Anywhere But Here (18 page)

My mother sighed once and looked around. That was all. We stood a moment with the groceries on the car top before she opened the doors. You look at a place differently when you’re leaving. I jammed my hands into the deep felt pockets of Benny’s jacket.

“You know we can still change our minds.” My mother started the car and sat back in her seat. We both put our hands near the heating vent.

We drove out into the traffic. It was still early, five o’clock, and not yet dark. The wet pavement made the car wheels hiss and the drivers ahead of us went slow and cautious.

“I know.”

My mother turned onto the highway and pulled on our lights. “Okay, okay,” she said to herself, when a passing car honked and blinked. She wasn’t going the direction of home, but I didn’t care, I didn’t have anything to do. We’d both started the year in Bay City knowing we wouldn’t finish. I liked wearing Benny’s jacket. I felt the inside, serrated seam. We were going over the bridge, the steel underneath roared every ten feet, it was like hearing the
hollow height and water. Then we were on the other side of town and my mother drove out to the cemetery.

People were coming home from work, there was traffic. We turned off the road, through a black, wrought-iron arch and then under the trees. My mother’s car bumped on a groove, meant to make cars go slow. It always seemed quiet in the cemetery, and that evening there were no other cars. Green vertical pumps stood every few feet on the lawn, to fill cans with water, and most of the boxes were planted. The grass was shiny, bright green under the drizzle.

My mother slowed and parked as close as we could get to her father’s stone. It was alone, the only one on a small slope between two oak trees. The other land was all bought for our family.

It was a pink granite stone, smooth on the edges, polished. Years ago, in summer, when we’d come to water the geraniums, Benny and I had slid down the sides. Now, my mother and I stayed in the car with the rain coming down over the windows. My mother left the heat on but turned the motor off. She kept her hands on the steering wheel.

“Should we go out?” I said, after a little while.

She shook her head slowly, no, over the steering wheel, her chin puckering into a frown.

I shifted in my seat, inside Benny’s jacket, and looked out the windshield; there was fog on the ground, blurring the distant lights down the hill and behind us on the road. The trees above us were dark and heavy; they seemed very old.

Finally, my mother pulled the lights on again and we drove out, the long way, down the winding path. It was the only time I’d been to the cemetery with my mother. I wondered if she came by herself.

We worked on the house. We painted my bedroom floor white and hung curtains to match my flowered bedspread. Ted fixed the fireplace. Now, my mother bought fresh flowers and candy to put out in bowls in the living room. The house was nicer than it had ever been, so people would buy it. But it wouldn’t last. We had to mop
up my white floor each time before people came to see the house, the new bedspread in my mother and Ted’s room wrinkled like a sheet if anyone sat on it. The days we’d stayed around the house, though, cleaning and painting and fixing things, were when Ted and my mother and I got along best, most like a family.

After summer school, once, I was in my room, in play clothes, leaning over to tie the laces on my sneakers. Ted knocked on the door. He was home early, he wasn’t usually home at that time.

He sat on my bed next to me. For a while, he didn’t say anything. It made me think that in all this time, he and I hadn’t been alone much. Just the two of us, we didn’t know what to say.

He held his hands in his lap and looked at them. “Your mother is leaving me,” he said. “I suppose you already know that.”

The tiles of the floor, painted white, spun when you looked at them too hard. It was cool in this room. My room touched the farthest back in the yard.

“Ann, do you know what a homosexual is?” He looked at me hard, waiting, like the teachers wait, a whole side of their heads still, after they ask a question in school. “Well, a homosexual is a man who likes men better than women. Your mother is saying that I’m a homosexual and when you’re older and she tells you that, I want you to know it wasn’t true.”

“Okay.”

“That wasn’t the reason.”

I couldn’t look at him. “What is the reason?” I mumbled.

“What?”

“If that’s not the reason, so what is the reason then?”

I sat next to him looking down at the floor.

“I don’t know, Ann. You’ll have to ask your mother. Someday you’ll just have to ask your mother. Maybe she’ll tell you.”

We kept sitting there, on my bed, staring at the wall. Then he picked up my hand.

“I’m sorry to see you go, Ann. Because in the years we’ve lived together, I’ve grown to love you. I’ve come to think of you as my own daughter.”

I smiled to myself and tried to keep it from showing. My chest felt warm, as if he’d given me something important to keep. I didn’t want to move, I was sitting in a small square of sunlight.

“I’m going to miss you,” he said.

I looked down at the floor between my sneakers. Ted was an orphan. My mother had told me he didn’t know who his real parents were, but every Christmas he sent a nutted fruitcake, carefully wrapped, to his foster parents in upstate New York. He sent it early so it would be sure to get there on time.

The sky in the windows, that had been plain and blue when I’d started to put my shoes on, was bright and almost dark now. I didn’t want to go outside anymore. Then we both heard my mother’s car bolt up the drive, the slam of her door. Ted dropped my hand back in my lap.

Lolly and my mother sat in the basement, laughing. They’d made a pitcher of Bloody Marys and it stood on top of the washing machine. They were sorting my mother’s old suitcases of things into boxes. All we could take with us was what would fit in the car. Stuff my mother owned but didn’t know where to put lay on a carpet in the basement. I sat on the top step where they couldn’t see me.

“He’s left and gone back and left and gone back. And he knows if he did, she could ruin him.”

“You mean she’d get half of everything.”

“Half, more than half, the house, everything that he’s worked so hard for and built up himself from scratch. I don’t blame him for wanting to hold on to it.”

At night, I walked back down to the basement where they’d been. I pulled a string to turn on the light. It was just one bulb. I rummaged through the cardboard boxes. In the pile marked
Take
were my baby skates and an old suitcase monogrammed with my father’s initials. The handle was broken and a dog collar buckled through the two metal loops. Inside was a jumble of my first-grade printing exercises, whole pages filled with small and capital E’s, a white photo album with a yellow pressed bud rose in it, a list of
classmates who might like me, a faded Band-Aid—colored hospital identification band from when my mother was in Saint Peter and Paul’s for me, photos of me naked with a beach ball in little cardboard frames—I quickly flipped them shut, then I found a yellowed onionskin paper report on me.

Ann is an average child. Her teeth have white marks, possibly from a fever in infancy, making her inappropriate for close-up facial photography. Her hair and olive skin are rich and promising, and her long bones might bode well, but her expressions are sometimes blank and unpredictable. In play skits, with other children, she was sometimes shy and melancholy, looking off somewhere into the distance. Other times, she became aggressive and out of control.

The report was a tissue carbon, on letterhead stationery, green on yellowed white. Ann Hatfield August. Age 2½. The Glory Jones Agency on Park Avenue in Chicago. I held it in my hands and read it over and over again, as if there might be more about me. I didn’t remember any of it. I didn’t know I’d ever been in Chicago.

It was a watery day, windy, not raining yet but it would, and I was walking to Three Corners. I waited on the old cracked sidewalk, outside the wire fence of Saint John’s School. Mary Griling was going to meet me at ten o’clock. I didn’t know how she’d get out of her classroom, recess wasn’t until 11:15. I guess she said she needed to go to the lavatory. Anyone would have believed Mary.

Chalky yellow light came from all the windows in the old red brick school. Dry leaves blew up against the fence by my feet. I felt in my pockets. Mary’s passion this year was for marbles. The popular girls in her class were girls whose fathers worked in the ball bearing factory up the Fox River in Pulaco, girls who brought huge, shiny ball bearings to shoot with. They called them steelies. I had a steelie and a package of colored cat’s-eyes.

I stood there and cars went by and then finally I saw her, coming
out in her indoor clothes, a jumper, a white blouse, knee socks and clean, polished saddle shoes. Her collar was neat and crisp, folded down like two envelopes. She had her badge pinned to her jumper over her left breastbone; it was a silver metal eagle on a white satin ribbon. Mary was awarded it in assembly for being the best female pupil in her class. She ironed the satin ribbon at night and put the pin back, fresh, every morning.

The sharp leaves touched our legs through our socks as they blew against the fence while we talked. I gave her the marbles and steelie and she put them in her pocket, keeping her hand there, holding them. We scuffed our shoes on the pavement.

“I guess you better get back,” I said.

“Yes.”

“Remember those pictures I took a long time ago in our new house?”

“Uh-huh.”

“I’ll get rid of them, burn them someplace.”

“Okay.”

“I’m sorry.”

She shrugged. “I don’t care.”

“Just go ahead and find Benny if you want anything,” I said. “Don’t be afraid of him.”

“I won’t. I like Benny.”

I never said anything to the rest of them, to the boys. She stood there and I put both hands on the shallow indentations of her shoulders. We kissed softly, both of us, the way I’d seen my cousin Hal kiss my mother once, looking at her mouth, so carefully, as if he were afraid he could miss.

“This way, we won’t have the house, but we’ll have a car to let people know who we are a little,” my mother was saying. She’d managed to get the Lincoln Continental after all. “Maybe out there where everyone’s in apartments, it goes a little more by the car. Because we won’t have a house or anything, but maybe this will help. They can see we came out of something.”

When we slid into the new car, it smelled like lemon wax. The
leather moved below us, soft and rich. We both wriggled, shrugging, to adjust ourselves. It felt like our bodies would make permanent impressions, the leather seemed that moist. My mother opened her purse and took out a bag with two long leather gloves in it. She held each of her hands up, taking a long time pulling them on.

Then it was an Indian summer day and everything was already done. We stood in front of our house on Carriage Court, alone, light, carrying nothing, already packed. Ted had left for the rink very early. The house was empty and clean, the windows washed. Everything inside had been accounted for. The grass was cut. There was a stake with an orange
SKLAR REALTY—FOR SALE
sign stuck in the front lawn.

“Comemeer,” my mother said, “I want to show you something.” We were standing on the front sidewalk, by the new car, which glistened in the sun. I didn’t want anyone, any of the neighbors, to step out of their house and see us. Across the street, the garage door was rolled up and one of the boys stood over a work table. A radio came on. I just didn’t want him to ask anything we would have to answer.

My mother lifted the lid off a garbage can and grabbed the back of my neck. Her other fist held a fan of pictures over the can like a hand of cards. She dunked my head gently.

“I was packing your closet and I found these.”

In the pictures, Mary looked simple, very young. She was much older now. The boys looked frightened and excited, eyebrows pushed together, dark uneven lips. The boys seemed guilty, caught. My mother peered down, looking at me looking at them. Her voice was very gentle, as if she were afraid.

“Don’t ever do that again, Honey. Seriously. It’s against the law. Because they could really sue you and put you in jail if the parents ever found out.”

The garbage cans were clean, hosed off, and ferns bright with new tight fronds curled against them.

“What for?”

“Just because.” She shook her head. “They just could. Take my
word for it. And believe me, they would. So don’t ever do that again, Honey, because you could get in big, big trouble. Really.”

She ripped the photographs into pieces. They’d yellowed, they looked old and simple. Mary, in them, was nothing, just so young.

“We’ll forget about it,” she said, quietly, letting them fall into the garbage can. Then, she bent down and retrieved the torn bits. “Actually, let’s not leave them here. You never know who looks around. We’ll throw them out somewhere else, on the road.” She unclasped her purse and dropped the shiny scraps of paper inside.

Then we walked down to the car, stopping on the lawn. My mother frowned. “You know you were right when we moved in. It is an ugly house. It really isn’t anything much. Just a little shoe box with no windows.”

I turned around and looked. It didn’t look to me like a shoe box anymore.

The leather smelled new and old at the same time as we sank down into the car’s front seat. My mother seemed nervous, driving. She hadn’t told the family about the Lincoln Continental and now they’d all see it. They’d have to. When we turned onto the gravel of Lime Kiln Road from the highway, the sky was blue, the clouds white and thin, the telephone poles pitch-black. High leaves on the trees glittered, sharp, dark green. The sky was a deeper blue than most pale summer skies and the wind moved like bright transparent banners around the branches. My grandmother’s house looked trim and neat as we drove up the driveway, the dark front bushes shiny. Birds sat on the tin tops of the mink sheds on the lawn, the cornfield was yellow and dry. Behind the old barn that once housed the butter factory, the highway looked dull, pure gray. And when we drove up and parked, my grandmother and Carol came out of the house. They seemed drawn to the car. Carol and Jimmy each touched it, running their hands over the sides.