Acts of God (14 page)

Instead I heard a man's voice on the other end. “Can you talk?” Nick said.

I was surprised at how glad I was to hear his voice. “Yes, I can talk.” I curled up with my legs under me, the blanket across my lap. His voice sounded distraught and far away.

“Listen,” he said, “I know you don't live here anymore, but you did. You know what it's like. I can't really talk to anyone, but I thought I could talk to you. I felt as if you understood my situation the other night.”

There was something warm and comforting in Nick's voice. We could be friends; we could be there for one another. Yet at the same time it seemed as if I were sinking into a dark hole, a place I wasn't sure I wanted to be. A strange, slightly scary place. I didn't know what I had or hadn't understood. “I'm not sure I can be helpful.”

“Tessie, you know Margaret. You were once friends.”

“I don't know if we were ever really friends.”

“But you know things about her.” He sighed. “I wish you were here. I wish we could sit and talk. I have so much I want to tell you. If we could sit across from one another and talk all night long, I think you'd understand.”

Holding the phone tightly against my ear, I nodded. “Yes,” I said, “I think we could tell each other lots of things.”

“I'm going to leave her. She lies to me all the time. She's a drunk. We aren't a couple anymore. We haven't been for a long time. She threatens me with all kinds of things.…” He sounded very tired. “If it weren't for Danielle—”

“She threatens you?”

“Oh, she says she'll kill herself. Or she'll take Danielle away from me. But that's mainly when she's drunk.”

“You have to do what you think is best.”

“Best for me or best for everyone?”

I hesitated, not because I didn't want to answer, but because I suddenly thought about my neighbor, Betsy, and the crossed line. I wondered if she could overhear this conversation the way I could overhear hers. And what would she be making of it?

“I like you, Tessie. I feel as if we can be friends.”

“We are friends,” I said.

“Yes,” he said, “we already are. But I want to know about you. I don't want to just talk about me. I want to learn about you.… Listen, can I call you from time to time? When I want company…”

His voice wasn't as bold, as sure of itself, as it had been. There was a slight tremor, a shaky edge that I hadn't heard before. I'd never thought of Nick as being weak when it came to emotions. He always struck me as a person who had the upper hand. But now he sounded almost afraid.

Wrapping the blanket more tightly around my legs, I found myself reassuring him. “Of course you can.”

“That's great, thanks.” He sounded relieved. “I'd really like to know you're out there if I need you. Look,” he said, “I've got to go. I'll call you soon.” Then he hung up quickly, as if someone had just walked in the room.

16

“
We really should have them
over, don't you think?” Lily said, running her hands through her hair. I was sitting at the dining room table, doing my homework while Lily perused some cookbooks. She entertained more than she used to, poring over recipes when our father was on the road. Sometimes she tried her recipes out on us, but mostly they were for guests. On counters lay open
The Joy of Cooking, The Secrets of the Italian Kitchen.
She made
canard l'orange
and
steak au poivre.
“At first I didn't want to, but now I just think we should.”

“Have who over?” Victor replied, a Cincinnati—half beer, half cream soda—in his hand, standing in the kitchen doorway.

“You know,” Lily went on, not really looking up at him, “the new family, the new people. The mother who lives with that girl over the liquor store. In Tess's class, the one she walks to school with now and then.”

“I'm not sure which girl that is,” Victor said.

“Oh, yes, you do, you know the people. I feel sorry for that girl. There's something about her. Something so sad. They are nice, actually. The mother—she has an odd name, Clarice—she works for Dr. Reiss. I've spoken with her from time to time when I call for appointments. She has the nicest things to say about Tessie. I think they're just, well, poor. Down on their luck.”

Victor pondered this while Lily made her case. “Oh, yes, I met her, didn't I, Tessie? A few weeks ago. The mother and girl who live across from the repair shop.”

“I don't think they live there anymore,” I said, looking up from my homework. “They've moved to one of those houses just past the railroad trestle.”

“Well, that's good,” Lily said. “I'm sure it's better over there.”

“And the father?” Victor asked. “Has anybody met him?”

Lily shrugged. “There doesn't seem to be a father.”

“Margaret talks about him all the time, but I've never seen him,” I offered.

“Well, I think we should invite the mother.” Lily flipped through her cookbooks, scribbling down future menus.

“So then, yes, why not. Have them over.” My father disappeared back into the kitchen with his Cincinnati.

“Don't you think we should have something small, something simple?”

“Sure,” my father called, “whatever suits you.” But something always came up and Lily never quite got around to making the phone call, inviting them over. She thought about it, the way my mother thought about everything, mulling it over, thinking it through, weighing the pros and cons, then forgot about the idea for a long, long time.

*   *   *

We lived a block or so from the railroad tracks on the south side of town. During the day when I wandered around, I liked to walk along the tracks, where I found the crushed remains of birds and squirrels. Once I found a cat cut right in two.

As soon as I crossed under the trestle, I found myself in the part of town where the houses were small and gray with front porches with broken screens, tricycles on the front lawns, laundry hung out to dry in the warmer months. The Skid Row of Winonah, my father called it.

There were smells I couldn't quite recognize but they left an oily taste in my mouth and there were garbage cans you could see, not hidden in a big bin like ours were. I don't even remember my parents ever taking out the garbage, though of course they must have, but here you could see it in cans that lined the sides of the houses, sometimes spilling over the tops. Often I saw men in uniforms coming in and out of these houses and they weren't coming to fix things, but actually lived here.

It was to this row of gray houses with battered front porches that Clarice Blair settled with Margaret a year or so after she'd arrived in Winonah. She'd taken a job as a receptionist for Dr. Reiss, a dentist who worked out west near Crestwood, and I guess she'd done well enough to move. It wasn't the house on the lake that Margaret said she'd once lived in, but it wasn't over Santini's Liquor Store either.

You could tell that Clarice had tried to fix the place up because the porch screens were repaired and she'd painted the house white. Though there wasn't any trash on her lawn and she had even planted a few pink and white flowers out front, there was plenty of trash on the lawns around hers so it seemed a little pointless. She'd tried to make the house look pretty, but it still looked shabby like the others around it, as if it were going to fall down.

Whenever Clarice or Margaret saw me walking by, they invited me inside. It seemed as if I couldn't walk down this road without being seen by one of them. I had a feeling after a while that they were waiting for me. Usually Margaret came onto the porch to greet me, then asked me to come inside and play.

The house was small and smelled like cats, but Mrs. Blair had tried to make it cozy. Pictures of dogs and flowers hung on the walls. There were toys in corners and a few potted plants by the windows and one plant I liked very much, with long, purplish-green tentacles, that hung in the kitchen and Mrs. Blair told me was called a Wandering Jew, which I thought was a strange name for a plant. “Just like you, Tessie,” Mrs. Blair said, “always wandering around.”

Whenever I stopped by, or whenever they spotted me walking and called me in, Clarice Blair always gave us milk and a plate of cookies and then Margaret would ask me to go upstairs into her room. Margaret's room was done up nicely with pink bedspreads and white curtains. But Margaret never wanted to just sit in the sun and gossip about the boys the way the rest of the gang did. Margaret had elaborate scenes she liked to act out. Pioneer sisters was one of her favorites. I was a sick sister who had to be nursed back to health and only Margaret could do this, pressing poultices to my head. She liked to save me more than she liked having me save her. She wanted me to do dramatic things that went against my nature—stagger into the room, collapse breathlessly upon the bed so she could rush to my side and lament. Once real tears coursed down her cheeks, which I thought was taking the game too far.

When we played pioneer sisters, she had calico skirts and bonnets we had to put on. Or satin and tulle skirts if we were princesses. When we were princesses, we were sentenced to the Tower and only Margaret knew how we'd escape. These games were complete with informants, guards, and go-betweens, often played by Margaret as well, and we played them as if they were not games at all, but something very real.

Before I left, Clarice Blair always made a point of telling me how much she appreciated that I was friends with Margaret; how much that meant to her. She said that Margaret hadn't had an easy time because they had moved around so much and that sometimes little girls misunderstood her. I was ashamed when Clarice Blair said these things to me and I hoped when I left the house that none of the gang would ever know I went there.

*   *   *

To get from my house to Margaret's you had to walk a block or two, then pass under the railroad trestle. It was just a viaduct. The trestle itself led to a big turnabout where engines could be turned around. Before Margaret came to Winonah, I never walked on the trestle because it was a bridge and if a train were coming, there was nowhere to go. Some of the boys—the bad boys who hung out at the Idiot's Circle, that small circle of grass at the train station where boys with nothing better to do sat and smoked and drank beer after school—raced the trains across the trestle, but no girls did. My brother Jeb came home with stories about boys who almost didn't make it, boys who'd had to make a dive for the bushes. The most I ever did was put a nickel on the tracks and see how flat it came out after the train rode over it.

But Margaret, once she'd moved from Santini's to the house near the trestle, always dared us to go with her to play there. She taunted us. She stood in the middle of the trestle, waving her arms. “What is it with you guys? You so scared?” We got tired of her taunting and agreed to go along.

The first few times we crossed the railroad trestle, we dashed across. But Margaret stood in the middle, arms akimbo, laughing her high-pitched laugh. She stood there, her black hair blowing in the breeze, her olive skin looking so sleek and smooth, and you almost had the feeling that she could stop a locomotive if one came barreling down on her.

In October we had a burst of Indian summer and the knowledge that the warmth and freshness in the air were the last hint of summer we'd have before winter set in. We wanted to take the long way home, to meander through the ravines one last time before they were filled with ice and snow. I was the only one who knew the routes the way Margaret did and together we ambled through the ravines, soaking our shoes, but we didn't care. The air was warm and the sunlight shone through the maples that had already turned gold. Scanning the ground, we searched for arrowheads but found none.

We walked until we came to Lincoln, past the library, the police station, under the trestle to where the old turnabout was. We lingered here, tossing stones, and when we looked up, we heard Margaret calling to us. “Last one across the railroad bridge gets a free milk shake.” That was always the dare, not to be the first, but the last.

Because I lived so close to the tracks, I knew the times of the trains. I could recite them in my sleep. The 8:05, the 9:32, the 10:27, and so on. I was used to the bell ringing, the gates going down. “The four twenty-four is due,” I said, but Margaret laughed and raced up the grassy embankment to the trestle. We scrambled on with her and then started to run. But in the middle we paused because Margaret had some nickels and pennies she wanted to place on the tracks. She was meticulously lining up her coins when I heard the train whistle.

“Run, Tessie,” Vicky, who was already across the railroad bridge, shouted. “Tessie, run!”

Behind me the 4:24 was barreling down. I ran as fast as I've ever run before or since. The train seemed to be gaining on me and I heard its whistle blow as if it were right inside my head. I ran perhaps only twenty yards or so before I dove for the bushes, breathless, my heart pounding.

Even as the train approached the trestle, its horn blaring, I heard that sharp, staccato laughter. That
ta-ta-ta,
almost like an opera singer during a mad scene. “Oh, Tessie,” Margaret shouted from the middle of the railroad bridge, “you looked so funny and you had it beat by a mile.”

When we turned, we saw Margaret standing there, arms outstretched, black hair waving in the breeze. Her eyes were shut tight and she seemed to be taking enormous pleasure in the moment. I shouted to her, “Margaret, run,
run!
”

When it already seemed too late, as if all were lost, she began to run. She dashed across the bridge and just as the train seemed about to run over her, its whistle blaring, she dove for the bushes. She lay there, still, and we thought she was unconscious or even dead. Blood trickled from scratches along the side of her face. Other cuts bled on her hands where she'd landed in the briars.