All American Boy (6 page)

“He is,” her mother answered.

“I can't feel him.”

“That's because he's still very small.”

“What will we name him?” Rocky asked.

“How about Peter?”

“That's Papa's name.”

“Yes. Do you think he'd like that?”

Regina leaned against her mother. “But what if it's a girl?”

“Then we wouldn't name her Peter, now would we?”

“Would we name her after you?” Regina asked.

“Maybe. We could do that.”

Regina nodded. “I want a girl.”

Mormor lived across town in an old white house covered in ivy. When she wasn't working at her diner on Main Street, she would be in her living room listening to
Stella Dallas
on the radio. A few days after they learned about the baby, Regina and Rocky went with their mother to see Mormor. Mama was being very quiet, and she'd scolded them on the way over, something she didn't often do.

“Behave at your grandmother's, please,” she said. “Don't get her upset. Just be good girls.”

Mormor
meant mother's mother in Swedish. When Mama was a girl, she had lived in the big old house on Oak Avenue with Mormor and Aunt Selma. That was back in the days when they all had just come over from Sweden to live in Brown's Mill. Regina didn't remember anyone ever talking about a man named
Morfar
, or mother's father. It was always just Mormor.

To Regina, Mormor seemed enormous. She was tall and wide and had two silver balls of hair on her head, one on top of the other. There were only a few teeth left in her mouth, so she never smiled. Mormor had arthritis in her legs, so she didn't walk around much. She just sat in her chair listening to the radio. If anyone asked her about her legs, which sometimes swelled to the size of tree stumps, she would say they had gotten so bad from all the years she had to stand waiting on customers at Britta's Lunch. Everybody used to go to Britta's for Mormor's Swedish meatballs and grilled sardine sandwiches. Mama has shown them where it was, in the place where Henry's Diner now stood, and told them how she used to work in the kitchen when she was little, peeling apples from the local orchards for Mormor's pies.

“Now, please, girls,” Mama said when they got to Mormor's house. “Stay outside and be good. Promise?”

Regina and Rocky promised. They were glad to not go inside. They much preferred Mormor's yard to the dusty echoes of her big house. Mormor had tall oak trees, knotting into each other as they crosshatched the sky, and birdhouses of all shapes and sizes, and beautiful roses growing on a trellis. Regina especially loved the roses. They were big and full, red and pink and yellow. It smelled so wonderful near the rose trellis. It smelled almost as nice as Mama's dressing table at home, with her powders and puffs and old perfume bottles.

But Mormor's voice had drifted across the afternoon. “How could you let this happen?” Their grandmother's words were deep and thick and angry in her guttural Swedish accent. “You foolish, foolish girl. As if the two you already have aren't enough to feed and clothe!”

The girls said nothing to each other. They just stood in front of the rose trellis, smelling the beautiful flowers.

“Listen to the hum,” Regina whispered.

The girls drew closer to the trellis. Behind the vines, dozens of bees droned their monotonous song. A few flew out, and the girls jumped back.

“I wish I had one of those roses to put in my hair,” Regina said, and she reached in, pricking her hand on the thorns. She pulled back in pain, shaking the trellis, and a dozen bees swarmed angrily out at her.

“That's God punishing you, Gina,” Rocky lectured her crying sister. “You almost killed Mormor's roses.”

“I just wanted one.”

Rocky shook her head. “It's just like the robins, Regina. You touch one, you kill them all.”

At the mention of the robins, Regina started to cry harder. For several seconds Rocky just stood there, watching her. Finally she put her arms around her sister and held her close, kissing the blood off her fingers.

“You've got to call an ambulance,” Mama whispered in the night. “I've hurt myself.”

Regina stood in the doorway. Her mother was on the floor, next to her bed, its linens draped over the side, as if she'd tugged on them, trying to get up. Now she held her knees to her chest, and she had blood on her hands.

Regina had awakened to the sound of her mother calling her name in the dark, the way Regina used to call to her, when she was very little and woke up from a bad dream. She had the feeling her mother had been calling for a long time.

“Just pick up the phone and tell the operator to send an ambulance,” Mama told her. “Can you do that? Just give her our address.”

“What's wrong, Mama?”

“I've hurt myself. Please do it now, Regina. Go quickly.”

Mama made a little gesture with her head, a little toss of her chin in the direction of the stairs. The sweat on her face and the blood on her hands glistened in the moonlight. Regina turned and ran.

She could hear her heart pounding in her ears. She tripped at the bottom of the stairs. She picked up the phone and held it to her ear.

“Is this the operator?”

She spoke directly over the mouthpiece, trying to be clear.

“Can you help my mother?”

Regina gave the address, and the operator made her repeat it. Then she replaced the phone on its hook and sat down on the floor, waiting for the ambulance. She pulled her knees up to her chest and held them, just as she knew Mama was doing upstairs. She thought about waking Rocky, but she didn't want to go back upstairs. She would sit on the cold wood floor and wait.

The house was very quiet. The buzz of the electricity filled Regina's ears, and she wondered why it made that noise even when everything was turned off. And she thought she heard a bird, trapped in the kitchen, but then the sound was gone.

She heard the sirens a long way off, and suddenly they were at the door, bright lights shining through the windows, illuminating the dark house. Men in white were banging against the glass. She opened the door and said calmly, “My mother's upstairs. She's hurt herself.”

The men in white ran up the stairs, and Regina followed, a small, slow figure trailing behind them.

“Get a stretcher,” one man called, and Regina looked past him, into Mama's room. Mama had fallen over on to her side, and Regina could see more blood under her now. Rocky had walked out of the bedroom, rubbing her eyes. A man led her downstairs. Regina walked over and sat by her mother.

“Mama?”

Her mother's face was against the floor. Her eyes were closed.

“Mama, I did like you said.”

They came in with the stretcher.

“Where's your father, little girl?” one of the men asked her.

“We don't have one.”

“How about grandparents?”

“A grandmother.”

“Why don't you go down and call her?”

“Will my mother be all right?”

They lifted her up on to the stretcher. Blood dripped to the floor. “Don't look, honey,” the man said. “Go downstairs and call your grandma.”

It was only after they left, when Regina started to clean the room, that she found the wire and the bloody bundle. That's when Mormor got there with Aunt Selma and ordered her to her room.

“I'll take them for a few days,” Aunt Selma is saying, “but Axel isn't good with children, you know that, Mother. Especially not
girls
.”

Mormor sits at the head of the table, with the radio on a stand next to her. She raises her hand to silence Aunt Selma as she listens to the end of Stella Dallas's travails this week.

“Mother, please, Axel is very upset. We can't afford—”

Regina and Rocky stare at their plates. They are pretending not to hear. Regina cannot eat the roast beef on her plate. It is too runny, too red.

“Eat your meat, Regina,” Mormor says in her heavy accent.

“Mother—”

“Selma, you'll do what is required,” Mormor says, cutting her off. “Your sister is dead. And I'm an old woman with arthritis in my legs.”

Aunt Selma makes a face. “I just want to know where
he
is. He does have
some
responsibilities in this.
Two
of them, to be exact.”

Mormor holds up her hand again, listening to the opening theme of the next serial.

“I'm not hungry,” Regina whispers.

“Eat your meat, Regina,” Mormor says, turning to her, “or else you'll end up with arthritis, too.”

Last spring a robin had built a nest in the wisteria that grew along their house just outside the back door. Every morning Regina, Rocky, and their mother would watch the robin bringing straw and twigs, fashioning together a safe little bed, hidden among the ivy. One day they stood on a stool and peeked into the leaves to see two tiny blue eggs in the nest.

“The baby robins are inside those eggs,” their mother told them. “But we mustn't touch them or else the mother will fly away and leave them all alone.”

Regina was very disturbed by this. “But then they'd die, Mama. Who would bring them worms?”

“No one, Regina. So we must never touch them.”

One day the baby birds hatched and Regina could hear their constant chirping all day long. The mother flew in and out of the leaves.

Regina and Rocky stood on the stool looking in at the babies, their beaks open, tiny heads turned up. Somewhere in the bushes the mother bird screeched.

“Come on, Gina,” Rocky said, “we're making the mother afraid.”

But Regina wasn't listening. She reached in and cupped one of the babies in her hand.

Rocky screamed and pushed her sister from the stool. “You can't touch them!” The baby bird fell, fluttered for a moment on the ground, and then was still. Regina began to cry.

“Gina touched them!” Rocky screamed to her mother. “She touched the baby birds!” Their mother stood in the doorway and her eyes filled with tears.

“Come into the house, girls. There's nothing we can do now.”

The mother bird flew in once and then she was gone. She didn't come back to the nest. The remaining baby cried all through the day. Finally Mama went out and brought the nest inside. They fed the baby apple juice with an eyedropper. They put it in a warm spot in the kitchen. During the night Regina could hear it chirping, sometimes frantic, sometimes irregular. In the morning the bird was dead in its nest.

“But I only touched one,” Regina said between sobs. “Why did the mother leave
this
one?”

Mama didn't know what to say. Rocky looked at her sister, choking with hatred, and explained what seemed to her to be absolutely common sense:

“You touch one, you kill them all.”

Mama bundled the baby bird in a cloth and took it outside. She was crying, too.

Now they are back at Mormor's house by the roses. The roses smell beautiful, and the bees are dancing around the vines, humming a more varied tune today, up and down and swirling through the air. Regina and Rocky are looking into the roses, not speakinging.

Regina is thinking about the weak little gesture Mama had made with her head, when she told her to run for help. She's thought about that a lot. It bothers her more than the blood. It was the last thing Mama ever did.

A long time passes.

Regina says, “I want to kill these roses.”

“Yes,” says Rocky, “I do, too.”

They grab the flowers in their fists, squashing them and pulling their heads from the vine. Petals flutter to the ground like snowflakes. Rocky grinds them into the dirt with her heel. Regina continues to pull at the vine, ripping the roses and their leaves, mindless of the thorns and her bloody hands. The bees dive angrily at them. The girls simply swat them away, intent on their work. They keep pulling and ripping at the flowers until every last one of them is gone. A blanket of crushed petals lies at their feet.

They see Mormor leaning on her cane in the doorway, looking at what they've done. They see her mouth open into a large, angry O. Regina doesn't care. She hears her grandmother shouting at them, ordering them inside to account for their behavior, telling them what bad girls they are. Regina runs. She doesn't think. She just keeps running. She runs out of the yard and down the street. She runs past St. Peter's Lutheran Church, where Mama used to take them. She runs onto Main Street and then right through the busy intersection of Washington Avenue, a bus driver leaning on his horn at her. Right past Henry's Diner she runs, right past the town hall, past the Palace movie theater and St. John the Baptist Roman Catholic Church, which has always scared her with its black-robed priests and heavy smells of incense. Into the tall grass of Devil's Hopyard she runs, where she finally collapses, her legs feeling as if they'll snap right off.

Only then does she turn to see that Rocky was behind her the whole way. They roll into each other's arms and cry for a long, long time.

Aunt Selma doesn't go to the funeral. She stays home to watch her sister's girls.

“Sit here and eat your oatmeal,” she tells them. She is dressed all in black. “I don't want you to move from those chairs. I want to say good-bye to your Mama. They're going to drive her by here after the church. I'm going to watch from the front door.”

“Can we watch, too, Aunt Selma?” Rocky asks.

“No. I don't want you to remember your Mama in a hearse.”

They don't know what a hearse is. Aunt Selma goes to the front door. They sit and drink their milk. It is a quiet morning, except for the birds chirping outside. The girls do not talk. Rochelle starts to hum. Regina fidgets.

“I have to go to the bathroom,” Regina says softly.

“Aunt Selma said we can't move from these chairs.”

“I have to go to the bathroom,” Regina says again.