All the Ugly and Wonderful Things (3 page)

I reached over and put my finger on the A. “Do you know how to say that one?”

Wavonna considered my finger for a second before she said, “A.”

“What about this one?”

“B.”

“This one.”

She sighed and said, “Abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz.” Silly Grandma.

Come Monday, I enrolled her for school.

The first day, after I dropped her off at school, I took a two-hour nap. The second day, I went for some much-needed beautification. Old women need sprucing up and my hair was starting to look bedraggled. The third day, I don't remember what I did, but on the fourth day I went to bridge club. I had a martini and a lovely raucous time with the gals. They were expecting me to tell them all about Wavonna, and I pretended to be the proud grandma.
Oh, she has the finest, baby-down blond hair. She already knows her ABCs
. Nothing really about
her
.

I held Leslie in my arms after she was born. Same with Amy. They were my granddaughters, my babies. I flashed their pictures and bragged on every little accomplishment.

Wavonna, I'd never seen her until Brenda got custody of her. I know you're supposed to love the hard ones more, but most of what I felt was pity. Her wispy hair and scrawny shoulders were so sad, and then those empty looks. Leaving bridge club, though, I felt like it was going to be okay. I would learn to love Wavonna the way I loved Leslie and Amy. She would learn to love me.

When I got to the school, Wavonna didn't come out. I waited for a few minutes before I went into the front office, where I was met by the school principal and Mrs. Berry, Wavonna's teacher. I'd handed Wavonna off to her on the first day in the school office. She was a friendly woman with a big smile, but that day she was a hysterical, sobbing mess.

Wavonna had run away from school.

I cried, but mostly I remember thinking,
This is how it started with Valerie.
Of course, skipping school didn't start with Valerie until she was in high school, but all the same I had a sinking feeling I had failed.

At eight o'clock, I went home and waited to hear from the police. I held the phone on my lap as I soaked my feet. I'd walked I didn't know how many blocks, knocking on doors all around the school. I needed to call Brenda, but I couldn't bear the thought of saying,
You were right. I can't handle her
.

My doorbell rang and I didn't know what to feel. Hopeful. Terrified. With my feet wet, I went to the door. Wavonna stood on the porch alone, shivering. Once she was in the house, I locked the door, like that would keep her from escaping.

“You scared me so much! What if something had happened to you?” I knew yelling wasn't the best way to communicate with her, but I couldn't help myself. “Never, never do that again! Do you understand me?”

She nodded, but I knew that nod from Valerie. It meant, “I understand you, but that doesn't mean I'm going to do what you say.”

After I called the police to tell them Wavonna was home, I made her some soup and counted out a pile of crackers. While I cried in the bathroom, she ate a few spoonfuls and two saltines. I couldn't go on like that, but I couldn't let her go into foster care. Would anyone else eye the level of soup in her bowl as carefully as I did? Would a stranger count crackers to make sure my granddaughter was eating?

I cleared the table and brewed some decaf. When I was sure I was calm, I said, “Wavonna, will you please come into the kitchen and talk to Grandma?”

She didn't sit down, but she stood waiting for me to talk.

“If you run away from school, they're going to take you away from me and make you live with strangers. I don't want that to happen. I want you to stay here with Grandma.”

She didn't react to that, but I didn't expect her to. I could have had a French poodle dancing the tango with a monkey on my head and she wouldn't have reacted.

“Will you tell me what happened at school? Why did you run away? If you'll tell me, I'll try to make sure it doesn't happen again.”

It was like with the alphabet. She had to prepare herself, but after a moment, she said, “The loud lady touches me.”

My stomach almost gave up the coffee I'd drunk. That sweet woman? I couldn't imagine her doing something like
that
to a child. In my mind that's what bad touching was.

“Touches you?”

She stretched her arms toward me, her hands curled into menacing claws, and then brought them back tightly to her chest.

“She hugs you?” I said.

A nod.

“And you don't like that?”

She shook her head seriously. I was sick with relief, and with knowing how awful the world looked to Wavonna. Of course, she never hugged me, and whenever I touched her, she shrugged out from under my hand.

The next day, we went to school, and I did what I should have done the first day. I walked her directly to class, planning to explain everything to Mrs. Berry.

All that went out the window when I reached the classroom.

In the center of the room sat three children in wheelchairs. I don't mean to be cruel, but they were drooling vegetables. In one corner, a child flopped around on blue rubber floor mats. The school could paint the walls as bright a shade of yellow as they wanted and hang up all the pretty mobiles in the world, but it was a horrible place. I couldn't imagine Wavonna spending five minutes there, let alone the four days I'd left her there.

Mrs. Berry hurried over with a big smile and said, “Oh, Mrs. Morrison, what a relief! Wavonna, honey, you had us so worried.”

That was the day I earned Wavonna's trust. Mrs. Berry swooped toward us, clearly planning to deliver an enormous, smothering hug. I spread my feet and put out my arm to block her.

“Mrs. Berry, we need to talk to someone about changing classes.” She made a wounded face as we backed away from her. I had nothing against the woman, but I was too old to beat around the bush.

When I sat down with the school counselor, I took the same approach. I looked her square in the eye and said, “My granddaughter is not retarded.”

“Mrs. Morrison, we don't use words like that anymore. Our concern is that her speech problems are a sign of developmental delays.”

“I don't mean it to offend, but she's not stupid. Look, here. Wavonna.”

She didn't look at me, but I knew she was listening.

“Give me paper and a pencil.”

The counselor slid a sheet of paper and a ballpoint pen across the desk. I scooted Wavonna's chair closer and said, “Go ahead and show her. Otherwise you'll have to stay in the class with the loud lady.”

As soon as I mentioned the special-education teacher, Wavonna picked up the pen and put it to the paper. First, she wrote out her name, neat as can be. Below that, she wrote her alphabet: Aa Bb Cc, and on like that. Under that she put her numbers. Then she did something I didn't even know she knew. She turned the paper over and wrote: Cassiopeia. Next to it, she drew five dots and connected them. Then seven more dots that she labeled Cepheus. She filled the paper up that way. The only ones I recognized were the Big and Little Dippers.

The way the counselor's jaw dropped down set me to giggling. I laughed right in that poor woman's face. Laughed until I cried. Before Wavonna, I'd been feeling pretty good. My cancer was in remission, and I had myself a nice retirement planned, before Wavonna moved in. After everything I'd been through in the last month, I needed a good laugh.

They put her in a regular classroom, but I told them right up front, “Don't give her a nicey-nice teacher.” I spelled it out for them. Nobody could touch her. They couldn't expect her to talk, but they shouldn't assume she wasn't listening and learning. I didn't make requests and I didn't apologize.

Things weren't perfect after that, but they got better.

She lived with me for almost two years, and in all that time, she touched me twice. On what would have been Irv's and my fortieth anniversary, I had a little wine and got maudlin. Wavonna touched my hand, my wedding ring. To comfort me, I think. The second time was right before Valerie got paroled, and I hired a lawyer to help her get custody of Wavonna and the baby she'd had while she was in prison.

We drove down to Tulsa for Leslie's birthday and had a fine old time: singing, wearing silly hats, and cheering as Leslie ripped open packages. After all the big hoopla, the three girls settled into the living room to play, while Brenda and I cleaned up.

I couldn't keep putting it off, so I sat down at the kitchen table and said, “I've been talking to Valerie's lawyer about this transitional program she can get into.”

“I didn't know she still had a lawyer. Are you paying for that?”

I didn't answer. I wanted it not to be her business, but maybe it was.

“Fine. So, Val's lawyer thinks she can get into some program?” Brenda cut a second slice of birthday cake. Her weight dogged her for years, because she ate when she was upset.

“It's for women with children, to help her get back on her feet so she can take care of Donal and Wavonna.” I knew that would cause a ruckus and it did.

“Are you serious, Mom? Do you really think Val can take care of them? You know what Vonnie's like. That's Val's parenting skills right there. A daughter who won't speak, won't eat, and sneaks out at night.”

“She's doing better.”

“I know. You're doing so good with her. I—” Brenda laid her hand on my arm, and I could see she really was sorry she'd lost her temper.

“I want Wavonna to be with her mother.” I wanted to want that. I wanted things to be simple and they never were.

“Do you really think that's the best thing for her?”

“Val's been getting treatment. This program will put her in an apartment, where she'll have a counselor. They'll make sure she takes her medicine, and help her take care of the kids.”

“Well, what do you need to do? Is there paperwork?”

“I need you to go to her parole hearing and the custody hearing. You're going to have to do it, Brenda.”

“Why?”

“Metastasized.” Wavonna had crept up so quietly neither of us noticed her until she spoke.

“What does she mean?” Brenda said. “Mom?”

“She must have overheard me talking with the doctor's office. The cancer is back. It's in my lungs and my liver. Three months they think, maybe less.”

Now that we were talking about hard things, Leslie and Amy stopped playing Barbies and came to stand in the doorway next to Wavonna. I tried to will Brenda to be strong, but she started shaking and crying. Amy and Leslie cried, too. They were all crying, except Wavonna. She crossed the kitchen and reached out to me. For a second, she laid her hand on my chest, touched those fake foam boobs I wore in my bra.

I loved her then, right as I was getting ready to leave her.

 

3

WAVY

June 1977

Aunt Brenda didn't want me to stay with Grandma at the end.

“Let Bill take her back to Tulsa. My friend Sheila is staying at the house to take care of the girls while I'm here,” Aunt Brenda said.

“She's going with you soon enough. Let her stay with me,” Grandma said. She held out her hand and I went to her, even though I wasn't brave enough to touch her with Aunt Brenda there to see.

“I love you, sweetie. I love you. Pretty soon I'm going to go and be with your Grandpa Irv, but God willing, you'll see me again, Wavonna. Not for a long time, but some day,” she said.

For a while, Grandma slept, and Aunt Brenda went into the kitchen to make coffee, but she sat at the table and laid her head down on her arms to cry. When the big clock should have chimed three o'clock, it didn't, because no one remembered to wind it. Aunt Brenda was asleep.

“I wish I weren't afraid. It seems so silly to be afraid, but it feels like driving to a new place and not knowing where I'm going,” Grandma said when she woke up. We were alone, so I held her hand.

I thought about Mr. Arsenikos, our neighbor where we lived before Mama got arrested. When Mama and Uncle Sean used to fight, Mr. Arsenikos let me hide on his back porch. He called me his “stray cat,” and gave me bacon sandwiches. Sometimes they were just bacon grease spread on soft, white bread, but sometimes they had whole pieces of bacon on them. After I ate, he would sit out on the porch swing and tell me the names of stars. He used his cane to scratch them out in the dirt, so I could learn them. He was a sailor on a boat called USS
San Diego
, which is also a city in California. His boat sank in the Great War, and he knew which way to row the life raft toward land, because of the stars.

On the chenille bedspread that was stretched over Grandma's belly, I drew Ursa Minor, with his tail pointing down.

“Ursa Minor is north tonight. Little Dipper,” I said, because Grandma called it that. I drew it in the palm of her hand, so she would remember. She nodded. By the time the sun came up, she was asleep again, and she didn't wake up.

Mr. Arsenikos said if you knew the constellations you would never get lost. You could always find your way home.

*   *   *

At Grandma's funeral, the only real thing was Grandma in a fancy box. Everything else was pretend.

Aunt Brenda pretended she wasn't mad at Mama.

“Oh, Val, I'm so glad to see you,” she said.

Uncle Bill pretended, too. Before Mama came, he said, “Let's get this over with and get her out of our lives,” but then he hugged her and said, “You look great, Val. You need to visit more often.”

“I want us to get together for Christmas. We can't just see each other for funerals,” Aunt Brenda said.

“I know! We have to keep in touch. I can't believe it's been so long since we saw each other. I've missed you so much,” Mama said.