One Heart (22 page)

But she didn't, she just walked around that way for a while, back out of the woods and into the flat field and down the hill, then suddenly stopped so all the kids slammed on their brakes behind her and she turned around and started walking, this time real quiet, so we could hear the kids' teachers ringing bells and blowing whistles. I just followed Gladys, and so did the kids, and they were whispering, “What's she doin'? Where we goin'? How come she's so quiet?” But they kept on her trail up the hill, and followed her right to our house, just ignoring the bells and whistles, and for a second I thought Gladys would invite them all in for a party, but she just stood on the stoop like the queen of England and looked out at her followers and said, “Good night, children.” And then she went inside.

They ran off laughing and singing and I went inside and found Gladys in the living room in her blue chair opening her Harry Truman book like nothing had happened.

“Well,” I said, standing near the couch. “That was something else!”

“Oh yes,” she said, not looking up from her book. “It sure was.”

“That was what I call a lot of fun.”

She still didn't look up from her book.

“Those kids, they loved it.”

She just kept on reading, and I said good night, and she said good night, and I went into my room and laid on the bed and smiled.

*  *  *

She was pretty much back to normal the next day and didn't want to talk about her pied piper night, so I dropped the subject. Some kids hung out of bus windows yelling to her as we walked to the dining room, and she gave a brief wave and kept walking and I understood she was embarrassed about it all. She was glad those kids were going home and a new batch was coming, and glad to be in the kitchen with Nadine, working.

One night she was up at Brent Quinn's drinking some beer with him, which weren't usual, and I was alone in the living room trying to get interested in the Harry Truman book when I heard a car pull up. I was still in the stage where every time I heard a phone ring or a car pull up I thought
James?
and so I went to the screen door and stood looking out into the darkness, and I could sense it was him even before my eyes adjusted to the night. He walked his long-legged easy walk toward the door and I stepped back and let him in and he said, “Ivy, hello,” and bent down and kissed my cheek. He was clean shaven, in jeans and a blue work shirt, and his eyes looked bluer and he seemed taller and I wanted to stop looking at him so I opened the refrigerator and said, “Are you hungry?” He said, “I just ate a while ago.” I said, “Well, how've you been these weeks?” He said, “I picked up some work a few town's over. They're putting up a new motel.”

I told him to have a seat at the table, and I sat down across from him and was disappointed to feel myself heartbroken again, and I had an urge to stoop to a very low level, I had an urge to go over to him and pull on his sleeve and say, James, just come back to me for one night, just tonight let's go off somewhere, and that's all I'll ever ask you in this world. Instead I kept my bearings and talked to him about his construction work on a new motel, and when he said, “My body's getting too old for this kind of work,” I felt a twinge of pleasure or relief at that, but it didn't last long.

“I thought I should wait a while before coming around, Ivy,” he said. The clock ticked. That kitchen could be so quiet. I wanted Gladys to come home and I wanted her never to come home.

“Well, I appreciate that,” I said, real quiet. “Gladys will be glad to see you.”

“Well, I came to talk to her but I also came to talk to you.”

I raised my eyes to his face and waited for what he'd say.

“I know you said not to thank you. I understand why you said it too. But you helped me a lot, Ivy. You helped me more than you'll ever know.”

“Why? Why did I help you? How?” I noticed my tone was harder than I wanted it to be.

“That's hard to put into words. But when I was with you, I had room to think. I had room to figure things out. You gave me a kind of shelter. Nobody else gave me what you gave me, Ivy, and I wanted to tell you that. I wanted to tell you I'd always remember it.”

“Is that right?” I said. “Well, so will I.”

Again my tone wasn't what I wanted it to be. I just sat and looked at him, and he looked away.

“Ivy, I know I used you.”

“Used me? Is that what it's called?”

“I'm sorry. I wanted to say I'm sorry. I wanted you to see that I never meant to hurt you. I'm just sorry.”

I could see he was feeling bad, and my heart softened up a bit. I said, “Thanks, James, for saying that.”

And then between us a little bit of ease set in, and I started telling him about working with Gladys and Nadine, and how Gladys liked birds now. He told me about a man he worked with who used to be a millionaire and lost all his money in the stock market. I got him a glass of water and put out a bowl of chips on the table. I told him Gladys was up at Brent's cabin and might not be home for a while, and if he wanted I'd go on up there and bring her back to the house. He said, “Why don't we both go on up?” Maybe he was curious to see who Brent was, maybe he was thinking Brent was Gladys's lover. I just let him go on thinking whatever he was thinking, and we took ourselves a walk in the dark and I didn't much care for that walk, that space between our bodies that felt like it was marked by a fence that would shock me if I tried to touch it.

At Brent's we stood and looked through the window and saw they were having a little party that consisted of Brent, Gladys, an old man I didn't know who was probably a townie, a pretty young woman named Sylvia Micheski who taught pottery in the summer, and a real old black woman named Minna Kates, who'd been hired as a storyteller for years, and who was sound asleep now sitting up straight in one of Brent's old armchairs with a smile on her lips.

“Well, let's go knock on the door around the side,” I said, and James said, “Why don't you, and I'll stand back here.”

So I guess James stood at the window and watched me step into the party and watched everyone say, “Ivy!” “Hey Ivy!” and watched Gladys say, “Little lambsy Ivy!” She was drunk, I could see, but looked nice in a simple green dress and bare feet because she'd taken off her sneakers, and she was wearing her wire frames instead of the old glasses. I sat next to her on the couch and said, “Gladys, James is here. He's outside right now.”

And she said, “What?” And I said it again. She stood up and excused herself, said she'd be right back.

About five minutes later she pops back in and thanks Brent for a nice evening, and then she's gone. And I'm there at the party. And I started to drink. I drank and drank and drank that night. I drank like I never drank before. And in the morning, when I woke up in Brent Quinn's bed, I didn't know what had happened.

Brent wasn't beside me. Maybe he'd just given me his bed. It was a pretty room, so pretty I had to take a moment just to look around. He had paintings hanging, including a pretty one of a woman in a bathtub with a dog on a mat beside her, and another one of a laughing old man in a café, and another one of the ocean, and all of them were in old frames, and the shutters were half open so the light streamed in, and on his bed was a handmade quilt of every color, and on the sills were jars of flowers and little statues, and I'm just looking around thinking, This is certainly one way to live, when Brent appears in the doorway holding a tall glass of fresh squeezed orange juice.

“I bet you feel about as good as I do,” he said, smiling. Now, I didn't know how to take that remark, as you can imagine, so I just sat up and said, “I bet.” And I couldn't look him in the eye, but I took the juice and told him he had a real pretty bedroom. He said Sylvia Micheski was making pancakes out in the kitchen, why didn't I come on out and join everyone. I made myself look at him, and he looked back at me, the sunlight in his eyes making them hard to read. What happened last night? I wanted to say, but couldn't, so I smiled, and I said, “Well, it sure is nice to wake up here,” and next thing I knew I was at his long oak table in the kitchen feeling a little sick and watching pretty Sylvia flip jacks, rocking back and forth on her small, sandaled feet. Old Minna Kates and William, the man from town who seemed to be her good friend, were over on the couch, talking quietly with mugs of coffee. When Brent came back into the kitchen, he stood beside me with his hand on my back, while he and Sylvia talked about blueberries.

I walked back home to get ready for work. It was Sunday. I'd be making stew. Gladys had off. Gladys and James weren't in the house and I didn't have the energy to wonder about where they might've got to. I got dressed and walked down to the kitchen with my head splitting open from one of the worst hangovers I ever had, and Nadine was there waiting for me, cutting up the vegetables. We stood side by side and cut vegetables for almost two hours. I told her I just wanted to be quiet.

After work I was still hungover. After all I wasn't a spring chick, and somehow that was a sweet feeling, that feeling of knowing all I could do was sit in a tub, soak my bones, get into a nightgown, and slide my body in between the sheets, which I'd just recently changed, so they were crisp and cool and I cried from the happiness of how they felt, and the happiness of having no other choice but to sleep, and then I slept.

W
HEN MY SON WAS JUST OVER TWO YEARS OLD
,
BACK IN
1979, this nice lady named Bernadette Myerly from south Philadelphia was watching him every afternoon while I worked at a boardinghouse for pregnant teenage girls. The house was called the Second Mile, and it was run by these Catholic nuns who were devoted to helping girls who, as the one nun liked to say, “got in the family way before they got in the family.” Me working there was odd, since I wasn't much older and wiser than those teenagers, and I'd done the same thing. But I'd had two years of being a mother, and that changed me. I was raising my boy alone, doing okay I suppose. Moses' father went back west just after Moses had his first birthday. He wasn't ready to settle down. He made that real clear by cheating on me twice. So it was like, hey, nice knowin' ya, Anthony. I wasn't in love with him anymore anyhow. I was too much in love with my baby. They don't tell you that's how it'll be if you have a baby. A grown man with stale breath and bristles, even a man as pretty as Anthony, looks mighty undesirable next to the magic of your baby, at least for a while. Anyway, Hambone had come back with us, and the truth is, he was more of a father than Anthony'd ever be.

Two of those teenage girls weren't easy to like, I mean they were loudmouths and pissed off at the world. One of them, Charlene, who'd been beat up for years by her own father, ripped a chunk of my hair right out of my head when I told her she couldn't smoke in the kitchen. I couldn't fight back or I'd be fired. What did I do to control myself? I looked at that wild girl with her angry red face and with all my concentration I thought how she was once an infant in somebody's arms. It was the only way I could feel a shred of compassion for that human being.

My son had broken my heart like all babies do when they first come into this crapped-on world, and for more than three years after his birth, I couldn't stop myself from looking at people and seeing them as they must have been as innocent, cute little babies. This became such a habit with me that it was like the whole human race started to cooperate; I would look at their faces and they'd give me this secret look of their old innocence. Okay, maybe I was warped. But it got me through some shitty situations.

I held that job for almost a year for a big four dollars an hour, and I think I kept coming back day after day in order to learn some kind of secret from the two of the nuns I worked with. I could've made more as a waitress, but I was learning something from those sturdy nuns who loved (I'm not talking tolerated, I'm talking loved) that Charlene girl who could spit in your face as a way of ending conversations.

At that age I wanted to believe that love was something you could have for a person if you just had enough willpower. Nobody was outside the possibility of love is what I wanted to believe. I guess deep down I wasn't sure whether I was inside or outside the possibility myself. I was back in Philly, I was taking my kid over to my father's and trying to pretend he was a normal grandfather and not an addict living on a couch. He was trying to pretend too, going to King of Prussia mall one day and buying little cars and stuffed bears and a shirt that said
I LOVE GRANDPA
, and a year's supply of animal crackers. He didn't have a girlfriend anymore, as far as I could tell. He'd been in and out of NA. “NA is not for people who need to quit, it's for people who want to quit,” he told me. “And I don't want to.” I had to quick pull out my trick of seeing the baby inside the man, because believe me, the man made me sick.

I was living in a house on Sansom Street with a bunch of kids—students, mostly. Rooms were fifty bucks a month, and the kitchen was never kept real clean, and the bathroom sink had fallen out of the wall and now sat in the hallway. The carpet was burnt orange shag, the sort all the slumlords bought in the early 1980s. Some of my roommates played in a wanna-be Lou Reed band and spent their time drinking and practicing at night. I would try to join them, but it didn't work. You can't just forget you're a mother. I couldn't relax the same way I used to. I'd have moments when I wished my baby would just go back to wherever he'd come from, and then I'd feel so guilty for thinking that, I'd have to leave the room and go upstairs where he was asleep in a wooden crib next to my bed. I'd crouch down and look through the spokes and whisper him promises. Sometimes I'd pass out on the floor, and when he woke up in the morning, he'd look down at me through the bars and smile.