Mila's Away, at College

(reprinted from Woman's Day, April 1992)

The steam from the coffee had condensed on the cold window and was running down the glass in tear-like trickles that gained speed as they traveled down the pane. Outside in the orchard the man from the smudge company was refilling the pots with oil. The grease smell from last night's burning was still in the air. Mr. Harris gazed out at the bleak darkening apple grove; Mrs. Harris watched her husband eat, nibbling on the edges of some toast, then then stacking the crusts about his coffee cup in a neat fence-like arrangement.

"We'll have to call Mila," Mr. Lowe siad, finally. "Your father's likely not to last out the night. She's his only grandchild. She ought to be here."

Mrs. Harris pressed her hands to the bones above her eyes. "Mila isn't going to like being called away from college," she said.

"We'll have to call her anyway. it's the only thing to do, ay?" Mr. Harris swirled the last of his coffee around in his cup so as not to miss any sugar.

"Father's liable to lapse into unconsciousness any time," Mrs. Harris argues. "Mila'll hate coming and Father won't know whether she's here or not. Why not let her stay at Whitman?"

Neither wanted, in the midst of their sorrow for the good man whose life was ending, to enter into any discussion of Mila. What was the matter with Mila? What had happened to her since she went away to college? She, who had been open and loving? And who now lived inside a world so absolutely fitted to her own size and shape that she felt any intrusion, even that of the death of her own grandfather, to be an unmerited invasion of her privacy. Black magic could not have changed her more quickly and unpleasantly and nothing except magic, it would seem, would give them back their lost daughter.

Mr. Harris, had never been to college, pushed back his cup and saucer. "Her place is here, Sela. I'm going to call Spokane now. She's a smart girl and it's not going to hurt her to miss a few days of classes. What's the dormitory number?"

Mr. Harris squeezed out from behind the table. "Don't bother. I can get it."

Mr. Harris watched her husband, his usually square shoulders sagging with weariness, wipe a clear place on the steamy windowpane with his napkin. Some of the green twilight appeared to seep into the warm dingy little kitchen. "I can't ever remember having to smudge before in May. I expect you're right," he added as he went to the wall toward the phone. "Mile isn't going to like it."

Mila didn't like it. It was May, the rains had been late and the world was burning with a green fire; a green smoke rolled down the hills and burst shoulder-high in the cover crops that filled the spaces between the trees in the apple orchards. There had been reain earlier in the day and drops still hung from the grass blades, sickle-shaped with their weight. Mila, walking across the campus with Matthew, squatted to look into one of these crystal globes.

"Green from the grass and red from the sun," she told him. "The whole world right there in one raindrop."

"As Blake observed earlier about a grain of sand," said Matthew.

"O.K., show off," Mila told him. "You know it -- but I saw it." She took his hand and he pulled her up, swinging her in a semicircle in front of him. "Down there in the grass the world winked at me."

"Don't be poetic, Mila," Matthew said.

"I will," Mila said, "just to tease you. I love to tease you, Matthew."

"Why?"

"Because you love to have me," Mila said confidently, taking his hand. Being older suited Matthew. She remembered when she had like him in spite of his looks; but now spindly had become spare, and the dark shadow of his beard -- Matthew had to shave every day while other boys back in Bubble Water were still just fuzzy -- lay under his pale skin; and the opinions, which had once been so embarrassingly unlike anyone else's were now celebrated at Whitman College as being "Matthewian." Yes, Matthew had changed since that day when she had knocked his tooth out trying to rescue him from the waterlily stems at Newman Lake. And had she changed? Did she also look better to Matthew, almost shapely now and the freckles not noiceable except at the height of summer? And with her new-found ability for light talk/ They were passing beneath the pine trees and the silver drops, falling as the wind shook the needles, stung her face, feeling at once both cool and burning. Meadow larks in the fields which edged the campus sang in the guiet way they have after the rain has stopped.

"Oh, Matthew," Mila said, "no one in the world loves the meadow lark's song the way i do!"

"It's not a competition," Matthew smiled, "you against the world in an 'I-love-meadow-larks' contest. Take it easy, kid. Love them as much as in you lieth, and let it go at that."

"No," she said. "I am determined to overdo it. Listen,' she exclaimed, as two birds sang together. "Not grieving, nor amorous, not lost. Nothing to read into it. Simply music. Like Mozart. Complete. Finished. Oh, it is rain to listening cars." She glanced at Matthew to see how he took this rhetoric. He took it calmly. she let go his hand and capered amidst the fallen pine needles.

"The gardener thinks you've got St. Vitus' dance," Matthew said.

Captain Cy, the college gardener whose name was really Cy, was leaning on his hoe, watching her hopping and strutting. She didn't give a hoot about him or what he thought.

"He's old," she told Matthew. "He does not exist." She felt less akin to him than to a bird or toad.

There were lights already burning in the dorm windows. Mila could see Evelyn and 'Becca still at their tables, finishing their Ovid or looking up a final logarithm. But between five and six most of the girls stopped trying to remember which form of the sonnet Milton had used or when the Congress of Vienna had met, and dressed for dinner. They got out of their sweaters and jackets and into their blouses and best jeans. she knew just what she was going to wear when she came downstairs at six to meet Matthew -- green silk like the merman's wife. They were going to the Pizza Hut for dinner, escaping salmon-wiggle night in the college dining room.

'At six," she told him, "I'll fly down the stairs to meet you like a green wave."

"See you in thirty minutes,' Matthew said, leaving her at the dorm steps.

The minute she opened the door, she began to hear the dorm sounds and smell the dorm smells -- the his and rush of the showers, the thud of the iron, a voice singing, "Dear old Whitman we love so well," the slap of bare feet down the hall, the telephone ringing.

And the smells! Elizabeth Arden and Fifth Avenue frothing in the showers; rubber-soled sneakers and gym t-shirts still wet with sweat after basketball practice, and the smell of the hot iron of damp wool.

But while she was still listening and smelling, Lynette shouted from the top of the stairs, "Long distance for you, Mila. Make it snappy."

Mila took the stairs three at a time, picked up the dangling receiver, pressed it to her ear.

It was her father: "Grandfather is dying, Mila. Catch the 7:30 home. I'll meet you at the depot."

"What's the matter -- Mila?" Lynette asked.

"I have to catch the 7:30 Pacific Electric. Grandfather's dying."

"Oh, poor Mila," Lynette cried and pressed her arm about her.

Mila scarcely heard her. Why were they calling her home to watch Grandpa die, she thought, angrily and rebelliously. An old man, past eighty. He'd never been truly alive for her, never more than a rought, hot hand, a scraggly mustache that repelled her when he kissed her, on old fart who gathered what he call "likely-looking" stones and took them over to the Norsk's to be washed and polished so he could turn them over and over and admire them. It was stupid and unfair to make so much of his dying.

But before she could say a word, Lynette was telling the girls. They were crowding about her. "don't cry," they said. "We'll pack for you. Be brave, Mila. Remember your grandfather has had a long happy life. he wouldn't want you to cry."

"Brave Mila -- brave Mila," they said. "Just frozen."

She wasn't frozen. She was determined. She was not going to go. It did not make sense. She went downstairs to meet Matthew as she had planned, in her green silk, ready for dinner at the Pizza Hut. The girls had told him.

"Are you wearing that home?" he asked.

"I'm not going home," she said. "It's silly and useless. I can't help Grandfather. It's just a convention. What good can I do him, sitting there at home?"

"He might do you some good," Matthew said. "Had you thought about that?"

"Why Matthew!" Mila said. "Why Matthew?" She had the girls tamed, eating out of her hand, and here was Matthew who loved her -- he said so, anyway -- cold and disapproving. Looking at herself through Matthew's eyes, she hesitated. "Well, if I have to be home, at the very least," Mila said trying to find some good in this disaster, "I can tell Ben that he and I are through. I've met someone else, I'll tell him. I've outgrown him and Bubble Water. And it will be over before the summer vacation starts."

"Go on," Matthew said. "Get what you need and I'll drive you to the station."

She packed her overnight bag and went with him; there didn't seem -- once she'd had Matthew's view of herself -- anything else to do. But once on the train her resentment returned. The Pacific Electric was hot and smelled of metal and dusty plush. it clicked past a rickety little town west of Spokane, headed south, where the pool hall signs swung in the night wind off the woods near Othello. An old man in a spotted jean jacket, and his wife, with her hair straggling through the holes in her broken net, sat in front of her.

Neath, thought Mila, anyone can be neat, if he or she wants to. Mila decided, then and there, to demand that her father get her a car to drive to college and back. No more trains and people and smells and grime like this.

Her father, bareheaded, but in his big sheepskin jacket, met her at the depot. it was after nine, cold and raw.

"This is a sorry time, Mila," he said. He put her suitcase in the back of the truck and climbed into the driver's seat without opening the door for her.

Mila got in, wrapped her coat tightly about herself. The sky was clear, the wind had died down.

"I don't see any sense in my having to come home," she said at last. "What good can I do Grandpa? If he's dying, how can I help?"

"I was afraid that was the way you might feel about it. So was your mother."

"Oh, Mother," Mila burst out. "Recently she's always trying to put me. . ."

Her father cut her off. "That'll be about enough, Mila. Your place is at home and you're coming home and keeping your mouth shut, whatever you think. I don't know what's happened to you recently. If college does this to you, you'd better stay home permanently."

There was nothing more said until they turned up the willow-lined driveway that led to the house. "Here we are," Mr. Harris told her.

Mrs. Harris met them at the door, tired and haggard in her Indian design bathrobe.

"Mila,' she said, "Grandfather's conscious now. I told him you were coming and he's anxious to see you. you'd better go in right away -- this might be the last time he'd know you."

Mila was standing by the fireplace holding first one foot then the other toward the fire. "Oh, Mother, what am I to say?" she asked. "What can i say? Or does Grandfather just want to see me?"

Her father shook his head as if with pain. "Aren't you sorry your grandfather's dying, Mila? Haven't you any pity in your heart? Don't you understand what death means?"

"He's an old man," Mila said obstinately. "It's what we must expect when we grow old," though she, of course, would never grow old.

"Warm your hands, Mila," her mother said. "Grandfather's throat bothers him and it eases him to have it rubbed. I'll give you the ointment and you can rub it in. you won't need to say anything."

Mila slid out of her coat and went across the hall with her mother to visit her grandfather's room. His thin old body was hardly visible beneath the covers; his head, with its gray skin and sunken eyes, lay upon the pillow as if bodiless. The night light frosted his white hair but made black caverns of his closed eyes.

"Dad,' Mrs. Harris said. "Dad." But the old man didn't move. There was nothing except the occasional hoarse rasp of an indrawn breath to show that he was alive.

Mrs. Harris pulled the cane-bottomed chair a little closer to the bed. "Sit here," she said to Mila, "and rub this into his throat and chest." She opened her father's nightshirt so that an inch or two of bony grizzled chest was bared. "He says that this rubbing relieves him, even if he's asleep or too tired to speak. Rub it in with a slow steady movement." She went out to the living room leaving the door a little open.

Mila sat down on the chair and put two reluctant fingers into the jar of poy-colored ointment; but she could see far more sense to this than to any talking or being talked to. if they had brought her home from school because she was needed in helping to care for Grandpa, that she could understand -- but not simply to be present at his death. What had death to do with her youth?

She leaned over him, rubbing, but with eyes shut, dipping her fingers often into the jar. The rhythm of the rubbing, the warmth and closeness of the room, after the cold drive, had almost put her to sleep when the old startled her by lifting a shaking hand to the bunch of lazy susans Lynette had pinned to the shoulder of her dress before she left Whitman. She opened her eyes suddenly at his touch, but the old man said nothing, only stroked the flowers awkwardly with a trembling forefinger.

Mila unpinned the susans and put them in his hand. "There, Grandpa," she said, "there. They're for you."

The old man's voice was a harsh and faltering whisper and to hear what he said Mila had to lean very close.

"I used to -- pick them -- on the north end of the lake near the roads leading up to the woods. I was always sorry to -- plow them up. Still -- so sweet. Thank you," he said, "to bring them. To remember. you're like her. Your grandmother," he added after a pause. he closed his eyes, holding the bougquet against his face, letting the wilting blossoms spray across one cheek like a pulled-up sheet of flowering earth. he said one more word, not her name but her grandmother's.

The dikes about Mila's heart broke. "Oh, Grandpa, I love you," she said. He heard her. He knew what she said, his fingers returned the pressure of her hand. "You were always so good to me. you were young and you loved flowers." Then she said what was her great discovery. "And you still do. You still love lazy susans, Grandpa, just like me."

At the sound of her uncontrolled crying, Mr. and Mrs. Harris came to the door. "What's the matter, Mila?"

Mila turned, lifted a hand toward them. "Why didn't you tell me?" she demanded. And when they didn't answer, she said, "Matthew knew."

Then she dropped her head on to her grandfather's outstretched hand and said something, evidently to him, which neighter her father nor her mother understood.

"It's just the same."