Anywhere But Here (49 page)

“Ogh,” Carol said, “I don’t know.”

My mother shook her head. “She never appreciates anything. And he has nice taste, you know?”

Hal came back, in the flippers, stepping carefully between boxes and wrapping paper. Benny looked up at him; he was sitting in a big chair with his legs dangling down, quiet because he hadn’t been given anything yet. Benny would get the flippers, though, he got all Hal’s equipment, a few months later, when Hal never used it.

Carol passed Jimmy a small red box and he pulled the ribbon off slowly and let it flutter to the floor. His lips closed as tight as a berry and his cheeks puffed out. What Jimmy wanted and believed he deserved couldn’t fit into this box.

Jimmy was our big spender. The Measer, he called himself at Christmas. Every year he waited until the day of Christmas Eve and then he went out and used cash. That year, he’d gone to Shopko and the downtown Shreve’s. He’d bought a dishwasher for Carol. It had come in a truck early that afternoon. Jimmy had made it perfectly clear that what he wanted for himself was a new black Easy-boy chair with a lever to adjust the seat back’s angle. But he’d snooped around the house and he hadn’t found it anywhere.

His cheek trembled when he lifted the white cardboard lid and
saw the watch. The watch looked expensive enough to mean that it, and not the chair, was his big present for the year.

“Carol, I already have a watch. You know that, Carol.”

“Jimmy, I know you have a watch but I thought … here, let me show you, this has an alarm on it. Where are the instructions? He told me at the store how to do it, but—”

“I don’t need an alarm on my wristwatch.”

My grandmother shook her head and opened her own purse. She passed out sealed envelopes with ironed five-dollar bills to Dorie and Diane. She called Benny and me to come sit next to her and our heads pressed together in the small circle of light. Under the lamp, her unpolished fingernails looked yellowish like pearls. She showed us the new green entries stamped in our savings books. She had an account at the bank for each of us. “See the interest,” she pointed, her fingernail tapping the paper. “You’re each collecting interest.”

Carol was whimpering now, wiping tears with the cuff of her sleeve. “Take those fins off and help me, Hal. Jimmy, I just thought you’d like another watch. At the water softener store, and all over, they said this was the newest thing. And you know you always like the newest thing.” She leaned over, scattering the crumpled wrapping paper on the floor, still looking for the instructions to set the alarm.

My mother pressed tiny bottles of perfume into the orphans’ hands. “It’s what I wear, smell.” She pushed her wrist up near their faces and they both bent down, sniffing her arm like puppies nursing.

I went over and stood by Benny. He swung his legs below the chair. His parents were fighting and they hadn’t noticed him. Then, Jimmy saw.

“What’s the matter, Benny, you didn’t get anything from Santa Claus? Look, Ann’s comforting him because Benny hasn’t got any presents.”

Carol stood in the doorway, shaking her head while she zipped up her jacket.

“No,” Benny said. He looked down, afraid of his father. I could tell from the way his cheeks went, he was about to cry.

“You just weren’t good enough, that’s the trouble, Ben. I don’t know any other reason that Santa’d forget you. Lookit, Annie’s got presents and these two, Diane and I’m sorry, what’s your name? They both got presents. What happened to you?”

“Dorie,” Dorie said quietly.

Jimmy’s voice grew. “You must’ve been bad.”

Then, Carol and Hal struggled in, carrying the enormous Easy-boy chair. It had been in my grandmother’s garage, next to the old lawn mower.

“Oh, Carol,” Jimmy sighed. His relief seemed great enough to almost equal happiness. They lifted the chair in place and Jimmy sank into it, working the lever, cranking himself up and down.

Now, Carol took out her handkerchief and blew her nose. “Oh, Jimmy, I’m so glad you like something I got you this Christmas.” Carol always carried ironed handkerchiefs and she had unfolded a white one, embroidered with green and red holly.

Jimmy leaned down and picked up the wristwatch. “You’ll have to show me how to use this alarm.” He buckled it onto his arm.

My grandmother stood up stamping her feet. “It’s getting to be time for B-E-D.”

Benny was still sitting, clutching the arms of his chair. Jimmy maneuvered the Easy-boy to an upright position. “Oh, listen, Ben, would you do me one favor?” He tossed Benny a set of keys. “Would you go and look in the garage for me? I think I left something there. By mistake.”

Benny’s face flew into an anxious happiness and he ran out through the breeze way. Then he came back, letting the garage door slam and lunging into Jimmy’s arms. I hated to see them like that, pasted to each other, as if you couldn’t pull Benny off if you tried.

“Here, you sit down a minute, Carol,” Jimmy said, giving her his chair. He followed Benny. The two of them ran into the garage and we heard the motor putting. When the rest of us left, to walk back over to our house, Benny was still in the garage, riding around in circles on his dirt bike. And when we came to our porch, the broken cookies and the box of C & H sugar cubes, which had been under the light, were gone.

I stood at the window and watched Benny’s garage, the chalky yellow light seeping out of the seams. I wanted it to be dark again. I heard my grandmother walking through our house, turning off lights. My mother came into our room, slipping her hand underneath my pajama top, and telling me it was time to go to sleep. She led me away from the window and pulled down the shade. I lay banked and quiet on the bed, only breathing, not moving otherwise, trying to feel nothing but her fingernails on my back. The sensations were black, delicious the way a cut can be.

It seemed it would have been easy to die like that, doing nothing, feeling nothing but pleasure, like underwater sounds or lights inside the dark bowls of closed eyes.

But I knew that it would always end and I would need it again and wanting it so made me smaller. After she left, going into her closet and pulling on the light or down to the kitchen to call Lolly, I couldn’t summon and recall the pleasure I’d just felt. I couldn’t remember pleasure and that was why I needed it so often and succumbed, again and again.

Because it was not easy anymore. The night my mother pushed my pajama top down off my shoulders and felt the soft hairs under my arms, I became less than a baby, a blob, a primitive living thing she could do anything to as long as she fed me with tickles. She liked to pull off the sheet, push down my pajama pants and pat my buttocks, they clenched at her touch. She wanted to look at me and blow air on my tummy with the full pride of possession. She kissed me on the lips and I shirked. When her hand reached down to the elastic of my pajama pants, I stiffened and bucked away from her. “Don’t.”

“I don’t know why not,” she said. “Why won’t you let me look, you’ve got such a cute, twussy little patutie. Can’t I be proud of your little body that I made?” When she stared at me like that, it seemed she could take something, just by looking.

“Could you talk like an adult, please.”

She sighed. I was already beginning to accept the back rubs I needed, with one eye open, guarding myself from my mother taking too much.

I thought of the orphans in the upstairs attic room. They didn’t belong to anyone. The nuns had clean dry hands, light on the tops of our heads. I knew nuns.

“Well, good night then,” my mother said.

A swallow of cold air came in when she opened the door and left. I thought of the orphanage, worn sheets, the one rough blanket, how in winter they may crawl into a bunk together, both girls thin and dry, one of them might wet the bed.

The next day, at noon, the orphans were served enormous portions, as if they had been underfed all year and this was our one chance to make up for it. During a lull in the conversation, my mother suggested that our family sell the land behind my grandmother’s house. That started an argument—my mother against everyone else.

It was an old fight. My mother suggested we put the barn on the market and everyone else started screaming. We kids all were sent to the downstairs bedroom, where we balanced our plates on our knees and tried to cut without tipping them. Dorie and Diane sat with their shoulders touching, making quiet references to the nuns, and to some other girl at the orphanage, as if to remind themselves they had a life.

Before, I’d thought Dorie might have scrubbed her fingernails clean in the cement-floored bathroom to impress us, with her manners, her pleasantness, with how little trouble she would be. She might have lulled herself to sleep thinking of flaky yellow light in a kitchen. But it seemed she was just now understanding that her private wish would not be realized, not only because we would not keep her, but because we were not a family she would want. They both seemed tired, anxious to leave.

In the kitchen, my mother was shouting. “I don’t want to be stuck here all my life! I CAN’T LIVE LIKE THIS!”

“Adele, it doesn’t have sewer and water. What do you think we could get for it now?”

Dorie spilled a cranberry on the white chenille bedspread. She looked up at us with terror, holding the berry between two fingers.

“Don’t worry, we won’t tell,” I said. Benny reached down care
fully to get his milk from the floor. We didn’t look at each other. None of us said anything. We just waited, eating as if eating was our duty.

Then Benny mumbled something.

“What?” I said. We were all jumpy.

“Salty. This turkey’s salty.”

Dorie and Diane walked upstairs to get their brown bag of clothes. Their beds were neatly made. It was as if they’d never been here. Their presents lay on top of the dresser, with the wrapping paper folded underneath.

“Can we leave these here?” Dorie said. “If you could keep them for us, because if we bring them back to Saint Luke’s, they’ll just get stolen.”

“Yeah, someone’ll take them for sure,” Diane said. “They take everything.”

“Took a necklace watch I had from my mother.”

“Okay,” I said, and then we waited in the backseat of our car. When my mother finally came, she was sniffling and she didn’t say a word to us. She slammed the door shut and started driving. I pressed my cheek against the window, knowing as sure as I knew anything that these two girls would never come back to our house to get their presents. My aunt Carol would probably keep them and rewrap them for next year’s orphans. They would wait in her closet of all-purpose gifts.

I looked over at Dorie and Diane. I wondered if they knew the minute they stepped out of our house that they would never come back, if they’d already forgotten their presents on the upstairs dresser, or if they kept complicated accounts, cataloging their possessions, remembering the names of the streets they would return to when they left the orphanage, to collect the things that would help them in their new lives.

Their faces told me nothing. They were closed and solemn as if they were counting to themselves.

One night, the last summer we lived on Lime Kiln Road, Hal and his friend Dave drove Benny and me out to Bay Beach. It was a night when the air was moist, almost beginning to rain. I felt a
mouth of wet like a kiss on my arm and then nothing as we walked through the crowds looking up at the lighted rides, and I waited, expecting it again.

Hal had money to buy tickets for Benny and me. They came ten for a dollar in a long green paper string. Benny and I wanted the Ferris wheel, we always wanted the Ferris wheel, and while the man strapped us in, with the old soft wooden bar, Hal and Dave stood at the fence.

We went slowly at first, our hands light on the bar, as the car tilted back and forth gently. Other people were still getting in, their bars snapped shut, it wasn’t really going yet. Then it started, lifting up from under in one cool swoop of wind and we were swinging at the top, stretching, the tilt knocking air out of us. On the way down, falling softly, all the lighted small houses came closer and more real and then the next time up was faster and faster until it was like breathing, our air sucked in and out, our eyes opening and closing, the blur of landscape and lights and dark trees, and our nails biting into the soft gray wood until, finally, our car coasted down. The man swung open the bar and we walked out, dizzy and light, down the runway, where Hal and Dave stood ready to take our hands and lead us through the dark paths. We were happy to follow then, everything was shaken out of us.

We walked to the pavilion, a damp dim building where we weren’t allowed, but Hal knew the way we were, half asleep and happy, we would never tell. There was a big barn door at one end that exhaled a breath of water. The bay started right there, down old wooden steps, cold and deep and dirty in one smell.

Girls and sailors moved on the dance floor, the boys in full white uniform, with hats. More sailors leaned on the refreshment bar that sold hot dogs and Nehi Orange. There was something about those girls. It was their dark lips, the glitter on their ears; their hair was not like our hair, it was thick and it swept up, and their legs looked tiny in their shoes. Dave took me on his back and Hal had Benny’s hand as we went through the crowd. We could have been lost but we trusted them.