To Come and Go Like Magic

L
eaving …

Momma’s ironing on the sunporch when I break the news.

“Someday I’ll leave this place,” I say. The glider creaks when I give it a push.

“Where you going?” She looks at me with about as much concern as if I’d told her I was going to Brock’s store for a Coke.

“Not sure,” I say, putting my eyes on my painted
toenails. Aunt Rose spent the weekend with us and polished my nails Hot Geranium to match hers. I imagine these red toes walking down some wide tree-lined boulevard in a faraway city. The
where
is not important. I’ve never been anyplace but here. How can I have a
where?

“People don’t leave Mercy Hill,” Momma says, laughing her
you don’t know what you’re talking about
laugh as she swipes the iron across Pop’s white shirt, giving it a lick and a promise.

“Why not?”

She shakes her head. “Grass is not always greener on the other side of the fence,” she says, sliding the hot iron carefully around each button.

“I don’t care,” I say. “I want to see what it looks like, see if it feels the same and smells the same someplace else.” I’m thinking fresh smells, like perfume and new-car vinyl and strange food scents in a city full of fancy restaurants. Not like here. Not like Mercy Hill’s coal smoke and sawdust and fields of cow manure fertilizing the corn. Momma’s eyebrows arch the way they do when she’s trying to fill in spaces with her black Maybelline pencil. “Grass is grass,” she says. “One side of the fence is as green as the other.”

Momma does not understand that the color of grass has nothing to do with it, that all the fences in the world separating here from there have nothing to do with it. Leaving is all that matters.

Outside these plastic porch windows the winter sun is white-hot and the bare maples and elms shudder in the slapping wind. Dried-up honeysuckle vines twist and dip along the fence top, barely hanging on to life. In the spring Pop will take off the scratched-up plastic windows and slip in screens, but today the backyard is a blur. It’s like looking through water or into a dream world from some other place and time.

T
hen and Now …

A year ago life was hunky-dory, as my aunt Rose says. A year ago we were the right size for this house. Momma; Pop; my brother, Jack; and me. Three bedrooms, two porches, and a dusty attic full of junk. A year ago my sister, Myra, was married to Jerry Wilson and lived in Jellico Springs. Uncle Lucius lived on Sycamore Street with his young redheaded wife, Gretchen. A floozie from way back is the way Pop describes her. With Uncle Lu going on seventy and her not even fifty, Momma says things were bound to happen the way they did.

The whole world can change in a year.

One morning Uncle Lucius woke up and found Gretchen gone. She’d run off with a traveling vacuum-cleaner salesman named Vernon Wright. Uncle Lu still laughs sometimes and says, I guess I was Mister Wrong. Then he goes out back under the sour-cherry tree and throws up.

Uncle Lu didn’t want to sleep at his own house anymore, so Pop and Jack set up an old, wobbly bed frame in our attic, and Momma bought a cardboard chest of drawers at the Kmart in Jellico Springs and put yellow curtains on the tiny window. From that attic window, with Jack’s binoculars, I used to watch redbirds sitting in the bare winter trees along the riverbank. Now the attic’s off-limits. My uncle has to have his private space to moan and stomp and talk to himself, shaking my ceiling so much the overhead light fixture jiggles with last summer’s dead bugs in it.

If the changes had stopped with Uncle Lucius, maybe it wouldn’t have been so bad. But next came what Jack calls the
aftershock
. My sister, Myra, showed up at the front door with a suitcase, saying Jerry Wilson had run off, too, and she had a baby on the way. All this news, the good and the bad, spilled out in one long breath. Myra couldn’t bear to sleep alone in
her
house either, so she moved in with me. Now she and her round belly with the baby-to-be take up most of the double bed,
and every night I hang on to the edge, afraid to move. If I kick in my sleep and hurt the baby, it could end up loony or something.

Pop says everything will work out in its own time, but he spends
his
own time working at the hardware store away from it all. Three days a week Momma sells dresses at Donna’s Dress Shop, and Jack practically lives at the ball fields—football, baseball, track. Any field will do. Meanwhile, I get to listen to Myra cry and my uncle curse the dogs. Our two dogs, Old Tate and Foxy Lady, live in a chain-link pen with identical white doghouses. Uncle Lu says those dogs are better off than he is.

E
nglish Becomes Geography …

I like school enough, but it’s nothing special. I get mostly Bs and don’t crack a book. Except to read stories, that is. My favorite spot in the whole school is the back row of stacks in the library. During morning study hall I sit on the floor in front of the radiator, smelling books and listening to the hot water sluice up through the pipes.

I like stories about people who are not real and places
that are hard to imagine. Anything can happen in a book. But Mrs. Sturdivant didn’t let us read much literature last semester. She said we had to do grammar double time. “You butcher the English language down here,” she said, emphasizing
down here
like it was a bad word, instead of just saying
Kentucky
. Mrs. Sturdivant’s from Chicago, where people talk proper without doing grammar double time.

But now she’s gone. She’s having a baby, like Myra, except hers is coming in two weeks’ time and she’s still got a husband. We helped pack up her pictures and baby magazines and carried the boxes to her car because her doctor says she’s not supposed to lift anything heavier than a loaf of bread.

We’re all talking and laughing and Zeno Mayfield’s trying to stand on his head in the back corner near the lockers when the substitute, an old gray-haired woman, walks in the door a full five minutes after the bell. Zeno calls her Granny. Right out loud, too. “Hello, Granny,” he says, but she doesn’t answer. He says she can’t hear, but I see her smiling to herself.