JEWEL (57 page)

Trains come through three or four times a day, and for the first few months we’d lived here it’d been a strange thing to wake up in the middle of the night, heavy in my head the dream of Cleopatra Sinclair disappearing into thick green woods, her turning one last time and calling out to me, while around me the room shook, the bed trembling beneath me, the tumble and scrape of wheels on the rails there in the dark. But it wasn’t long before all of us, including Brenda Kay, got used to the sound. Not a month after we moved here, too, Leston and Burton’d taken out one of those oleanders, cleared a spot for Brenda Kay, who’d taken to making her way to the fence, her with enough courage to stand and wave at the trains passing by, especially at the red caboose, where sometimes a man would lean out, wave back to her.

The house was what we’d been able to afford. Wilman and Barbara and Billie Jean lived just down the freeway in Buena Park, living right over to Torrance was. Annie and Gene and, back before they’d divorced, Burton and Sarah, my middle boy finding eleven years ago the same ugly territory his older sister’d discovered so many years before.

I look out at that street, the gray asphalt of it, the cracked white cement sidewalk that crosses in front of my house, the green lawn, all of it a place where, once, my grandchildren, every one of them grown now, used to ride bikes, used to tussle and fuss and wrestle and laugh.

But this afternoon I don’t see the yellow van, Los Angeles County School District printed in black letters across the side of it, pull up to the curb. I don’t see any of Brenda Kay’s friends, eyes straight ahead or out the window, none of them, it seems, ever blinking. I don’t see Brenda Kay stand from her seat, Barbie lunchbox in hand, pink canvas knapsack in the other, don’t see her slowly make her way out the door and step down to that sidewalk, her white shoes maybe scuffed a little.

I don’t see Lupe, the Mexican girl who’s been driving for eight years now, don’t see her single gold tooth in amidst all the perfect white teeth she shows when she smiles at me.

Nothing. That’s what I see. Just that empty out there.

Early of a Saturday morning last month Wilman and Barbara came over, him in his nice new Oldsmobile company car, parking in the driveway right here next to the kitchen windows. I’d been up for an hour or so already, Brenda Kay and me dressed and ready, though it was only seven-thirty.

Brenda Kay was in her recliner, the radio on next to her, and had a ruler and some crayons and a tablet of pastel papers. She was singing and singing, like always so far from any tune that it didn’t matter.

Just her voice, her attention on the crayon in her hand, her eyes on the paper. When I heard Wilman’s car pull up I said, “They’re here now, let’s get a move on! ” She didn’t look up.

We were headed to Saugus for the day, to visit a Mrs. Tindle, a woman I’d never met before, but who I’d been told about by the people over to the Gardena Human Services Department.

We were headed there for a reason, one I’d been putting off thinking on for the whole of my life, and on that morning a month ago I still wasn’t ready for it.

We were headed there because it was a house where retarded girls lived, a house in the valley up there where this Mrs. Tindle and her husband cared for girls like my Brenda Kay.

For the past six or seven months, Wilman and Burton and James and Anne and Billie Jean had all talked to me about this eventuality, this looking for a place Brenda Kay could live some day, and of course what this said to me, the real words beneath the ones they kept giving to me, was that my own days left were lined up and waiting, the last of them not too far distant.

No news here, this realization lately come into my children’s heads l

!

a notion that’d been bounding through my own since before I could remember.

Since before, certainly, the death of my Leston, him unable to get back on at ECC when we moved back. He’d had to take on a job as a janitor, him dying of a heart attack in a grade-school hallway after pushing a mop for two years.

Or perhaps I’d even known my life was on its way to over even before Brenda Kay was born, when on an evening in March James’d told us he was signing up for the Army, him the first of my children to leave, that old movement from inside my home out into the world the first sign in a world filled with signs that my own death was coming up. Nothing more than that, my term of days here on earth were already winding down even that far back.

That was what the trip meant, even though when Wilman came in I reached up and hugged him and kissed his neck like any other day he came to see me, then did the same to Barbara, who fussed over me, told me how fine my dress looked, though it was something I’d had for years, a shapeless blue thing I’d bought even before Brenda Kay’d started over to the high school. We were each of us acting like this was just any other Saturday morning visit.

Wilman went past me and on into the living room, said, “Billie Jean’d be here if she’d been able to get off at the hospital.” He paused.

“Burt, you know, he’s off to Phoenix with that girlfriend of his. Anne and Gene are out to Lake Havasu.”

“I know, ” I said.

Then Wilman hollered, “Brenda Kay, you fat! ” “Wimn! ” she shouted, “you fat too! ” Barbara said, “We’re going to have fun today. We’ll go to breakfast at Spires first, then drive on up there. They’re expecting us.” She reached to the collar of my dress, straightened it out, though I’d taken a moment myself in the mirror before they came, knew my collar looked just so. Still, I smiled, said, “Sounds fine.”

“Bill? ” she said, looked past me to the living room. “Did you remember the pillow for the car? ” Bill, I thought, and for a moment I wondered who that was, who this woman could be calling out to, and then I remembered. Bill.

“Yep, ” Wilman answered, and I heard Brenda Kay laugh “Huh! Huh! Huh!

” to something he said, I didn’t know what. I only heard her laughter.

We drove north on the San Diego Freeway, me up front with Wilman.

Barbara’d bought a sack full of Tiger Beat and Teen magazines and the like, Brenda Kay flipping through them and taking in all the pictures of boys with shirts ripped open to show pale hairless chests. “Who’s that?

” Barbara would ask, point to a photograph, and Brenda Kay would shoot back a name, give the television program the boy starred in, or simply say “Bandstand” or “Soul Tain” if she’d seen him there. Barbara clapped with each answer, said, “That’s right, Brenda Kay, that’s right, ” then pointed to another photo, started all over again.

Though I loved Barbara and what she was doing, a piece of me wanted quiet, wanted to just sit there in the bright morning light of a Saturday freeway. Traffic was just as slow as any other day, cars and cars round us, more buildings and billboards and reflections off glass and bumpers and all else. More broken light and colors and cars than ever, this city grown too large from that place we’d entered like it was the new Jerusalem in 1952. Then there’d been only the one freeway, us stumbling blind into Bundy Mufflers and deliverance from our past lives, safe passage into the next.

And Burton’s old words came to me, traffic stopped on the freeway, us not even out to the airport yet, I hope that ain’t just a dream of yours, Momma. I saw his face as we leaned against the drainboard in the house his daddy’d built by hand, a face all the clean and soft angles of a boy just out of the woods after following his sister, the face of a boy not yet left from home, and then came my pitiful words back to him, me all knowledge and light and wise years even back then, Once you let it turn into a dream, then it won’t ever happen on you, I’d said.

But it was a dream, all of it, a dream of how I might fix things for us, Brenda Kay’d never tested higher than a six-year-old, not even with the new programs and all the new research and innovations we were always being told about in the newsletters, Mr. White and his speeches and chair all long gone. Brenda Kay made no progress, even when there’d surfaced those new terms bestowed upon our children by the school, EMR, for Educable Mentally Retarded, TMR, for Trainable Mentally Retarded.

And always, always she was a TMR, her programs at the Instruction Center geared that way. TMR children had the task of setting the right number of bolts on a cardboard template, then slipping those bolts into a plastic bag provided by the company paying for the service. One day they’d do the bolts, another day the nuts, then the bolts, then the nuts. Certainly there’d been joy in her accomplishing that much, she even brought home a paycheck once a month, always for some odd small amount, $7. 31, or $6. 96. On those afternoons she came home waving the check, we’d go right down to the bank, cash it, then go to dinner at a Denny’s or Sizzler, where I’d let her pay for her meal herself, though money still meant nothing to her, only pieces of paper, chunks of metal handed over to a smiling waitress.

But then, the Tuesday before Wilman and Barbara’d come over, Brenda Kay’d brought home with her Barbie lunchbox and her pink canvas knapsack a note from the Instruction Center teacher, a Mrs. Samuelson, telling me Brenda Kay would have to be removed from the TMR program for a few months, she couldn’t seem to match up the right number of bolts to the template, Mrs. Samuelson informed me, and probably needed a break from the work. For “Refueling” was the word the woman’d used.

Refueling. - And there we were, on a freeway and headed for the moment when Brenda Kay and I would lay eyes on the real Jerusalem, a house in Saugus where retarded girls no different from my own would end up their own days, the world spinning round them, while Los Angeles and its cars and freeways and buildings and clean, shiny people lived and made love and money. It was a dream, I saw, Burton knowing more than I ever would even that far back.

My arms were crossed against the cool of the air conditioner, that air suddenly too cold, ice in me, and I shivered, turned to my son. I looked at him, there with his sunglasses on, and saw how the skin beneath his chin had started to sagging, saw the trace of blood vessels across his cheeks and how they’d started to break up here and there. I saw the sharp edge of wrinkles beside his mouth, him there in profile to me, and I saw my boy for what he was, a forty-eight-year-old man driving his ancient mother to a place called Saugus and a house where retarded girls lived once their mothers died, this the same man I’d seen watch a doctor change dressings on the dead flesh of Brenda Kay’s burned legs. He was an orphan, I saw, one of the five I’d left here on earth, and I quick took my eyes from him, looked out the windshield, looked for some deliverance of my own out there.

Above the buildings and cars and billboards was a still blue sky, and all of Los Angeles seemed suddenly far behind us. It was years behind us, the sky out there the same sky we’d followed like a star, escaping Mississippi and headed for here on a day when we’d passed from the desert and into green orchards, oranges not ready to pick, broccoli and strawberries and lettuce.

Then the stopped cars all swarmed up, swallowed that sky, and I knew the only thing I could do was to look back at my son, try and give him whatever it was I’d kept from him in order to take care of his sister.

Here was the boy, I saw in the man beside me, who I let stand all on his own in that doctor’s office above the hardware store, the boy who’d been afraid to cry while he watched the horror of his baby sister’s rotting legs and brown and oozing skin.

Cars all round us picked up speed, and I could feel my blood move .

more quickly in me as Wilman drove faster. I felt my arms prickling over in goose flesh, and knew it was because I saw the chance to make up to my son at least to this one of my children that moment I’d lost to him so long ago. I knew I could make it up to him here in the car before we found the end of my life and what would happen after I was gone, all of it played out in whatever this Mrs. Tindle’s turned out to be. This was the moment I couldn’t lose, and so I turned to him, my arms tight against my chest, and I smiled at him, smiled and smiled, and I spoke.

“Wilman, ” I said, and I paused.

“Yes, Momma, ” he said. He quick turned to me, then faced forward again, sunglasses still on. He said, “You cold? ” He reached down with one hand, fiddled with the air conditioning.

“Wilman, ” I said again, “I want you to know I love you.”

The cold air stopped, too quick in its place the sun through the windows, all beautiful and light, but hot all the same. I waited for him to say something.

“Momma, ” he said, and smiled, though I couldn’t tell if his heart was in it, his eyes still hidden behind his sunglasses. Barbara’d gone quiet in the back seat, listening.

He said, “Don’t be afraid, ” and turned to me. He was still smiling.

“Us going up here only means you’re planning for the future, planning for the day when you can take it easy, rest yourself after so long.”

I turned from him, from the lie he and I both knew was a lie. I looked out my window, let a few seconds of Los Angeles and California disappear before I said to him, “You drank a date shake once and threw up behind a Texaco station.” I was quiet a moment, then turned back to him. “You remember.”

Now he had his sunglasses off, and he was looking at me. He was smiling, and I could see his heart in it, see all of him right there in his smile, and I saw, too, more of my Leston in him than I’d ever thought possible, the wrinkles beside his eyes, his high forehead and sure, easy smile, the freckles across his nose. But his eyes were brown, not Leston’s deepwater green. His eyes were deep blackbrown, my own eyes, and not just my own eyes, but my father’s eyes as well, and the eyes of Jacob Chetauga, all of us still here every minute my son breathe .

He said, “I remember, ” and then he turned back to the freeway. He said, “I love you, Momma.”

“What’s this about? ” Barbara said. She leaned forward, her hand just touching my shoulder. “Who threw up? Bill? ” Bill, I thought again.

i, “It was a long time ago, ” I said, and I reached up, touched Barbara’s fingers, patted them. “Too long, ” I said.

“Willie Ames! ” Brenda Kay shouted then. ““Eight Enough’! Eight Enough’!