Harvesting the Heart (2 page)

Paige

hen
I least expected to, I found Mercy. It was a diner on a seedy side
street in Cambridge, and its clients were mostly students and
professors who wanted to go slumming. I was down to my last
twenty. The previous night I had realized that no one in their
right mind would hire me as a nanny without references and that I
wasn't going to get into art school on a smile and a song and my
meager portfolio. So at five-thirty in the morning I squared up my
shoulders and walked into Mercy, praying to a God I had wondered
about my entire life that indeed this place would be my deliverance.

The
diner was deceptively small and smelled of tuna fish and detergent. I
moved to the counter and pretended to look at the menu. A large black
man came out of the kitchen. "We ain't open," he said, and
then he turned and went back inside.

I
did not look up from the menu. Cheeseburgers, clam patties,

Greek
antipasto. "If you aren't open," I said, "how come you
unlocked the door?"

It
took several seconds for the man to answer, and when he did, he came
right up to the spot where I was sitting and placed one beefy arm on
the counter on either side of me. "Shouldn't you be going to
school?" he said.

"I'm
eighteen." I tipped up my chin the way I had seen Katharine
Hepburn do it in old black-and-white movies. "I was wondering if
there might be a position available."

"A
position," the man said slowly, as if he'd never heard of the
word. "Position." His eyes narrowed, and for the first time
I noticed a scar that reminded me of barbed wire, all snaked and
spiky, which ran along the length of his face and curled into the
folds of his neck. "You want a job."

"Well,
yes," I said. I could tell from his eyes that he did not need a
waitress, much less an inexperienced one. I could tell that at the
present time he did not need a hostess or a dishwasher, either.

The
man shook his head. "It's too damn early for this." He
turned and looked at me, seeing, I knew, how thin I was, how
disheveled. "We open at six-thirty," he said.

I
could have left then. I could have gone back to the cool T station,
the subway where I'd been sleeping these past few nights, listening
to the soft violins of street musicians and the crazy screams of the
homeless. But instead I took the grease-spattered paper that was
clipped to the inside of the menu, listing yesterday's specials. The
back was blank. I pulled a black marker from my knapsack and began to
do the only thing I knew with confidence I could do well: I drew the
man who had just dismissed me. I drew him from observation, peeking
into a small pass-through that led to the kitchen. I saw his biceps
curl and stretch as he pulled huge jars of mayonnaise and sacks of
flour from shelves. I drew the motion, the hurry, and then when I
drew his face I sketched it quickly.

I
pulled back to see the picture. Spread over the broad forehead of
this man I had drawn the outline of a strong old woman, her shoulders
stooped from work and from denial. She had skin the shade of bootleg
coffee, and crossing her back were the memories of lashed scars,
which turned and blended into the distinctive twisted scar of the
man's own face. I did not know this woman, and I didn't understand
why she had come out on the page. It wasn't my best drawing, I knew
that, but it was something to leave behind. I placed the paper on the
counter and went just outside the door to wait.

Even
before I had the power to sketch people's secrets, I had always
believed I could draw well. I knew this the way some kids know they
can catch pop flies and others can use felt and glitter to make the
most creative covers for book reports. I always used to scribble. My
father told me that when I was a toddler, I had taken a red crayon
and drawn one continuous line around the walls of the house, at my
eye level, skipping over the doorways and the bureaus and the stove.
He said I did it just for the hell of it.

When
I was five, I found one of those contests in the
TV
Guide,
the
one where you sketch a cartoon turtle and send it in and they give
you a scholarship to art school. I had just been doodling, but my
mother saw my picture and said there was no time like the present for
securing a college education. She was the one who mailed it in. When
the letter came back congratulating me on my talent and offering
me enrollment in the National Art School in a place called Vicksburg,
my mother swept me off my feet and told me this was our lucky day.
She said my talent was hereditary, obviously, and she made a big deal
of showing off the letter to my dad at dinner. My father had smiled
gently and said they sent a letter like that to anyone who they
thought would put up the money for some phony school, and my mother
had left the table and locked herself in the bathroom. Still, she
hung the letter on the refrigerator, next to my damp finger painting
and my noodle-glued collage. The letter disappeared the day she left,
and I always wondered if it was something she'd taken because
she knew she couldn't take me.

I
had been thinking a lot about my mother, much more than I had for
several years. Part of it was because of what I had done before I
left home; part of it was because I
had
left
home. I wondered what my father thought. I wondered if the God he had
so much faith in could tell him why the women in his life were always
running away.

When,
at six-ten, the black man appeared in the doorframe, filling it,
really, I knew already what the outcome would be. He stared at me,
openmouthed and bothered. He held my portrait in one hand and
stretched his other hand out to help me up from the sidewalk. "The
breakfast crowd starts coming in twenty minutes," he told me.
"And I expect you ain't got no idea about waiting tables."

Lionel—that
was the man's name—took me into the kitchen and offered me a
stack of French toast while he introduced me to the dishwashing
machine, the grill, and his brother Leroy, the head cook. He did not
ask me where I was from, and he did not discuss salary, as if we had
had a previous arrangement. Out of the blue, he told me that Mercy
was the name of his great-grandmother and that she had been a slave
in Georgia before the Civil War. She was the woman I'd drawn across
his mind. "But you must be a prophet," he said, "
'cause I don't tell people about her." He said that most of
those Harvard types thought the diner's name was some kind of
philosophical statement, and anyway, that kept them coming in.
He wandered off, leaving me to wonder why white people named
girl babies things like Hope and Faith and Patience—names they
could never live up to— and black mothers called their
daughters Mercy, Deliverance, Salvation—crosses they'd always
have to bear.

When
Lionel came back he handed me a clean, pressed pink uniform. He
gave a once-over to my navy sweater, my knee socks, and my pleated
skirt—which, after all this time, hadn't lost its
industrial-strength folds. "I ain't gonna fight you if you say
you're eighteen, but you sure as hell look like some prep-school
kid," he said. He turned his back and let me change behind the
stainless-steel freezer, and then he showed me how to work the cash
register and he let me practice balancing plates up and down my arms.
"I don't know why I'm doin' this," he muttered, and then my
first customer came in.

When
I look back on it, I realize now that of course Nicholas had to have
been my first customer. That's the way Fate works. At any rate, he
was the first person in the diner that morning, arriving even before
the two regular waitresses did. He folded himself—he was that
tall—into the booth farthest from the door and opened his copy
of the
Globe.
It
made a nice noise, like the rustle of leaves, and it smelled of fresh
ink. He did not speak to me the entire time I was serving him his
complimentary coffee, not even when I splashed some onto the Filene's
ad splayed across page three. When I came for his order, he said,
"Lionel knows." He did not look up at me as he said this.
When I brought his plate, he nodded. When he wanted more coffee, he
just lifted his cup, holding it suspended like a peace offering until
I came over to fill it. He did not turn toward the door when the
sleigh bells on its knob announced the arrival of Marvela and Doris,
the two regular waitresses, or any of the seven people who came for
breakfast while he was there.

When
he finished, he lined his fork and his knife neatly across the edge
of the plate, the mark of someone with manners. He folded his paper
and left it in his booth for others to read. It was then that he
looked at me for the first time. He had the palest blue eyes I had
ever seen, and maybe it was only because of the contrast with his
dark hair, but it seemed I was just looking through this man and
seeing, behind him, the sky. "Why, Lionel," he said, "there
are laws that say you shouldn't hire kids until they're out of
diapers." He smiled at me, enough to let me know I shouldn't
take it personally, and then he left.

Maybe
it was the strain of my first half hour as a waitress; maybe it was
the lack of sleep. I had no real reason. But I felt tears burning
behind my eyes, and determined not to cry in front of Doris and
Marvela, I went to bus his table. For a tip, he'd left ten cents. Ten
lousy cents. It was not a promising beginning. I sank down onto the
cracked banquette and rubbed my temples. I
would
not,
I told myself, start to cry. And then I looked up and saw that Lionel
had taped my portrait of him over the cash register. I stood, which
took all my strength, and pocketed my tip. I remembered the rolling
brogue of my father's voice telling me over and over again,
Life
can turn on a dime.

A
week after the worst day of my life, I had left home. I suppose I had
known all along that I was going to leave; I was just waiting until I
finished out the school term. I don't know why I bothered, since I
wasn't doing well anyway—I'd been too sick for the past three
months to really concentrate, and then all the absences started to
affect my grades. I suppose I needed to know that I could graduate if
I wanted to. I did just that, even with two D's, in physics and in
religion. I stood up with the rest of my class at Pope Pius High
School when Father Draher asked us to, I moved my tassel from right
to left, I kissed Sister Mary Margareta and Sister Althea and told
them that yes, I was planning to attend art school.

I
wasn't that far off the mark, since the Rhode Island School of Design
had accepted me on my grades as a junior, which of course were
recorded before my life had started falling apart. I was certain that
my father had already paid part of the tuition for the fall, and even
as I was writing him the note that told him I was leaving, I wondered
if he'd be able to get it back.

My
father is an inventor. He has come up with many things over the
years, but it has been his misfortune usually to be a step behind.
Like the time when he invented that tie clip with a roll-down plastic
screen, to protect the fabric during business lunches. He called it
the Tidy-Tie and was sure it would be his key to success, but then he
learned that something remarkably similar already had a patent
pending. The same things happened with the fogless bathroom
mirror, the floating key chain, the pacifier that unscrewed to hold
liquid medicine. When I think of my father, I think of Alice, and the
White Rabbit, and of always being one step behind.