Jack is not deterred. “What I mean is, what if you would strip off all the paint, Saffee? Every layer. Strip it away, scrape it off, right down to the raw wood.” He runs a hand over the speckled top. “It would be a really big job, of course, but as you did it, I bet you’d get a fresh perspective. You’d be an overcomer. It would be a sort of, well, cleansing.”
Now she is furious. “There you go with your psychology.” She usually appreciates his analytical comments, but this is going too far. “I told you, I just want to walk—”
As he has done before, Jack gently touches her lips with two fingers. “But that’s not victory, Saffee. Don’t you see? That’s letting a wooden table haunt you like it haunted your mother. Right now it is ugly, covered over by your mother’s agony. But underneath, judging by what I saw, there lies a piece of beautiful, redeemable work. By restoring it, I have an idea there will be benefits for you too.”
He talks as if she has agreed to do this harebrained thing. Slave over this table? That is the last thing she wants to do. However, a degree of release has accompanied her outburst, and because of it, and because of her trusting love for Jack, she melts. She agrees to take the troublesome table home. Perhaps they can store it in the garage.
Together, they force apart the tabletop to release the extra leaf. It is obvious that they will be unable to load the table into the pickup themselves. To Saffee’s chagrin, Jack says he will go to the house next door, that blue house, he says, to enlist help. Saffee is too disconcerted to object.
While he is gone she leans against a wall, staring at the table in disbelief. How could she have agreed to take it home to their honeymoon cottage? What peculiar hold does it have over people? Over her to make her so emotional, and now, over Jack, that he would be so drawn to it he would even knock on a stranger’s door in order to move it?
As they drive back to Minneapolis, Saffee is silent in disbelief. Here they are, rolling down the highway with the paint-splattered Norway table, of all things, in the truck bed. She had not expected to be dogged in marriage by anything so painfully tangible from the past.
Ten miles from Miller’s Ford, Saffee blurts, “Jack, can’t we turn around and put it back in the house?”
Jack says he loves her so much that he doesn’t want her to carry around “memory baggage” for the rest of her life. “Don’t you think everyone has something they want to forget?” he asks. “No one can completely unplug unpleasantness of the past, but sometimes actions help deal with it.”
Her temper flares. “And how would you know?” Their first week of marriage not over and she sounds ugly. “You, with the perfect childhood and natural abilities and talents galore, you’re lecturing me about memories!” She glares out the window, sickened that she yelled, yet not willing to retract her words.
Jack says something about as a young boy not being good in sports, having a bodybuilding regimen, compensating his inadequacies with good academic habits. She hardly listens. How can he compare her upbringing to some mere struggle with male ego—even if male ego is something she knows little about?
“I don’t know about your, well, challenges,” she says, “but I can’t see how they compare to growing up in a home as crazy as mine and wanting to forget about it, and certainly not wanting symbols around like that old table.”
“I am sympathetic, Saffee, really I am, and of course I can’t completely identify. But I’ll just say again that running away from memories doesn’t leave them behind.”
Inwardly she huffs.
CHAPTER FORTY
WEEDS
The next day Jack tinkers with the lawn mower Nels had left behind in the Miller’s Ford garage. Mrs. Corbet, the duplex owner, had made it clear that both tenants were to care for half of the yard. Saffee leans against the Volkswagen parked in the driveway and watches him fill the mower with gas. She looks askance at the Norway table’s disassembled parts taking up most of the floor space of the single-car garage. There is no other place to put them. She wonders how long Jack will be happy to leave the car outdoors. Maybe by the time winter comes he will agree to throw the table away.
The spring grass is hardly long enough to cut, but Jack is eager to try. “Mowing might become a chore someday,” he says, “so right now I think I’ll enjoy it.” He pulls the starter cord and roars off. She lowers the garage door.
Enjoying the warm sun, Saffee surveys their new neighborhood. She notices that the yard fronting the other side of the duplex is perfectly groomed. The tenants have yet to be seen. Across the street is a dense wooded area that runs the length of three blocks. She admires a stand of white-barked birch trees exactly opposite the duplex. They bend and mingle like whispering old women, then shake with laughter in the breeze. Jack thinks the Norway table might be birch. It is hard to believe that the table she has grown to despise in its ugliness was once a lovely tree, or, more likely, trees free to yield their branches to the wind, free to shake their leaves.