One
Prudence Baylor snuck back in the house at sunrise
and dragged her suitcase down the steps. Her eyes
burned and her shoulder ached from falling asleep
in the car. She was grateful for the discomfort. It kept
her looking ahead and not at the time-smoothed banister, the worn
red carpet that ran the length of the stairs. Nor the old house itself,
which in preceding weeks she wasn’t sure she’d be able to leave
when the time came. Out the window a Willamette Lumber truck
blasted along the road and suddenly it felt like any other morning
and not her house at all, full of all the comforts a person should want,
but she no longer did.
She stopped short when she saw her father was up early and
already in the kitchen, sitting at the table, listening to the radio. The
lights were off and a block of grey daylight reflected off the floor. He
was dressed in his chinos and a checkered flannel, his hair smeared
over his forehead. His hands were folded and his head bent as if in
prayer, but she knew he was just fighting another hangover. As she
came and stood in the doorway, she folded her farewell note deep
into her palm.
He plucked his cigarette from the ashtray and looked up at her
with bloodshot eyes, the pupils like two bottomless wells. “You
know I don’t like you taking your mother’s car like that.” He sucked
on the wet end of the cigarette, ignoring the suitcase by her feet.
“Where do you go all night anyway?”
Prudence touched the cord to her hearing aid, its earpiece
The Artichoke Queen
1
plugged in her right ear. “Just for a drive,” she replied, raising the
volume knob on the box that was clipped to her skirt. She looked
out the kitchen window, where the ’50 Dodge sat in the driveway.
A vision of the previous night came to her: its clattering engine, its
tires skidding along the wet cinder logging roads. The headlamps
trembling as they swept through the forest, as she sped deeper into
the mountains than she ever had before.
She’d been driving those unmarked roads for years, a private
way of clearing her mind. Last night she’d been gathering the
courage to leave home, lost somewhere along the Luckiamute River,
when the road ran out. She screamed and hit the brakes. The car
shuddered to a stop just feet from the tree line, the engine ticking,
tire smoke tumbling over the car. Prudence collapsed there on the
seat, her cheeks wet with tears. She awakened under those dripping
alders, out where the woods were dark and full of noises that made
her heart shake like a rattle.
“Just for a drive,” her father said, stubbing out the cigarette.
“Well, it’s an odd thing to do. What if you broke down?” He shook
his head, as if at the futility of posing the question to her. “I don’t
know anyone who goes out driving God knows where in the middle
of the night. Go get drunk in town like everyone else. That I wouldn’t
mind.”
“I’m sure you wouldn’t.” She glared at him when she spoke,
as even now he was trying to whittle her down to nothing. She
straightened herself, squaring her shoulders. “I’m leaving today, like
I told you,” she said. Her voice sounded more confident than it ever
had in her twenty years. “There’s nothing keeping me here any more.
You’ve seen to that fairly well.”
Her father looked as if she’d just shaken him awake. He leaned
forward and set his elbows on the table. “So you’re going to leave
2 Owen Duffy
your old man behind and head for greener pastures? Well, let me be
the one to tell you that there’s nothing out there. Not a God damned
thing.”
He scraped back his chair, stood and walked to the sink. His
shoulder brushed a calendar that hung from a cabinet, and Prudence
watched the calendar swing back and forth on its nail. On the top
page was a cartoon of a boy and a girl scrubbing a dog in a laundry
basin while a horrified mother looked on, her hands smacked to her
cheeks. It was an Ivory Soap Flakes advertisement her mother had
mailed away for. And there it sat now, still turned to December, 1953.
Prudence remembered the promise she’d made to herself in the
preceding months. She stepped forward and steadied the calendar,
watching her father’s back, the slow rise and fall of his shoulders.
“I’m leaving today,” she said. “Nothing you can say will change
that.” She took a deep breath. “And I’m going to take Mother’s car.”
Her father dumped the remnants of his coffee in the sink.
Prudence watched it drip down the porcelain, then as he rinsed it
away with a trembling hand. He flipped off the faucet and turned. He
looked at her a long time, his tongue working inside his mouth, as
if tasting his disappointment. No, she knew that look too well. This
was different. He was savoring the cruel and awful things he knew
about the world that she’d soon understand. Some truth that would
excuse the way he’d been lost in his own private miseries nearly her
whole life.
The only sound in the room then was the radio, and he walked
over and snapped it off. “You can go,” he said, snatching his
mackinaw from the back of his chair, “but you’re not taking that
car.” He threaded his arms in his coat sleeves and went to fetch his
keys, as if giving her time to change her mind.
Prudence looked down at her mother’s suitcase, which she’d
The Artichoke Queen
3
found hidden in the back of his bedroom closet the day before.
Although it was pasteboard and very old, it still looked brand new.
Her father scooped on his hat and jerked the door open. “Well,
if you’re really leaving, let’s get going. I have a lot of work to get
done today.”
He
drove
her to the McMinnville bus depot in silence. Rain
dotted the windshield of his red work truck, Baylor Radio and
TV Repair scripted on the door in gold letters. On the way they
passed the First Presbyterian Church, the one he’d stopped going
to months before. The ivy covered Twin Falls High School where
she’d graduated two years earlier, the rubber boot factory with the
busted out windows. People walked along the downtown sidewalks
carrying lunch pails, their heads bowed in the constant drizzle; lives
that to Prudence always seemed without hope or desperation. Lives
consumed with the daily struggles of just getting by.
Her father parked across from the bus depot while she went in
to buy a one-way ticket to Los Angeles. It all went just as she’d
rehearsed so many times: her hand not faltering as she tendered the
money to the clerk, who eyed her uncertainly, as if wondering why a
young woman was traveling alone. As she stepped back outside, her
father followed her inside the Busy Bee Café while she waited for
the bus, and sat down across from her. While her coffee went cold,
Prudence watched the clock on the wall.
She knew that he was waiting for a sign of weakness that he
could utilize to get her to stay. He stared at her while he leaned back
in his chair, fingers laced across his chest. The other patrons, some of
whom she’d known her whole life, looked at her and quickly away.
She’d been getting that a lot lately. The pity that comes in quiet
ways: a pinched smile, the extra room on the sidewalk, the way no
4 Owen Duffy
one ever asked how she’d been, because they all knew.
After a few minutes, her father dropped his hand on the table.
“I just don’t know why you want to leave. Everything you have is
here.”
“You know why,” she said, matching his volume.
He shook a cigarette from his pack of Old Golds, ignoring the
stares from the other diners. She looked at him. The deep wrinkles
around his green eyes, the faded red hair and square jaw, his still
muscular build. “Fine, go back to school next fall.” He tamped the
cigarette on the table and then tucked it in the corner of his mouth. “I
suppose your mother would’ve liked that.”
Prudence pushed her coffee away, the spoon clanging against
the saucer. At the teachers college, she’d been the captain of the
women’s swim team and had even petitioned to ski on the Willamette
University men’s team, which always struck him as a bit funny. And
then he’d made her quit the crummy teachers college before her
winter exams to come home to help out around the house. She had
planned on attending there for two years, then transfer to a co-ed
college, somewhere far away. She resented him for pulling her out
of school at the end of the semester, and she resented him now for
telling her she could just go back, as if that would solve everything.
“I’d have to start the year over,” she replied, folding her arms.
“And besides, everyone would feel sorry for me.”
Prudence knew it didn’t make much difference to him why she
left, only that she was leaving him alone. They both knew he needed
someone to look after him. That he’d never cooked a meal in his life
and fell asleep every night with a cigarette in his hand. And although
she knew he loved her in his own hard style, there was a trace of
burden in it. As if she was, with her hearing aid and her lack of
interest in anything normal, the source of his disappointments. But
The Artichoke Queen
5