Now and Again (44 page)

One by one, the newly elected girls floated across the room to stand on the dais with the outgoing officers until there was only one more result left to announce. Tula's hopes rose and sank with every beat of her heart. Sammi was popular, but she had become increasingly bossy over the last few months, so perhaps the girls had tired of her. In fact, it was highly likely. But when the drumroll sounded and the new Worthy Advisor was finally announced, Tula was shocked but not really surprised to hear Sammi's name instead of her own. The meeting hall erupted into whistles and applause. Tula clapped her hands automatically, but when she looked around the room that had held such promise for her, tears welled in her eyes. Each time they threatened to fall, she reminded herself that the eighth bow station with purity as its central tenet still existed, if only in her heart. And purity included feeling happy for Sammi. Mrs. Winslow was right about that. It also included making something of herself no matter how insurmountable the obstacles in her path.

But there was another voice inside her head, and the more she tried to ignore it, the louder and more insistent it became. What if she had been wrong about purity, wrong about what white signified—wrong about everything! The incident at the motel had worried Tula. It seemed an indication that her instincts were wildly off-kilter. Why had she thought the motel was a good place to take Will? Why had she insisted on cleaning behind the toilet? And why hadn't she realized that no amount of scrubbing could ever change the motel's drab colors and flimsy wallboard into something more permanent and respectable? She still thought that the Rainbow banner should be re-envisioned, but now she wondered if the added stripe should be black, with all that blackness signified. In any case, the idea of purity suddenly seemed childish and naïve. Were the women who came to the clinic impure? And who had first thought to apply the concept of purity to women so that they could forever after be held to an impossible standard and found wanting?

Tula had resolved to do better by Will, and just before he left for the army, she had tried again to arrange a special evening. Mr. and Mrs. Winslow had gone out of town for a few days, and Tula had volunteered to keep an eye on their house. She invited Will to go there with her, and after making sure the plants were watered and everything was in order, she gave him a tour of the upstairs, ending with the master bedroom.

The room was dominated by an enormous bed that was draped in flounced bed coverings and piled with satin pillows. At the windows, silk curtains fell in shimmering puddles to the floor, and an entire wall was hung with paintings of beautiful women cuddling lapdogs or brushing their hair. The setting was the opposite of the motel room in every regard, and Tula's heart was thumping erratically as she drew Will across the threshold and sat down on the edge of the bed.

Instead of sitting beside her, Will wanted to peer into the closets and turn on the water in the roomy shower. “Get a load of this!” he exclaimed. “Who ever thought of making the water come out from the sides!”

The bathroom was scrupulously clean. No suspicious yellow scum or lint or curls of pubic hair marred its gleaming surfaces. Instead, there were stacks of fluffy towels and dishes of fragrant, unused soap. Only belatedly did Tula realize that it was clean because her own mother had worked herself to the bone to keep it that way. Will insisted on peering into every cupboard and sniffing every vial of perfume before he sat down beside Tula and told her he respected her too much to force her into anything. “I understand about purity now,” he said. “It took me a while, and even if I don't completely understand it, I know that whatever's important to you should be just as important to me.”

Tula wasn't sure how it all happened, but before she knew it, she and Will were eating ice cream at the Main Street Arcade and promising to wait for each other, and then they were kissing each other good-bye. Tears were oozing from her eyes as she said, “I'll think about you, Will. I'll think about you every day.”

“I'll think about you too, Tula.”

“Do you have the picture I gave you?”

“I'll keep it in a special pocket. Right next to my lucky crystal and my knife.”

“I have your picture too. It's sitting right beside my bed, so it's the first thing I see every morning and the last thing I see at night.”

And then she was waving from her doorstep and Will was gone and the waters of her life closed over him. Some days, if she didn't count the persistent ache in her heart, it was almost as if he had never been part of it at all.

After the ceremony, the new officers stood in a long line to receive the good wishes of the assembly. Mrs. Winslow breezed around the room, her head held high, curls bouncing stiffly on her head. “You still have a whole year to figure things out,” she said when she saw Tula standing in a corner by herself. At first, Tula thought she was talking about Will, but of course she wasn't.

“Yes ma'am,” said Tula.

“A lot can happen in a year! Just keep in mind that Mr. Winslow is always looking for good secretarial help at the plant. He might even have a summer position so you can start to learn the ropes. And of course I need household help every now and then.”

“Yes ma'am,” said Tula again. It was as if she had already given up on college, already begun scrubbing bathrooms alongside her mother, already started fading into the grimy shadows of the motel or flushing little pieces of herself down the sparkling toilets of the rich people's homes.

B
y the time Will left for the army, Maggie had been gone more than six months. For weeks afterward, Lyle passed shadowlike through the concrete expanse of the munitions factory, avoiding people who approached to congratulate him, as if he were the heroic one. If Jimmy raised his hand from across the parking lot, Lyle pretended not to see him. Then, at the end of April, he took two days off to visit Will before he shipped out overseas. The day he returned, MacBride called him into his office and said, “I know things have been difficult for you, Lyle, but we have standards to uphold.”

“Yes sir,” said Lyle, snapping his shoulders back and speaking crisply. He had spent the last two days watching Will and his fellow soldiers stand at attention and salute, and some of their spit and polish had rubbed off on him.

“It's not that I don't know things have been a little rough,” said MacBride.

“Yes sir,” replied Lyle.

“The thing is, I need people who can give me one hundred percent.”

MacBride went on about inputs and outputs and effort and reward while Lyle studied the worn face in front of him, with its squinting eyes and wrinkled skin and specks of ingrained dirt, and wondered if MacBride was happy or at least content.

“I hope you'll see this as an opportunity,” said MacBride. Then he said he'd be happy to write a recommendation for Lyle and that his final paycheck would be sent to his home. Lyle scanned the cluttered cubicle for clues to his future, but the dusty workplace safety manual and the chipped metal task lamp and the grimy work orders tacked to the bulletin board next to the photograph of MacBride's son and grandson holding fishing poles seemed like artifacts from an exhibit about the distant past.

“I have a son,” he said. He almost told MacBride that he had missed work because he had been seeing his son off to war, but the rule was that absences were to be cleared in advance, and he hadn't done that.

“Family,” said MacBride. “That's what it's all about.”

Most of Lyle's acquaintances couldn't remember whether he attended the high school graduation or not. Afterward they said, “Didn't see you up at school,” despite the fact that Lyle had been sitting in the R section, right where he was supposed to sit. Will wasn't there to walk across the stage, but there was a flag with a wooden stick strapped to the empty chair between Rafe Rodriguez and Stucky Place. August Winslow had been asked to give the graduation speech, and the principal beamed out at the audience as he introduced him.

“Our speaker was recently honored as one of Red Bud's great men, so we are lucky to have him with us today,” he said.

Winslow looked like a politician with his dark suit and silver hair. “I'm probably not the greatest of the great, but the others were unavailable,” he said, which made the audience laugh since everybody knew that all of the other men on Sammi Green's list were long since deceased.

Winslow spoke about individual strands in the strong rope of the American economy. He said that local businesses like the one he worked for were always happy to welcome new graduates, but that some of the young people before him would spread their wings and fly before coming home again and others would soar farther afield, using what they had learned right there at Red Bud High to help make distant communities stronger. He said “freedom” and “heartland” and “sea to shining sea.” He made special mention of two boys who were joining the armed services immediately after graduation, and then he saluted the flag on Will's chair and everybody clapped.

Lyle wiped the tears from his eyes and hurried out before the ceremony was over. He sat for a long time on the stairs that led down to the locker room, his knees as bony and angular as the metal treads, his khaki shirt blending in against the cinder-block wall, and his inner chambers as empty and echoing as the stairwell. He was proud of Will for going off to make something of himself, and he wondered if it was too late to spread his own wings. There had to be a job for him in Phoenix. He and Maggie could get a fresh start there. Now and then a group of students burst through a fire door from the hallway, their high spirits propelling them up a flight or down and out into the sunshine, and only by flattening himself against the wall did Lyle manage to avoid being kicked by a polished battalion of special-occasion shoes. When August Winslow rushed past followed by the mayor, Lyle craned his neck to watch them through the balusters.

“Goddamn it, Buddy,” Winslow hissed. “Keep those kids out of the creek! I don't care what you tell them. No, don't say it's toxic! Chrissakes, isn't that the whole point? Make up something about venomous snakes—it doesn't matter what. Just get it done.”

Whether it was Winslow's words or Will's absence or the fact that he hadn't eaten yet that day, Lyle experienced the kind of phantasm people who died and came back to life claimed to have had of the light-filled paradise that was waiting for them on the other side. What Lyle saw wasn't paradise, though, but a parallel world of privileged information and secret contacts and clandestine assignations. It was as if he had broken through the walls of his existence to find that what he had thought were hard limits and bolted doors were only flimsy illusions woven from the thread of his expectations and lack of confidence in himself. Now he saw that anyone who wanted to could tap on the barrier and break right through. He felt powerful and alienated, as if there was an important reason for his suffering and he was about to find out what it was. His own passivity made sense now too. It was what the people in charge wanted from people like him, and he had been only too willing to comply.

It was the sensation of finally seeing beyond the curtain that caused Lyle to drive carefully home, staying well within the speed limit even on the New Road Extension, where he had always revved the engine and banked the curve. It was what caused him to search through Maggie's things for some hint of what the police had been looking for or for some clue as to what she had meant about the Iraqi babies. But he found nothing, only a couple of sweaters and a few magazines with their pages missing.

The next afternoon, a representative from the bank that held the mortgage arrived to change the locks and post a sign in the front yard. “What are you doing?” asked Lyle, but the man merely handed him a business card and a pamphlet and asked him if he had somewhere he could stay.

“Why do I need a place to stay?” asked Lyle.

“Read the pamphlet,” said the man. “If the pamphlet doesn't explain everything to your satisfaction, you can call the number on the back.”

L
yle's calls became less and less frequent. Neither of them said so outright, but with Will gone, there was little for them to talk about. “If I can't come home,” Maggie had said the last time they spoke, “maybe you should come to Phoenix.”

“That's an idea,” Lyle had replied. And then he had asked, “Are you making progress on the case?”

“We should hear something any day now.” Since Maggie had been working for the attorney, two of his clients had been granted new trials, so the office was busier than ever. “Everyone wants representation,” she said to Lyle. “But hardly anyone can pay.”

“Maybe if you prove Tomás is innocent, they'll forgive you for taking his prison records and you can come home,” said Lyle.

“So they figured it out?” said Maggie.

“I expect they did,” said Lyle.

Maggie didn't say that Tomás's records weren't all she had taken, and she wondered if each stolen document would count as a separate strike when they added up the charges against her.

When several Mondays went by and Maggie didn't hear from Lyle, she dialed her home number only to find that it was out of service. A lump of panic rose in her throat, and whenever she swallowed, the lump reasserted itself and made her gag. She called True, who promised to get a message to Lyle. Then she called Misty, who told Maggie the police were still sniffing around. “We would have heard if they'd found something new, but you probably should lie low for a while longer just in case.”

That night Maggie tossed fitfully and awoke when it was still dark to find Dino whining and licking her face. “Okay, boy, okay,” she said, but it took her a minute or two to remember where she was. When she took him out for his morning walk, she thought she saw Tomás dressed as a soldier. Good for you, Tomás, she thought. As she followed him up a side street and into an alley, she noticed he had put on weight and seemed taller than she remembered, but just when she got within shouting distance, he was swallowed up by the crowd. A few minutes later she saw him coming out of a coffee shop with a group of friends, and then she saw him selling magazines from a darling little cart. “Tomás!” she called out.