The Workshop

Abstract

FICTION The Workshop Julie W. Sherman The road to Billie's trailer goes through the kind of lush, green countryside that made my city cousin Albert sink down in the back seat of Pop's car and gaze out, as one might crouch with fear in a thunderstorm . Big tracts of land are marked off by long driveways and fences that reach their vanishing points somewhere in the woods. In the autumn wind, hammocks drift lightly on porches, waiting to be fought over on soporific summer afternoons. Billie moved in with Cappy, her boyfriend who was a carpenter, despite Pop's avowal that he would never visit them. Dire were the family's warnings about the probable character of a man who couldn't "get beyond the hand-to-mouth stage of life." Could one, my mother demanded, expect much of someone named Cappy? Billie said she was fed up with living in a big town full of people who spent all their time doing things they hated and then took it out on people they loved. While Cappy made hat racks and umbrella stands for sale in his workshop , Billie was going to cook eggs and sausage and learn how to paint spice racks with a country motif. The good life, she maintained, was being around Cappy as he worked up an appetite sawing, hammering, leveling, dovetailing, and polishing. By the time Albert came down from New York, Pop's curiosity had gotten the better of him and Billie came out to meet us in the pebbly driveway. Cappy, in jeans and a plaid shirt, followed along behind. When we stepped out, we heard a great rustling high in the trees. Thousands of green leaves switched from light to dark in the wind and branches swayed hypnotically against a grayish-blue autumn sky. The coming of winter was heavy in the air and someone asked if our emergency sweaters were still in the trunk. Albert's mouth hung open as he looked around at the earth. Soon he was swaying slightly with the trees, his feet fortunately tethered by gravity to the ground. Billie smiled at him and told him the sound he heard was the trees singing in the wind. Julie W. Sherman lives in Washington, D. C. 30 "You got it wrong, sugarplum," said Cappy. "It's the wind singing in the trees." Billie said no, the wind never did anything but cause activity in other things. It caused trees to sway, snow to drift, seeds to germinate, and people to feel alive. She asked if we would like to have Christmas with them in the cozy trailer. Cappy was making a new rocking chair, she said, having it in mind that Pop could sit in it on Christmas Eve. "Right now," Cappy told us, "I'm working on special projects." Projects, Billie explained, meant things that are handed down through generations. Cappy was thinking of the family, she added approvingly. Whose family's generations the projects were for we didn't ask, because you can't say to a guy, "Are you going to marry my sister and work your way into a system of acceptance in our family? Will you someday be more than a guy who hasn't saved a dime and has a cartoon character name?" You just have to wait. On the matter of Christmas, Mom whined a little about the family being accustomed to turkey being prepared in a "proper kitchen," meaning her own. Pop thrust his lower lip out deliberately, like an old man growing lonely but still clinging to the idea that grown children should regard his house as their home. It was warm inside the trailer. Billie had it fixed up with Indian print curtains and some old rugs I had seen in our relatives' houses. She had a little electric heater glowing under the window that looked out on the singing trees. We could smell chicken and carrots simmering on the stove. "I should think Christmas here would be very cozy," Albert pronounced , drinking in everything in the colorful little room. At that, Cappy sidled up to him, putting me in mind of a dog that jumps...