Sound Of Gravel, The (10 page)
When we arrived in Strathmore, it felt as if we had dropped into a town in the middle of an orange grove; the air was thick with the scent of sweet orange blossoms. The neat, orderly rows of small, rectangular homes looked like an Emerald City, and at its center was my grandparents’ olive-green, three-bedroom house. The manicured, lime-green front yard had two oak trees that framed the house perfectly. Grandma kept a flowerbed of orange and yellow marigolds next to the front door, along with neat green shrubs, and pink roses under the living-room and guest-room windows. From the first time I saw it, I felt warmed from the inside out.
Mom balanced Meri on one arm and reached for the shiny silver screen door, but before she could knock, Grandpa surprised us by pulling it wide-open. His gray eyes twinkled as he gazed at what must have been quite a sight—seven nomads, dirty, hungry, and exhausted.
“Well, hello there.” His smile was wide enough for us to see the full extent of his perfectly straight dentures, and his voice was raspy from an old smoking habit. What little hair he had was greased back from his forehead, gray streaks across a pink landscape. “Come on in!” His shoulders shook with a short laugh, and his eyes flashed like a playful child’s. His voice was tinged with hints of a Texas twang, a legacy of his boyhood in Plano, where he’d been one of ten children in a monogamous Mormon family.
Grandpa gave Mom a one-armed squeeze and welcomed each of us as we walked through the door. Then he leaned forward, gently grasped Meri’s opalescent face with a red, leathery hand, and kissed her forehead. “She’s a pretty baby, Kathy.” He patted Mom on the back gingerly.
My grandpa kept the thermostat at seventy-five degrees minimum, so their house was always warm—so different from the barrel heater and drafty walls we had known in LeBaron. My grandparents’ brown-and-white-speckled carpet—as opposed to our cracked concrete floor—made us feel cozy, insulated from the outside world. The house even smelled warm, like a breakfast of maple syrup, waffles, butter, and coffee.
Grandma stood in the kitchen, where she had been preparing breakfast, her thin forearms crossed over a pale blue housedress that she wore with matching slippers. Behind her, morning sunlight streamed through the window and lit up the big, white curls on her head like a halo. She met Mom where the living room started and the kitchen ended and said, “Well, hello there,” echoing Grandpa. She closed her eyes behind silver-framed bifocals while she hugged her daughter. They separated, and for a moment Grandma held Mom at her shoulders and seemed on the edge of giving a speech. Instead, her arms went limp and dropped to her side. “You must be tired, Kathy.” Grandma took Meri from Mom’s arms and Mom started to cry, her shoulders shaking. She dropped her purse to the floor, collapsed onto the living-room couch, bowed her head, and rested it in her palms. I watched her and didn’t understand how she could be crying when I was so happy.
Grandma’s eyes resisted a glance in her daughter’s direction and remained fixed on Meri. Grandma’s eyes were watering too. “Oh my gosh, Kathy, this little baby girl looks just like a movie star. She even has a mole over her lip like an actress in an old movie.” Now tears rolled down Grandma’s cheeks, though she still refused to look up. “I swear she’s one of the most beautiful babies I’ve ever seen, and I’m not just sayin’ that because she’s my grandbaby.” Grandma bent forward and buried her face in the bundle of blankets that swaddled Meri.
I watched as Mom patted her eyes with a Kleenex one final time before putting on her glasses. She seemed unable to look at anyone else in the room, her head hung forward, her shoulders slouched. Grandpa sat quietly in his leather La-Z-Boy chair with his head in his hand, his eyes wide and vacant, as if he didn’t have a clue what to say.
The following Monday morning, we woke up to Grandpa’s alarm clock instead of a rooster’s crow. Its soul-shattering buzz didn’t so much wake us as shock us to life. Then, another shock: we had to go to a new school. The house already smelled like hot coffee by the time I was out of bed. I dressed and went to the kitchen for breakfast and found Grandpa slumped over the oval, faux-oak kitchen table with a mug of coffee at his side and his face hidden behind the newspaper. Grandma looked hunchbacked as she fried her husband an egg on the stove. Toast popped out of a white plastic toaster. My grandparents looked at us and said good morning with smiles. Grandma asked each of us what we wanted for breakfast. I chose cornflakes with sugar and milk.
“Pass the
lechee,
please,” giggled Grandpa, who never tired of mispronouncing
leche
if he thought it might get a laugh, which it always did, at least from those of us under the age of ten.
Not until I’d almost finished my second bowl of cereal did Mom stride into the kitchen with her navy-blue purse straps already over her shoulder. She had on mascara and pearl-pink lipstick, and her hair was curled back. “You kids ready to go school?” she asked as she bit her pearl-pink lip. Matt, Luke, and I stood up from the table, picked up our jackets off the arm of the love seat, and followed Mom outside the front door.
I had to squint to keep the bright California sun from stinging my eyes as we made our way to Strathmore Elementary, which sat directly across the street from Grandpa and Grandma’s. The walk hardly took a minute, but it was long enough to catalog a lifetime of differences between our new home and our house in LeBaron. In LeBaron, our walk to school had been along dirt and gravel roads lined on each side by sharp barbed-wire fences with crooked wooden posts. My brothers and I had walked with our heads down as we avoided potholes, kicking stones with the tips of our tennis shoes. We’d watch cows graze in green fields of the surrounding farms, picking up friends as we got closer to school, and walking with them the rest of the way. We didn’t know anyone but Grandpa and Grandma in Strathmore. Instead of pastures and cows, we saw sidewalks, shiny chain-link fences, a crosswalk with bright white stripes, and stop signs so new they looked glossy.
Mom held my hand and Luke’s as Matt walked on ahead, his skinny body quickly lost in the shadows of a building as wide as two city blocks. Our new school was covered in stucco and painted a neutral cream color, which somehow made its tall trees look taller and its grass greener.
At the end of a wide cement staircase lay bronze doorknobs and double glass doors. Inside the doors, phones rang, smartly dressed people talked professionally, and women with long, well-maintained fingernails tapped on typewriters. The registration office was bigger than my entire Mexican classroom had been, and it was crowded with framed photos, trophies, plaques, and green potted plants on every desk and in every corner. I was so busy looking around that I hardly noticed when Mom announced she needed to get back home to the other children and kissed us good-bye.
A school secretary walked me to the first-grade classroom, which was adjacent to the most elaborate playground I had ever seen: it had two swing sets, a teeter-totter, a monument of a slide, two tetherball poles, and a set of monkey bars. As we entered the classroom, I noticed it smelled serious—all crayons and pencil shavings—and was filled with individual wooden desks and big, round tables surrounded by shelves crowded with books. I heard my teacher’s voice behind a wall of cubby compartments before I ever saw her. I liked her from that instant, and not just because she spoke English.
“I’m Mrs. Tabousky,” said a tall woman with short brown hair sprayed stiff with a thick coat of hair spray. I took note of her light, lavender lipstick and black mascara and the bright pink blush on her cheeks, as well as the way her soft, warm hand confidently gripped mine. Understanding every word she said made me feel smart, and the desk I was assigned fit perfectly. I settled into it, ran my elbows over the shiny, smooth surface, and smiled.
The days flew by, and before I knew it, the school year was almost over and I had turned seven. I woke every morning to the protection of thick, warm blankets, and in the mornings when Audrey’s diaper leaked, I’d never be wet or cold for long because I could always take a hot shower. After breakfast, I’d skip across the street to the playground and play with my classmates. They were nice and welcoming, not at all wicked the way church elders in LeBaron had said Americans always behaved.
One afternoon in June, the week before school was out, Mom folded her arms over her belly, narrowed her eyes, and inspected me. “Did you get into trouble at school, Ruthie?”
The suggestion surprised me. I shook my head and tried to think of what I might have done.
“Your teacher wants to meet with me after school tomorrow.”
I couldn’t sleep that night, I was so nervous about Mom’s meeting at school. The next day was even longer. At last the final bell rang; I stayed at my desk as my classmates filed out. I spied Mom waiting in the doorway, tugging at the bottom of a tight, pinstripe blouse like a nervous schoolkid waiting to talk to the principal. Once it was quiet, the two women greeted each other.
Mom fixed her hair with her fingers, acting as nervous as I felt. “Ruthie’s not in any kind of trouble, is she? I know she really loves your class. She comes home talking about it every day.”
“No, no, not at all.” My teacher turned to me. “Ruthie, I’m going to talk to your mom in private for a little while. Do you have anything to work on while we talk?”
“Can I color when I’m finished with my math?”
“Yes. I just copied some new color-by-number worksheets. You know where they are.”
Mom observed the exchange in silence and followed Mrs. Tabousky up the aisle, where the two sat at students’ desks to talk. Mom’s large breasts nearly covered the cream-colored desktop, and her bottom hung off the sides of the chair. My teacher showed her a pile of papers, pointing out certain parts with the tip of her ballpoint pen. Gradually, Mom’s body began to relax into the chair to the extent it could; she even seemed happy, happier than I’d seen her in a long time. At last, the women got up from their desks and my teacher waved me over.
“Ruthie, your mom and I think it’s a good idea if you spend the next school year with me. Would you like that?” Mrs. Tabousky asked.
“Do I get to stay in this classroom?” I asked excitedly.
“Yes, you will be in this classroom with me for all of next year. We’re going to work on your pronunciation, and I’ll help you practice your reading every day.”
I couldn’t have been happier about the idea of repeating first grade. I loved Mrs. Tabousky, and after all our going back and forth between LeBaron and El Paso, staying in one place sounded good to me. I was dreading the approaching summer break—I couldn’t imagine why all the other kids were so excited. I had an uneasy feeling that summer wouldn’t be much fun.
“I like your teacher, Ruthie,” Mom said as we walked home hand in hand. “Are you happy to have her again next year?—
Oh, no!
” Mom screamed before I could answer. She dropped my hand in the middle of the crosswalk. I followed her gaze to my grandparents’ yard, where Audrey was running, naked from the waist up. Matt was chasing her with a pink cotton blouse.
“I think Audrey’s gonna make us all nutty,” Mom said to herself, her voice grave. A car honked for us to cross the street, and Mom ran toward the house as Audrey ran in the opposite direction on the sidewalk. Even though she still wore diapers and didn’t talk much, Audrey’s body had begun to change. Suddenly she was almost as tall as my mom and had some of Mom’s curvy softness. Audrey’s breasts bounced when she ran, and her nipples looked like brand-new pencil erasers.
“What the heck are you doin’?” Mom yelled. “Put your shirt back on!”
Audrey stopped short and blinked several times, her face expressionless. I felt frozen when she acted that way, and I didn’t know what to do. My instincts told me to keep away from my older sister, and I stayed back at the corner while Mom and Matt approached Audrey from different directions, Mom having snatched the blouse from his hand. Even after they had practically tackled Audrey, the shirt barely made it over her head.
“Lift up your arms, Audrey. We gotta get this shirt on ya, Sis. Be still.”
I made my way to them, close enough to see that Audrey’s blank expression had been replaced by a delirious smile. Her moaning was emanating from deeper in her throat than ever. Her tongue licked her upper lip and lapped up the mucus that streamed from her nose. Her body was rigid as she refused Mom’s commands.
“Audrey, put your arms up!” Mom said.
Completely isolated in her own world, my sister kept her arms stubbornly straight at her sides, her hands in tight fists as she rocked back and forth and stamped her feet—first left, then right, left, right. Mom kept struggling with her and finally got Audrey’s blouse over her head. Matt stood behind her, body-blocking Audrey in case she tried to make a run for it. Frustrated, Mom’s pale pink lips stretched taut as she pulled the blouse down past Audrey’s breasts and belly.
We heard laughter from across the street. Three boys were standing on one of Strathmore’s pristine sidewalks, snickering with their hands over their mouths. I recognized them as some of the boys Matt played basketball with at school. My brother’s face was bright red with humiliation. He smiled, trying to make it seem as if the whole scene hadn’t been a big deal, but I could see that he was blinking as he tried to hold back tears. He pulled down the brim of his cap, bowed his head, and walked back to the house with his arms across his chest. Mom panted, her chest expanding and contracting furiously as she pulled Audrey toward the door. I wished summer were over, a summer that hadn’t even begun.
School had been out less than a week when Mom announced that she had found us a home of our own, a rental she would pay for out of her government assistance checks. The old house was on the other side of the railroad tracks from my grandparents’ neighborhood, but well within walking distance. We were ecstatic. We knew what it meant: we were in the magically delicious land of California for good!