Lark and Termite (10 page)

“He sounds like a bird sometimes,” Nick says.

Take a seat
is what I say to him when we’re in the basement, cooling off, sitting on the old couch that has its springs out right through to the cold cement floor. It’s the couch Charlie used for years in the office of the restaurant, a narrow room behind the kitchen where Nonie does the accounts and bills. It’s a big couch, long and broad. This summer I realized the use they must have put it to, nights when I was a child and slept at Nick’s, with Solly curled up next to me. This summer, too, I started looking through Nonie’s boxes. Pretending is a lie I’m tired of telling her. Down there with Termite one of the hot afternoons, I saw how the boxes were stacked, balanced and squared, like they’d been there a long time. Termite sits on the broken couch and I put a breadboard across his knees so he can use the big crayons he likes. Once I get him started, he moves his arms up and down, back and forth, long arcs in one color across an unfolded newspaper, while I draw in my notebook. He doesn’t look at what he makes, but I watch his colors get darker. Most of the time, I draw him. Standing in space. No chair, no alley. One day I turned the radio loud the way Termite likes it. “Heartbreak Hotel” was on and I looked over at the boxes.
Well since your baby left you. You’ve got a tale to tell.
The boxes had always been in that corner, sometimes covered with other stuff. They were big and they were all the same size, like from a moving company, a solid dusty wall stacked four across and three deep, solid and hard to rock, taped shut and never opened, addressed to Nonie in somebody’s handwriting. I wiped off the dust and saw they were stamped
BEKINS VAN LINES,
Miami, Florida. I decided to go slowly. I know the stuff in the box I’ve gone through was never Nonie’s. A set of silver plate in its own velvet-lined box, each piece marked
LENOX
in tiny script on the back, like a code. Porcelain dishes, service for eight, in a gold-edged flowery pattern, packed with cardboard, neat and professional. No pictures though, no documents, no papers to tell me more than I already know.

“Kind of musical,” Nick is saying. “A bird making its own sense.”

“Or not,” Nonie says.

“Termite can imitate almost anything,” I say. “Things just sound more like music in his version. Sounds instead of words.”

Nonie leans forward to help Termite with his spoon. He can hold things bigger than spoons—his pitcher, fat crayons, toast, or candy bars. He holds his strips of blue because we wrap them around his wrist. Sometimes he uses a wooden serving spoon with a thick handle. Regular spoons and forks are too thin and hard. We know exactly how to feed him. Touch, touch, each side of his mouth, neat and fast. Nonie’s looking at him. “You never make things up, though, do you, Termite,” she says.

“No,” I say, “he doesn’t.”

It’s a fact. Termite can only tell the truth. I know she means she wishes, she wishes, he could say something more than the sound of what he’s just heard. I pretend he thinks more, backward and forward for miles.

“Good cake,” Nick says. “And this cold tea is mighty nice, evening like this. The air is goddamn still, heavy as lead. That storm coming in. Tomorrow, they say. Rain all week. Maybe it’ll clean up the river a little. I don’t like such a brown muck of a river.”

“Lord, Nick.” Nonie laughs. “That river was always brown.”

“Not so, Noreen. The river was cleaner years ago. You could see into it. In the dark it was olive green. I remember.”

“In the days it was—” She goes on at him, making fun now.

“Sapphire,” I chime in. “It was sapphire. Bright, stone blue.”

Nick Tucci gives me a look, then he nods. “Knocked your eyes out,” he says. “Standing there under the railroad bridge, watching the water. Oh, that blue river.”

We’re laughing, and Termite hunches his shoulders, throws his head back to look up into the plum-colored sky, like the river is up there somewhere.
That blue river.
He says it in high and low sounds, and the sky over us could be a river, bruised and deep as it looks. I reach over and tilt his chin down. His head is heavy, and his neck muscles are not so strong. He throws his head back again, right away.

“He’s got his opinions, has Junior,” says Nick Tucci. “You tell them, Junior.”

“Leave him be, Lark.” Nonie’s eyes get wet when she laughs hard. “He’s taking a sounding. My God, that sky does look like it could fall. Should be a full moon tonight, but we won’t see anything behind clouds like those.”

I can see Termite’s nostrils move, a vibration so slight, like the gills of a fish moving when it breathes, and I hear him smell the air like he’s drinking it. I wonder does he see the clouds at all, does he feel the color instead, or does he think the word “river” is like a sky, so he looks up. Why would he think that. Because it’s true. He could think the sky is like a river that doesn’t stop. Nonie would say he just reacts to us, our laughing, our shouting, whatever. She’d say I give him things to know. Then I remember the candles. “Not much of a birthday, is it, Termite. I forgot about candles.”

“You don’t need candles every time, Lark, as many birthdays as you make him.” Nonie feels the pockets of the apron she took off. They’re all blue aprons she wears at work.

“I kind of promised him,” I say. “Too late now.” But Termite tilts his head back down, gives me his sideways look.

“Not too late. We have most of a cake here, and a few leftover candles. Somebody celebrated at the restaurant today, with a piece of Charlie’s lemon pie.” Nonie has a partly crushed box of those little skinny candles they give away free at bakeries.

“Pie is all wrong with candles,” Nick Tucci says. There are only three candles, but he’s leaning forward, putting them on the cake. “Should be nine, right? Each one of these counts for three years, Junior, so the flames gotta be extra high.” He lights them with his cigarette lighter, then he stands and picks up the plate and holds it just in front of Termite. Nonie and I get up and stand with Nick, so close our faces touch. We let the candles burn, then we blow, really slow, with Termite. The little flames flutter perfectly and go out just right, all at once.

“Excellent,” Nick Tucci says. “A slow-motion blowout.”

“Now, Nick,” Nonie says, “I’ll bet those boys of yours wouldn’t mind some of this cake. Between the motorcycles and secret soldier stuff, they could use Lark’s divinity icing. Like a prayer in spun sugar. You’re such a cook, Lark. If only someone would buy you a restaurant.” She shrugs for Nick’s benefit. “Lark’s cakes are what Charlie would be coming up with if he really did know anything about baking, or pastry—”

“Charlie is just a short-order cook,” Nick says in a serious tone. “He should forget the pies and cakes.” Nick doesn’t much like Charlie. I think he harbors a brotherly resentment.

Nonie cuts him off. “Charlie has no choice. Lark is not working for Charlie, and I’m not baking for the restaurant in addition to everything else.” She checks her watch, the wristwatch Charlie gave her a year ago, on their “anniversary.” It has a platinum band and a square little face with diamonds on either side. Once it was Charlie’s grandmother’s. He spent a lot to have the works inside replaced and to buy a flexible platinum band. Platinum is more dear than gold, Nonie says. The watch is waterproof, and she almost never takes it off. Those little diamonds catch the light like the ring he never gave her. Gladdy was angry that Charlie was so extravagant. She stayed away from the restaurant nearly a week. An unexpected benefit, Nonie said. “Time to stack the café,” she says now. She puts her hand at the back of Termite’s neck, smooths his curls. “I need to cut his hair soon. These curls get so tangled.”

We’re cleaning up. Nonie starts with the dishes. Nick Tucci is putting away the chairs. Termite holds the moon pitcher right up to his mouth, making sounds into its open lip. Someone might think he’s talking, but he’s saying his version of the plates stacked against one another, the plastic chairs scraping, our footsteps, the wheels of his own chair turning as I push it inside.

I lean down close to him and whisper, in the powdery smell of his hair, “Your birthday, Termite, every day.”

Every day,
he says back to me,
every day, every day.

N
ick Tucci has gone home with the cake. Nonie is doing the dishes, and Termite sits beside her in his chair, holding the radio. She makes him keep the volume lower than it’s been all day and she puts the tall plastic glasses on the sideboard to drain. He looks sideways into the ridges just at eye level, like they’re little fun-house mirrors he can see into. I’m making his bath. When I was nine and ten I used to wear my bathing suit and get in the tub to hold him, and Nonie would soap him and take him out. We were bathing him and she told me his head was heavy for him to hold up because there was water around his brain. He’d get stronger. The exercises would help. Like when we made a pretty sound with a bell or music box and he turned toward it, I let him turn his head against my palm, turning to hear until I played the sound again. The water in his head never got in the way of his listening. Where did the water come from, I wanted to know. She couldn’t tell me.

Nonie keeps a framed picture of herself and my mother on our kitchen wall, near the clock. The circular fan on the windowsill turns its grilled face back and forth, back and forth, and the frame stirs a little on its wire hanger, settles, stirs. The chrome of the fan shows a curved reflection of the stacked plastic glasses on the shelf above, and the arms and hands of the girls in the picture. The girls are playing dress-up and my mother always got to be the bride. Because she was youngest, Nonie says, she took unfair advantage. My mother’s name is Lola. We seldom talk about her and we almost never say her name. To think her name feels like breaking the rules, but they were Lola and Noreen, those sisters. They’re both swathed in filmy white that was probably window curtains, and my mother wears a crocheted jacket they must have thought looked lacy. She’s maybe eight or nine in her crown of braided flowers and weeds, long stalks of delphinium that are already falling apart, but she looks eerily grown up in the lipstick. It’s way too dark for a bride. She stands there like she knows it, guarded or defiant, the shapes of her coltish legs dark in the sheer fabric, but she clasps her hands uncertainly and looks up into the camera. She’s of two minds. The picture is the only reason I forgive her at all. If she were pulling a face or acting cocky, I think I might hate her. Nonie has an arm around her. Nonie’s much taller, being four years older, so she’s the boy, with a penciled mustache and her long hair plaited back.

Their father was a Jehovah’s Witness preacher and they weren’t allowed to cut their hair or drink cola or celebrate holidays. I don’t know who allowed them to dress up or what cola has to do with a religion. My mother’s hair was wavy and red and such an eyeful they made her keep it in braids. The day after my grandfather’s funeral she cut it to a Rita Hayworth swoop. Their mother was too sick to stop Lola making up for lost time, Nonie says. Nonie was in what she calls her respectable phase then, having left Charlie when he wouldn’t marry her. She’d gone off to Atlanta and met her first husband. He was quite a bit older, a widower with an insurance business. Insurance, like there’s any such thing, Nonie will say when she refers to him, but she spent a few years a safe, kept woman down there where it was nearly always warm. She says she was shameless then. She’d never had anything, then she got it all. One day she walked off. But she left things, not kids. Lola finished high school in Winfield after their mother died, then went to live with Nonie. That didn’t last long. The second husband was in the restaurant business, ran a supper club. Troubled men are trouble: that’s all she’ll say about him. Couple of years. Then she came back here to Charlie. I asked her once if Charlie was troubled. Heavens no, she said, Charlie’s not addicted to anything but hard work and Catholic guilt.

Nonie says she wants me to be able to take care of myself. No cleaning up other people’s dishes, doing anyone else’s work. She says we have Termite, and we have to take care of him too. When a woman wants things she can’t get for herself, Nonie says, a man can smell it. She says never let a man inside you unless you want him around forever, because you can’t get rid of him after that, no matter how many times he leaves you or you leave him. Nonie was telling me that before I even knew what it meant: inside you. When I was younger I would see a heart scrawled on a sidewalk, on a bathroom stall, on the wall near the pay phone at the Coffee-Stop where Elise works, and I would think: inside you. Like it was feelings, romance, Elise’s cheap mystery novels with women on the covers. No, Nonie said, it’s when a man puts his body into your body. Then he’s inside you, and your body remembers, each time, every man, even if you try to forget. You came back to Charlie, I said. Is that why? He’s inside you? Now you get it, Nonie said. But why him, I said, and not someone else, another one? Because I was so young then, Nonie said, when we started, and there were so many times. You’ve got to be careful when you’re young.

She got me thinking about Solly, all those times when we were little kids, then not so little. He’d be all over me but I wouldn’t let him inside. I was already too full of Nonie’s words.

How many times, I wonder, Nonie and Charlie. I lean over the tub to turn off the water. Heat rises up at me like some thought of them, young and warm when she was in high school and he was a little older, on the riverbank where kids went, or in the field by Polish Town. Or in Gladdy’s house downtown where Gladdy and Charlie lived even then, where Charlie lives alone now part of every winter while Gladdy bakes in the Florida sun. Nonie’s own childhood house, where she lived with my mother, burned down. There was always a wide slash across the ground until the Texaco expanded and built over top the scar. Nonie and Charlie are together here now, I suppose, when no one is home. That’s not often since Termite has stopped going to school. They could go to Gladdy’s, I guess, the months Gladdy is gone. Nonie says Gladdy went south a long time ago, before she ever got on a plane. That little beach house in Coral Gables is the only thing Charlie Fitzgibbon will ever own, Nonie tells me, until his mother lets go of it all. Gladdy only put it in his name to save on taxes. There sits Charlie waiting, and Nonie says his mother may even outlive him. Charlie and his heart pills. That leaky heart is his, at least, something Charlie owns.