Anywhere But Here (66 page)

I went away to their retreats. In the woods in Michigan, Minnesota, I even drove up to Ontario. Never once to a doctor. For a long time it was my secret. I read the Bible. I memorized:
the fear of God is clean, enduring forever
.

We are strangers before thee
.

I came to know my own wickedness, how I hoarded. Around campfires in pine woods, clearings like our own in the Vale of Valhalla, painted rocks in a circle, I knit and felt alone. The others, nuns and churchwomen, fell in together and did good. They darned the priests’ socks. They made potato salad, they
gossiped and laughed, washing pots and pans. I wouldn’t join. I prayed. I pleaded for cleansing, there in the north. I wanted the cold to come and burn the dust, everything impure out of me. A crystal agate, something forced by fire. I touched the stone while I prayed, the stone I wanted to save. It was the deepest part of me. My fire. My good.

But the others complained. Priests took my hands and asked me to forget. One of them read my palms; the right hand and the left, what you are and what you were born to be.
There is a time to mourn and a time to forget
. I yanked back. Father James sat me down and gave me suggestions, how to make my way with the other women, as if I were an unpopular girl.

That was when I finally went back home. The women stood in front of a silver trailer, opening bottles of relish and ketchup for a barbecue. All of a sudden, they looked mismatched and shabby to me, the nuns in their hiking clothes. Socks under sandals, the red acne scars on their skin, they were women who had never been pretty, women who would never have sons.

I didn’t want to scrub with them on the ground, in a campsite. I’d wanted silence and cold, I’d wanted to climb. Gossip, cooking—those nuns played bridge on picnic tables—all that I could have with my own.

I drove home. And when I got there, I knew I’d given in. I was tired, I unloaded all my gear and dumped it in the basement. I made a call for an appointment with the doctor.

And what did I see that first day back from Canada, when I opened the newspaper, but a picture of Ben’s little Susie engaged to marry to Jay Brozek. All five of those Brozek boys came back from Vietnam. No one else ever died. The Brozek girls were pretty, three or four of them went to college, all on scholarship. Sheila got married and now she lives across the street. Every year, Christmas Eve, they sent their youngest with a basket of cookies to Gram. Phil and Jimmy talked when they met on the yard, Phil told Jimmy to sue. It got me down.

I cut out the picture and put it under glass on the desk top where I paid my bills. I went into the bath and soaked for a long
time. I looked at my breast, felt for the stone. I seemed so different now that I was back and given up, I almost thought it wouldn’t hurt, I wouldn’t find it. But there it was, rubbery, mobile, the same as when I’d first touched it and I knew then that it was something bad they would take away from me. I’d have to go in the hospital for them to cut it out.

I don’t know what I thought, that that Susie wouldn’t ever get married. She was only sixteen when it happened. She had to go on and have a life, too. I kept looking at that picture every month when I paid my bills, it’s still there, under the glass. And now, you know, it doesn’t bother me. Because around the eyes and the mouth, Jay turned out to look like Benny. She must have seen that, too.

I was glad about you but you weren’t here. The season you were on TV, we bought a machine to tape your show. During the daytime, I’d put you on and just look at you. I thought of you every once in a while and thought that you’d turned out to be a nice girl. I was glad to have you for a niece. But I never wrote. I could have, I had time. I could have at least sent a card. I should have, I was still too much by myself, I wasn’t near as good as I should have been.

You came the one Christmas from college on the Greyhound bus, you saw Hal and Jimmy fight. Gram didn’t feel too well, she wouldn’t have even stayed up if you hadn’t been here, but Hal came late and then he played rough with Tina. Poor Jimmy said, maybe next year we could all get to Florida and Adele could come and meet us there.

And Hal said by next year, he’d be a millionaire and he’d have a helicopter. He said maybe he’d visit us for a day in Florida and then go to Haiti.

That Patty put up with all of it, his drinking, everything, and all the while, she worked too. She typed for a pediatrician. Now, she won’t even speak to him, he says, she won’t say hello when they run into each other in the mall.

That night, your mom called and I think she felt bad because
you were here and she was alone then out in California. Well, she started in on Gram. Did you get the sweater, Did you get this, Did you get that. Oh, we were so used to it by then, it didn’t get us down anymore. Gram and I just said no, no, not yet, real quietly, but we blamed it on the Christmas mail, said we were sure it would come tomorrow or the day after. And that seemed to calm her down.

She wanted to talk to Hal and I shouldn’t have let her, he’d already been so rude to the rest of us, he was drunk. Well, he got on the phone and all of a sudden, he was yelling, I couldn’t hardly even listen, he could be so mean. “You’re a liar,” he shouted. “You didn’t send anything and you know it. That’s bullshit. And every year since you’ve been out there you call and say the same damn thing and you know damn well you didn’t do it! I don’t care if you don’t send anything, just don’t give me this bullshit.”

Jimmy finally tore the phone away from him. Then I guess you went and talked to her on the extension in the bedroom.

Hal and Patty left that night not so long after, Hal still drunk. He’d been drinking since I don’t know when, he’d had a beer in his hand steady since he walked in our door.

And we wanted to keep Tina with us, put her to bed in Ben’s room. I said I’d take her home in the morning.

But Hal said no, she was his and she was going with him. He grabbed her like he did by the hair so she was almost crying.

I took that Patty aside and asked her if she couldn’t just drive or talk him into staying over and she said, no, she felt the same way, but she didn’t dare fight. That really got him started, she said, the best thing she could do was go along with it.

Jimmy couldn’t take it anymore, he went into the bedroom and said good night. That was it for him. And you and Gram and I stood like a little chorus huddled together in our boots there under the porch light. Patty sat on the passenger side, her face all flat and sour, and Hal took a long time unlocking his door. He drove a Ford pickup then. I bent down to Tina and said, “Where do you want to sleep tonight? Do you want to drive with your dad like this or should we fix you a nice bed and I can take you over to your dad’s house in the morning?”

She wouldn’t look at me. She squirmed, from one leg to the other.

“I don’t know,” she said.

All of a sudden, she went to the bathroom then, standing up, I guess she was scared. She couldn’t hold it and Hal glared at me saying, “See, now look what you did. Trying to take my kid away from me.”

She looked at the little puddle in the snow by her foot and then she started to cry, late, the way kids do sometimes. “I want to go with my dad,” she said. And he hoisted her in and we stood and listened to the motor gunning and then watched the headlights make dizzy paths down the road, much too fast. All night, I jerked at noises, waiting for the phone. But nothing happened. They didn’t die. Nobody else ever died.

Do you eat carrots? The doctor told me young girls who have cancer in their families should eat a carrot every day. There’s something in it that prevents, the same thing that makes the carrot orange. I eat a carrot every day now and it hasn’t come back yet. I go in for X-rays every six months and so far nothing has shown. He says I’m like a normal person again now. But they took so much out because I didn’t go in right away. If you ever feel anything, you go right in because they say they can do it now and still save the breast. I wear a falsie and then in Florida, I have a bathing suit with it built right in. But it’s in our family, both; the stones and the heart.

Hal went through a lot before he straightened out. For a long time, even when he was young, he always had to have a scheme. He tried to sell things around here to the neighborhood kids, he tried to get them to buy his creepy crawlers, he wanted them to pay to ride that horse. Well, in town, maybe so, but no kids out here were going to pay to get up on a pony.

Then, after Benny, he started taking his vacations out in Colorado. He likes it there. He’s always said he might like to move someday. I hope he does, I hope he makes it. Well, he was in at the beginning of Breckenridge, before you heard about it as a
place. Then the names you heard all the time were Aspen and Vail, Sugarloaf. Well, he put lots of money in, all his savings, and he borrowed from Gram and from us too, for this development. And it really seemed it ought to go. He went in with five or six others. It was a good idea, but somehow, when it all came through, it turned out the others owned the land and Hal owned the snowplows. And the snowplows broke down and that cost money to repair and pretty soon they rusted. In a couple years, he ended up paying someone else to take them off his hands.

He was behind from that for a long time. But he kept working at the store, ten, twelve hours a day until he got ahead a little. The next thing was those houses. He bought two little houses and he was going to renovate and fix them up and sell for a profit. And he worked on those too, Patty helped, he had Tina over there after school painting. But they were right by the railroad tracks, so nobody wanted to buy. He took a loss on those too.

He started the Chinese restaurant and the Frozen Yogurt and then one time he tried to get the Wisconsin franchise for some new Sony gadget. None of it panned out. He just doesn’t have the knack for making money.

It’s a good thing Jimmy got him started in the Rug Doctor, so at least he’s got that and the pressure cleaners. His plans all came to nothing. He still talked, for years he was going to be a millionaire. Nothing he did ever worked.

Jimmy and I were back to normal, then, we had things in common. The health. We both take the Herbalife vitamins in the morning and we eat our cereal with wheat germ and brewers’ yeast. You came quite a few times on your vacations, Gram was always glad about that. Each time, you went home with junk from the basement, nothing valuable, our old coats and Villager sweaters. You like that old stuff, I don’t know what you do with all that junk. I kept hoping my old coat would turn up on TV. The once you wore those crazy earrings.

I remember, I overheard Jimmy talking to you in the breezeway. I was coming up from the basement with a load of wash. “She doesn’t want to,” he said. “Not once since Ben.”

I stood still there on those steps. I didn’t want to hear more.

“Maybe,” you said and I could almost see you shrugging.

The next day, we put you on the Amtrak train, Gram and I. You had a duffel bag and a huge sack of peaches from the yard. That was the time, you told us, you fell in love, you wrote that you stayed up all night with him, eating peaches and watching the stars in the observation car.

Well, I didn’t have hair then. I was still wearing the wig. All my burns from the trailer fire healed but I still didn’t have my hair back. Such a thin down grew all over my head. I’ve seen it on some women with cancer.

That night, I stayed up late, Jimmy was out, it was his Elks night, they played poker. He kept up a social life, more than I did. When he came home, I heard him on his side of the room, undressing, hanging his clothes.

“Jimmy, are you hungry?” I whispered.

“You up, Carol?”

He switched the light. I was wearing an old nightie and I still had my wig on. “Let’s have some ice cream,” I said.

In the kitchen, I spooned out from the carton. He opened the sliding glass doors, never mind the bugs, the air smelled sweet, alfalfa and the hay. It smelled like a million dollars.

“Should we go outside and eat it?”

I took the blanket from the davenport in the breezeway and we spread it on the grass in the backyard. I dug out some Hershey’s chocolate syrup back in the pantry from before we started the health. It was a loud summer night. The crickets were loud, the stars were near. Everything was dark around us. Next door, Gram had been asleep for hours, Griling’s was dark, too. Bub had been gone quite awhile already then.

All of a sudden we were living on a road with mostly old people. We finished our bowls of ice cream and then Jimmy said, “Want some more?” He went in and brought out the whole carton and we ate from that with our spoons. Then that was done for, too.

I shivered a little and Jimmy rubbed his hands on my arms to
warm me. All of a sudden, I felt shabby. It was an old flannel gown and I didn’t ever bother with the falsie at night.

We lay down there on the grass and we started to sleep. I didn’t know if he’d even want to touch me like that, the way I was. It wasn’t like when we were young. But then it started. He put his hands under the nightie and rubbed my legs. He pulled the whole thing over my head. The wig caught on the collar and came off.

“Oh, Jimmy,” I said.

“Shhh. Nobody’s up.”

I felt like our voices were drowned out by crickets. I remembered, I didn’t want to kiss. I tucked my chin over his shoulder, I felt our legs moving on each other, crossing, and recrossing, the wetness of the grass.

We did everything but kiss. That seemed silly to us, maybe, kid stuff. When we woke up, it was still the middle of the night and the ground had grown cold beneath us. My shoulder was wrong. Jimmy said his hip hurt. So we lugged everything in and went to bed. We didn’t find the wig, but we didn’t look hard, I said, just leave it, we’d get it in the morning.

And we went in Ben’s room and both slept in his little bed. We seemed smaller that night. In the morning, the whole room turned shades of gray, us too, our arms, our legs. I woke up and went to get breakfast ready, I left Ben’s door open, Jimmy was still asleep, and then when I was standing in my robe by the counter mixing a blender drink, I remembered my head. I looked out the glass doors to the backyard and it seemed fresh and strong, the way the fields and grass here get in July. July is really our nicest, and it all looked the same, as if we’d never been there. Then I thought I saw a dark impression in the middle of the lawn. The grass was pretty tall, so it was darker there, crushed down. But I didn’t see my wig and I wasn’t going to go outside and look for it in daylight.