!” Peggy called out. “Don’t forget it! I love you so much!” At last she set Mireille down on the passenger seat. She did a five-point turn and drove slowly out the pale, sandy driveway while Lee, unprepared, thought hard about calling his father to say his daughter had been abducted.

Instead he challenged his son to a game of cribbage. Women will say they’re leaving and go to the grocery store, or drive into Richmond for a movie. If it wasn’t a minor event, it was one he needed to minimize, at least until after bedtime.

But she didn’t come back, and Byrdie lay down like a dog by the door to wait for her.

Peggy’s decision hadn’t been spontaneous. It bore few of the hallmarks of madness. It took days to plan.

She had a tank full of gas. The trunk was full of khakis and old polo shirts, blankets, an air mattress, food, water, spray primer in black, her portable typewriter and spare ribbons, onionskin thesis paper, and many other supplies. She wasn’t going to a motel, much less her parents, or even to the New School for Social Research.

Instead of heading for the highway or the interstate, she turned onto a little county road. It went to dirt with a sign, end state maintenance, and she kept going. “Look at that, Mickey, blue butterflies,” she said. They were flying almost as fast as the car. She didn’t want to raise a cloud of dust. They came out on a gravel road that was part of a forgotten battlefield monument and passed a cairn raised to the memory of the Confederate dead. “Look at that, Mickey, a pyramid,” she said, curving off to the right into the trees again and following a dirt track that paralleled a river. Up ahead she saw the towers of a nuclear plant, flashing for a moment through a gap in the trees. An old crossways, with a sign as though it were still a town, two wooden stores falling down, pokeweed up to the rafters. Then a floodplain, a desert of stubble and sand. Topsoil had filled the river below, flattening it until it turned its own banks to mud flats, making the farmers poor and stealing their land until they just up and left, leaving their houses and barns behind.

She turned away from the river again. They zigzagged. Peggy was looking for something specific: an open barn, an abandoned house.

It was into such a barn that she drove the Fairlane, and into such a house that she took Mireille. A tall, drafty house, swaying with the trees around it. They stayed overnight.

When they crossed south again, headed for tobacco country, the gleaming red Fairlane was a dull dark gray.

Finding an abandoned place in southeastern Virginia wasn’t going to be as easy. Without the big rivers as highways, things had developed on a smaller scale. There were no palatial plantation houses anchoring medieval market towns. The houses were small, and they generally had people living in them. The economy revolved around the tobacco cartel. It meant a man could make a living forever off his inherited right to harvest—or at least launder—a set amount of tobacco. Tobacco made the difference between staying on the land and giving up.

Wherever it wasn’t tobacco, it was cotton. Sometimes corn and soybeans with hogs attached. When the soil announced it couldn’t take any more and gave up the ghost, the subsidies came for doing nothing. With the result of pines. Endless tracts of pines growing on naked grit, allowed to get maybe twenty feet tall before somebody came along and harvested them with a nipper, right off the stumps, thwap. Deafening.

Where there were no pines, there were swamps full of game. Boom, bang, squeal. More deafening. Hound dogs starving by the roads every fall and winter, thinking every truck that passed was the hunter who’d brought them, running for its doors. Death by trust.

People generally were hard-hearted and hard of hearing and possibly not eager to understand you when you talked. They were independent people. Tobacco was not their only cash crop. Peggy and Mickey passed a billboard that in 1967 had said buy a flag! fly it high! In 1970 someone adjusted it to read buy a bag! fly high! No one fixed it, and in 1975 it was rotting in place. Its symbolism was timeless.

They drove flat, lonely roads until Peggy spied a solitary cabin with flaking green paint. It stood under trees in a shallow pool of water. She pulled in and honked the horn. She got out of the car and yelled, “Hey!” She kept yelling as she splashed up to the door. But the house was empty.

There was a thick layer of dust on two liquor bottles and an empty baked bean can, and a newspaper from 1951 in use as shelf paper in the pantry. There was no furniture, but the windows had glass. No footprints. Stiff toile curtains.

Wading around outside the house, she saw that previous tenants had built up the ground in the crawl space. The house stood on dry pillars. And the water wasn’t seepage from below, just a big puddle from the last rain. It was the kind of land you can’t build on anymore, marl where the soil doesn’t “perc.” The cesspool had no cover, but it was deep and black and smelled of earth. She fetched naval jelly from the car and smeared it on the joint of the pump handle. The water rushed out cold and clear. It was a deep well, drawing water from under the clay.

“We’re going to put down stakes right here,” she said to Mireille.

That night Mireille slept.

She was used to a house where people made noises at all hours. Her father getting drinks for guests, her brother staring at them over the banister and getting reprimanded, her mother puttering in the laundry room, opening the door to check on her, the top-heavy house creaking as the inhabitants shifted their weight. Here her mother lay down when it got dark and clasped her hard to her side. There was nothing that could move in that wind-struck shack. It had done all its settling long ago. There were floorboards that creaked, but nobody to step on them. The only sound was the rushing of pine needles on the trees filtering the dusty air. The pollen was so thick the car was dusted canary yellow the next morning. The humidity, when the temperature got up in the afternoon, was an invisible weight bearing a person to the ground. Mireille slept again.

By the second morning, she was no longer an irritable child. She peeled herself off Peggy and looked around for something to play with.

Peggy did not pay visits to her parents of her own accord, but this was a special case. In general they alternated holidays so as not to miss any relatives: Easter here, Fourth of July there, and so forth. Invariably they ate with Peggy’s parents on Thanksgiving because Lee’s mother didn’t cook. Then everybody came to Lee’s parents’ for Christmas. They had maids making eggnog on rotation and a two-story tree in the front hall with a Lionel train around it, and the kids idolized them. Peggy’s parents, on the other hand, thought she spoiled the kids beyond belief. Her mother had knelt on the rug next to Byrdie, holding his new NERF ball behind her back, and said, “Now, I know you’re not used to hearing the word ‘no,’ but I don’t want to play ball right now. I want us to play Go Fish with your sister. Can you do that one little thing for someone else?” Family get-togethers involving the Vaillaincourts were tense, stubborn confrontations about child-rearing practices, seething under a facade of ritualized gentility and studiously avoided by everyone.

Thus Peggy believed that while Lee might set the wheels of justice turning, he would hesitate for days before calling her parents. Yet it was summer vacation, and they would be calling Stillwater to see when she was bringing the kids to swim in the pool. She decided to drive up and preempt them.

She knew where the key was hidden, but she rang the doorbell. “My, my!” her mother said. “Aren’t you tan!” She let her in, looking her up and down. “You’ve been playing tennis again!”

Peggy laughed. “No, Mom, I’ve been gardening.”

“I would know if you’d been gardening,” her mother said. “The back of your neck would be red and wrinkled as a turkey. No, you’ve been playing tennis. At your age you should be riding or playing golf. Something you can wear a hat and gloves at.”

“Well, isn’t this a surprise,” Peggy’s father said. “What brings you to our neck of the woods?”

“Let me get Mickey,” she said, turning back toward the car. “I didn’t know if you were home.”

“Where’s Byrdie?”

“School,” Peggy said. “What a great kid.”

“He’s a little spoiled, but he’s a fine boy,” her father agreed.

“How’s Lee?” her mother asked.

“That’s what I wanted to talk to you about. Lee’s not—as a matter of fact Lee and I are not getting along. We separated.”

“You’re not living with Lee?” Her mother drew back in dismay.

“I’ve got my own place. Be honest, Mom. Lee Fleming! How long was that going to work?”

Her father chortled.

“Well, is he fine with it?”

Peggy sighed. “Sure. He has a new girlfriend.”

Her father guffawed.

“Are you getting a divorce?” her mother asked.

“Not so far.”

“Do you have a lawyer?”

“I’m not getting a divorce, so why would I need a lawyer?”

“Lee’s out there right now, deceiving you with some two-bit hustler,” her mother said earnestly. “I don’t remember you signing any premarital agreement. He’s going to have to settle something on you. We’ll force him.”

“You and what army? I’m telling you, I cut out of there with no forwarding address. If I go to a judge, Lee will get custody of Mickey, too, not just Byrdie. I couldn’t make Byrdie come along. He didn’t want to, not with a choice between me and the Playboy of the Western World. Now name me a judge Lee’s not related to. I wouldn’t touch a court of law with a ten-foot pole. Screw me over, fuck you. Screw me twice—”

“Watch your language, young lady!” her father interrupted.

“Anyhow, he’s broke. He won’t have a cent until his mom buys the farm, and that’s going to take forty years. If she dies first, his dad marries some deb and we never see a cent.”

Peggy’s mother took Mickey by the hand and stood in the archway to the dining room, making as though to take her someplace else to play, but not wanting to miss anything. “Let’s play boats,” Mickey said.

“I don’t have boats. I guess you don’t have boats anymore either, now that you don’t live on Stillwater Lake.”

“Mommy made the lake fall down. Now we play boats in the yard.”

“Where are you living, honey?”

“We got a pyramid, and blue butterflies!”

“Where do you live?” Peggy’s father said, addressing himself to Peggy.

“Rented house,” Peggy said. “Nothing special.”

“Where?”

“I’d rather not say. I don’t want Lee serving me with papers.”

“I’m concerned about you, honey.”

“I can make my own decisions.”

Her father laughed. “I noticed! Do you have a phone, where we can call you?”

“Not in the house. There’s a party line at a bait shop.”

“You should get a phone for safety. Just list it under a fake name.”

Peggy stopped off at her dad’s churchyard to let Mickey play. The church was one of the oldest in the country, nearly square, with gated pews shining pale green and the Ten Commandments in loopy gold script on alabaster tablets at the front. Austere, creaky, ancient. She picked up a bench and let it fall. The echo ricocheted off the walls and made Mickey jump. They walked around the outside, stroking the soft salmon brickwork with its tracery of lime and the dark pottery of the glazed headers. In the graveyard a solitary angel kept watch over a boxwood. Broken columns—the oldest graves. The next era, bas-relief willows and skulls. Then cast-iron crosses. Then the newest graves, granite monoliths. The names were always the same. Except for one. The cemetery had apparently been integrated. A cluster of mauve plastic roses poked up from the foot of a tiny mound. At the head was a temporary marker, a cross made of unfinished pine, already weathered, reading karen brown 1970–73.

Peggy remembered the Browns. A nice black family who lived on the school property like her parents. Not neighbors exactly, but close by. And here they had lost a child like Mickey. A child who ought to be older than Mickey, but would always be younger. How sad. She looked at her daughter, and then she did something terrible. She drove to the courthouse, to the county registrar, whom she knew, and said, “Morning, Lester!”

“Miss Peggy! How do you do?”

“Fine, thanks. It’s beautiful out! My dad asked me to come down here. He’s doing Leon Brown’s back taxes and now the IRS says they need a birth certificate for their little daughter that died. Because of the deduction. He didn’t want to ask Leon for it.”

“Ain’t that a shame.”

“Her name was Karen.”

He fired up the Xerox machine and dug around for his notary stamp, then pulled out a hanging file tabbed with a B.

In the car on the way home, Peggy glanced at Mireille repeatedly and said, “Karen. Karen? Karen. Karen.”

“Who’s Karen?”

She poked her in the side. “You are Karen! You can’t go to school with a boy’s name like Mickey! You have to have a girl’s name, and your girl’s name is Karen. Karen Brown. My girl’s name is Meg. Meg Brown. Meg and Karen Brown.”