Harvesting the Heart (4 page)

A
bus
from I don't know where was coming through the dark tunnel of the
station. "I've been out of my head with worryin'," my
father admitted.

I
watched the bus's wheels blot the herringbone-brick terminal drive. I
thought of my father's Rube Goldberg contraptions, the inventions
he'd made just to entertain me: a faucet that sent water down a
gully, which released a spinning fan, which in turn blew a paddle
that connected a pulley that opened the cereal box and poured out my
serving of Cheerios. My father could make the best out of anything
he was given. "Don't worry about me," I said confidently.
"After all, I'm
your
daughter."

"Aye,"
my father said, "but it seems you've got a bit of your mother in
you too."

After
I'd worked two weeks at Mercy, Lionel trusted me enough to lock up.
During the down times, like three in the afternoon, he'd sit me down
at the counter and ask me to draw pictures of people. Of course I did
the workers on my shift—Marvela and Doris and Leroy—and
then I did the President and the mayor and Marilyn Monroe. In some of
these portraits were the things I didn't understand. For
example, Marvela's eyes showed a man dark with passion, being
swallowed by the living sea. In the curl of Doris's neck I'd drawn
hundreds of cats, each looking more and more like a human, until the
last one had Doris's own face. In the fleshy swell of Marilyn
Monroe's peach arm were not the lovers you'd expect but rolling
farmland, rippled wheat, and the sad, liquid eyes of a pet beagle.
Sometimes people in the diner noticed these things, and sometimes
they didn't—the images were always small and subtle. But I kept
drawing, and each time I finished, Lionel would tape the portrait
over the cash register. It got so that the pictures stretched halfway
across the diner, and with each one I felt a little more as though I
truly belonged.

I
had been sleeping on Doris's couch, because she felt sorry for me.
The story I had given was that my stepfather had been making moves on
me and so the minute I turned eighteen I had taken my baby-sitting
money and left. I liked that story, because it was nearly half
true—the eighteen and the leaving part. And I didn't mind a
little sympathy; at this point, I was taking whatever I could get.

It
was Doris's idea that we do some kind of blue-plate special—
tack two bucks onto the price of a turkey club, and you'd get a free
portrait with it. "She's good enough," Doris said, watching
me sketch the frizzy lines of Barbra Streisand's hair. "These
Joe Shmoes would be Celebrity for a Day."

I
felt a little weird about the whole thing, kind of like being a
circus sideshow, but there was an overwhelming response to the notice
we stuck in the menu, and I got bigger tips drawing than I did
waiting tables. I drew most of the regulars on the first day, and it
was Lionel's idea to make those original sketches free and hang them
up with my others for publicity. Truth be told, I could have drawn
most of the diner's patrons without their posing for me. I had been
watching them carefully anyway, picking up the outlines of their
lives, which I would fill in in my spare time with my imagination.

For
example, there was Rose, the blond woman who came for lunch on
Fridays after having her hair done. She wore expensive linen suits
and classic shoes and a diamond wedding band. She carried a Gucci
pocketbook and she kept her money in order: ones, fives, tens,
twenties. Once, she brought in a balding man, who held her hand tight
throughout the meal and spoke in Italian. I pretended this was her
lover, because everything else in her life seemed so picture perfect.

Marco
was a blind student at the Kennedy School of Government, who wore a
long black overcoat even on the hottest days in July. He had shaved
his head and wore a bandanna around it, and he'd play games with us.
What
color is it?
he'd
ask.
Give
me a clue.
And
I'd say something like "McCarthy," and he'd laugh and say
Red.
He
came in late at night and smoked cigarette after cigarette, until a
gray cloud hovered at the edge of the ceiling like an artificial sky.

But
the one I watched most was Nicholas, whose name I knew only because
of Lionel. He was a medical student, which explained, Lionel said,
his odd hours and the fog he was always in. I would stare at him
point-blank because he never seemed to notice, even when he wasn't
reading, and I tried to figure out what was so confusing about him. I
had been at Mercy exactly two weeks when I figured it out: he just
didn't fit. He seemed to gleam against the cranberry cracked vinyl
seats. He held court over all the waitresses, holding up his glass
when he wanted a refill, waving the check when he wanted to pay, and
yet none of us considered him to be condescending. I studied him with
a scientist's fascination, and when I imagined things about him, it
was at night on Doris's living room couch. I saw his steady hands,
his clear eyes, and I wondered what it was that drew me to him.

I
had been in love in Chicago, and I knew the consequences. After all
that had happened with Jake, I was not planning to be in love again,
maybe not ever. I didn't consider it strange that at eighteen some
soft part of me seemed broken for good. Maybe this is why when I
watched Nicholas I never thought to draw him. The artist in me did
not immediately register the natural lines of him as a man: the
symmetry of his square jaw or the sun shifting through his hair,
throwing off different and subtler shades of black.

I
watched him the night of the first Chicken Doodle Soup Special, as
Lionel had insisted on calling it. Doris, who had been working with
me since the lunch rush, had left early, so I was by myself,
refilling salt shakers, when Nicholas came in. It was 11:00
p.m.,
just
before closing, and he sat at one of my tables. And suddenly I knew
what it was about this man. I remembered Sister Agnes at Pope Pius
High School, rapping a ruler against a dusty blackboard as she waited
for me to think up a sentence for a spelling word I did not know. The
word was
grandeur,
e
before
u.
I
had stood and hopped from foot to foot and listened to the popular
girls snicker as I remained silent. I could not come up with the
sentence, and Sister accused me of scribbling in the margins of my
notebook again, although that was not it at all. But looking at
Nicholas, at the way he held his spoon and the tilt of his head, I
understood that grandeur was not nobility or dignity, as I'd been
taught. It was the ability to be comfortable in the world; to make it
look as if it all came so easily.
Grandeur
was
what Nicholas had, what I did not have, what I now knew I would never
forget.

Inspired,
I ran to the counter and began to draw Nicholas. I drew not just the
perfect match of his features but also his ease and his flow. Just as
Nicholas was digging in his pockets for a tip, I finished and stepped
back to view the picture. What I saw was someone beautiful,
perhaps someone more beautiful than I had ever seen in my life,
someone whom others pointed to and whispered about. Plain as day, in
the straight brows, the high forehead, and the strong chin, I could
see that this was someone who was meant to lead others.

Lionel
and Leroy came into the main area of the diner, carrying leftovers,
which they brought home to their kids. "You know what to do,"
Lionel said to me, waving as he pushed his way out the door. "See
you, Nick," he called.

Very
quietly, under his breath, he said, "Nicholas."

I
stepped up behind him, still holding my portrait. "Did you say
something?" I asked.

"Nicholas,"
he repeated, clearing his throat. "I don't like 'Nick.' "

"Oh,"
I said. "Did you want anything else?"

Nicholas
glanced around him, as if he was just noticing he was the only
customer in the diner and that the sun had gone down hours before. "I
guess you're trying to close up," he said. He stretched out one
leg on the banquette and turned the corners of his mouth up in a
smile. "Hey," he said, "how old are you anyway?"

"Old
enough," I snapped, and I moved closer to clear his plate. I
leaned forward, still clutching the menu with his picture, and that's
when he grabbed my wrist.

"That's
me," he said, surprised. "Hey, let me see."

I
tried to pull away. I didn't really care if he looked at the
portrait, but the feeling of his hand against my wrist was paralyzing
me. I could feel the pulse of his thumb and the ridges of his
fingertips.

I
knew by the way he touched me that he had recognized something
in what I'd drawn. I peered down at the paper to see what I had done
this time. At one edge of the picture I'd sketched centuries of
kings, with high jeweled crowns and endless ermine robes. At the
other edge I had drawn a gnarled, blossoming tree. In its uppermost
branches was a thin boy, and in his hand he held the sun.

"You're
good," he said. Nicholas nodded to the seat across from him. "If
you aren't keeping your other customers waiting," he said,
smiling, "why don't you join me?"

I
found out that he was in his third year of medical school and

that
he was at the top of his class and in the middle of his rotations. He
was planning to be a cardiac surgeon. He slept only four hours a
night; the rest of the time he was at the hospital or studying. He
thought I didn't look a day over fifteen.

In
turn, I told him the truth. I said I was from Chicago and that I had
gone to parochial school and would have gone to RISD if I hadn't run
away from home. That was all I said about that, and he didn't press
me. I told him about the nights I had slept in the T station, waking
in the mornings to the roar of the subway. I told him I could balance
four coffee cups and saucers on one arm and that I could say I
love
you
in
ten languages.
Mimi
notenka kudenko,
I
said in Swahili, just to prove it. I told him I did not really know
my own mother, something I had never admitted to my closest friends.
But I did not tell him about my abortion.

It
was well past one in the morning when Nicholas stood up to leave. He
took the portrait I'd drawn and tossed it lightly on the Formica
counter. "Are you going to hang it up?" he asked, pointing
to the others.

"If
you'd like," I said. I took my black marker out and looked at
his image. For a moment, a thought came to me:
This
is what you've been waiting for.
"Nicholas,"
I said softly, writing his name across the top.

"Nicholas,"
he echoed, and then he laughed. He put his arm around my shoulders,
and we stood like that, touching at the sides, for a moment. Then he
stepped away. He was still stroking the side of my neck. "Did
you know," he said, pressing a spot with his thumb, "that
if you push hard enough here, you can knock someone unconscious?"
And then he bent down and touched his lips to where his thumb had
been, kissing the spot so lightly I might have imagined it. He walked
out the door before I even noticed him moving, but I heard the sleigh
bells tap against the steamed window glass. I stood there, swaying,
and I wondered how I could be letting this happen again.

^chapter
2