Lark and Termite (11 page)

I don’t think my mother ever owned anything. I think she got pulled apart. Too many people owned a piece of her. Winfield did, still does. The whole town knows more about her than I will ever remember. I knew her once. I must have, though Nonie doesn’t say so. I didn’t come here till I was three. And Termite did, for a year, maybe in Florida where the boxes came from, when she must have been finding out more and more how much he needed. Men had hold of her. My father, whoever he was, and then Termite’s, the one Nonie calls a baby, the one who died in Korea. I asked Nonie a while ago, what if he hadn’t died. Would he be taking care of Termite if Lola couldn’t? Don’t know, Nonie said, but you’re here, taking care of Termite for him.

And Nonie is here too.

Termite and I don’t look anything alike. Even if Termite were normal, I don’t think we would. He’s so blond, so fair, with those blue eyes. My hair and my eyes are dark, even if my skin isn’t. Didn’t matter. Kids at school called me Guinea and Dago, like they did the Tucci boys. Joey taught us all how to beat kids up. Maybe that’s why no one called Termite names. Plenty would have, but he was always with us if we weren’t in school. The sand-lot kids that hung out at the rail yard were afraid of Joey, then Solly. The Tuccis were ready to fight. And they were always strong, even before they grew up. Summers we kids took care of ourselves. Down by the river, under the railroad bridge. Joey would swing us around in circles by our armpits, real fast, held still himself by centrifugal force, and he’d swing Termite too. Termite loved it. I was never afraid Joey would hurt him. He’d hear Joey’s voice and throw his head back, look all the way up, eyes cast to the right, like that’s where Joey always was. Joey would say, “Jesus! That boy is ready for a ride.”

Termite was so pale you could see the blue veins through his skin, and his light hair grew in soft curls you could comb with your fingers. From the beginning, I confused him with an angel, a good part of me that didn’t speak and wouldn’t talk in plain language. A part of me I carried around, tried to take care of, couldn’t understand in normal ways. It’s funny. The only thing Termite and I have alike is our birthmarks—brown marks near our navels the shape of tiny shoes. Similar, Nonie would say, not alike, and it’s a shoe if you see it that way. Once I outlined them in ballpoint pen to show her, the boot shape, and the heel. It’s true mine is larger. Why not, Nonie said, you do the walking. He’s lucky you’re a girl with strong legs.

I get that from Nonie. I might be skinny like my mother, but I’m strong like Nonie. I’m like an adopted child, related to Nonie twice, through adoption and blood. I don’t have any trouble lifting Termite. He’s so slight and he doesn’t seem to get heavier. He gets longer, too long to be carried in my arms, up against my shoulder anymore, like a baby. This year I carry him on my back, with his arms crossed around my neck. Down the stairs to the basement, up to the attic when it’s not too hot or cold, out the back door to the wagon in the yard. The wagon’s deep enough to hold the back and seat of a padded office chair, bolted in for Termite, with straps attached to help him stay upright, room for his legs to splay out or fold under him the way he likes. The chair back stands up above the wagon sides enough that he can see just fine and rest his head. We go to the river, down to see the trains, sometimes to Charlie’s for lunch. Late afternoons we might meet Nonie to walk home with her after her shift. But now if I take him anywhere else—to a store, to the doctor’s, to a movie—he has to ride in the wheelchair. He complains so, it’s not worth it. Nonie says he didn’t hate that chair until after he started at the school. Finally she put it in the closet, so he doesn’t have to see it. Home should feel safe, she says. Let Social Services threaten us all they want. Getting used to the chair again will have to wait. But I miss the movies. In the summer, when he was small, we used to pay our quarters and go every other day. We’d leave the wagon outside under the marquee and Termite sat on my lap. Sometimes all the Tucci boys came, but mostly Solly. He liked the westerns. Solly would say whole scenes to us later, acting out parts, and he could do John Wayne’s rolling walk. The dialogue went into his head and stayed there. Seems a million years ago.

“You finished running the bath, Lark?” Nonie is rinsing the supper plates. “If you could just bathe him,” she says. “I’ll put him to bed. I know you want to practice.”

She’s talking about typing practice. I don’t much want to tell her about Stamble. Stumble, shamble. I have to, though. “Nonie, someone came by from Social Services today.”

“Who came by?”

I hear the edginess in her voice. “Not the same woman as before. A man. He was real polite, you can tell he’s new. He asked for you and he said he lives near here.”

“What do I care where he lives? The Social Services people are all the same.”

“He said we needed a smaller wheelchair for Termite, child-sized. He’s strange-looking. White hair and lashes and no eyebrows to speak of. And he was wearing a suit and a hat, all covered up in the heat, like he was afraid of the sun. His skin is pale, like the inside of a rabbit’s ear, and his eyes are so light.”

“Sounds like Mrs. Gaston, down at the Mercantile. Older lady, or looks older. You know her. Wears the thick glasses? She’s an albino. There’s one or two around town. Albinos always have bad eyes, and usually bad hearts. They don’t normally live to be old.”

Mercantile. I remember. The short little woman who sells ribbon in the sewing section. Thin white hair pulled back in a bun, and her skin pale as a root, like she’s been dug up from underground. Yes. Like Stamble.

“You’re telling me our new social worker is an albino?” Nonie shakes her head. “Social Services must have assigned us a new caseworker without telling us. Typical. First thing they do is show up without calling, just to see if we’re torturing Termite. Like he’d rather live at that school, farmed out the way some of those poor kids are. And a lot of them not as disabled as Termite.”

“So-called disabled,” I say. “I’m not going to talk about him that way.”

“Well now, Lark.” She looks at me dead-on. Arches her brows in that way that shows up the star-flared lines around her eyes, the shadows beneath them. She turns back to the dishes. “How do you want to talk about him then?” she asks me.

“They’re not as well off,” I say, “not as well off as Termite.”

“They’re sure not,” Nonie says. She’s pulling the stopper out of the sink, drying her hands on her apron. “Our prince here gets bubbles in his bath, and radio control, and birthdays every time he turns around. Am I right, Termite? And he’ll get school at home too, if that’s what we have to say he gets.” She sighs then and leans near him, cups his face in her hands. “What’ll we teach you first? How about local politics, how federal money pours into that school while they all stand with their mitts out, and those kids sitting there, waiting to get their faces wiped off after lunch.”

“I can teach him the same things at home,” I tell Nonie. “I have some of the same materials, and I can make more. They can’t make us send him, can they?”

“We’d have to say I teach him, because you’re not an adult. Homeschooling is not usual around here, but some parents do it. Look at all the religious nuts in this county. We’ve got the Temperance Methodists, the Irish Catholics like Charlie and Gladdy, the Italian Catholics like Nick, and still plenty of Jehovah’s Witnesses, like your grandparents were, but it’s mostly the Pente-costals and Nazarenes that school at home. No one bothers them. It’s just that Termite’s handicapped, like the word or not. He’s past school age now and he has to go, to the special school or at home, but they’ll say we don’t have the training. As though we haven’t taken care of him all this time.”

I know they want to test him more, see what’s wrong with him. What they can do about him. They all think they have to do something. It’s never all right for him to be what he is. Nonie said the doctors in Cleveland wanted to look in his head when he was a baby, see what parts of his brain didn’t work, what did, like that wouldn’t hurt. And they would have, except they decided it wouldn’t do any good.

Termite can hold his head up now, except when he’s tired. From the time I was a kid I thought his head was heavy because there was so much in it he couldn’t tell or say. That everything had stayed in him, whether he recognized the pictures or not. That he’d kept all the words I couldn’t call up, our mother’s words and words about her. Words from before we were born, what I heard until I was three and forgot. Words about what house what road or street who was there how she looked and talked and why she sent us away. It’s hard taking care of Termite but she kept him for a year, she tried. Why did she try or stop trying. And I was a normal kid she didn’t keep, except I’m not normal, because I don’t remember her. I’ve got my own big blank but no one can see it in the shape of my head, in how I speak or don’t speak or don’t move. It’s like by the time he was born there was too much to know. It filled his head too full, then wiped it blank. If I said this to Nonie, she’d say I like my own stories. These are birth defects, she’d tell me. No one knows why or what. Nothing your mother did caused them. We’re here and we move on from here, and isn’t that bathwater run yet? You need time to practice typing. Didn’t Charlie bring you the typewriter from the restaurant so you could practice? Well then.

“Lark, are you in a dream? That tub must be full.” Nonie opens the bathroom door and takes a look. “He’ll like this.” She looks down at the frothy bath. “But you’re going to have to drain some out before you put him in. It’s way too deep.”

Put him in,
Termite says after her, but she’s right; the tub is too full and the bubbles stand up above the porcelain rim. The smell of the bath is in the kitchen now, soap and warmth, and I carry Termite into the little bathroom. I get his clothes off while I let the water drain lower. “Way too high,” I tell him, and he says the sounds back like he agrees. But I know he doesn’t. He likes the bubbles all heaped up, he can smell them, and when I put him in he reaches straight into them, and puts his face just where they start.

Nonie smiles, shakes her head. “Give a yell when he’s ready and I’ll put him to bed,” she tells me.

S
ometimes I feel so tired all of a sudden. I’ve got all the windows open and the chimes hung from the kitchen ceiling are moving and tinkling in the air. There’s a breeze almost, but the air is hot. Termite is clean and powdered and his hair is tousled up in a pale blur. I steer his chair toward the living room and see Nonie on the couch. She’s put her legs up waiting for us and fallen asleep with her shoes off. Her toes are covered in those black half-circle feet of her support stockings, and her mouth is barely open. If we get closer we’ll hear the tiny whistle of her breath, like she’s an old lady. I don’t want to, so I turn Termite back around, into the kitchen. He nods. He likes this time of night before bed and I face his chair the way he likes, near the window, so he’s close to the turning pieces of the chimes. I glued pieces of red and green and silver foil to one side of each metal strip—the thing still makes noise that is sharp, then muted, but now he loves being near it. That’s why I think he might see colors, or maybe what’s shiny.

I go into the bathroom to wash, turn the bathroom light out, stand by the sink. The bathroom door is almost shut, but I can see the back of Termite’s chair. He settles into a cat sound, a kind of purr that’s jagged and melodious. I pull my dress off and stand on Termite’s damp towel. Wind my hair up in an elastic, put the stopper in, run the cool water almost to the top of the sink. I wash with my hands, let the water run down my legs in tracks. Close my eyes and wash between my breasts, around them and under them, between my legs. It’s sexual sometimes. It is now but I don’t make a sound, I can be so quiet. I have to do it most nights or I can’t sleep. Usually I want to go to bed with it done so I can close my eyes and not think. It can be over in a minute. Sometimes I think I could stand in a crowded room and do it without even touching myself. I think about where that room might be and who might be in that crowd. Strangers, most of them, except for two or three. There’s no controlling who I might think about— Solly and Joey, or Nick Tucci, even Charlie, or other men I barely know. But they don’t look at me the way men mostly do. In my thoughts, they’re more like women, or they’re men who know what women know. They know it all and they look inside me, straight into where I’m getting to. I get to that place and fall through it. Then I open my eyes and I’m here, and tonight the whole of the alley and all the backyards past the frame of the window look sleepy, turned inside out. Gray and pretty, fuzzy with dusk. Not like Winfield at all, not like anywhere.

I open the bathroom door wide and see Termite in his chair, turned away from me toward the chimes, sitting very still. His white blond curls and fair skin and pale blue pajamas glow in the dim kitchen. There’s no air, not a breath, but the chimes move in their tiny circle like a dream, like they’re in thrall to a magnet or a thought. The kitchen window holds a space layers deep above the stony shine of the alley. Lights have come on in the houses, people move in the lit-up spaces. The Tuccis’ frame two-story is nearly dark, and I hear Joey’s car before I see it, hear the slice and slide of gravel. Solly’s driving, with no headlights. He slams into their side yard, jerks to a halt. I see him get out and pull his shirt off and lean against the car door, and whatever I just pulled down or shredded in myself begins to come together again. I see Solly go around and help Joey out. They’re drunk, or Joey is, which is pretty normal for Joey but not so usual for Saul, and I see Joey fall over, then Solly gets him up and walks and drags him into the house. They leave the doors of the convertible open. Joey’s little love car, Nick Tucci calls it, and it looks abandoned, like a puzzle thrown apart, white and topless and opened up. I want to walk over there naked and shut those doors, feel the air on my skin, make them see me when they’re too drunk to do anything about it. Doing it is like a reflex with them, must be. Finding someone to get into. There are girls who can’t resist watching them need it so much.