A Face in Every Window (12 page)

Mam let me have my say, and I could see tears in her eyes, but she held on. She kept her head up, her jaw forward, her hands buried in her coat pockets.

When I finished yelling I ran back toward the house, the pack filled with our day's supplies bouncing on my back.

Mam stayed in the woods. She stayed there all afternoon and on past dark. Everyone wanted to know where she had gone. I kept telling myself that she was fine, she knew how to get around in the woods. I told myself that I didn't care where she'd gone, but the longer she stayed away, the faster I found my heart beating, and I couldn't concentrate on my studies. I heard the others downstairs organizing a search party. I looked out my window when the porch light went on and saw them all gathered in the driveway, Pap and Bobbi and Larry, with his odd assortment of friends. I wondered why they just stood there. Why weren't they running out to the
woods? They were so slow. I pounded my wall and yelled through the glass pane, "Get a move on!"

Then I saw Dr. Mike's BMW rolling into the drive and swerving onto the grass to avoid the junk heaps lined up near the porch. He drove right over to the group and stopped his car, and both doors opened. Dr. Mike got out of one side and Mam out of the other.

Pap ran to Mam and hugged her. The others crowded around and I could see Mam explaining herself, her hand pointing to the woods and then at Dr. Mike. I watched them all head back onto the porch and heard them come inside, their voices filling the halls, and then the whole house filled back up with voices and music and laughter. I turned on my radio and sat at my desk. I had a lot of work to do.

M
AM TOLD EVERYONE
that I wanted my belongings and my room left alone. Late that night the household paraded in and dropped off my clothes, books, chess set, microscope, Swiss Army knife, a pair of shoes, a five-dollar bill, and some change. Half the stuff I hadn't even known was missing, and some of the shirts and books didn't belong tome.

Jerusha came in last and handed me my book on biodiversity. She sat down on my bed, making herself at home by drawing her knees up under her chin, the heels of her boots digging into the edge of the mattress. She looked at me with her protruding eyes and said, "I'm interested in science, too.
I
'm not just into poetry. It's neat how species change, isn't it? I mean, just by living in a different climate a finch can take on a whole different set of characteristics and needs from his fellow finches in another climate."

I sat at my desk and nodded, waiting for her to leave.
Jerusha made me uncomfortable. She seemed too intense, with her large staring eyes and the veins in her neck that bulged anytime she spoke. Her voice sounded hoarse and raspy. She was stick thin and never seemed to eat except to pick a bit of food off of my plate. She wore her dark brown hair straight, cut just above the shoulders, with bangs that came exactly to the top of her brows, and she had on a man's pinstriped suit with a superwide Minnie Mouse tie.

"I'm sorry I took your book." She sighed. "I'm sorry, you know, everybody's been getting into your stuff and you don't like it. You should have said something sooner. No one was doing it to steal from you or anything."

All evening, as each person had come in with my things and apologized, I had felt like a cranky old man. They all made me feel as if I were being selfish to want to keep track of my things, to want to hold on to it all, but it did belong to me, and it was all I had.

"If you'd just ask first, maybe I'd let you borrow my books," I said to Jerusha. "I hate people just taking stuff. It doesn't seem to occur to anyone that I might want to read that book or wear my own shirts or use my microscope. My grandmother gave me that microscope."

Jerusha shrugged, hugging her knees. "Sorry," she said.

"Yeah, well."

She sat on the bed, nodding at me as if she wanted me to say something more, but I couldn't think of anything else to say so I told her I needed to get back to work.

"You work a lot."

"Yeah," I said, turning back to my desk and my books and pretending to get interested in my studies.

"I graduated from high school when I was sixteen," she said.

"Mmm," I said, a surge of jealousy rising up in me. I, too, would be graduating at sixteen, and I had been proud of that—well, stuck up about it, really. I had skipped the fourth grade. Back then, the whole school, the whole neighborhood knew it. I'd made sure of that, and I loved hearing people say things like, "That smart O'Brien kid with the retarded father. Looks like he got all the brains."

I didn't mean to be cruel to Pap; I just knew how people saw things, and I wanted to make sure they understood that just because Pap had brain damage didn't mean I did.

"I'm taking this year off, though—from college, I mean," Jerusha said, and I looked up.

"I didn't know you went to college. How come you just—well, why don't you have a decent—How—"

Jerusha laughed, nodding. "What am I doing waitressing for a living? That's what my parents want to know. They want me to finish college and go to med school."

I turned around in my chair to face her. "Well, if you've got the brains, why not?"

"I'm not sure I'd love medicine enough. I don't know what I want to do. I love music and poetry, I'm interested in science, but then I'd like to do something—I don't know, maybe join the Peace Corps or something." She raised her brows, closing her eyes, and grabbed the toes of her boots. "I've had several pieces of poetry published and I've got a manuscript out, so maybe I'll be a poet."

"If you're serious, why do you hang out with those pretentious lunatics?"

Jerusha unfolded herself and stood up. "Because they're fun. So I'll see you, then," she said, giving me a half wave before leaving.

Maybe Jerusha and I could have been friends, but like Mam, she always hung out with the group. Once I tried to bring up biodiversity with her at the dinner table and the whole conversation around us stopped. Jerusha looked at me, then at the rest of the table, and broke into laughter, resting her head on my shoulder a second as if she thought I was just the silliest, most pitiful person she'd ever met. I tried to laugh it off, too, but after another five minutes, when the conversation got rolling again, I got up, leaving my plate for Jerusha, and slipped back up to my room, where I belonged.

***

C
HRISTMASTIME HAD ALWAYS
been a big deal at our house when Grandma Mary was alive. She had been born on December eleventh and Pap on Christmas Day. The whole month had been a time of mounting excitement for all of us, but that year as the days drew closer to her birthday, my heart, my whole body seemed to get heavier and heavier. When I awoke each day I felt as if I were getting up to go to her funeral all over again.

Pap, however, was his usual excited self. He had always been possessive about the month of December. This was his special month, the month he shared with Jesus, and when in church the priests talked about Christmas Day and Jesus's birth, I think Pap believed they were talking about his birth, also, as if he, too, were born in a manger.

He loved Christmas carols and sang them as if they belonged to him, his own birthday songs. When others sang them with him, he'd blush and hang his head and sing quieter, finishing with a shy smile.

That December, Mam and I had purchased several gallons of paint and we were all working to get the downstairs rooms painted before Christmas Day.

One late afternoon when Mam and Pap had not yet returned from work, the rest of us got busy painting the woodwork in our dining room a color called Soldier Blue. Larry, Harold, Leon, and new guy Ben, all in their jewelry, scarves, and boots, worked on the molding around the ceiling and floor, while Melanie, bending and dipping as if she were at a ladies' tea, Jerusha, with her Winnie-the-Pooh tie tied around her head, and another new addition named Susan, a guitar player, did the windows and doors. Bobbi and I painted the mantel and shelves around the fireplace.

While we were working, Bobbi turned the radio down and brought up the subject of Pap's birthday, and said that Pap didn't want tofu and seaweed for his birthday dinner.

I told them that we always had a special dinner for Pap on Christmas Eve and suggested having roast beef and chocolate cake, which was what Grandma Mary had always prepared for him.

Bobbi dipped her brush into the bucket of paint she and I shared and said, "No, he told me he wanted hamburgers and hot dogs and potato chips."

Larry and Jerusha gagged.

"Why don't we just inject ourselves with lard, it's a lot faster," Larry said.

Harold said, "Not half so tasty, though."

"Maybe you're the one who wants the burgers," I said to Bobbi, and she sneered at me.

"Ask him yourself, then, if you don't believe me. He also said he wanted to toast marshmallows."

We all laughed, but then Susan, who was a lot like Mam and game for anything, said, "Well, why not? We could light a fire in one of these fireplaces and toast them inside."

Bobbi shook her head. "No, he wants it outside, at night, so he can see the Nativity."

"Well, that's impossible," I said, painting across the top of the mantel and getting Bobbi's hand by accident.

"Hey! You did that on purpose."

I held up my hands. "I swear I didn't"

"Yeah, well, watch it"

Susan said, "Why is it impossible? We could make a pit in the ground, or build one if the ground's too frozen, and do the hot dogs and hamburgers and toast the marshmallows all outside. It would be great. We'd just need a lot of blankets and stuff."

Leon said, "I've got some old wool army blankets we could use, and a grill we could set over the pit Yeah, it would work."

Then everyone started talking, making suggestions, each one more ridiculous than the next, and I said so.

"You guys are crazy. We're not about to have a weenie roast in the middle of December—give me a break. The least we could do is give Pap a decent roast beef and chocolate cake dinner like he's always had."

Susan turned around to face me, her whole body covered in more paint than she was putting on the door, and said, "You're a real killjoy, JP, you know that?"

"Lighten up, JP," Harold said, and Ben and Leon agreed.

Larry said, "Leave him alone," and Bobbi said, "Why? He's always acting so superior. Mr. Know-It-All. 'You! Paint the doors, and you, paint the windows,"' she added, imitating me. "Mr. Boss Man, telling us all how to paint. 'Even strokes, even strokes'—give it up, JP."

"Mam put me in charge," I said, my voice cracking.

"That's 'cause she's trying to get you to participate, fit in, but all you do is drag everybody down." Bobbi ran her paintbrush across the mantel where I had already painted.

I slapped my brush down on the mantel, not caring where the paint landed, and said, "Fine, all of you do what you want. You can toast marshmallows in a snowman's mouth for all I care. Nothing I say matters, anyway." I marched out of the room and headed for the stairs. I heard Susan say, "Spoiled baby."

Then Larry said, "That's enough. Leave him alone. He's allowed to have his opinion," and it occurred to me then that 1 had become Larry, the old Larry, always on the outside, unable to fit in at school or at home. I thought about this, climbing up the two flights of stairs to my room. He had come into our home and taken over my position in the family. He played the role of the oldest child now, and he had collected about him all the people he could find who were enough like him to make him feel good and right, while at the same time managing to shove me off balance and out in the cold.

On Christmas Eve we celebrated Pap's birthday just the way everyone wanted it. I knew Mam was pleased; she liked anything that was held outdoors. And Pap was so excited he
couldn't do anything right and went around all day with his shoes on the wrong feet, refusing to change them. Late in the afternoon Mam hauled out the wool blankets Leon had brought us and spread them out on the lawn, while Larry and I dug through the semifrozen ground to build a pit and light a fire. Then we all sat out on the blankets, wrapped in everything warm we owned, and grilled hot dogs and hamburgers. We toasted marshmallows and watched the glow from the campfire, the lighted Nativity set looming above us.

Pap stuffed two wrinkled hot dogs in his mouth, no bun or condiments, then jammed several puffy-skinned brown-black marshmallows down his throat and said through the sticky wad in his mouth, "Okay, let's stop now and open my presents already."

Bobbi, who had been stuffing down just as many hot dogs and marshmallows as Pap, jumped up and ran to the porch for her gift. We knew she had been excited about what she had bought Pap. She had bustled around the house all day, teasing Pap and trying to get him to guess what she had bought him.

Bobbi handed Pap his present and Pap tore off the wrapping paper without even looking at it. He opened up the box in his hands and found a set of gardening tools, silver with red handles. Beneath the tools were packets of wildflower seeds and a booklet with colored photographs of flowers. Pap drew in his breath with delighted surprise. But you could hand him a bar of soap wrapped with a bow and he'd be pleased.

Bobbi knelt down beside him. "Your very own garden set, Pap. Take good care of them."

Pap hugged the box of tools, and then Bobbi. "Yes, I love these all, and I love myself gardening. Don't you just love me gardening? Don't you love it's my birthday? What else did I get?"

We all gave Pap something for gardening—pots, a kneeling pad, a pair of gloves, and then because we still had two more hours until we all piled into Larry's van and went to midnight mass, we decided to give out all the presents. I gave Mam and Pap my school picture in a frame I bought at a boutique downtown. I gave Larry a bunch of recipes I'd copied out of the
Vegetarian Times
magazine. Mrs. Pallo, who worked with me in the school office, had tons of back copies of the magazine in her home, and she brought them in and I copied a bunch of the recipes out on index cards and bought a fancy recipe file, also at the boutique store. I gave Bobbi my Einstein T-shirt and she hugged me. Mam saw us and wiped her eyes as if she had tears in them. I gave Larry's poet friends each a copy of the poem "Howl" by Allen Ginsberg, the group's favorite poem. I'd typed it into the computer at school, created a design around the edges, and printed it off on gold paper.