Zigzagging Down a Wild Trail (3 page)

Jackie sneezed and Tobrah said, “This is fun.” Jackie experienced a rushing sensation of blissful abandon, something she'd thought only a child could feel. She remembered feeling this way once when she was small—the meaningless happiness of jumping up and down on a bed, bouncing off the walls, chanting, “Little Bo Peep is fast asleep.”

Tobrah had a way of moving jerkily—as if she were imitating some old comedian or mocking a private memory. She skipped ahead down the strawberry rows, then stopped to pluck a bright berry.

“Gotcha!” she cried. She had picked up the expression at Kid World and had been applying it to everything.

Jackie's friend Annabelle had brought them to a farm south of town to pick strawberries. It was the last of the crop and the patch was drying out. Tobrah had been collecting all sorts of berries—green ones, deformed ones, rotten ones, as well as ripe ones. Jackie felt warm and peaceful. Tobrah's tan skin glowed bright in the hot morning sun, and now and then she tugged at a handful of hair, stretching the curls.

“Don't pick the green ones,” Jackie said, but Tobrah didn't hear. Jackie said to Annabelle, “I'm not sure when to correct her or when to just let her go.”

“Wait till she starts school,” Annabelle said sympathetically. “You won't be able to keep up with her.”

“She's always busy with something,” said Jackie. “She's got a great attention span.”

“She must not have seen much TV.”

“I don't know. She won't tell much.”

“She's repressing her grief.” Annabelle worked in the typing pool at a social services agency and liked to talk knowledgeably about the cases she had typed up.

“What does a little child know about grief?” Jackie asked. She threw a rotten berry across a couple of rows.

Annabelle shook her head skeptically. “You can take a child that's been through a trauma and give it all the love in the world and it might take years for the child to start to trust you.”

“That's ridiculous.”

Instantly, Jackie regretted her tone. Annabelle's son was in a chemical-dependency program, and Jackie knew Annabelle blamed herself. But Jackie felt as though some kind of safety valve had broken in her. She was becoming impatient with adult ideas. All she wanted to do was play with Tobrah. They had been reading—stacks and stacks of storybooks from the library. Tobrah was rapidly learning to recognize words. They watched videotapes together. They made paper villages and building-block malls, with paper dolls as shoppers. They were collecting stuffed animals, yard-sale bargains. Yesterday they had a tea party. Tobrah had wrapped a ball of yarn around the table and chairs, making a large green spiderweb. Jackie had to cut it apart, and the yarn—five dollars' worth—was ruined. When Jackie was a child, she would have been punished for wasting yarn, but now she couldn't even scold Tobrah. Jackie was too much amazed that anyone would have thought of draping yarn in that fashion. It was a creation.

Now Tobrah was coming toward her, where Jackie was working her hands through strawberry plants. A spider jumped off a leaf. Jackie looked up. Tobrah, clutching several red berries, had red stains on her mouth. Her hair was bright in the loud sun.

“I want to go,” she whined. “I'm hot.”

“I'm ready,” Annabelle said. “My handy's full.”

After they took their handies of strawberries to the owner's house to pay, they poured the berries into large metal pots and plastic dishpans they had brought. Carefully, Jackie set the pans of berries in the back seat of the car, next to Tobrah. Jackie fastened the seat belt for her. As she clasped the buckle and pulled the belt tight, Tobrah's fingernail accidentally scratched against Jackie's wrist, drawing blood. It had never occurred to Jackie that a child's fingernails would need to be trimmed. She stared at the little nails, transparent as fish scales.

“Does she remind you of when I was little?” Jackie asked her mother.

“You weren't that sure of yourself.”

“Do you think I looked like her?”

“I can't see you in her. Maybe I don't want to. All I see is him.”

Lorraine paused from glazing a cake to light a cigarette. She tapped it on the counter the way Jackie remembered her father doing his unfiltered Luckies. Lucky Strikes. LSMFT, she recalled, from out of nowhere. Lorraine, in a voice hoarse from smoking, said, “Believe me, she's better off without her daddy.”

“Why are you still so bitter?”

“I reckon I want to be. It's my privilege.”

Jackie ducked her mother's smoke stream. “Did you hate Daddy?”

“I guess I did, finally. I made him go. I couldn't stand it anymore. He was always complaining, never enjoying anything.” Lorraine shuddered. “That was the worst part. He was such a sourpuss. He thought he was better than anybody else. He was always growling about the way the world was going to hell. You can't put up with people like that.”

Jackie stood over Tobrah, searching for resemblances between herself and the sleeping child. She could see a faint repetition of her own upper lip, the narrow forehead, a certain dark shadow under her eyes. Jackie had heard that computers could create new faces by combining photographs. It amused her to imagine Meg Ryan crossed with Sylvester Stallone; Newt Gingrich and Monica Lewinsky. Sensations from her own childhood floated forth; the taste of grapes from the trellis in the backyard, the sour green tang of the pulp set off by the sweet purple lining of the skin; the sandy texture of a pink marshmallow bunny squatting in Easter grass; the distasteful odor of sloppy joes in the first-grade lunchroom.

Bob was supposed to visit, but he was late and Tobrah had fallen asleep. He had taken his mother to town. It was Social-Security-check day. His mother didn't drive, and since his father's death, Bob ran errands for her and took her places. His mother kept asking them what his arrangement with Jackie was called. She said she couldn't keep track of the new alternatives to marriage. When Bob and Jackie and Tobrah showed up at church together one Sunday, Bob's mother was embarrassed, and the congregation itself seemed shaken. Jackie hadn't been back to church with Tobrah since then.

Bob came in at ten minutes after nine, bringing ice cream for Tobrah—pistachio, because of the color.

“She's already asleep,” said Jackie. “She ate a hot dog, but I haven't eaten yet. I waited for you—the pot roast is drying out though.”

“I like it dried out,” he said with a grin. “Like jerky.”

“Oh, you're just saying that.”

“No, it's true!”

“You know what Tobrah said? She said bananas smell like fingernail polish.” Jackie thrust a banana under his nose and he sniffed it. “Isn't that funny?”

“She's right,” Bob said, sniffing the banana again.

He set the ice cream in the freezer and swiped his finger through the whipped cream in a bowl on the counter. Jackie was making a sinful dessert.

“I think childhood has changed,” Jackie said. “The way I remember it, any kid who said that about bananas would just be laughed at, but nowadays they call it ‘creative.' ”

“True,” Bob said. “What I remember is how everything you thought about depended on what you could afford. Nowadays kids have everything, so their minds just run wild.”

“Yeah. The sky's the limit.” Jackie slapped down place mats. “I don't understand it,” she said. “I don't understand where it all leads.”

After supper, they watched TV in her bedroom. Jackie was afraid Tobrah would catch them in bed. Tonight they watched a videotape of
The Big Easy
that Jackie had rented that afternoon. The movie had a remarkably sexy scene, but neither of them stirred. It was after midnight when the movie ended, and they still had their clothes on.

“I'll be back in a minute,” said Jackie, starting to get out of bed. “I'm going to check on Tobrah.”

Bob caught her arm. “You check on babies—not five-year-old girls.”

“I want to see if that fan is too much air for her.” She flinched. “Do you think I'm being too protective?”

“I'm afraid you'll let yourself get too attached to her.” He reached his arm around her tenderly. “Kids are a mess,” he said. “They always know how to hurt you.” He shooed a curl away from her forehead.

“But Dad gave her to me. Maybe that was his way of making up to me after all these years.” She sat up straight against the backrest. “The bastard,” she said. “He left me when I wasn't much older than Tobrah. And now he ups and leaves her too. Well, we'll show
him
!”

“You're going a little overboard, Jackie.”

“Bull noodles! What has my life amounted to? No kids. Two lousy marriages. I'm sure it was his fault, ruining things right at the start.”

“You're too hard on yourself, Jackie,” Bob said. “Maybe you shouldn't be the one to bring her up.”

She opened her paperback. Words raced before her eyes. She was barely conscious of the book, wondering if it was upside down. She saw herself sitting there, not concentrating, not grasping what was in the book or what was going on with Bob. Tobrah and Bob and Jackie, an oddball little family. Jackie pictured them in a movie—the wacky mom, the long-suffering dad, the precocious child. Or, the desperate mom, the sad-sack dad, the devil child.

Jackie usually slept late on weekends, and one Saturday she woke up to find that Tobrah had eaten most of a jar of peanut butter. Jackie didn't know what prevented the child from walking out the door, running away. Sometimes the little girl seemed filled with secret knowledge—probably only stuff learned from TV, Jackie thought—and at other times she seemed to have just come out of a hole. Her favorite books were
The Hungry Princess
and
The Foolish Cat,
which Jackie thought were for younger children, but she wasn't sure anymore what was appropriate. At the grocery one day, Tobrah had wanted to buy cat food and stationery, and Jackie had had to stop and try to think why they couldn't buy them. Jackie started liking pizzas and tacos, kid food. One evening they even had fluffer-nutters and Cokes for supper. That was Tobrah's worst day at Kid World. Melissa McKay had come with her My Little Pony and wouldn't let anybody comb its tail. Several of the children had broken into tears.

After supper, Tobrah soberly colored in her coloring book, working with fierce concentration. The crayons lay scattered on the kitchen table. As Tobrah shifted position, a dandelion crayon rolled over the edge of the table. Jackie caught it. Tobrah was coloring a ballerina surrounded by clowns. She explained, “This lady is telling the clowns about her comb she lost, and they said the man that found the comb would be a prince. If she could find him and he had the comb she would be a princess.”

“That sounds like Cinderella.”

Tobrah shook her head vigorously. “This lady don't have any mean sisters. Nobody makes her work.”

“But Cinderella wanted to work,” said Jackie. “Cinderella decided not to marry the prince. She decided to go to medical school and be a doctor.”

“No, she didn't! You always tell it that way. You don't tell it right.”

“Everybody has to work,” Jackie said, rolling a sepia crayon between her fingers. “My mother worked at the same plant where I work. She had to be on her feet eight hours a day. And she didn't have a prince. It was just her and me.”

“Can we have a gerbil?”

They had seen gerbils in a pet store the day before.

“We can't have pets here. It's not allowed in a house this small.”

Jackie felt guilty about the lie, but she couldn't imagine cleaning up after an animal. She remembered the summer days when her mother went off to work and left her alone. She was really too young to be left alone. She watched TV and listened to records and played solitaire. She hadn't minded. She liked it. Nobody bothered her. Tobrah never seemed lonely either. It pleased Jackie to recognize this kinship with her sister. She remembered playing by herself, working on long, absorbing projects. Her paper dolls lived in shoe-box houses on a cardboard street, with house plants for trees. She had created a whole town once, with streets made of neckties and stores full of tiny objects (thimbles, buttons, and candy). The names came drifting back to her. Mulberry Street, Primrose Street. The town was named Wellsville, because nobody ever got sick there. Jackie had had pneumonia the winter before she built Wellsville.

“Jackie, jack-in-the-box, Jackie O,” said Tobrah now.

“How do you know jack-in-the-box?” asked Jackie. “And what do you mean by Jackie O?”

“Jackie Jackie Jackie,” Tobrah chanted, shifting her attention to some cassette tapes Jackie had been organizing in a shoe box. Tobrah's green sweatshirt featured new snags and smears of chocolate syrup.

A month later, Jackie realized she might be pregnant. The notion seemed absurd—it was too ridiculously coincidental for a five-year-old to enter her life, followed so soon by a baby. But Jackie was thrilled, eager to believe it. She felt stirred up. Silent with her secret, she shopped with friends and in the mornings went walking with women in the subdivision, for exercise. She woke up early, waiting for that stir of nausea that was supposed to come, but she felt only anticipation. She felt as if her blood had been carbonated.

By the time of her doctor's appointment, Jackie calculated that she could be six weeks pregnant. She took an early-morning urine specimen with her—in a jelly jar, enclosed politely in a paper sack. She had read in a women's magazine that she should do this. The same magazine said that having a baby late in life was a healthy way of rejuvenating the system.

“I appreciate that,” the doctor said briskly as he set the sack aside. “But we don't do those anymore. We do blood tests instead. They're more accurate.”

It bothered Jackie that scientific knowledge seemed to change like fashion trends.