Anywhere But Here (19 page)

My grandmother didn’t say anything. She smiled with her teeth together and she was squinting, the way she did in the sun.

“What’s that, a Lincoln Continental?” Jimmy said to my mother.

“Mark III,” my mother said.

She had packed neatly, and with an eye for color. Through the
windows the inside looked spare and orderly. The trunk was full and the backseat had only our best suitcase, and on the tan leather, there was a printed red box and each of our summer sweaters. That was all we were taking with us to California for the whole rest of our lives.

Hal was gone already, at boot camp in Texas. The night before he’d left for the air force, I’d sat on his lap, pretending to shoot beebee guns in the air. I had looked outside over the dry lawns. All our lives we’d collected skeets from the fields. It was supposed to be good when you found a whole one.

Inside, the kitchen was buzzing with sun. It was after eleven in the morning. Jimmy Measey had already driven to breakfast at Bob’s Big Boy on the highway, then to the water softener store and back again. Carol stood pouring coffee for everyone while my grandmother served squares of rhubarb pie, just made this morning, still warm. Jimmy sat on a high stool drumming his hands on the table.

That summer, because we were leaving, I’d stayed afternoons and watched, trying to learn how to bake. The crust must be made in the morning; the parts not set, but the flour, lard and water mixed on the kitchen table, rolled out thin on the cutting boards. Nothing was measured, nothing kept. My grandmother washed and picked over the fruit, chopped the rhubarb, peaches, tossed in handfuls of berries and beat up eggs and sugar and fresh nutmeg in a blue bowl. Maybe vanilla, if we remembered. We poured the liquid into pie crusts, lining the square tin pans, and it smelled as clean as milk. We dallied over the crusts, ruffling the edges with two wet fingers for a long time. When they were in the oven, there was a fine dust of white flour in the air. I’d watched and studied, taking notes.

“Would you like milk?” Carol set the glass down, hard, in front of me on the table. Then she walked to the counter and wiped her hands on her apron. She seemed to be trying not to get in anyone’s way, she stood studying her knuckles.

Carol would have my grandmother to herself now. My mother eyed Carol suspiciously, a little bitter, as she slowly ate her square of rhubarb pie, examining each piece on her fork before she put it in her mouth, as if it were a complicated wonder.

And Carol looked at her sister, who still had her figure, a young
face. (Why was it—she seemed to be puzzling—that Adele’s face stayed clear long past the age when Carol’s and all Carol’s friends’, women who used masks and facials and creams, accepted lines?) Who knew what Adele could get for herself, what we could do in California? We already had the new car and Carol must have wondered where we got the money for that. (Later, she would hear from the former owner, the dentist’s wife, who belonged to clubs, about the matter of delinquent payments.)

But my mother’s optimism must have seemed stamped on her clothes and even on mine, like labels. Carol glanced down shyly at herself, leaning against the counter, and she slouched, looking frumpier. She rubbed at her mouth with a napkin, as if she had eaten something sweet and oily and there were crumbs on her face that would stay no matter how hard and how many times she washed. Her thighs rubbed against each other as she walked and she seemed to wish we would leave. She moved as if she hardly ever thought about her body from the waist down. She paid no attention to her legs. Except when she saw my mother.

But it would only be a little while now. Carol closed her eyes and when she opened them she looked out the window. She could wait, she knew, she must have said it to herself without words, she was a waiter, she always had been, always would. The oblong silver water tank gleamed like the Goodyear blimp on the grass, in the untimely sun. Carol would have remembered Benny and me in our baby sun-suits climbing on the rough silver, scratching our chubby legs. It was all so new to us then. “It’s funny what kids like,” Carol said, “the most ordinary things, like water.” Water tanks, things after a while my mother and I forgot and didn’t even see anymore. Carol shook her head. It was too bad for Benny that I would be gone. All summer, Carol had found Graham crackers hidden in stacks in Benny’s room, when she’d gone in to dust. She hadn’t said anything. She’d left them.

Carol must have known she would always change the towels, screens in summer, storm windows in fall, the plain things, putting both hands on Benny’s shoulders; only when she thought of that, she probably pictured his squirmy body below her fingers and a small
boy escaping under the kitchen table. Now, to touch Benny’s shoulders, Carol had to reach. And he would still grow more.

My grandmother wasn’t young either, and when she was old and when she could no longer take care of herself, Carol would be right there, right next door, here. Carol would come every morning for coffee and ask her what she wanted to do that day, in the same careless, flat inflection our grandmother had used with her and she had used talking to her own children.

Carol would keep her mother clean, she would keep the sheets fresh and smelling of rainwater. Every day she’d come and push the windows open. She would take the time to wash the doilies on the windowsills underneath the African violets and iron them, just to put them back again where they’d been. Never in a million years would my mother do that. No matter what she said.

When the sky clouded and turned gunmetal gray with the blue, Carol would walk by herself over the back lawn in a hurry to the clothesline between the two pines. She would put the wooden pins in her pockets and her mouth and fill her arms with sheets.

These were chores my mother and I had done, had dreamed about doing always, but now we wouldn’t anymore. We wanted other things.

When my grandmother was old, I would be away at college, my mother could be anywhere and Carol would be there, here, home. We already knew it that day. It worked out like numbers in arithmetic. Carol was already wide in the hips, she and my grandmother went to the same girl at the Harper Method Beauty Shop every Friday, a standing appointment, for the same all-around-the-head permanent curls. Carol’s face had become rounder, with kindness, as she’d grown into middle age. Her voice had the bland, even quality of an unselfish nun. It was only around my mother she had an edge.

And my mother, tasting the coffee go bitter and dry in her mouth, having eaten her two pieces of pie, felt full and still sure there was not enough. She stared at the half pie left in the tin pan. Carol was always born first. Her mother already had a daughter when she was born.

It was almost noon and there was a breeze lifting the thin summer
curtains off the sills. My mother set her cup in its saucer and it trembled, chiming a little as she looked around the kitchen. Simple views. A corner. The refrigerator. Broom closets, the clean white stove. The mangle. With her chin in her hands, she closed her eyes a second, perhaps believing that if Carol were not next door (the dark darker, the edges of her eyelids tight), her husband, the Arab, my father, gone nowhere, a new hard star in the night sky, it would have been only herself, she would be staying home with her mother. She would be the one. The night sky chipped with light would be bordered with windowsills like a framed doily.

Then she opened her eyes and all the silver in the kitchen—faucets, fixtures, the tin bread box, handles on the cupboards—was glistening with maintenance and care and it would someday be Carol’s and if my mother wanted it more than everything, if she picked the first star in the sky every night of her life and wished, she still could not have it, ever.

The screen door slammed and it was Benny. He stamped in, heavy on the floor, hands at his sides, grinning. He wore glasses now, small glasses with thin gold rims. He was shy because he had a present. Just Benny in the room, standing, tall and awkward, breathing like a light lift of sawdust, seemed to let Carol’s shoulders relax. He justified the position of the land.

I took my present from his hand. He hadn’t wrapped it. He’d been over in the garage, working, he’d finished just this second. It was a metal box, tin, with a hinged lid. Inside was a cushion of blue satin. I kept staring into it, I didn’t want to look anywhere else, it was perfect.

“It’s for jewelry.”

“He made that all by himself.” Carol nodded.

Benny and I ran outside, to the lilacs and the pussywillows behind the garage. We were too old to play anymore. We just stood there, our bare arms long and weak, kicking dirt. Our parents were coming out now, down the porch to the car. We could hear the dog yapping at their heels.

“Oh, you shush now, you,” my grandmother said to him. I imagined her bending down, patting his back. He had to be quiet. He would be here forever; in a minute, we would be gone.

They couldn’t see where Benny and I were and they hadn’t thought yet to call or look. We were behind the garage, in the bushes, left alone a secret there. There was wind that day that seemed to make you want to move; I thought after we drove away that Benny would start running. The sky was plain and clear, the air where we were was old. There was nothing in the birdbath. Everything was in its place just where it was.

Suddenly, we heard our mothers, each of them, calling our names.

“Ben-ny.”

“Ann. Ann.”

They were calling loud, as if we were farther away than we were. Their two voices echoed in the air off the trees. They must have been cupping their hands. We looked at each other, suddenly scared, and hard. We had a minute—they thought we had farther to come—before they would start looking for us.

Then it was black and Benny was hugging me and we were dizzy, turning, standing up. That was something about Benny, always. He could hug you so hard, hanging on as if he were dying, falling off the spinning planet, out of the earth’s fall, and his fingernails bit into you and you were there, black, for a second.

We fell to the ground then and apart. We opened our eyes on the grass. I looked at him one second, then ran to my mother.

“Well, well, there you are.” They were slow still, by the car, a family in a picture, in blue and white sailor suits, the dresses rustling in the breeze. Then I saw behind her glasses my grandmother was crying, the tears slow on her skin like drops of water on a peach. My bike was leaning against the garage, my bike that Benny was going to give the Grilings.

We stood by the car with the door open, the wind was there all around us, we heard a thin distant constant moving wind. My grandmother came in close. Everyone else was farther back, like croquet balls, anything colored and still, scattered on the grass.

There were three pairs of shoes, my grandmother’s, my mother’s and mine, all white. “Here,” she said, and far above, she handed my mother a blue envelope. “It’s nothing much, just go buy yourself one of those little portable televisions with it once you get there.”

Her hand slapped against the skirt of her dress to call her dog
away, away from the white wheels of our car, us, the open window, the gravel white and sparkling as we were driving away.

“Well, remember,” she said, and then there was just the wind louder and the indifferent changing sky and Benny was running somewhere on the edge of the lawn and I saw nothing and we were gone.

LILLIAN

4
THE AGE OF THE YEAR