Anywhere But Here (30 page)

We woke up late and dizzy the next morning. The sun felt high and generous, soaking the white curtains and softening the corners of the room. Lilacs seemed to beat against the screens.

“Where did he go?” I asked my mother. We were tucking a corner of the white chenille bedspread into the dark wooden frame. Together we bunched the cloth down, her hands pressing over mine.

“He’s gone,” my mother said.

“For how long?”

“Oh, I don’t know.” A string of hummingbirds moved on the lilac bush outside, where someone had tied a red scarf. Flies in slow orbits hit against the screens. My mother started ironing. All her summer clothes that year were seersucker and cotton.

“He’s gone to California to make us money,” she said. “But he’ll be coming back.”

“When?”

For a moment, her mouth wavered and her face began to lift. Her hands stalled on the iron. She picked up a blouse, held it across her shoulders and then took it to the closet. There was a row of empty hangers. Her chin snapped back into a straight line and she began pushing the iron again, over the perforated pink and white fabric.

“I don’t know,” she said.

I sat on the floor, waiting. She ironed carefully, starting every blouse at the collar. When the last one was hung up and buttoned again, I asked her what we were going to do.

She didn’t answer. She turned off the iron and looked out the window, her hand resting on the dresser. “What, Honey?” she asked a moment later.

“I said, what are we going to do today.”

She yawned. “I don’t know. I’m a little tired, how about you?” She reached out her hand and found mine. We stood there a moment and then she sat on the bed. “Come on up, let’s just close our eyes a minute.”

We lay there on our backs. It was where she’d slept with him.

Before we went to sleep, my mother hummed one of my father’s tunes. My father wanted to be a songwriter. That was why he’d gone to California. People told him he was a handsome Arab. He thought he could make money in the movies. As far as I know, songwriting was the only one of his aspirations to remain constant for most of his twenties. Later on, he gave up on music, too.

After my father left, my mother and I slept in the same bed. My mother would slide under the sheet, in her slip that she slept in, and tuck her hands under my arms to get warm. That year, my mother went to bed with me after supper and when I crawled out in the morning, she was still asleep. My grandmother and I tiptoed around the house until noon, when she woke up, and then we were quiet again after four, when my mother took her naps.

The three of us drank large quantities of milk. Our milkman delivered two cold bottles every morning. African violets on the mantelpiece thrived, perhaps because my grandmother and I stopped several times a day to check the moisture of their soil with our fingers. The house seemed to stay effortlessly clean.

And while my mother rested, my grandmother and I stole out of the house on expeditions, to see the maple syrup tapped out of trees in fall, to feed ducks and geese cans of corn at the Wildlife Preservation Center in winter, to search in spring for trilliums and wild violets in the fields. Perhaps my grandmother and I could have lived like that forever, moving quietly, playing, she on top of the kitchen table with her cards, me underneath with my colors; but by summer, my mother regained her strength. We watched it happen. One day she stopped taking naps. The next week she didn’t go to bed with me after supper. And by that time, she was already bored.

She enrolled the two of us in figure skating classes Saturday evenings. She bought us matching short dresses made of stretch fabric and skin-colored tights. The rink seemed silent, the only sound was a humming, like the inside of a refrigerator. The ice was divided into eight rectangular patches and my mother and I shared one.

We concentrated, our necks bent over like horses’, as we followed the lines our blades made. My skates had double runners. Then, at eight o’clock, scratchy music started up on the PA system and we free-skated, wild around the rink.

“This is how you really lose the pounds,” my mother called, slapping her thigh, “skating fast.”

A man did a T-stop in front of her, shaving a comet of ice into the air. They skated off together, while I stood there, wiping the melting ice from my face. That was the first time we saw Ted.

When the music stopped, my mother pulled me over to the barrier, where we ran our skate tips into the soft wood.

“See, when you’re older, you can bring a boy you’re dating here to see you skate. He can watch you and think, hey, she’s not just another pretty girl. She can really do something.” She nodded up to the rows of empty seats. They were maroon velvet, with the plush worn down in the centers. My mother looked at me with a slanted gaze as if, through a crack, she could see what I’d become. I knew what I wanted to be: I wanted to be just like her.

But my mother felt restless, waiting. We drove slowly through the winding streets of the good neighborhoods by the river, her friend Lolly from college in the front seat. We ate soft ice cream cones which melted fast, the chocolate dripping down our shirts.

“Boy, wouldn’t you love to live there?” my mother said, slamming on the brakes.

Behind a long dark lawn stood a house with white pillars. “But, go on, Lolly.”

They spoke in low voices. “Who would have thought, here in Bay City? Would you, the next time, I mean, before the, shall-we-say, ring? You know what I mean?”

“I know what you mean. And I think I would,” my mother said.

“And so do I know what you mean,” I yelled from the backseat, although of course I didn’t. I just felt left out and I wanted them to stop.

They sipped coffee outside on the back porch. I pretended to be taking apart a lady’s slipper, studying it, setting the soft red
pieces out on the boards between my legs, so they wouldn’t think I was listening. They were talking about how many times a week Lolly should wash her hair and how many shampooings per wash.

My mother sighed and looked out over the fields. Serrated red and yellow leaves stuck in the grass, and all the corn was down.

“So have you heard anything from, a-hem, California?”

My mother didn’t talk for a while. I didn’t dare look at her. I moved the stem of the lady’s slipper up and down on my palm. My father had been gone for two years.

“Ann, go inside and watch TV with Mom,” she said finally. “Go sit and keep her company.”

I dragged my slippers on the boards. They were quiet until I was gone. My mother had both hands around her coffee cup and she stared down into it, blowing. The living room was dim because all the curtains were closed. I sat on the floor next to my grandmothers legs.

I liked the smell of nylon stockings. They were everywhere in our house: hanging from the shower curtain rod, brushing my face in the bathroom, tucked in the top drawers of dressers next to silver cases of lipsticks, which, at that time, had their own rich waxy smell. The stockings smelled different with legs inside the nylon, they smelled like something burnt.

“Well, now, let’s get up and do something,” my grandmother said, at the commercial. “Not just S-I-T in front of the TV all day. Should we drive out to the cemetery and water? We can stop at the dairy on the way and you can get your chocolate milk.”

“Okay, Gramma,” I said.

While my grandmother backed the Oldsmobile out of the garage, I stood on the porch, listening to my mother and Lolly again.

“And so he said, he said to me, Well, come on, Adele, you’ve been married before. Let’s try and see if we like it. Like it? I said, Like it? Well, what happens if I don’t?”

My mother and Lolly bent over, hugging their knees, laughing. A hawk drifted in the sky.

“Why is that funny?” I said. “Will someone please tell me what’s so funny about that?”

They looked at each other and laughed some more. I started walking to my grandmother’s car, my hands trembling at my sides.

“It’s something that’s only funny for grown-ups,” my mother called.

I slammed the door and then turned, smiled at my grandmother. The tin cans we used for watering at the cemetery rattled in the backseat. I was glad we were going because I didn’t want my grandmother to stay inside all day and get pale and soft like an old person. She thought she was taking me for my benefit. Neither of us imagined that we were the one in any trouble.

Once, when he was still at home with us, my father tried to mow the lawn. In the morning, he left from the back door, with his black case of vacuum cleaners and vacuum cleaner attachments. My father was a salesman then. He loaded the trunk of the car, our Valiant, the color of root beer Popsicles.

The lawn mower was a piece of furniture, orange metal like a tractor. It was the kind you sat on and rode. Grass sprayed off in a fountain from one side.

My cousin Benny stood on the driveway, bare-legged, fidgeting by the lawn mower. Even as a child, he was always moving. When he had to wait for us, he’d go out in the backyard, with a stick as tall as he was, spinning, and you could run up to him and clap your hands and he wouldn’t hear. He was blond as an unlit wick.

“You wanna ride?” Benny’s sneaker stuck up against the orange metal, bracing to pull the cord. Jimmy Measey walked out of the garage carrying a tin can of oil. It was still on the ground, empty, after.

“Me?” My father’s fingers opened on his chest, lightly. He’d been in Wisconsin five years. In Egypt, where he came from, they had no lawns.

Just then the metal of the screen door rang. My grandmother walked outside with a hoe and a white cotton glove. She wore men’s clothes, overalls, plaid shirt, a different plaid scarf. Since her husband died, she’d begun to get up early and she had taken to wearing his clothes.

My father wavered. Jimmy Measey told me later he was trying to impress my grandmother.

“Sure,” my father said. He looked down at Benny, touched the chalky yellow of his hair. My father was always sorry I wasn’t blond. I looked like him, not my mother. “Would you like to ride along?”

“Can’t. Only one person at a time.”

“All right.”

“Here’s the gas, here’s the brake,” Jimmy Measey explained, swiveling the wheel.

Benny snapped the cord and my father shot off, his backbone a ruler, taking the ride hard. He went in one straight line. All of a sudden, the velvety grass turned bumpy. My father’s hand waved, the arm flapping back behind him.

“Hey, get off, slam the brake!” Benny’s yell scratched a sharp red line on the sky. I saw it years, a long time, after.

“Jump off,” Jimmy Measey said, running after the lawn mower. “Jump.”

No one understood what my father was yelling, and he went through the hedge, crashing corn stalks. Finally he fell off. Silky corn hair stuck on his collar when Jimmy Measey caught up to him, on the ground. The mower was still going, towards the barn. Benny chased it. My mother started out of the house then, her high heels catching in the grass.

“I don’t know why you didn’t just slug on the brake.” Jimmy Measey demonstrated, crushing a corncob under his boot, even though my father was walking, towards the house and my mother. Jimmy Measey felt impatient to go, he was late. He liked to drive to Bob’s Big Boy on the highway before work and order coffee and unbuttered toast. He liked to sit at the counter and hear the other voices, familiar and unfamiliar at the same time. He’d made a rule for himself, to be in the water softener store by ten. Jimmy Measey was a salesman, too. But he never left. He might have looked at cars on the highway overpass, wishing he were a stranger in one of the small windows, going west. But even in imagination, he always returned, back to Lime Kiln Road.

“What have they done to you?” my mother screamed, but my
father shrugged her off his elbow and walked ahead fast and alone.

Benny rode the mower in, his sneakers bouncing up off the sides. Benny loved machines.

Jimmy Measey’s hands rocked my shoulders, tilting me back. “You miss your dad, don’t you? You miss your daddy, I can feel that in you.” We stood outside, by a fire, burning leaves. Jimmy Measey was behind me, I felt all his weight. Benny stood there too, impatient to move, his blue sneaker pawing the ground. Smoke poured into the sky.