Anywhere But Here (14 page)

A long time ago, once, my mother drove me far, I don’t know where it was, to a brick hospital, just the two of us. It was on a long lawn, like the dairy, a low, brick building that went on as far as you could see. We parked in the parking lot in back. My mother told me she had to have a test for TB. I was young enough to misunderstand.

“For TV? For TV?” I kept saying. “You have to have a test for TV?”

“No,” she said. She was distracted.

I had to wait, sitting in the lobby on a chair, while she went somewhere else. A long time later, she came out in a wheelchair, a nun in a white habit pushing it behind her. “Come on, Ann,” she said, without turning her head to me. The nun didn’t say anything; they both looked forward. I hurried up to go and ran a little to keep next to them. The nun left us for a moment in a long hallway. There were glass showcases on both walls. I held on to a small piece of my mother’s sleeve.

“See, I’ll have to come and live here,” she said. She looked at the handiwork in the cases and sighed. “I guess I’ll learn how to knit and crochet and make things like that. That won’t be so bad. I suppose I’ll like it after a while.”

She looked down at her hands and smiled.

“What about me?” I said it quietly, almost a whisper, and just then a huge roaring started in my head.

“You’ll get used to it. I won’t be able to take care of you anymore, I’ll be too weak. But I’ll knit something for you, maybe a sweater. You can come and visit. Mmhmm. I think I’ll knit you a sweater.”

The nun came back and said, “We’ll have the results on Thursday.” Thursday, Thursday stuck in my mind, a purple word.

The nun wheeled my mother to a cement ramp outside the building. My mother stood up and took her purse from next to her on the wheelchair. It was a white patent leather purse with gold clasps. We started walking to our car. My mother looked back, once, at the nun in her white habit, the veil moving a little in the breeze as she turned. The roaring was still in my head, in back
of one ear, and I didn’t say anything. It was spring that day, there were irises and daffodils planted along the edges of the hospital lawns. There was a watery breeze like on Easter. My mother drove home and never mentioned any of it again.

I was sitting on my bed, watching television. My mother came into the room. “Oh, there you are, I called you, didn’t you hear me.” She rubbed away a tear with a cuff. “You scared me. You know yesterday I was watching you from his sliding glass doors, and you were just standing there on that long grass by the sidewalk, you weren’t even in the nice garden, sort of shuffling your sneakers on the ground, in that jacket, with your hands in your pockets and your head down. I saw you looking like that, unhappy, sluffing around like a little old man, and I thought, nothing is worth it, you’re my jewel. Honest, Honey, you are. You’re my absolute precious, long-limbed jewel. I have to get you somewhere they can see you.” Her face folded and she started crying. “In that plain old jacket, with your head down, kicking, I thought to myself, here’s this beautiful, long-limbed girl with potential stuck in a nothing town. You look like a boy in those jeans and that scruffy jacket, some boy at a gas station in some nowhere place.”

One day, I came home from school and the house was furnished. It had everything. I walked from room to room, switching on lamps and sitting on sofas. I ran my hands over the polished tablet ops. The house had still been empty that morning.

When my mother came home she explained that it was only rented and temporary. She didn’t like the blue and green color scheme, but it was the best they had. She and Ted wanted to invite the family over for Thanksgiving.

For three days we shopped. Ted went to work every morning, as usual, but my mother and I drove to the country to buy pumpkins. We placed orders at butchers’ and bakeries. My mother said she’d give me a note for school saying I was sick.

My mother’s sister Carol lifted her eyebrows, her hands modest in her lap, counting the different kinds of forks and knives fanning out on both sides of her plate, while her husband Jimmy started a story. All of Jimmy’s stories were about sex or machines. The same thing with his jokes.

“This widow was lonely,” he was saying, “so she goes to her husband’s grave and digs up his you-know-what and nails it in her bedroom so it sticks up through the floor. She makes a little trapdoor for it, so, during the day, she can put it down. You know, for company.”

“Oh, Jimmy, not with the kids here.” Then she looked at me and laughed. “You know, you just can’t stop him.” Carol was eleven years older than my mother. She looked like a country woman, with her tight curls and undistinguished color of brown hair.

My grandmother shook her head as if she’d just tasted something bitter. “I don’t like to hear such stuff.” Her voice thumped like the weight of her footsteps when she walked around her house at night.

My mother carried in a pewter soup tureen. She bent over the candles, serving. The soup was from fancy cans we’d bought in the gourmet department of Shreve’s, cans imported from France. “It’s madrilene,” she announced. Jimmy was rolling back his sleeves, still telling his story, but in a softer voice. Jimmy had respect for a few things. One of them was food.

He winked. “And so another guy, a neighbor, he catches on. He looks through her window one night and sees. So he goes in the next day with a saw and a shovel and two-by-fours and he builds himself a little room under the floor where her husband’s thing is. He throws that out.”

“He doesn’t bury it properly?” My cousin Hal carefully unfolded his napkin on his lap, over his knees. Hal was thin and straight, all right angles. You could tell Hal hated his father.

“Okay, say he buries it.”

“So,” my mother said, sitting down. She smiled and slowly lifted a spoonful of soup to her lips.

“The house looks very nice, oh, so much better,” Carol said.

“Every night, he crawls into his spot and he’s ready. And so they do it. And this goes on a few months. And then one night, she comes with a knife”—and Jimmy lifted one of his own knives, the butter knife, for emphasis—“and she goes, okay, Harry, come on, we’re moving. I bought us a new house.”

“Dad,” Hal said.

“They’re at it again.” Carol’s head twitched back and forth, resigned.

“No more now,” my grandmother said. “You had to have your one, so now you’ve had it.”

Jimmy Measey was still laughing, sputtering, repeating the gesture with his knife. “Come on, you’re going to a new house, fella.”

He looked over at Benny, who was pretending to smile like he understood. Benny got this smile whenever his dad looked at him, a thin smile you felt you could wipe off with a rag. When Benny was little, his father used to tease him around other people. Once we were sitting at a restaurant, out for steak dinners. Jimmy kept telling Benny how good chopped sirloin was, how that was what he should really want, how nothing in the world was as delicious as chopped sirloin. Jimmy thought that was wildly funny, tricking Benny out of his steak, making fun of him for not knowing the names. Benny had that same wan smile then, when the whole family was laughing, as a waiter set down his hamburger. Benny was afraid of his father.

“What’s this, tomato broth?” Jimmy said.

“It’s madrilene,” Ted said quietly, looking down.

“Yeah. S’good.” Jimmy speared a lemon slice with his fork. “Now what am I sposed to do with this?”

Carol nudged him. “Just leave it, Jimmy. Leave it on your plate.”

Hal smiled deliberately at my mother.

The next two courses came on small, hand-painted plates. Everyone finished the endive salad and the salmon mousse before my mother. She smiled and talked, eating slowly, looking at each bite before she put the fork in her mouth. She was really enjoying
herself. It made me happy. Then Ted cleared the small plates and followed my mother into the kitchen.

“Don’t you want us to hold on to our forks, Del?” Carol was asking.

My mother shouted back. “No, there’s plenty clean. Just look to the left of your plate.”

I brought out the pâté, each plate garnished with a limp-stemmed violet from the refrigerator. We’d paid fifty cents each for them at Debago’s nursery.

Jimmy looked at his watch. “It’s been almost two hours and all she’s done is make me hungry.”

When I set down their plates, Carol and my grandmother giggled and shook their heads. Jimmy lifted his violet. In his big hand it looked like a specimen, something dead.

“Addie, what’s this flower for? Am I supposed to eat it?” he yelled into the kitchen.

“Shhh,” I said.

My grandmother frowned. “It’s like those fancy little butters you two used to get from the factory, such little portions,” she whispered.

Then my mother glided in and they all hushed. She was beaming. Ted stood behind her, pulling out her chair. She still thought her dinner was a success. I looked at her cheeks, high and proud, and I bent over and started eating my pâté. It tasted delicious. I felt like telling her people laughed. They were hungry. But it was so good and she was happy. Why couldn’t they just wait?

“So, tell me, how is your work, Adele? How do you like the new school?”

My mother sighed. Whenever my grandmother asked her questions, she sighed and she slumped back into her chair. “Well, Mom, I don’t like that drive out there every day in my old car with the window that doesn’t roll up. Ann knows. But these administrators are bright, just out of college, most of them. It’s a good team.” She looked down at her hands on the tablecloth. “I have plenty to do this weekend still. Those darn reports. Ann, maybe tomorrow we’ll drive downtown to the library and both just work.”

Jimmy Measey was talking to Ted about moving the water softener store to Three Corners, because they were tearing up the road for the new highway.

Ted never talked about his own work at all, as if he were embarrassed. I didn’t blame him. It didn’t exactly seem like a job. My mother once told me Ted was an orphan.

My mother rustled in her chair and stood up. “Ted, could you please come in and carve? And Ann, would you mind taking our plates?” We both stood up beside her, the family. I felt behind us they were laughing at the way we did things. It seemed unbearable for my mother not to know. She was trying so hard.

In the kitchen, I tugged her arm. “Mom, I think they’re really hungry. It’s getting late.”

“Well, I hope they’re hungry.” She’d stepped out of her shoes and she was leaning with both hands on Ted’s shoulder, watching as he cut. “Oh, it’s perfect. Just pink enough. Per-fecto. Honey, you take the bread basket out. Go.”

“It’s prettinear ten o’clock. Ugh, I don’t like to eat so late.” My grandmother smiled at me then, as if it were all right to complain about my mother. I was supposed to know she didn’t mean me too. But I felt so sorry for my mother. I wanted them all to leave, before she knew anything.

“Ta-da,” my mother said, setting down the platter of sliced steak and new potatoes. Her face stalled, waiting for compliments.

“Well, that looks very good,” my grandmother said.

“Adele, you don’t mean to tell me that after all this time, we’re not even going to get a turkey,” Jimmy said, laughing but not really.

My mother looked around the table at each of us as if the lights were just turned on. She looked down to Ted, as if for help.

“Jimmy, this is châteaubriand, ordered five days ahead from the butcher down at Krim’s, at eight ninety-nine a pound, it’s the best meat you can buy in the whole world, I hope that’s good enough for you.”

“Come, let’s shush and eat,” my grandmother said.

“Well, Adele, it is Thanksgiving. It’s ten o’clock, we have been
sitting here since five waiting. If you’d told us, sheesh, we could have had it at our house. Carol would have baked a turkey.”

My mother’s chair screeched across the floor. She left, running into the other room, her dress a black swatch in the hall. “You can’t do anything right with them,” I heard her sobbing, as Ted followed. He was smiling his awkward, zipper smile when he stood up.

Benny and I both sat, very straight, with our hands on our laps.

“Oh, Jimmy, if you would only once just be quiet. You know how she is.”