Peg Club; fiction by Adam Hofbauer
Peg Club
Adam Hofbauer
On the evening of her immediate family’s first Thanksgiving together in nine years, Peg alone was in any way prepared for the holiday photograph. Peg had managed to squeeze them all onto the couch, her husband Nate, her two grown daughters, and her nine month old granddaughter, in spite of everything up to and including the collective pressure posed on the couch by the total diameter of everyone’s assembled thighs.
Baby Arya, sitting on her mother’s lap but resting one baby-shoed foot on Peg’s left knee, being obviously excluded.
Though Peg was looking straight ahead at the photographic lens of her son in law’s phone, she could see her husband and youngest daughter out of the corners of her eyes. Seated on opposite ends of the couch, they were looking at each other, and Peg just knew that they were seeking, somewhere in each other, the motivation to smile. Dana, Peg’s eldest, was squeezed in to her right, and was wordlessly shifting her weight from leg to leg, the pressure of her left thigh against her mother’s right leg a conspicuous sign of her own relative lack of readiness. Baby Arya was a baby and, though it would be nice if she smiled, her eventual expression was somewhat forgivable, her relationship with happiness and smiling too nascent to be understood. One part of Peg was aware of all of these things, and their presence in the living world. But another part of her was elsewhere, having followed her gaze past her son in law and his smart phone’s photographic lens, over his shoulder and through the living room window. Though darkness lay outside the window, Peg knew well enough the way forward along the path of this gaze, down the driveway, downhill and past the butterfly bushes, past the mailbox and the curb and across the road, until finally entering a patch of neglected farmland. It was here that this other part of Peg had now traveled. In the years she had lived in that house, Peg’s physical body had never set foot in that patch of farmland, itself now a minor prairie of waist high grasses. But she had begun to more freely imagine herself there, having realized only recently that it was a place where she could better know herself and, if given the time to search, grant herself the permission to smile.
By Thanksgiving evening in the sixty second year of her life, the woman on the couch considered her first name to be Peg and her last name to be LeGrange. When introducing herself to new people, she would say, “My name is Peg” instead of, “I’m Peg.” Peg had taken her surname from her first, only and current husband, Nate, on the day of her marriage to him thirty two years earlier. Her legal first name, by birth, remained Margaret, as chosen by her grandmother and accepted by her parents. But Peg had no recollection of considering her name to be Margaret, or of anyone calling her that. She also had no memory of the days of her life in which she had been referred to as simply Margie. She had never been referred to as Marge. Peg’s first recollections of herself as a named being came sometime around the first few days of her elementary schooling. Somewhere in the unkempt grasses of Peg’s mind lay a copy of the public school of brick and steel that had once existed in the living world. In this school, having crossed for the first time the halo of concrete surrounding the building, Peg remembered saying, ‘My name’s Peg’, and two other little girls announcing that this was also their name. A fourth girl soon wandered over, and for a few days they called their group of same named friends Peg Club. Peg Club meetings involved sitting under the kind of solid metal slide that was no longer considered safe for children, where the concrete halo of the play yard fell away to a segment of neglected farmland, and waiting for someone to call out to them. At which point they would all at once respond, and then sink into a fit of conspiratorial giggling that carried across the living fields. But the giggling of groups of young girls holds powerful energy, and the girl’s teacher contacted all of their mothers and informed them of this complicated, and troubling situation.
Equally threatened by the latent power of such unity, the girls’ mothers had agreed to an equal redistribution of names, at least until the girls could be placed into different classes some day, when their unstable energy could be properly dissipated. So one of the girls, the one Peg remembered as being the most intelligent, had remained Margaret. Another, of whom Peg had no strong associations, had her name shortened to Margie. The most graceful, and ultimately most beautiful of the girls, had transitioned easily into the flourish of Peggie. And Peg, now as then, had accepted the short, thud stub of Peg. This naming immediately put an end to Peg club. The girls found other friends, more in suiting to their individual temperaments. Peg was paired with a girl named Dot. And even into the later grades of their schooling, and the early stages of their adulthood, it was these names that stayed with the Pegs, each of them introducing themselves to friends, boyfriends, potential employers and future father in laws by the names assigned to them by their threatened but practical mothers. They had worked these names into the muscle memory of their signatures, written them on cards for various occasions, and seen them written in frosting on celebratory cakes. Peg too, for years, had told everyone her name was Peg, until the day she met for the first time a man who she suspected, correctly, that she would marry, held out her hand to meet his and announced, “My name is Peggie.”
In the beginning of what would become her marriage to that man, the same one who was sitting two sets of thighs down from her on the couch on the night of Thanksgiving, until sometime into the infancy of her first daughter, Dana, the woman on the couch still considered her name to be Peggie. She had needed its grace, the way she imagined the captain of a lumbering cargo vessel needed the agility of a tugboat. She had needed the extra syllables of Peggie to escort her through the first few months of sex with Nate. Whispering, “Call me Peggie now,” had made the insides of her mouth feel flexible and soft, like the flourish of a bullfighter's cape. Hearing Nate say ‘Yes, Peggie’ made her want to be made of light blue marbles, deconstructed, and bounced down a flight of cold, oak stairs. She had needed its added syllable when introducing herself to her OBGYN, and then to the Dr. who would deliver, eventually, both of her baby girls. She had only shortened her name when she went to work at Lenscrafters, thinking it would look better on her name badge. For years, people she had met during that time of her life continued to call her Peggie, and correcting them made her feel the ongoing endurance that the name had given her, in the days when she had needed it to serve her growth as a person. Nate still called her Peggie, often when he lost himself in that place he went when they were having sex, as if he too needed the name’s power to connect him with the experience, lest he drift off forever into some foreign space existing only in his mind.
Peg sat now, thirty two years since marrying that man, in the evening of Thanksgiving, on a couch between both of her adult daughters. Unlike her husband and youngest daughter, Peg’s eyes were already looking forward, towards the raised camera. Though a portion of herself was elsewhere, searching vast interior farms for the motivation to smile, nothing of this partial absence was betrayed in the living world of thighs and smiles. Peg’s sweater was a color of almost but not quite cranberry red, cut by runways of orange. Her fingers, picking slightly at this sweater’s thick cuffs, were the only movement that might have revealed any anxiety, though no one would have guessed at the current state of her split attention, Peg having long ago realized that even when she spoke of it, no one tended to listen. She had been preparing this moment in her mind for months, since she had suggested the idea of getting the girls and the baby together for thanksgiving to her husband. By the evening of Thanksgiving, Peg had been a grandmother for nine months, but had only met her granddaughter for the first time two nights ago. There were gaps in her life like these, in time and in her relationships with her two adult daughters, that Peg was determined to fix. This was the main motivating factor in all of them being together now on Thanksgiving, for the first time in nine years, sitting together on the couch in Peg’s living room and preparing to be photographed. These six people, Peg and her husband and daughters and granddaughter and son in law, together on this day, Thanksgiving, on this couch represented for Peg the completion of a great work. Their time apart on holidays, she had decided sometime around the day she learned she was going to be a grandmother, was now just a bad habit no one had ever challenged. Yes, her youngest daughter Emily had spent, before apparently getting herself together, years away from all of them, running around Wyoming, fighting forest fires and getting herself thrown into various mental hospitals. But aside from that, no one had planned for the time apart to collect the way it had. For some of that time, Peg had led herself to believe that her family contained less love than others. But Peg’s recent discovery of a vast personal territory through which she could better come to know herself had led her to never again translate a lack of togetherness for a lack of love. So she had suspected, correctly, that the right of amount of pushing could correct this. As far back as she could recall, Peg and Nate had spent Thanksgiving at the home of her brother-in law, occasionally joined by Dana. Peg’s brother in law never served a whole turkey, just premade sandwich trays. His family was really big, and they formed a line to eat from the trays, like diners in a cafeteria. But Peg had decided that this year for Thanksgiving she would host her own family, new grand daughter and son in law included. She would roast a turkey. She would ask them all how they liked their coffee. It was still to be seen if this holiday as a family, the turkey, the coffee, and any others in the future, could improve her relationship with her daughters, or create one with her son in law. As her son in law’s right hand made the universally recognized motion for ‘get closer together’, the present section of Peg was considering whether or not she should whisper an order to smile. But, like so many things, Peg was prevented from doing this by the thought of how much better things would be if they just happened without someone having to do something about it.
Peg’s mind that day had wandered to an imagined scene in California. I wonder, she found herself thinking over hunks of turkey, if California Peg is just right now sitting down for Thanksgiving dinner? A year before, one of Peg’s friends from school had retired, and then almost immediately announced that she was moving to a shared living community in California. This friend, who had been the member of Peg club referred to as Margaret, had long ago gone back to calling herself Peg. But by her retirement party, everyone had started calling her California Peg. At that party, Peg’s turkey sandwich brother-in law had made a joke about California Peg living with, ‘All the fruits and nuts out there’. He had made the same joke at Peg’s retirement party eight months ago, all the fruits and nuts, before suggesting that maybe now Peg could go visit her there. I will, she had thought, but hadn’t. What she had done was looked at her Facebook posts all year and, seeing pictures of a life that seemed like something she had never considered wanting, all far off and ocean adjacent, begun to compare her own life to that of California Peg. California Peg, who had given up diet sodas. California Peg, who had stopped dyeing her hair, only to end up looking even better, like an actor in a Centrum Silver commercial. Her own retirement party had been the first time Peg had begun to think of herself as capable of occupying two spaces in the same moment, and the first time she had looked out her living room window and sensed an unexplored region of herself existing in an identical but interior space.
Peg had been hesitant to explore this space at first. She had said nothing of it to her husband or daughters. Anticipating kindred spirits in the women at her church, Peg had even started going to scrap book club. The women there made collages based around the themes that inspired them, like, ‘My Family’ or ‘Faith.” So Peg had started making scrapbook collages with themes like, “The subdivisions that were never built” or, “Searching for the light as it looked in the steakhouse, as I was sitting with my father.” In the last meeting she went to before they asked her to leave, Peg even told scrap book club about how it didn’t make sense that God had stopped speaking to mankind. That maybe if she traveled to the right acre within herself, she could hear God speak. The pastor had told her that maybe she would hear God better if she stopped talking so much. That night, Peg had decided, finally, against telling Nate about the farmland of her mind. Instead, she had suggested that maybe they should have Thanksgiving at the house that year.
With that Thanksgiving at the house now achieved, sitting on the couch in her red sweater with orange runways and preparing to smile for a picture not yet ready to be taken, Peg had still told no one else. Nate would catch her sometimes, when he came home from work, standing in the living room and looking out the window across the road. He would ask her what she was thinking about, and she would shake her head and change the subject. The day they had moved in, when the girls were little and Nate could still have been called skinny, the realtor had mentioned how pretty soon the vacant space across from them would be teeming with brand new subdivisions. More than twenty years later, in the absence of anyone staking claim to that physical territory, Peg had begun to appropriate it as the basis for a secure, personal territory. This territory had always existed, and Peg had faint memories of days predating even Peg Club, in which her imagination had deposited her there. But only in the years since her retirement, and even more frequently in the months since her granddaughter had been born, had Peg felt herself exploring this territory, whose borders were equal to the border of her mind.
It was as if she had come across a restaurant serving strange food she had never tasted, only to realize she spoke the dialect of the servers and recognized the spice blends from a time older than her memory. It was like walking through a hospital only to realize you were walking by the room in which you had been born. But it was also as if she had found this territory after it had already suffered some great calamity. Its grasses had been trampled by the weight of black carriages. When the wind blew there, it brought down from the clouds the smell of diesel. And Peg refused to be that woman, carrying around with her an endless, sinister place, defined by empty holidays and missing daughters. So she had resolved that, just as she would reclaim the bonds of her family, Peg would reclaim the peace of her own inner territories.
Sitting now, next to the nine month old girl arranged on Peg’s own adult daughter’s knees, with no further insight into what California Peg was up to, Peg knew just as little about what had become of all the other Pegs in Peg Club. At that point in her life, the evening of Thanksgiving in the sixty first of her Autumns, Peg was the only person she knew named Peg. But she couldn’t remember all the other Peg’s dying. She would have remembered a death notification for someone with either her birth name of Margaret or her chosen name of Peg or any of the other connotations that had emerged, decades ago, in the dissolution of Peg Club. Maybe they had all moved away, like California Peg? When her second daughter was born, Peg had named her Emily. And when she was growing up, Emily would have usually at least one friend also named Emily. She must have had six friends named Emily, little kids in dance class, in her marching band, during her two stays at the psychiatric hospital. And now her daughter was grown and wanted to name her daughter Arya. They were already replacing the Emily’s and not even all the Pegs were gone yet.
Arya, Peg had asked over the phone the day Dana had informed her of her impending grand daughter’s name. She was unfamiliar with this name. It was popular now, Dana explained. It was the name of a cool character on a show people watched. Peg had repeated the name a couple times, trying to figure out how to pronounce it, Arya, Arya. Nate had butted in from the phone in the bedroom, asking, “I don’t know. Arya or aren’t ya?”
Pressed now as she was between her daughters on the couch, and having perhaps not anticipated the collective expansion of her immediate family’s legs, Peg knew that those daughters might argue for the importance of the days in which you realized something about yourself, or overcame some obstacle or challenge, and that these would have been the sources from which she may have collected the ability to smile. But Peg also knew that her daughters, as grown women, were only now leaving that period of their lives in which this still seemed so true. They were leaving the time in which so many lessons came so quickly, and entering a phase of life that she assumed would be much like her own, in its slow accumulation of simple depths. She knew, as their mother, of the futility of trying to tell them this now, or of trying to tell them of the possibility that, when they approached the age she was now, they would find that time of lessons suddenly blossom again. That they might both find, within their minds, something like a territory of forgotten grasses.
If the last ten months of planning a family Thanksgiving had taught Peg anything, it was to look back over her shoulder while exploring the acres of her imagined but neglected farmland. From there, she could see more clearly the movements of those she loved, and how those movements compared to any other family, as seen from any other possible remove. How though it seemed like the gathering of families was inevitable , given how many pictures she saw online everyday of people doing that, behind every one of those pictures was someone asking those people to put aside their distances and conflicts and sit together and, if all went according to plan, smile. Someone had to be the watchman, she had learned, never sleeping, at guard, and every once in a while acknowledging the joy brought on by things like the spontaneous wearing of nice sweaters.
Peg was filled with a deep, unbidden love for her family. But because she was more skilled at the act of feeling than the act of expression, Peg knew she came across as aloof, even cold. She preferred stud earrings, for example, disliking the freedom implied by the kind that dangled. When talking on the phone, she preferred listening to speaking, though her daughters often mistook her silence for boredom. Dana, in their weekly Sunday afternoon phone calls, was always asking this, if she was bored. And she was always thinking, no tell me everything, but she was always saying no, why would you ask that?
Peg had been very excited about the prospect of a new baby. She felt open around babies, whose vast interior lives so eclipsed their capacity for expression. Peg prided herself on her ability to interact with babies, if not her ability to raise them into well functioning and emotionally available adults. That she had been, for so many of the months in which her daughters had been babies, depressed, she had decided was not worth examining. It was better to look forward to the opportunity Emily’s new baby would provide, in that she could interact with it, and her family could see her doing that. It would remind Nate what a loving person she was, and let her daughters see her the way she had wanted to be when they were babies, bright and full of warmth. She had the opportunity, at last, to be properly maternal, in the sense that people expected. She looked forward to seeing in her daughters the impact of motherhood, Emily through this baby, Dana through any baby she might have eventually. How it would make of them something different. How maybe on some thanksgiving in the future, one of them would look across the couch at her, and they would share a thought as tired mothers.
By that day, the Thanksgiving of the sixty first year of her life, the largest major city near where Peg lived was, as it had always been, Cincinnati. This was a city that Peg had rarely visited, until Dana had moved there for college. It was the same city that Emily had almost moved, to attend that same college, until she dropped out prematurely to become a wildland firefighter in Missouri. It was the city where Dana still lived, though if she did this with a boyfriend or a girlfriend or anyone romantically Peg still wasn’t entirely sure. And though Peg still did not visit that city as often as she had imagined she would when she had learned Dana was moving there, she had still been able to learn a single fact about its zoo. In that zoo, in 1914, the final passenger pigeon had died. Those pigeons had once been so numerous as to block out the skies. Now, gone from god’s living earth, Peg considered them as native residents in her own neglected farmland. She felt this territory was likely populated by any number of extinct species, by people who spoke dead language, by scriptures delivered by god but never cosigned by the women of the scrapbook clubs of Emmaus. But having only discovered this territory recently, Peg had yet to fully explore it. She had so far only imagined herself riding slow, at dusk, beneath its skies, those skies orange and filled with passenger pigeons. And her heart, in response to that image, filled itself with a sense of solidarity with that race of long dead pigeon.
Peg knew she was a sleepless rider in an endless prairie, in the dusk of a sun forever setting, riding ankles to the grasses in the restless hour of long dead birds. She often imagined the sky of a color orange that she had not seen in the living world in so long that it likely existed now only in her memory, as it had been once, through thick glass, in the late hours of evening in a particular steak house whose name she could not recall. Emily, Peg knew, had a surplus of old sins. Nate had a surplus of prayers. But she, Peg, had angels. There were armies of them. Peg lived, as in the moment before the taking of the picture, somewhere between her husband and her daughters, solid but unseen. Her husband and youngest daughter’s luxury was to look at each other and think about something which both of them were thinking at the same time, but neither had the words to speak. Peg’s job was to know those words, but be unable to speak them, because there was always a picture to be taken, or a Thanksgiving to be planned or a baby to be named. She could see across the net of experiences that her family called their lives. She could see what was needed, from moment to moment, to sustain the things that held those lives together. A phone call every Sunday. A reminder to fix the porch light. A woman of her age was expected to look at these things and smile.
Peg had only met her granddaughter the day before yesterday, when Emily arrived with her in the driveway of the same home in which the photograph was about to be taken. Peg had not introduced herself then as Peg. She had also not said, “My name is…” She had said simply, “I’m here.” And she knew that, for as long as she could maintain the emotional and physical distance that had developed between Emily and herself, she would be able to consider herself not by a new name, but by a new category. She had held Arya, briefly at first, then more and more over the last thirty six hours, each time looking over to Emily, to confirm what she hoped she was feeling. That this was helpful. That Arya would have, enduringly, the quiet love of a slow moving ship in pitch dark waters. That if Emily’s back ever got tired from holding her, or her eyes weary from watching for her, Peg would be prepared to step in.
Peg could not speak directly to the effect that parenting sons might have on a woman. She had only ever parented daughters, and so far had only ever grand parented a granddaughter. But she did know the effect on her of parenting daughters. She had known some women for whom the mothering of girls was part of a broader act of becoming, the kind of women who glowed in the months after their deliveries and never lost touch with their daughters. California Peg had been like this, all effortless in her nurturing. At least, that’s what it looked like in the photographs. There had been a time when Peg wondered if what she had experienced after both her daughter’s births could be considered postpartum depression. Until Emily was first admitted to a psychiatric hospital at the age of twelve, Peg had never interacted with the psychiatric system, and had still never taken a single psychiatric pill. Peg knew that Nate blamed himself for Emily’s mental health issues. She remembered the months he sat up on Sunday nights, watching the weather channel and hoping Emily was warm wherever she was. She recalled the two occasions when he had sat in his truck, parked in the garage, the keys in his hands. How both times she had been the one to tell him to come inside. If Emily knew about this, she probably resented her mother for it. Fathering daughters had made Nate a softer man, because those daughters had needed his love to be as soft and pliable as the gradually advancing folds of his stomach. But mothering daughters had made Peg harder, because in those years when Emily drew a jagged line across the country, lost touch with them and stopped answering her phone, she had known what would be required of her should Emily resurface. And now that she had, with a daughter of her own, Peg knew that for all she wanted to carry that baby into an acre of grasses that existed only in her mind, another possible future had to be considered.
Because, yes, she could see Arya beside her. She could hold her and love her as her grandmother. But if something should happen in Emily’s relationship with Arya’s father, or if something should happen in Emily’s life to return her to the jagged landscape from which she had only recently emerged, who was going to take care of that baby? It wasn’t going to be either of the husbands in the room. It wasn’t going to be the child’s other grandparents, of whom she knew nothing. It was going to be her. And she was prepared for that. That was what the unbidden love she had for her family meant. But it hadn’t meant she had planned to become a mother again at the age of sixty something or seventy, or however old she would be the day Emily responded to being a mother the same way she had responded to so many of the things in her life that hadn’t endured past the point at which they could entice her with their newness. Peg knew that Nate was too kind to think these things. And she was too taciturn to say them. But they were the way things were, thought or not, said or not.
The most sentimental part of Peg that existed wanted to carry Arya out of Emily’s sight. Not forever, not like that, but just for a minute. Just long enough to escort her into a barn she had imagined into being in a certain acre of her mind. There, summoned from the orange suburbs of those neglected grasslands, would be all of the members of Peg club. There would be California Peg, the smartest of them all. There would be Margie and Marge. But there would also be Peg, as she had been on those days beneath the kind of metal slide they didn’t make anymore. And there too would be all of Peg’s younger selves, all of the bearers of her discarded names, going all the way back into the days before she could even remember, into the origin days of Margaret. They would be waiting for something, all in silence. Until, from somewhere back the way they’d come, a voice would call out, “Peg?” And there beneath strings of light the color of the window of an extinct steakhouse, a full crew of past Peg’s perched on the dry beams but no one getting any splinters or ruining their dresses, they would all at once say, “Yes?” and then start to laugh. And Peg would whisper while the others laughed, safe enough to speak but not be heard, that this was the energy in the unity of names. That while she would die with her farms unmapped, nothing of the sort would befall anyone who came under her watch. Not so long as the Pegs were gathered. And she would repeat, “I’m here,” before leaving the barn, still thick with laughter, returning to the living room, returning the baby to its mother, turning to the camera, and smiling.
Adam Hofbauer’s fiction has appeared in The Eastern Iowa Review, the Emerson Review and Gold Dust Magazine and The Atlantic. He holds an MFA in Creative Writing from San Francisco State University. He lives in Philadelphia, where he is an active member of the Backyard Writer’s Workshop, and his work has most recently been heard at the Creative at the Cannery and The Hatchery Reading series
Inquiry
The following has been provided by the author:
In southern Ohio, two water parks once faced each other across the same highway. One of these parks has long since closed, but for decades there existed the possibility of an indecisive family encountering the choice between two exits, each leading to a water park barely distinguishable from the other one. Kids in the back going, "Dad, its too hot,' and dad driving but making that, 'Which one do we have the coupon for?' face, the situation only resolving through the intercession of this hypothetical family's matriarch stating something to the effect of, "Take that exit." No one ever even asking her how much coupon hunting and pro-con deliberation went into deciding between two seemingly identical experiences on this, the only Saturday the whole family will have free for the foreseeable future.