Harry Sue (21 page)

“Are you wearing a bra, young lady?”

“No,” I mumbled, and looked down at the floor. Across the way, Baba looked just as miserable as me with some strange man's hands between his legs. But we got through it and stood aside, fingers crossed for luck, waiting for J-Cat.

She glared at the lady as she did her job.

“Are you wearing a bra, ma'am?” the lady hack asked.

J-Cat squinted. “You think I can carry this rack around without support?”

The lady hack put her hands on J-Cat's private parts. She reached into the neck of her sundress and pulled out a couple of tissues.

“What's this?”

“That's a snot catcher,” J-Cat said. “Code name: Kleenex.”

“What about
only
two dollars in change don't you understand?”

“You mean I can't bring in some Kleenex?”

“No, you can't bring in Kleenex. Those are the rules.”

They each had a hand on the folded-up tissue that J-Cat had stuck in her bra.

“What if my nose runs while I'm visiting?”

“Use your sleeve. C'mon, you're holding up the line.”

“Use my sleeve? Do you know where I got this turtleneck? Do you? Value Village, that's where! Cost me three dollars and ninety-nine cents!”

At this point, the guard took a step back and put her hand on the shiny brown stick hanging at her side.

Baba handed me the folder. “Allow me to apologize for my wife's behavior,” he said, prying the tissues out of her hand and dropping them into the plastic tub on the table. He took her firmly by the hand and whispered something in her ear. J-Cat's wild eyes landed on me.

I was giving her my “please, please, don't burn the spot!” look. She shook her head to one side like she was trying to get water out of her ear. And smiled up at the guard.

“Sorry,” she said, and sat down on the bench to put her shoes back on.

“I'd like to see her get snot out of a polyester blend,” she muttered to herself.

“That's it, lady! You! Back here!”

With one shoe on, J-Cat jumped up and started stalking toward the hack, her fists clenched.

“Anna, please!” Baba said.

“You can take the kid,” the lady hack told Baba. “But she's gotta wait outside. It's that or a termination. Make up your mind.”

Baba and I held our breath. We both knew the
next ten seconds would tell us whether or not we had two conettes in our crew.

J-Cat's face was beet red, but she let another hack take her by the arm.

“Can I have my tissue back?” she asked through clenched teeth as they disappeared back through the swooshing glass doors.

The visiting room looked like the cafeteria at the hospital minus the food. There were more plastic chairs and round tables, and, at one end, another hack, sitting up high behind a wood desk so he could look down and see everything that was going on. Over in one corner, there were toys for crumb snatchers to play with and a fold-down table for changing the babies. Two little girls twirled an imaginary rope, while two more jumped between them, calling out, “Miss Mary Mack, all dressed in black,” to use up their energy.

Baba and I stood on the edge, looking for somebody alone. Somebody with long dark hair who smelled like home. I thought I saw her, maybe. I touched Baba's arm. We started walking toward the lady who was chewing her fingernail and looking out at the crowd like she was looking real hard for somebody. As I got closer, it was all I could do not to throw myself into her arms.

But then we heard the words, “Harry Sue?” coming from another direction. I swung around,
trying to find the voice, but I couldn't find a face that even came close to matching the picture I held in the palm of my heart.

Baba was walking somewhere. He turned back and put his arm around my shoulder.

“Is that my Harry Sue?” an old lady asked me. She sat at a chair against the wall, the fingers of one hand pressing against the other.

Black hair streaked with gray fell down around her soft face. She had on lipstick, but the lines weren't exactly right. It was the same with her body. There seemed to be too much of her for her head.

I looked at her, wondering how she knew my name.

Baba was close behind me, pressing me forward with his big hands.

I wasn't thinking too clear. My instincts took over. I started to run.

But I didn't get far because Baba had me again by the shoulders. He was pressing my face to his ribs, whispering in my ear.

“She's in there, Harry Sue,” he kept saying. “She's in there.”

And a little piece from
The Wizard of Oz
floated into mind. When some Munchkin asks Dorothy where Kansas is, she says: “I don't know, but it is my home, and I'm sure it's somewhere.”

I forced myself to turn around and look
at
her. She was perfectly still, sitting on the chair. But I had never seen the look on that face before. She was crying, biting her lip and getting lipstick on her teeth. I can't even give you words for it, Fish, it was that far south of sadness.

Was this really my somewhere?

I stepped forward. “Mom?”

She made a little gulping sound and I ran into her then and crushed myself up against her and started crying like a baby, and we were just the same as the time I saw her before she was sent up. Only now it didn't seem so much like she was my mom, but like we were just two people, lost together.

When I finally pulled away, I sure wished they had let J-Cat come in with her tissues. Mary Bell had some, though, and she gave me one. Baba had moved away from us. He was being polite, giving us space. But as I watched him, playing peekaboo with a wandering crumb snatcher, I wished he was back by my side.

“I heard you been looking for me,” Mary Bell said, trying to smile.

Fact was, Fish, I could hardly look
at
her. She had changed that much from what I remembered.

“You got …” I pointed to her mouth, and she laughed, twisting her tissue until it broke in pieces and rubbing it against her teeth.

“Guess you can tell I never wear it,” she said. “I just … Well, I was trying to look presentable.”

I wanted to ask why it mattered, after all this time. I didn't, but she seemed to know what I was thinking.

Mary Bell pressed her lips together. “I been such a disappointment, I know. I just thought …”

“There's something I gotta know, Mary Bell,” I said, looking at my feet, forcing the words out of my mouth. “Did you … did you ever try to find me?”

Mary Bell wasn't in any condition to be talking. Her shoulders were working up and down like the seesaw on the playground and her face was twitching something terrible. I looked over at Baba, who'd lowered his hands from his eyes and was staring at her, too. It was so hard to watch that I left her face to study the little crumb snatchers calling out rhymes and pretending to jump rope in the corner.

If they could jump with no rope, I figured I could imagine my way out of this situation. I tried to use my mind to put a different face on the lady in front of me. But no other face would come.

“It's okay,” I said finally. “You don't have to say.”

“Baby,” she said, sucking up her snot and rubbing the rest away on her sleeve. “I wanted you more than breathing, but I tried so hard not to …
not to be selfish. There were girls here said it wouldn't do you any good to see me, that you'd lose all your respect for me. That it was better for you to remember us like we were before.”

I felt mad then, Fish, wondering what kind of waterhead goes to other conettes to get educated.

“It took me a while to find you after you moved. But I did. And when I called—you know we can't call except collect—Granny—” Mary Bell broke off there like just the name made her tongue burn. “Granny wouldn't accept.”

Mary Bell covered her face with her hands and her shoulders started pumping all over again. When she finally looked up at me, her face was crumpled up just like that Kleenex she'd been worrying.

“Look what you went and did, Harry Sue. You went and grew up, anyway. And I had no part in that.”

From out of nowhere, another conette slid into the seat next to Mary Bell and put her arm around her.

“That one yours, Mary Bell? I didn't know you had a kid.”

Fish, there was so much churning inside me at that moment, I felt like a washing machine that's been dragged out of balance. Knowing Mary Bell didn't even talk about me to the other conettes was
worse than knowing she didn't write those letters like I thought. It felt like … like, well, like taking a sucker punch to the heart.

I went over to Baba and pulled on his sleeve.

“I gotta pee,” I said.

I believe we drove thirty miles in silence on the way home. Baba held on to the steering wheel with his big hands and I stared out the window at the little streets that flew past as we drove along the one-lane highway.
What would I look like coming out of one of those houses?
I asked myself, desperate to keep from seeing Mary Bell's old face all messed up with despair. What about that one with the petunias in the wheelbarrow? Or maybe that one with the plastic windmill?

“Is somebody going to tell me what went on in there? Or don't you remember I was detained in the visitors' waiting room for over fifteen minutes?”

“Later, Anna,” Baba whispered.

“Later? I been waiting for later since we left Gillikins. This
is
later.”

“You can tell her,” I said quietly, putting on a bike helmet in my mind and getting on that bike with the blue streamers.

I tried not to listen, but I found myself leaning forward more than once to catch Baba's soft words. When he got to the part about the conette who'd been ear hustling on me and Mary Bell and gave up that she didn't know Mary Bell had a kid, I pressed my head back against the seat. I didn't have to listen to
that
mess twice. I even closed my eyes.

That's why I didn't see what happened next. Baba says J-Cat stuck her little foot between his and slammed on the brakes. I smacked up against the door as he let loose swearwords from another continent and veered over to the side of the road.

She was screwed around in her seat as far as her seat belt would allow.

“Are you gonna let that flat-talking fool tell you how to feel about Mary Bell?”

I wasn't about to look at J-Cat. This was none of her business.

Do your own time! You nut-up-bug-ding-wing-crazy-making-Category-raggedy-old-J-cat!

I heard the glove compartment unlatch and the passenger door open. Then she was right beside me, banging on my window and waving a thick paperback book in my face.

“Roll it down! Roll it down!”

I looked at Baba. He was patting his shining face with a handkerchief.

“Let her have her say, Harry Sue, or we'll be here all afternoon.”

I rolled the window down a crack with no definite plans to listen.

“You better listen!”

J-Cat kept her voice loud enough to override the hands I held against my ears as well as the cars passing on the highway. “This is your Kansas!”

She read:

The sun had baked the plowed land into a gray mass, with little cracks running through it. Even the grass was not green, for the sun had burned the tops of the long blades until they were the same gray color to be seen everywhere. Once the house had been painted, but the sun blistered the paint and the rains washed it away, and now the house was as dull and gray as everything else.

When Aunt Em came there to live she was a young, pretty wife. The sun and wind had changed her, too. They had taken the sparkle from her eyes and left them a sober gray; they had taken the red from her cheeks and lips, and they were gray also. She was thin and gaunt, and never smiled, now.

As she read, I started crying again and didn't care who saw or heard me. J-Cat yanked open the door and pushed in beside me. She pulled my head onto her lap and patted it.

“We don't know anything about it, Harry Sue,” she said. “But I imagine your Mary Bell has been through worse than anything that old Kansas prairie had to dish up.”

Being held by J-Cat is like getting a hug from a bundle of sticks. She is one bony lady. Soon as I recovered myself, I pulled away and tried to resume looking out the window on the other side. I needed to find somewhere else to be in my mind.

“There are a few things you don't know, Harry Sue,” Baba said, making his way onto the highway again. “Things I learned after you left.”

Since J-Cat was out in the lobby, they had let me leave the visiting room without Baba. He had to stay behind anyway to get Mary Bell to sign the papers.

“That woman was a new prisoner, a … how do you say it? A fish. She only just met your mother. And there is also someone who kept eyes on you while your mother's been in prison.”

“What do you mean ‘kept eyes’?” J-Cat asked. She had the window rolled down and was sticking her head out, feeling the air on her face.

“You know, watched Harry Sue. Kept eyes.”

“Oh, you mean, ‘kept an eye on her.’”

“I don't need a grammar lesson right now, Anna,” he said.

“Just trying to be clear.” J-Cat pushed her head out the window again.

But I still didn't get it.

“Stop the car!” J-Cat screamed, and this time she let Baba hit the brakes, believing after her wild call there must be some sort of emergency. Before we knew it, she was out of the car again, taking off down a side road just like the ones I'd been imagining myself on.

“What now?” Baba sighed.

I followed her with my eyes as she ran up the driveway of a small brick house with a sign out front that read: Free Puppies.

Not knowing what to do, Baba and I sat there, recovering, for quite some time, while a cloud of dust settled slowly around us.

“There were letters, too, Harry Sue. Not from Mary Bell, but to her. From Mrs. Mead.”

I had no time to think this through since J-Cat came running back to the car and stuck her crazy orange head in the window.

“I wanna be Anna again.”

“Huh?”

“Don't play me for a fool, Harry Sue. I know you call me J-Cat.”

What was I supposed to say? It wasn't the most flattering nick in the world.