One Heart (11 page)

“You've been through a lot,” I said, real quickly like I could feel what was coming.

“I'm in worse shape than I can say,” he said. “Shouldn't keep coming into your room.”

“I don't mind.”

“You should mind.”

“Why's that?”

He didn't say anything.

“Why's that?”

He looked me in the face then and said, “I came to see Gladys. I'm not sure this is the right thing to be doing. I came to see Gladys.”

“And Gladys is gone,” I said.

“I was just lonely, Ivy. And now I'm even lonelier,” James said.

“That's something,” I said. “That's something. Because I'm
not
lonely, and I can see now I been lonely all my life and never even knew it.”

James just looked at me while I cast my eyes down and thought about my words and wondered if what I said was true or false.

When Gladys called again I told her he was still visiting, but nothing else because it didn't seem like something I could say over the telephone. I asked her if she was coming home and she said “Not sure,” and I was glad of that. Because by the time she called, I knew I was in love with James.

Maybe he was lonelier after each time we were together but maybe that was his goal, to get lonelier and lonelier, all the way to the very last edge of lonely, so he could see his whole life clearly. Or why would he have kept coming back to my room, and why would we have taken those walks in the valley at sunset with neither of us speaking and sometimes holding hands and sometimes just lying right down on the dark green earth?

And I wasn't eating anything because love like that takes all your appetites away, it's like your appetites for sleep and food and other people just get sucked up into your appetite for your lover, and suddenly you're fifteen or twenty pounds lighter and you have these dark circles under your eyes but you still look good because your cheeks are pink and your body is filled with a secret hunger and a kind of sorrow that feels like happiness.

Meanwhile I was still working the garden with the little winter-school children. Pretty soon it would be too cold for gardening, but it was perfect in late September, with a sharpness in the air you could take inside you. And hundreds and hundreds of ripe tomatoes we'd can. I learned something about children out there. They're a lot more interested in you if they can feel you're carrying around a secret world, a world you consider more important than the world of children. The campers always liked me well enough, but out there in the garden they liked me even more and asked me questions no child had ever asked me, not even my son. “Ivy, when you were small, did they have televisions? Did you have a nice mother? Did you hate school? Did you hate boys? Where did you live when you were eight?”

I'd answer all the questions and they'd ask others and the gardening went quickly like a smooth dance and afterward I'd always walk down the dirt road alone, carrying my shoes and feeling like some kind of queen because the children would sing, “Bye, Ivy! See ya tomorrow!”

And a fine-mannered Indian boy named Apoorva made me a nice lanyard. That was a first.

Sometimes at night after a warm fall day we'd take a sheet down into the valley, a white sheet that we'd spread out on the black grass. James would get undressed and I would kneel beside him and massage his back and his legs. I was good at this, and sometimes James returned the favor, and he was good too.

One night as he was returning the favor I kept having a vision of my father standing on the hill just looking down into the valley at me and James. It was a childish wish of mine and I understood it was childish right away. What I wanted was for that man, my father, to see me with James and see that James loved me, even though I knew deep inside me that James really didn't
love
me, but it
looked
like love and
felt
like love to me if I didn't think too hard, and I wanted my father to come back from the dead to see me as a woman who James was loving. The man who loved Gladys was now loving me.

This surprised me because I hadn't given much recent thought to the man. My father, I mean.

“Guess who I'm thinking of?” I said to James. He was sitting beside me, one hand on my spine.

“Who?”

“My father. I keep picturing him in his black hat standing over there on that hill.”

“He had the heart of a bull, your father.”

“What?”

“Your father was a bull.”

I thought about that for a second, and started laughing, and laughed harder the more I tried to figure out what it meant, and I kept seeing a real bull, a live bull, walking around in my childhood house, snarling, and the bull had my father's face, and I couldn't stop laughing at the thought. But I laughed myself sick and started crying.

Basically I see now I was a whole different person by this point, crying like that.

James looked over at me and was quiet for a second.

“He showed favoritism, no denying that,” James said. “He favored your sister. I always wondered how that felt for you.”

He had started to refer to Gladys as “your sister” and never said her name during this time.

“Why do you think he favored her? Why was he so hell-bent on pretending I didn't exist?”

“I don't know,” he said. “A mystery.”

“Come on, James.”

“Maybe he knew your sister would be harder to tame. Maybe he liked the challenge. He was a certain kind of man.”

“Maybe,” I said.

I was unsettled. It was all happening too quickly. I had always thought of myself as happy, my life as easy, but something about this love affair was cracking me open like a safe where I'd locked away pain. Because really, Gladys had it harder with my father. It was easier to be ignored and dismissed and every so often teased. Not always easy, but easier. Because I did love him. You don't come into the world as a child with a choice about who you'll love, you just love whoever's there. And it's deep inside you the rest of your life no matter how much you know your love's unreturned. But still, it was easier to be all that than to be beaten. Not only beaten, but made into a little wife in an apron. Made into a prize possession.

Gladys was beaten with a belt at least five times that I remember and I wasn't even once struck with his hand as far as I know. I put almost all of my energy into giving him no reason to hit me, I think. I remember the first time Gladys was beaten hard enough so that she had red welts on her legs she was only eleven or twelve years old. In those days the boys from school had the habit of visiting girls in their class in the evenings. They wouldn't knock on the door, they'd just roll around on the front yard like gymnasts. They'd be dressed in white T-shirts and dark gray baseball pants. They'd do head-stands and backward somersaults and things like that while the girl would stand in her bedroom window or maybe on the front porch dressed nicely because she'd have been expecting them. Gladys was out there on the porch one autumn evening in a dress and her white patent leather shoes that she wore all year-round when everyone else only wore them in summer because she was an individual. She watched the boy gymnasts performing under red trees with a small smile on her lips, not giving them too much appreciation, but just enough. My father wasn't home when this was going on, just my mother, and she thought it was sweet. She'd stand behind a curtain and watch the boys herself.

That night Gladys whispered out to the boys, “Come around back in about five minutes.” Which they did, and Gladys let them in the basement door and gave them each a shot of whiskey. My father kept all the spirits down there in the basement. So after they had their shot they all went running off except for Digger Kovaleski, who Gladys had a case on. Digger and Gladys stayed down in the basement kissing too long, because the next thing they knew my father was there beside them pulling their hair to separate them, throwing Digger Kovaleski out onto the ground, and ordering Gladys up to her room. The other boys were waiting for Digger, hiding on the side of the house. I looked out the window at them from the dining room. Next thing I know Gladys is being beaten with my father's belt up in our bedroom. All the windows were open up there. I could hear the belt get louder on her skin, and a few times she cried out but mostly she stayed quiet. And the boys on the side of the house could hear this beating, could hear the sound of that belt against Gladys and could hear her cries. They just stared at each other wide-eyed, some of them smiling, and all of them listening until it was over, and then they ran off.

Gladys had welts on her legs and her back and they lasted a long time. My father told her he wouldn't beat her so hard if she'd behave, and it hurt him more than it hurt her. My mother didn't know much better, since she'd been beaten too (maybe most people had, spare the rod spoil the child and all that), so she didn't say a whole lot. She had a heartbroken look and tried to be extra nice to Gladys, but that just infuriated Gladys.

I told James this story and afterward nothing was quite the same between us. I could feel I'd changed everything, but I kept on talking. James had a Quaker mother who raised him without any violence, so for him the story had more impact than it would a more regular person, I guess.

I told him a story from when I was a girl, a story that I never told anyone, and the problem was even as I was telling it I could hear how it couldn't mean much now, not to James and not to me. Still, I talked on. I told him how when I was just a little girl back in southern Delaware, twelve years old, I thought I loved a man named Willy who worked behind the counter in the local drugstore. I considered him to be the most romantic man in the world because his fiancée had run off on him. The fiancée was a pretty girl who wore a Stetson hat with a dress, and everyone thought it looked good because she gave you the impression she was a queen, even when she was slouching at the counter waiting for Willy to take a break and smoke a Lucky Strike with her out front.

Willy had thin black hair, too long for those days, so it made him stand out as a bit unusual, and he wore old shirts with his father's name stitched onto the pocket,
Warren
, and I could smell his body when he set my Coke down on the counter, and I'd want to touch his arms with their muscles, and whenever people came into the little creaky floored drugstore and Willy gave them a slow, sad dip of his head, I'd have to bite the edge of my fist I liked it so much.

I kept telling this story to James, maybe trying to erase the story of the child Gladys, and the more I told it the more I felt like the child Ivy was a figment of my imagination and only the child Gladys was real. I was telling the story fighting for the child Ivy to be real as I talked. I just laid on my back and looked up at the sky and kept going.

I told James how I wrote little love letters to Willy sometimes right there at the counter, all hunched over so he wouldn't see the words but wanting him to be curious, and then one day he was. It was four in the afternoon and I was at the counter on the red vinyl stool that twirled up and down, though I weren't much of a twirler considering my size, and that little store was half lit with orange afternoon light and half in the shade, and Willy was by the window biting his nails, which on most men wouldn't look good but on him it did. He was looking out at the street when suddenly he turned from the window and called down, “Hope you're not writin' some boy love letters down there.”

James was trying to perk up a little, trying to forget my sister and remember me, and his hands were pulling up the grass and he said, “So did you give Prince Charming of the drugstore your little letters?” and I could see on his face he was working hard to be interested, and maybe he was a little bit, so I told him how my face got red and my heart pounded and I yelled back to Willy, “No, I'm just doodling.”

And Willy said, “Don't be duped.”

“I won't be duped,” I told him.

“Because you only got one heart, partner. One heart.”

“I know.”

Then he turned right back to the window.

Even then I sensed that Willy was planning to waste his life biting his nails behind the counter and warning others to protect their hearts, but at that age it seemed romantic to me. Then one evening I went to Willy's house and spied through his window while he ate his dinner from two cans, can of beans, can of corn, and he used his bed (unmade) for a chair and his dresser for a table and he wolfed down the dinner like a starving man, looking at his own reflection in the dresser mirror the whole time.

I just stopped going to Willy's after that I felt so bad to have seen all that, and I never could get it out of my mind, fact it'll just come to me about once a year when I least expect it, clear as a bell, like I'm seeing it all over again.

James pulled me to him all the sudden. It surprised me.

Something reached his heart in the memory I told him, or maybe he just felt it was pitiful how hard I was trying.

We both stayed quiet for a minute.

“Don't understand why she never mentioned something like that,” James said. “She told me most things.”

“Who knows,” I said, and turned away my face because my eyes were stung by confusing tears.

We kept on with our love affair, and we kept on talking.

It just wasn't quite the same.

My son, Louis, called in mid-October to wish me a happy birthday. He said he'd be coming home to visit for Christmas. He asked me if anything was new and I stood by the kitchen window and said, “No. Not a thing.” I saw right then I had turned into a woman with too many secrets.

Then, a week or so later, when James and I were about to take a drive into the valley, me in a new sweater and lipstick, both of us almost at the point of thinking she might be gone for good, Gladys was at the door, battered brown suitcase in hand, the evening sun behind her. She wore a white cotton blouse and a blue skirt, or rather a blue sarong. On her feet were black Cuban heels.