More Than Enough (8 page)

Jenny was one of those beautiful girls and she did not seem at all out of place. She wore a yellow T-shirt that said
GIVE ME CHOCOLATE
! and white tennis shorts, which my mother had bought a while ago at a secondhand shop, though they looked new and expensive as she danced next to other girls as tall and athletic and attractive as she. The girls were doing a shimmy with their hips, with their full torsos in fact, though the powerful motion of the hips swiveling, then grinding to a stop, then swiveling again, was what you noticed most. It was sexual. There was no other word for it, and Jenny was good, was adept at this. I had to wonder then how she had made friends and become talented in the same few weeks that I had been sitting around with my arm in a sling waiting for torn muscle and strained ligaments to heal. Only a few weeks before I'd been hurt, Mr. Bryant, the assistant basketball coach and health teacher, had asked me to try out for the junior varsity basketball team because I was tall. “We need a boy with your height,” he'd said. Mr. Bryant didn't seem to doubt for a minute that I would make a good athlete, and I even began to picture myself leaping to the hoop and slamming one in, never mind the fact that I had never played the sport and that I couldn't jump more than an inch or two into the air. The cheerleaders would shake their pom-poms and scream for me. Even Tracy Bingham, the squad leader who drove a white Rabbit convertible and had perfect, medium-size breasts and a very nice smile, would notice me and begin to think about me sailing through the air with a basketball in my hand when she was trying to do her math homework at night. It was a silly fantasy, I knew, and I was ashamed of ever having dreamed it up, especially after my injury destroyed any remote chance that I might become a star athlete. It hardly mattered, I told myself. I had more important things than Tracy Bingham to think about. But somehow my sister was a success. She was an attractive teenage girl with social ambitions and friends, and I had no idea how she'd remade herself so quickly. Perhaps she'd been developing—growing taller, more beautiful, and popular—for a while, and I hadn't been looking. Sitting in those bleachers, I felt suddenly panicky. I felt suddenly that it was too late, though I wasn't sure exactly what was too late. Something had passed and I had missed it. That's all I knew.

Jenny made the team and as soon as the rejects had left the auditorium, the Billmorettes surrounded their new members and screamed and clapped and hugged them. They handed over to the new girls the red-and-gold Billmorette uniforms with the big
B
on the chest. I walked down the bleachers and faced my sister on the court, who made no sense to me as a Billmorette. “Did you see? Did you see?” she shouted. When she tried to hug me, I let out a yelp and reminded her that my arm hurt, even though it hadn't hurt a bit when she'd grabbed me. I just felt that she should be cautious around my injury, that she should show some manners and consideration. But she was too damned excited to apologize.

“You have work to do at home,” I reminded her because someone had to lay down the law and insist she spend some time at the kitchen table trying to turn her C and C- grades into B's. When we lived in Boise, she'd signed a contract with Mom that was taped on the refrigerator door and that said, “I agree to get at least two B's this term.” After breaking this contract, she was grounded to the house between the hours of three and five, her mandatory study time. But with both my parents working, I was the only one to enforce these study hours, which I did militantly because I understood how essential good study habits were. All the same, my father had given her permission to try out for the Billmorettes and do just about anything else she wanted to do when she wanted to do it.

“We have our first team meeting right now,” she said. “Could you tell Mom to stop by school and pick me up on her way to get you at the hospital? Could you call her please and tell her that?” That afternoon was supposed to be my last appointment at The Richmond Clinics.

“I guess I could,” I said.

“Who's that?” Janet Spencer asked her.

“Oh,” Jenny said. It hadn't occurred to her until then that she was going to have to introduce me to her new friends. I didn't look so hot. I never did. Fashion was not a big concern of mine then. I wore a loose pair of Levi's—another of my mother's great finds at Deseret Industries—that fell halfway down my butt and that I had to pull up fifty times a day. I pulled them up when Janet Spencer set her large blue eyes on me. My white, long-sleeved T-shirt said
TEAM PLAYER
on it for some reason. I hated wearing T-shirts with words on them, but more often than not the best secondhand clothes—the newest, most unused-looking clothes—were the ones with the silliest words on them. I had another that said
SLED DOG
on it, which was really a strange thing for a shirt to say. Of course, my arm was in a sling and I held my heavy backpack and red parka in my good hand. Janet Spencer wore the red-and-gold Billmorette uniform, the little skirt of which came up to the middle of her muscular thighs. Her hair was the blond of lemon peel and her smile was incredibly white and large. She seemed to take me all in with that huge, terribly dishonest smile. “This is my brother,” Jenny said.

“Cool,” Janet Spencer said.

“Nice to meet you,” I said.

“Yeah,” she said, turning away and plunging into a huddle of red-and-gold drill team girls. My sister waved a hand at me and said, “See you in a couple hours.” I stood there for a while, alone in the middle of that court, holding my coat and heavy book bag and feeling how separate, how far away—a universe away—I felt from all those squealing girls who had just begun shouting out the first line of the Billmore fight song, which goes,
“Billmore! Billmore! Billmore is bold!”
I did that until my sister actually stuck her head out of the huddle and shouted silently—so that I could only see the word on her lips—“Go, go, go.” So I did. I turned and headed for the main exit, which was all the way on the other side of that basketball court and seemed to take forever to reach.

*   *   *

It was a strange day for the end of February—rainy and muggy—and I spent the bus ride up to The Richmond Clinics watching beads of water flit across the window next to me. In the examination room, the doctor prodded at my shoulder and moved my arm in different angles before telling me that I'd healed up, that the strained ligaments and torn muscle were better than ever, and that there was no need to put the sling back on. He was a young guy with an absolutely bald head that shone orange and smooth in the light. “You don't seem too happy about it,” he said. I said I was, even though I couldn't have felt less excited and I wanted to keep the sling, which he had been about to throw away. When I asked him if I could take it, he laughed and said, “It's all yours.” Later, as I stood outside the entrance waiting for my mother to pick me up, my arm felt odd, skinny, naked without it. I stood just inside the awning, watching the rainwater run off the building. It put me in a trance—the water running down in strings and drumming against the sidewalk—so that I barely noticed the fact that I'd put the sling back on. My arm still hurt a little, or so it seemed to me, and I wondered if the doctor hadn't been wrong, if maybe my arm could use a few more days in that sling. Besides, I liked the way it felt and wanted to wear it a little while longer, the way you want to wear an old, holey T-shirt because the fabric is worn fine, nearly as comfortable as your own skin.

When I sat down in the car, my mother didn't say anything and didn't look over at me. She just pulled out of the parking lot and drove past the Fort Douglas Country Club and for some reason down the hill, which was the opposite direction we needed to be driving. She'd just gotten off work from Oak Groves and looked especially tired that day, her hair a little messed up where she'd worn the nurse's cap, a white hat that she'd thrown into the backseat of the Buick and that looked like one of those paper boats kids make in grade school. Jenny was sitting in the backseat, wearing her new Billmorette uniform. I guessed that my mother and she had been arguing since Jenny was quiet and quickly gave me a look of caution, a look that said something's wrong with Mom. When my mother looked over at me, I saw that her eyes were swollen and glossy red, that she'd been crying, and that something really was wrong. “I thought they were letting you out of that thing today,” she said, gesturing at my sling.

“They asked me to wear it for another week or so,” I said, lying to avoid what I sensed was going to be a very unpleasant situation.

“Your arm is healing, isn't it?” she asked.

“I guess I'm not healing as well as they thought I would.”

“Why is that the case?” she asked.

“The doctors aren't sure.”

“Wonderful. Great,” my mother said. She looked at me, and I saw that she was not only sad but angry, too.

I should have stopped, but sometimes I just didn't know when to stop. “They said it might take months more. They said they'd have to do some tests and things.”

“Jesus.” She hit the steering wheel with her hand. “Why can't anything go right with this family? Why?”

“What's wrong with everybody?” I asked.

“Nothing,” my mother said. We'd stopped at a light, and she looked at me and smiled, as if to prove it. “Nothing.” A tear dropped quickly from her eye, then another and another. She let out a laugh. “Oh, shit,” she said.

“You're scaring me,” I said. I looked out my window at a hippie on a chopper who'd just pulled up beside us. He wore no helmet, and his long hair and beard dripped with rain. “I want somebody to tell me what's wrong.”

“It's nothing. Nothing at all.” My mother put her head down on the steering wheel and really started to cry.

“The light's turned,” I said. The people behind us had begun honking. “You have to go.” I nudged her, and she sat up and began driving, her eyes focusing, drying a little as she watched the road.

“Mr. Warner died today,” my mother said, looking straight ahead. Mr. Warner, I guessed, was one of the tenants at Oak Groves. “I have this job where people actually die, Steven. It's crazy, crazy. He just fell over on me. I couldn't believe his weight. I've never felt anything so heavy.”

“Who's Mr. Warner?” I asked.

“Just an old man,” she said. “A very old man who died a few hours ago and fell on your mother. How insane is that?” She looked at me and began laughing out loud as the tears came to her eyes again. “Now I have to go back there and talk to someone about it—the coroner or someone—so that they can make out a report. I'm the sole witness to Mr. Warner's death.” She was taking a left turn and stopped talking to concentrate on her driving before starting in again. “I have to make a statement. I was telling him to lift his arms up so that I could sponge him there. That's when he fell on me. Jesus.” I could see by the way my mother was shaking her head back and forth, back and forth, that she was remembering it in detail and trying as hard as she could, flexing her jaw and then spitting out a laugh, not to remember it. In the backseat, Jenny was looking down at her lap. She'd probably heard the whole story by now. I could picture Jenny wanting to tell my mother about making the drill team, being a Billmorette, and then my mother telling her about the dead guy. “He still had soap on him,” my mother continued, “and I was rinsing him off. If you send them to lunch with soap suds still on them, they get sent back to you and you have to rinse them off again. That's when he just fell over on me like I was supposed to comfort him or do something. So now we need to go back there. I have to sign something. I guess that's what you do when somebody old with no living relatives dies. I didn't even know him. He was too old to know.”

“Are we going to Oak Groves right now?” I asked.

“He never said anything that made sense, anything that you could reply to,” she said. “You can't get to know someone you can't have a conversation with, can you?”

She seemed to expect an answer from me, so I gave her one. “Not really.”

“He just muttered all the time. A lot of the elderly at Oak Groves are like that. The other nurses tell me I'm going to get used to that. But I'm not used to it, and I don't want to get used to it. He couldn't hear you, either. When you'd say his name, you had to yell it right in his face as if you were calling to someone across a parking lot. It felt cruel. Even then he hardly knew to look at you. You can't get to know someone like that, can you?”

“I guess not,” I said.

She didn't say anything for a moment. “I don't mean to be telling you all of this. But I haven't been able to talk to anybody yet.” She looked at her watch. “It only happened a few hours ago. Afterwards, I took the others to lunch as if it were just any other day and none of it affected me at all. But it did. It really did. I don't think I can do this anymore.”

We drove through the intersection of 100 South and 200 East, exactly one block south and two blocks east of the Temple, I knew, because the grid system in Salt Lake was built around Temple Square. Every address told you where you were in relation to that silly-looking holy site. The City of Zion really was built around God. At a red light on Main Street, we stopped in front of the high stucco walls of Temple Square, behind which rose the Disney-like spires of the Temple itself with the golden statue of the Angel Moroni blowing a trumpet atop the highest central spire. Pedestrians hurried in and out of the Temple Square gates, huddled beneath umbrellas and newspapers and squinting into the wet air.

“When God returns,” Jenny said, “the Angel Moroni will come to life and really blow his trumpet. That could happen at any time. It could happen now. That's when everybody will come back to life.” She was peering out the window at the angel and trying to distract us so that she wouldn't have to hear about Mr. Warner anymore. I saw her plan and I didn't want to hear any more about the old man, either, but I didn't much like what Jenny was saying. I didn't like having to picture, as I did then, everyone digging free of their graves and walking around in the afternoon sun, trailing black earth behind them, as golden Moroni blasted at his trumpet.