“Never came back,” I finished.
“I should say he never came back. I should say he indeed never came back. He dropped dead on the street, and Harriet had such a time trying to keep the state from taking those kids. He left her nothing, poor woman, I’m sure he didn’t expect to just die. They were living in Rockford by then—you know, it’s over an hour away—and she stayed there, I never knew why. But she would send the kids to us a few weeks each summer, once we were in the house. Oh, such sad-looking children. I’d always try and make Dottie a new dress to send her home with.”
Abel Blaine. His pants were too short, above his ankles, I remember, and kids laughed at him when we went into town, and he always smiled as though none of it mattered. His teeth were crooked and bad, but otherwise he was nice-looking; perhaps he knew that he was nice-looking. I think, really, his heart was just good. He was the one who taught me to search for food from the dumpster behind Chatwin’s Cake Shoppe. What was striking was the lack of furtiveness he displayed as he stood in the dumpster and tossed aside boxes until he found what he was looking for—the old cakes and rolls and pastries from days before. Neither Dottie nor my own sister and brother were ever with us, I don’t know where they were. After a few visits to Amgash, Abel did not come back; he had a job as an usher in a theater where he lived. He sent me one letter, and enclosed a brochure that showed the theater’s lobby; it was just beautiful, I remember, with many different colored tiles, ornate and gorgeous.
“Abel landed on his feet,” my mother told me.
“Tell me again,” I said.
“He managed to marry the daughter of someone he worked for; the boss’s-daughter story, I guess, is his story. He lives in Chicago, has for years,” my mother said. “His wife’s quite a hoity-toity and won’t have anything to do with poor Dottie, whose husband ran off with someone else a few years ago now. He was from the East, Dottie’s husband. You know.”
“No.”
“Well.” My mother sighed. “He was. Somewhere here along the Eastern Seaboard he came from—” My mother gave a small toss of her head toward the window as though to indicate this was where Dottie’s husband came from. “Thought he was just a tiny bit better than she was, probably. Wizzle, how can you live with no sky?”
“There’s sky.” But I added, “Except I know what you mean.”
“But how can you live without sky?”
“There’s people instead,” I said. “So tell me why.”
“Why what?”
“Why did Dottie’s husband run off?”
“How do I know? Oh, I guess I do know. He met some woman at the local hospital when he had his gallbladder out. Say, that’s almost like you!”
“Like me? You think I’m going to run off with Cookie or Serious Child?”
“You never know what attracts people to each other,” my mother answered. “But I don’t think he ran off with any Toothache.” My mother tilted her head in the direction of the door. “Though he may have run off with a child, I’m sure she’s not a serious child, you know, I mean—” My mother leaned forward to whisper, “Dark or whatever ours is, you know, Indian.” My mother sat back. “But I’m rather sure she’s younger than Dottie and more attractive. He left Dottie the house they lived in, and she’s turned it into a bed-and-breakfast. Doing all right, as far as I know. And Abel’s in Chicago doing more than all right, so good for poor Harriet after all. Well, I suppose she’d worried about Dottie. My word, Harriet worried about everyone. Not worrying now, though, I guess. She’s been dead for years. Like that, in her sleep one night. Not a bad way to go.”
I dozed on and off listening to my mother’s voice.
I thought: All I want is this.
—
But it turned out I wanted something else. I wanted my mother to ask about my life. I wanted to tell her about the life I was living now. Stupidly—it was just stupidity—I blurted out, “Mom, I got two stories published.” She looked at me quickly and quizzically, as if I had said I had grown extra toes, then she looked out the window and said nothing. “Just dumb ones,” I said, “in tiny magazines.” Still she said nothing. Then I said, “Becka doesn’t sleep through the night. Maybe she gets it from you. Maybe she’ll take catnaps too.” My mother kept looking out the window.
“But I don’t want her to not feel safe,” I added. “Mom, why didn’t you feel safe?”
My mother closed her eyes as though the very question might drop her into a nap, but I did not think for one minute she had gone to sleep.
After many moments she opened her eyes and I said to her, “I have a friend, Jeremy. He used to live in France, and his family was part of the aristocracy.”
My mother looked at me, then looked out the window, and it was a long time before she said, “So he says,” and I said, “Yes, so he says,” in a tone of apology, and in a way that let her know we need not discuss him—or my life—any further.
Right then, through my doorway, came the doctor. “Girls,” he said, and nodded. He went and shook my mother’s hand, as he had the day before. “How’s everyone today?” Immediately he swooshed the curtain around me and this separated me from my mother. I loved him for many reasons, and one reason was for that: how he made his visits private for the two of us. I could hear my mother’s chair move, and I knew she’d left the room. The doctor held my wrist to take my pulse, and when he gently lifted my hospital gown, in order to check the scar, as he did each day, I watched his hands, thick-fingered and lovely, his plain gold wedding band glinting, pressing gently on the area near the scar, and he looked into my face to see if it hurt. He asked by raising his eyebrows, and I’d shake my head. The scar was healing nicely. “Healing nicely,” he said, and I said, “Yes, I know.” And we’d smile because it seemed to mean something—that it was not the scar trying to keep me sick. The smile was our acknowledgment of something, is what I mean. I have always remembered this man, and for years I gave money to that hospital in his name. And I thought then, and I think now, still, of the phrase “the laying on of hands.”
The truck. At times it comes to me with a clarity I find astonishing. The dirt-streaked windows, the tilt of the windshield, the grime on the dashboard, the smell of diesel gas and rotting apples, and dogs. I don’t know, in numbers, how many times I was locked in the truck. I don’t know the first time, I don’t know the last time. But I was very young, probably no more than five years old the last time, otherwise I’d have been in school all day. I was put there because my sister and brother were in school—this is my thought now—and my parents were both working. Other times I was put there as punishment. I remember saltine crackers with peanut butter, which I couldn’t eat because I was so frightened. I remember pounding on the glass of the windows, screaming. I did not think I would die, I don’t think I thought anything, it was just terror, realizing that no one was to come, and watching the sky get darker, and feeling the cold start in. Always I screamed and screamed. I cried until I could hardly breathe. In this city of New York, I see children crying from tiredness, which is real, and sometimes from just crabbiness, which is real. But once in a while I see a child crying with the deepest of desperation, and I think it is one of the truest sounds a child can make. I feel almost, then, that I can hear within me the sound of my own heart breaking, the way you could hear outside in the open air—when the conditions were exactly right—the corn growing in the fields of my youth. I have met many people, even from the Midwest, who tell me that you cannot hear the corn growing, and they are wrong. You cannot hear my heart breaking, and I know that part is true, but to me, they are inseparable, the sound of growing corn and the sound of my heart breaking. I have left the subway car I was riding in so I did not have to hear a child crying that way.
My mind went very strange places during these episodes of being in the truck. I thought I saw a man coming toward me, I thought I saw a monster, I thought one time I saw my sister. Then I would calm myself, and say aloud to myself, “It’s okay, sweetie. A nice woman
’s going to come soon. And you’re a very good girl, you’re such a good girl, and she’s a relative of Mommy’s and she’ll need you to go live with her because she’s lonely and wants to have a nice little girl to live with.” I would have this fantasy, and it was very real to me, it kept me calm. I dreamed of not being cold, of having clean sheets, clean towels, a toilet that worked, and a sunny kitchen. I allowed myself into heaven this way. And then the cold would come in, and the sun would go down, and my crying would start again, as a whimper, then more forcefully. And then my father would show up, unlock the door, and sometimes he carried me. “No reason to cry,” he sometimes said, and I can remember the feel of his warm hand spread against the back of my head.
The doctor, who wore his sadness with such loveliness, had come to check on me the night before. “I had a patient on another floor,” he said. “Let me see how you’re doing.” And he swished the curtain around me as he always did. He didn’t take my temperature with a thermometer but held his hand to my forehead, and then took my pulse with his fingers to my wrist. “Okay, then,” he said. “Sleep well.” He made a fist and kissed it, then held it in the air as he unswished the curtain and left the room. For many years, I loved this man. But I have already said that.
Other than Jeremy, the only friend I had in the Village during this time in my life was a tall Swedish woman named Molla; she was at least ten years older than I, but she also had small children. She passed by our door one day with her kids on the way to the park, and she started talking to me right away about really personal things. Her mother had not treated her well, she said, and so when she had her first baby she became very sad, and her psychiatrist told her that she was feeling grief because of everything she had not received from her own mother, et cetera. I didn’t disbelieve her, but her story wasn’t what was interesting to me. It was her style, her forthright spilling out about things I didn’t know people spoke of. And she was not really interested in me, which was freeing. She liked me, she was nice to me, she was bossy and told me how to hold my babies and how to get them to the park, and so I liked her back. Mostly she was like watching a movie or something foreign, which of course she was. She made references to movies, and I never knew what she was talking about. She must have noticed this, and she was polite about it, or maybe she did not believe that I could have a blank face when she spoke of Bergman films or television shows from the sixties, or music too. I had no knowledge of popular knowledge, as I have said. At that time, I barely understood that about myself. My husband knew it about me, and would try to help me out if he was around, maybe saying, “Oh, my wife didn’t see a lot of movies growing up, don’t worry.” Or “My wife’s parents were strict and never let her watch television.” Not giving away my childhood of poverty, because even poor people had TVs. Who would have believed it?
“Mommy,” I said softly that next night.
“Yes?”
“Why did you come here?”
There was a pause, as though she was shifting her position in the chair, but my head was turned toward the window.
“Because your husband called and asked for me to come. He needed you babysat, I believe.”
For a long while there was silence, maybe it was ten minutes, maybe it was almost an hour, I really don’t know, but finally I said, “Well, thank you anyway,” and she did not reply.
In the middle of the night, I woke from a nightmare I could not remember. Her voice came quietly, “Wizzle-dee, sleep. Or if you can’t sleep, just rest. Please rest, honey.”
“You’re never sleeping,” I said, trying to sit up. “How can you go every night never sleeping? Mom, it’s been two nights!”
“Don’t worry about me,” she said. She added, “I like your doctor. He’s watching out for you. The residents know nothing, how can they? But he’s good, he’ll see to it that you get better.”
“I like him too,” I said. “I love him.”
A few minutes later she said, “I’m sorry we had so little money when you kids were growing up. I know it was humiliating.”
In the dark I felt my face become very warm. “I don’t think it mattered,” I said.
“Of course it mattered.”
“But we’re all fine now.”
“I’m not so sure.” She said this thoughtfully. “Your brother is almost a middle-aged man who sleeps with pigs and reads children’s books. And Vicky—she’s still mad about it. The kids made fun of you at school. Your father and I didn’t know that, I suppose we should have. Vicky’s really still pretty mad.”
“At you?”
“Yes, I think so.”
“That’s silly,” I said.
“No. Mothers are supposed to protect their children.”
After a while I said, “Mom, there are kids with mothers who sell them for drugs. There are kids whose mothers take off for days and just leave them. There are—” I stopped. I was tired of what was sounding untrue.
She said, “You were a different kind of kid from Vicky. And from your brother too. You didn’t care as much what people thought.”
“What makes you say that?” I asked.
“Well, look at your life right now. You just went ahead and…did it.”
“I see.” I didn’t see, though. How do we ever see something about our own self? “When I went to school when I was little,” I said, lying flat on my back on the hospital bed, the lights from the buildings showing through the window, “I’d miss you all day. I couldn’t talk when a teacher called on me, because I had a lump in my throat. I don’t know how long it lasted. But I missed you so much, sometimes I’d go into the bathroom to cry.”
“Your brother threw up.”
I waited for a moment. Many moments went by.
Finally she said, “Every morning before school in fifth grade your brother threw up. I never found out why.”
“Mom,” I said, “what children’s books does he read?”
“The ones about the little girl on the prairie, there’s a series of them. He loves them. He’s not slow, you know.”
I turned my eyes toward the window. The light from the Chrysler Building shone like the beacon it was, of the largest and best hopes for mankind and its aspirations and desire for beauty. That was what I wanted to tell my mother about this building we saw.
I said, “Sometimes I remember the truck.”
“The truck?” My mother’s voice sounded surprised. “I don’t know anything about a truck,” she said. “What do you mean, your father’s old Chevy truck?”
I wanted to say—oh, terribly I wanted to say: Not even when there was the really, really long brown snake in there with me one time? I wanted to ask her this, but I could not bear to say the word, even now I can barely stand to say the word, and to tell anyone how frightened I was when I saw that I had been locked into a truck with such a long brown— And he moved so quickly. So quickly.
When I was in the sixth grade a teacher arrived from the East. His name was Mr. Haley and he was a young man; he taught us social studies. There are two things I remember about him: The first is that one day I had to go to the bathroom, which I hated to do because it called attention to me. He gave me the pass, nodding once, smiling. When I returned to the room and approached him to return the pass—it was a large block of wood that we were required to hold in the corridor to prove that we had permission to be out of the classroom—when I handed him back the pass, I saw Carol Darr, a popular girl, do something—a kind of hand gesture or something that I knew from experience was making fun of me, and she was doing it toward her friends so they could make fun of me as well. And I remember that Mr. Haley’s face became red, and he said: Do not ever think you are better than someone, I will not tolerate that in my classroom, there is no one here who is better than someone else, I have just witnessed expressions on the faces of some of you that indicate you think you are better than someone else, and I will not tolerate that in my classroom, I will not.
I glanced at Carol Darr. In my memory she was chas
tened, she felt bad.
I fell silently, absolutely, immediately in love with this man. I have no idea where he is, if he is still alive, but I still love this man.
The other thing about Mr. Haley was that he taught us about the Indians. Until then I hadn’t known that we took their land from them with a deception that caused Black Hawk to rebel. I didn’t know that the whites gave them whiskey, that the whites killed their women in their own cornfields. I felt that I loved Black Hawk as I did Mr. Haley, that these were brave and wonderful men, and I could not believe how Black Hawk was taken on a tour of cities after his capture. I read his autobiography as soon as I could. And I remembered the line he said: “How smooth must be the language of the whites, when they can make right look like wrong, and wrong like right.” I worried too that his autobiography, which had been transcribed by an interpreter, would not be accurate, and so I wondered, Who is Black Hawk, really? And I got a sense of him as strong, and bewildered, and when he spoke of “our Great Father, the President,” he used nice terms, and that made me sad.
All of this, I am saying, made a huge impression on me, the indignities that we had forced onto these people. And when I came home from school one day after we learned how the Indian women planted a field of corn and the white men came and plowed it up, my mother was in front of our garage-home, which we had only recently moved out of, she may have been trying to fix something, I don’t recall, but she was squatting by the front door, and I said to her, “Mommy, do you know what we did to the Indians?” I said this slowly and with awe.
My mother wiped at her hair with the back of her hand. “I don’t give a damn what we did to the Indians,” she said.
—
Mr. Haley left at the end of the year. In my memory he was going into the service, and this could only have been Vietnam, since it was during that time. I have since looked up his name on the Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., and it isn’t there. I don’t know anything more about him, but in my memory Carol Darr was all right to me—in his class—after that. We all liked him, is what I mean. We all respected him. This is no small feat for a man with a classroom of twelve-year-olds to accomplish, but he did.