Lark and Termite (12 page)

So much,
I think I hear Termite say, and I look at him to see. But he’s only crooning to himself, satisfied because it’s dark and the air is soft and motionless, and he has the sound of the chimes and the colors are shining. I hang my dress on the hook by the kitchen sink and pull my nightgown on.
Day is done.
We sang that song at the camp I went to before Termite came. The only time I went away, before or since, I was Termite’s age, the age he is now. I try to remember myself and it’s like struggling in a sack, like those kittens Nick Tucci sent Solly to the river with, the one time I told him to bring some home from the rail yard. We think of Termite as someone who’s two or three, we take care of him like that. I get really scared when I think there might be a part of him that’s as old as he really is, a part of him that knows more and more, like anyone else does.
Gone the sun,
sang the little girls in rounds. But Nonie was wrong, the moon is out bright as a plate. I see black clouds sail across it fast, like mountains across an orb.

Nonie

There’s choice but no choice. Kids deal with what is, and take one shape or another.

Whatever I had, Lola wanted. First she wanted to be bigger, tougher, stronger, like me. I was four years older, the one she looked up to. Our mother always seemed more a child than we were, quiet, all her edges turned down the way Dad liked them. Lola wanted to read my Bible instead of hers, my bigger, heavier schoolbooks, but she only pretended to read, her eyes skimming the shapes of the words so she could turn the page at the right time. She’d sing the hymns I hated until I hated them more, and our father let me stop singing and just play the piano for Lola. She performed, even then; she could only see herself in the way people looked back at her. I cooked the food and Lola served it. She lit stubs of candles and lay flowers alongside the plates, all in the service of the Lord. I did the work and she carried off the sleight of hand, drew Dad’s gaze away from me, away from our mother. Dad worked maintenance for the city after he left the mines, but Lola would shine his shoes as though he was preaching all day at the Temple instead of emptying trash and waxing floors. Later he did preach, and she’d sit up front with me nights, working her fingertips deeper under my thigh. She’d gaze at him, nodding and mouthing the right phrases, and move her fingers under me, tickling and poking me to prove what a good show she put on.

Dad was convinced she was a kind of prodigy, that she had the spirit in her. He said he didn’t need to treat her like a child. He’d shut them up in his room and make her read Revelations to him while he prayed. My mother and I were forbidden entrance, but he told us we could stand at the closed door and listen to Lola speak the Holy Word. I saw them once, through the window from outside, when he’d left the curtain open. She sat on the bed stock-still, reading from the small white Bible our mother had carried at her wedding, while he knelt before her and clasped her knees to his chest, his head bowed on her bare legs. She was young enough that her skirt came just to his forehead. Her voice never faltered.

Years later, when we could talk about it, she swore that she kept him from carrying through. Now I know what it cost her. For a while he even rented her out as a douser to farmers trying to find water. He’d drive her through the county all day on a Saturday, and she’d walk across fields with a forked willow dousing rod, the men trailing her. Once she showed me with a yardstick, in our room, how she went into a trance and held the rod so it seemed to jerk and move of its own accord. She struck it lucky a few times, then began to miss, and got out of it by telling Dad the work gave her powerful headaches, that she couldn’t be clear when the men who paid them money weren’t favored by the Lord. She was ten years old at the time. Amen, she’d say at Temple. Even then, her mouth was like a flower with damp petals. Her white skin and that red hair. Our father made her wear a hat or a scarf to Temple: our mother’s hats, her frayed scarves. Lola tied them on tight and covered her hair completely, like it was her idea. She’d get swept away, locked into this passion or that, even if it was Dad’s borrowed passion, temporary, and ridiculed when we were alone in the bedroom we shared. It was our mother who scared Lola, sitting and looking out windows, sitting in the pew at Temple, so silent she only moved her lips for prayers.

Giving a person like Lola the looks she had was like giving a baby two fistfuls of dynamite. She realized little by little, and learned early to mirror back what people wanted to see. Our father thought she was his little Witness serving at Kingdom Hall, while she hid her cosmetics and borrowed heels at school. She’d sew clothes in home ec that she never brought home. People hate girls that beautiful, but she had a way about her. She’d steal inside, up close, she couldn’t help herself. Even when I knew she was doing it, when she did it to me, it felt good. She could seduce me like she did anyone else, but the terrible thing was, with me it was real. She wanted my approval desperately, like part of her was always that motherless child, but she maintained her self-respect by competing with me, being unpredictable. I let her win, even encouraged her, when it served my purpose. I was the older sister but I let her protect me: our father was fixed on her. She managed him instinctively, played to his delusions, for years. She performed and adapted. I had rules and plans. I guarded my plans and was careful. Lola learned to offer herself up, to me or anyone: her smiles, her glances, a hymn, walking into a room, like she was sharing a peach. She made it look easy, and it was, but sometimes, with me, she was frantic, and she could go from one to the other fast. I held her then until she stopped shaking, but I was angry at the guilt I felt when she seemed vulnerable. She scared me the way our mother scared her, but for different reasons. Lola was impossible to control, and taking care of her was my job.

It wasn’t hard at first. When she was a little kid, she said she wanted to marry me and no one else. She’d brush my hair at night, lay out my tenth-grade outfits, fuss over me. Little by little she took over chores I’d been assigned, cleaning and dusting, laundry. At eleven, she was taller than me. I was fifteen, but she filled out my clothes better than I did. Soon enough she noticed my new interests and wanted to smoke cigarettes, wear my sweaters, walk by the river with boys who had no idea how old she was. I paid her not to with lipsticks and cheap perfume she couldn’t wear at home. By then I worked after school, clerking at Murphy’s Five & Ten. Lola envied my grown-up life and drew my picture in that notebook of hers, page after page, my face from one angle and another, recognizable but changed, a reflection of a reflection. The rest was sketches of tables and walls, our bedroom window, the kitchen sink, like she was studying meaningless objects in secret. She kept her notebook hidden. She knew something about those drawings she didn’t want anyone else to understand. When I started seeing Charlie Fitzgibbon on the sly, an older boy already out of school and working in his father’s restaurant, she lied for me. I was working at Murphy’s, she’d say, or staying late at school. Two or three times a week, we’d pretend to go to sleep and she’d help me out of our bedroom window, then wait for me to come home.

Charlie and I would meet in the meadow by Polish Town when the grass was high enough to hide us, or by the river in the shelter of the railroad tunnel. I’d decided long before that Dad’s religious wrangling and hellfire were lies. Charlie had been raised with his own version of the same. Whatever we did was wrong, equally sinful and private, so there were no boundaries. It was dark and we’d find a place to lie down. Now and then we’d catch glimpses of other teenagers, or see a Polish Town prostitute conducting her quick business, but we took our time. I’d come back home after midnight, warm and wet, smelling of the river if I’d washed, smelling of him if I hadn’t. Lola would be sitting up, awake as though she’d never slept, waiting for my tap on the window. We kept a washbasin and pitcher of water on our nightstand, not so unusual in the ’30s. Indoor plumbing was still a recent addition in a lot of Winfield neighborhoods. Lola would move the basin to the board floor and help me off with my clothes, like she was nursing me after an accident. I’d wash with that cold water and a piece of laundry soap. Later she’d creep out of her narrow bed into mine. What does he do, she’d ask me, how does it feel. Show me. Pretend. I turned my back to her, but I let her stay, and tangle her legs in mine.

Dad began going away on weekends, preaching over near Bellington. Finally he got his own congregation there and spent most of his time living over the storefront they rented as a Temple. They didn’t pay him much but I was working enough, even in high school, to cover the expenses he didn’t. It was a relief to have him gone. I was the adult in the house. Our mother grew even more silent, and never stirred after dusk. Late at night, I’d let Charlie into my room if it was raining or bitter cold, into my bed. Lola would go sit in the kitchen in the dark. She’d be gone when we started but sitting there near us when we finished. After, if we fell asleep for a few minutes, she’d be in bed with us, right next to me.

Maybe it’s why she never stayed any amount of time with a man I didn’t find first. Oh, I’m sure there were others I never knew about. There were years I wasn’t in touch with Lola, for obvious reasons. But as long as she was near me, she borrowed my men. She never intended to keep them. Lola never kept anything. She knew better.

Back when Lola was a child men watched on the street, she was sure I’d marry Charlie and the three of us would live together. Never my plan, but she thought she was standing right between us. She thinks we’re her parents, Charlie joked. She was fascinated that he went to confession and told the priest what he did with me, then prayed I wouldn’t get pregnant. I didn’t pray I knew Gladdy looked down on me with a vengeance, that in her mind a pregnancy would always be the only scandalous, inarguable reason for Charlie to marry so beneath himself. We’d started when I was sixteen. You can have a baby, Lola would tell me, and I’ll take care of it. She was quite dutiful, Lola was, as a young girl. She featured we’d go away like a little family and live beside the ocean somewhere warm. We could watch waves instead of a river that got brown and swollen and floated all manner of things that fell into it from Polish Town.

Lola found herself an ocean, but she didn’t stay. Sometimes even now, I wake up in the dark and think of her, waiting for my tap on the glass. I can still hear the river and that sound, that tapping, like a message or a question I can’t answer. The smell of earth and perfume comes up at me, like she’s left her scent along the ground and in the air.

Termite

Lark smells like the soap smell on her hands. She puts one bowl and another in his arms tight against him so the bowls don’t move. Down the alley the ragged orange cat crawls low under Tuccis’ house. The cat drags its flattened legs under the porch steps and squeezes through webs and rotting leaves, over hard black beetles hiding from the light and the small scattered bones of harvested creatures. Mice bones and bird bones, bones of voles and flat-nosed moles, and rabbits too small to hop. The cat lies still on the cool dirt, safe in its litter of bones and scrap that smells of humid mold. Lark’s soap smell is like white flowers. She stands behind him so the bowl stays tight and she holds the bottle of color in his hand. Two drops Lark says, pink instead of red. She tells him how the batter folds pastel pale, and he can feel the heat outside, wavering over the grass and the alley. The heat glints on stones and gravel and presses hard to cut. Too hot to be out, Lark says. Plants droop and the grass sighs like something squeezed, but the clean almond air of the soup in the bowl lifts in the weighted heat. Lark pushes his chair away because the oven racks slide out hot, but the fan blurring side to side blows the sweet smell in circles. He sits by the window and hears the faint roots of the grass in the berm of the alley, long veiny threads that reach deep in the ground to drink where no one sees. He holds the radio to say with sounds.

The doorbell is like an alarm that no one rings. He knows it’s going to ring and it rings loud. It catches like a chime that chokes and starts and then it blares again.

Who can that be, Lark says.

The orange cat lifts its ragged head. The scars on its face shine yellow in the dark under Tuccis’ porch.

Lark pushes his chair to the living room. The couch where Nonie lies at night and rests her feet is empty. The piano is empty. The chairs are empty and the low table where Elise and Solly played cards is empty. The house is only for Lark and him and the sweet smell of the cake, but the doorbell rings again. There’s a glow through the window in the door. When he looks from the side he can feel it on his face, faintly cool. The heat from the open oven is like a shelf falling out and slamming, but the glow behind the door is quiet. Lark doesn’t always know but now she knows. She opens the door and keeps it nearly shut. She talks through the space between. Murmurs and sounds. A man talking. Not a heavy man like Nick Tucci and Charlie.

I take a secretarial course, Lark says.

The man steps closer, air that moves in a shape. The glow falls through the door onto Termite’s face and shoulders, a cool pale beam that’s found him.

I was hoping I could speak, the man says. Voices are swirling in his voice and the voices move when he moves. He’s more than himself. Lark doesn’t hear, she doesn’t see. Termite sees him, a shape glowing through the door that Lark keeps nearly closed. The shape shines like a light.

This is your brother in home care don’t you find it.

The man’s words come and go and echo with voices. The voices layer one over another and another, and they see inside, into every corner, into the boxes alone in the basement, into Lark’s room and his room, inside the wall Nick Tucci broke to make a bigger door between, into the attic with its pull-down stairs.

What’s his real name.

The voices know every name. The voices touch each plant in Nonie’s garden and move along the clotheslines and into the shed and between the stacking chairs Lark puts here and here. Voices whisper up and down the alley, over the dry grass and hot white stones, around this house and that, careful and fast like a wind that rushes and knows.

Someone’s birthday if you need anything.

Lark shuts the door. They stay still, waiting for the man to leave. Termite feels him standing on the sidewalk in front of the house. Finally the man turns and goes. His footsteps sound going away and the voices rush after him, breathing small sounds. The glow and the cool air move away, trailing him like shadows no one sees. There’s a shadow of a taste in the warm room, and the humid air darkens with a sweet tinge. Lark says oh no. She pulls the cake from the oven. Not so you’d taste, she says.
Wild mint grows by the tunnel wall where the sun can reach. Solly bites the leaves with his teeth, presses them wet in his hands. Here, he says. Taste them Termite, on your tongue. Salt and sweet and bitter green, and that’s her you taste on my fingers, even through the clothes she won’t take off.

Louder he says, train’s gone now Termite. I know you want it back but now it’s gone. Hold on to me, I’ll take you in the water. You love the water.

The water comes up high. Solly breathes and swims them fast. The sky wavers and the river smells of iron where the train bled into its shadow and poured into the water. Lark sings the song about the bread upon the waters but Solly moves in the bright shallows where Lark can’t see. What can I do about her, he whispers, keeps whispering, what can I do. But the water doesn’t answer, the water is still.
Nick Tucci’s hand on Termite’s head is warm and heavy and dark as the space under his house where the ragged orange cat waits for nightfall. At night the orange cat hunts and the lilacs stir and Nonie rolls her stockings down before she puts her feet up on the couch. Now the orange cat peers through the broken lattice that covers the underside of Tuccis’ porch and Lark puts the chairs just so around the plastic table. The alley bleeds its green smell where the mower cut and the ragged orange cat waits to crawl long and low where the alley is open and wet. Nick Tucci drinks his ice tea. He says he’s too thirsty to live and the sounds in his throat drain down and down into the wet dark inside him. He drinks loud and fast and Termite says and moves until Nonie sends Lark into the house. Nick Tucci puts his big hands flat on the table, but the darkness inside him follows Lark, steps close behind her everywhere she steps. Nick Tucci smells like Zeke’s tears smelled when Zeke cried in the wagon and put his wet face on Termite’s face.

One of your boys maybe.

Open the door for her to jump in.

He rings his bell once and Lark answers. She has the glass moon man in her hand and the cold across her face when she bends to get the cake.

Then she’s standing in the doorway from the kitchen. Nick Tucci gets up and moves toward her, dark as the stones in the tunnel. He steps hard across the ground, moving heavy and deep as the rolling water in the river. If he could press against Lark he would hold on tight
. Don’t you make him cry more now. Joey stop teasing Zeke because he cries and Termite doesn’t. I told you Termite doesn’t cry. When he was a baby we could never tell what was wrong except by how he moved. Zeke you don’t have to cry. A dead thing is scary but now I covered it up. The dogs got her, that’s all. Look, she left her kittens before they even opened their eyes. Joey do you have to be mean. Solly take these kittens home for Zeke. Take your shirt off Solly and we’ll wrap them up and keep them warm. There. The little things. Hear them crying? All little ones cry don’t they Termite. Except you never needed to cry.
The cake in his mouth is three tastes he can taste. Lark says the names of the tastes are in the colors, one drop and two drops, and she moves the knife fast, icing each layer, turning them round and round so the cakes turn too like soft sweet wheels. Then she puts one cake on top of another, turning it careful like a special prize. The alley pools its sharp green smell and glows its quiet stones. Cars plow through the heat with their tires ticking, sticky on the hot roads. Everyone waits for evening when the air gets bluer and the hot air lets go slow. Every grass yard makes a different sound, higher and lower, up and down the alley. There are sounds in every house.

Nonie sits between Nick Tucci and Lark. Nick says about the river being brown and green and they’re laughing and he says and says.

Oh that blue river.

He looks up to say. Their laughter chimes all around while the sky goes up and up. High up the rain is holding still before it falls. It’s going to fall and fall, roaring like the ocean sound in Lark’s seashells that she holds for him to hear. Oceans have waves like a pulse, Lark says, and she puts his fingers on her wrist to feel the tiny beat. The sound in her skin surges but the sound in the shells only circles, coming and going in one curled space. His birthday comes and goes and Lark makes every birthday. Nonie has the candles. The cake comes close and holds still and he sees. The lights jump and the black thread on fire inside each flame is burning small and big, standing and falling, and then the lights go out. He can make every sound and he makes the sounds.
Lark wears her swimsuit to make his bath. Nonie tells her when to turn the taps, how much hot and cold, how high, but Lark pours the bubbles and the white froth smells of soap. Nonie crouches by the hard lip of the tub and the small groan of her legs sounds when she moves. Lark sits in the bath to hold him and she moves his arms and calls it swimming but Nonie says hold still. Keep him still Lark, he doesn’t know not to breathe if the water’s over his face.
Lark’s shape in the kitchen is taller and thinner than Nonie’s shape. Nick Tucci has gone home and Lark leans over Termite and Nonie stands by the sink. Nonie soaps the dishes and Lark runs his bath.
The bubbles leave a sweet skim and Lark’s legs in the bath are long thin shapes. She says her legs are his legs and they’re taller than the giant in his book. The giant lives in the sky above the beanstalk and sings sounds to the Englishman. Lark says that was a bad giant.

We’re not smelling blood like him. We smell an evening in Paris. Nonie, why is it Paris?

Because Paris has the Eiffel Tower, like that picture on the bottle.

But why do they have a tower? You said Paris collaborated.

Not all of Paris, Lark. I told you, the Resistance were heroes and they fought all during the war.

Fighting when I was born, Nonie.

That’s right. You were the best thing that happened in 1942. But you were three when you came to Winfield and the fighting was nearly over. You rinse him off now and I’ll get the towels.

Fighting like Solly and Joey, Lark says when Nonie’s gone. Tough messy fighters, Lark says, yelling a curse to scare the Polish boys.

Termite doesn’t tell or say. Nonie comes back in her white slip that she wears under her uniform at Charlie’s. She’s a broad shape in her white straps, the turn of her head the same and her shoulder soft where Termite leans his head. He’s in Nonie’s arms that are wide and clean and smell of the cucumbers she slices thin and puts across her eyes. She puts him on the floor on the towels that are a hard bed and dries his hair, rubbing with a cloth. Her voice comes and goes. She says Lark is eleven years old and mother to that whole crew.

Don’t you get tired of all those boys? Don’t you ever want a frilly dress and a tea party?

Lark won’t say or tell.

All right, what a face. You cloud up like a thunderstorm. I guess it’s better you’re like you are, fast enough to keep up with them and fight them off if you have to.

Lark says she can fight anybody and Nonie lifts the towel away. Her fingers touch across his eyes and he lies still in moving air. The bathroom window is open and the morning glory vine turns and twines, reaching in, breathing its own smell.

You may not be fighting them yet Lark, but you will soon if you have any sense. You’d best remember, boys’ hands wander.

The air is soft all over him.

But not this boy’s hands, Nonie says.

She holds his wrists and pulls him up so his hips rest on the floor. She swings him gently and the air slips under him, cool and quiet. Do it careful, like this, makes his muscles stronger. He’ll hold his head up to listen if you sing something he wants to hear.

Lark sings the rhyme about the monkey and weasel but it’s the vine he wants to hear, the sound of the leaves alive like ears uncurled and furled, the flowers opened wide and the tiniest buds like soft
pricked points.
The smell from the dishes and the bath are two smells like different flowers. Lark bends to turn the water in the bath with one long arm and then she lets it pour. He holds the radio. The hard round knob against his wrist talks to the tubes inside. Nonie makes the dishes slide and clank.

Lark, are you in a dream? It’s way too deep.

They can’t make us send him can they?

Don’t have the training. Take care of him all this time.

He can smell the soap and the rain. The rain comes closer and the wind is in the morning glory vines, swaying them like a skirt. Water pounds and clatters into the bathtub and pours from the kitchen spigot and the night smell settles warm against the house, close against it like one animal against another. The vine has gone blind and closed its flowers but he hears it stirred and lifted in the dark, pushed against the window screen and sucked and pushed. He plays the radio to let it whoosh and roar. Nonie says he thinks that buzz and noise are music. Lark, will you take that thing away from him. Well it’s his music Lark says, but she takes the radio. She turns the chimes fast on their string so they unwind slow and slower and make their lights. Drain out some of that water, Nonie says.
Cats hide in the weeds by the river, scared of the rail yard, scared of the dogs and the ditch. The dirt is dark and soft under the railroad bridge. Termite’s feet reach almost to the end of the wagon and Lark reads him the book about giants in the sky. She pours tea into Termite’s cup and says Solly don’t let that cat in here. That cat has a ragged lip, old ragged cat that follows us everywhere. Solly takes off his shirt and cuts it sharp as a rope against the stone walls in the echo. Fe fifo fum, I smell the blood. Solly’s shape walks up and down and Termite helps to say until Lark says that’s enough, the cat’s run off. Then it’s quiet. Just the heat like a buzz on the water. Solly says they’re going in the river after the train comes, the river is warm as a bath.