One Heart (14 page)

“We can go sit with that man,” Stephen said. “That's a big spring.”

“I'm not disturbing him,” I said.

The man looked up at me then, then back to his book.

Stacy said, “Who wants to smoke a splib?”

A splib was what she called her marijuana cigarettes.

Well, Stacy and Stephen went to smoke while Gus and I stood side by side mumbling things like, “You going in?” “Don't know.” “Didn't expect it to be so well lit.” “Is there like a full moon?” “Why are we here?”

So they come back naked, Stacy and Stephen, and then the four who were crammed in together stand up and walk naked over to their little fire. They stoke the fire. They crouch by it. Cavemen. Stacy and Stephen go into the spring where the four people had been. I'm beginning to get a little disgusted. I'm not the queen of clean, but I never had the urge to sit in another person's bathwater either.

Gus, he just took off his clothes and glasses real quick, folded them neat. Then he went to sit with Stacy and Stephen. When he was in there he said, “Come on, Gladys, this is heaven.”

Stacy said, “Come on, we don't care if you're fat.”

That Stacy had a lot of class.

She was too young to know that I could be happy being a big woman. She was too young for knowing much of anything. If I wanted to go sit in the bathwater of strangers, I would've stripped and they would've seen a big, strong, healthy-enough body. That's how I look naked. Powerful. I know I do. Despite the excess.

“You three have a nice soak. I'll just look at the stars,” I said.

But I kept looking back to the lone man with the book. He was young, maybe thirty. His hair was dark and thin. He wore glasses and his shoulders were strong looking, the kind of strength some men seem to get from a lifetime of tension.

Well, the man puts his book down all the sudden. Then he looks at me. “You should take a soak. It's good for the spirit,” he said.

“What's the temperature?” I said. My heart was racing. Because I knew I was going to do an extreme thing.

“It's just warm, just warm enough. It's just like putting on a silk robe that's sat in the sun all day.”

“A silk robe,” I mumbled. “A silk robe.”

And then I got out of my clothes and walked over to that spring and climbed in. I wasn't Mrs. Graceful. I sank down and put my head back on the earth and looked up at the stars. I could hear my heart. The stars looked like they were beating, like they had hearts too.

My three cohorts in the other spring joked, “Guess we're not good enough for her!”

The man across from me said, “Nice?”

“Real nice.”

“You should come here every time you want to die,” he said.

I lifted my head off the earth and looked at him. We looked at each other for five seconds or so. Finally I said, “Why would I want to die?”

“You might not. I just took a stab.”

“And you?”

“And me?”

“Do you want to die? Do you come here when you want to?”

“Oh, most certainly. Johnny got his gun. Uh-huh. Johnny had his fun. But Johnny can't talk to anyone. If you get my drift.”

I didn't. My friends in the other spring were now singing,

“Your name's Johnny?”

“My name's Thomas. I'm sorry, I should've kept quiet.”

For a while we sit there. A breeze in the high leaves above us.

Then our feet were touching. It felt good. I felt my foot move against his. He moved his foot against mine.

“I believe it's usually best to dwell in silence,” he said. “To dwell in silence,” he said, “is to dwell in possibility.”

Fanciest thing anyone ever came out and said to me personally. I'll never forget it. He moved his leg, stretched it forward. Now his leg was lined against my leg.

“So you got a way with words,” I said, too quiet. I don't think he heard. Maybe he heard my heart, maybe he heard my heart beating like a jazz drum.

Soon it's our legs are entwined. My cohorts are still singing the same song, doing harmony now. I wanted them to sing on and on. I wanted this
man
. I admit that.

And all the sudden I knew he'd been to Vietnam. I knew he'd been hurt. I knew he was one of the wounded souls who couldn't sleep.

“My son was over there,” I said.

“Over where,” he whispered.

“Over there.”

“Is that right.”

“He died over there.”

Then we were quiet, both looking up at the stars, and he said, “Ursula?”

I said, “Ursula?”

“Yes, Ursula. Let me read you this nice sentence.”

He picked up his book and read, “
The new house, white, like a dove, was inaugurated by a dance
.”

And he'd pulled his legs back. We weren't touching anymore. And all I could do is say, “Read it again.” And he read it again, four times.

Well, I've had an odd life with odd encounters but this was the strangest.

Not so much the man, but what he called up in me. The kind of hunger. The kind of loneliness.

He said it was time to go after a few minutes. And the feeling was mostly gone. Just scraps of it were left, and a kind of deep pit inside me where the scraps floated. Now I was just sorry I'd come here. I watched this man. He stood up, he climbed out. I looked up at him. He had a strong young man's body, but it looked so alone I was filled with the heaviest kind of sadness. And when I closed my eyes, I saw Wendell. I saw Vietnam jungle rice paddies. Dark green twisted confusion. Flames. Someone screaming. Wendell a boy on a bike. I opened them quick. The man dressed and said good-bye, and “I'm sure I'll see
you
here again sometime.”

But in the Valiant on the way back to town I knew I'd never see that place again. Gus and the others sang all the way home, the same damn song. “Damn! We're good!” they said. And I stared out the window. Everyone was strangers to me. I missed Wendell. I couldn't talk. My throat was filled up with missing him.

I wrote Raelene a note. I told her if she needed anything, call.

On the bus back home I leaned my face on the window like a dreamy girl. Mostly because I was tired. And because I didn't want to talk to the blonde woman next to me. Or her children in the seat behind me. They all had colds. The one boy kept kicking my seat. I sunk into myself. I pretended I was deaf. I made my eyes look blank too. The blondie maybe thought I was retarded. I could hear her thinking, Just my damn luck to end up sittin' with a deaf retard.

On that ride home I remembered all kinds of things from long ago. My mother's vegetable garden. My mother. I remembered how she'd take me and Ivy to the ocean. She'd wear a bathing cap and earplugs. She swam all stiff, like she was made of tin. It always bothered me. I'd want to rip the cap off and dunk her head under, hold it for a while. So she would come up alive and kicking. I don't know why I was born with this kind of mean spirit but I was.

“Mom! He farted on purpose!” the child behind me screamed.

“Did not!”

“You did too ya big fartin' liar!”

The woman, the blondie mother, she just sat beside me and pretended she didn't know these kids. The kids got louder. I finally had to say, “Aren't those your kids?” Surprise, the deaf woman can talk. She stared at me. And then she whipped herself around and talked to those kids through gritted teeth. They shut up for a good five minutes. The bus rolled on.

And I remembered James. I remembered how James and me knew how to spend a winter day. Light a fire, open the curtains to the gray sky, get under the blankets. I kept remembering that one thing over and over again. I didn't go trailing into other things. I controlled my mind. And when the woman settled down those kids for the fifth time, I drifted off into half sleep; I dreamed about the same thing. The fire, the gray sky, the blankets. And James.

So it didn't surprise me when I got back and James was there. Thoughts are like spirits. You think a thought about someone and the thought will travel right into that someone's heart. Whether they know it or not.

Or so I started thinking.

It did surprise me to find out he was with Ivy. I have to admit that surprised me quite a bit. I didn't know what to make of it, it seemed so odd. I wasn't hurt, initially.

It had been eight years since I'd seen James. We thought we had a lot to talk about. So we tried to talk, right there in the house. Ivy just let us be. For a few days, we'd sit at the table and try to talk. I wanted to talk, but it wasn't working.

“So, what have you been doing these past years?” I'd say.

“Well, a lot of things. Working hard. Living.”

“So tell me some of your jobs.”

James looked about the same, a little older I guess. He was tired looking, but he was always tired looking. One of those men whose face tired out before his body.

He didn't tell me I looked good. And I knew I didn't. Four days on a Trailways at my age will leave its mark. Still, we felt our connection to each other. A few times at the table, talking, we felt it. One of those times it was what you call a fierce connection. It stung. I couldn't breathe.

I would've done anything James asked me to do. I had nothing to lose with him. I had wrecked mine and James's life together long ago. After we lost our girl. Plenty a woman lost a child and recovered right alongside the child's father. For me, it weren't possible. I remembered James saying,
Please, please, please, don't leave me
. Like he was a child too. But I'd already left him. I left everyone. I was in a land of my own. Soon as I knew she was gone, I went to that strange land. Had to. At the time I didn't see another way.

So what James wanted after all was to go to the pond. The pond where we lost her. Where we slept while she drowned.

“I just want to see it,” he said. “We can get there in three hours.”

Meanwhile Ivy was out walking, walking, walking. She worked in the garden or out in the field raking up leaves with the kids, she came home to eat, but otherwise she was walking. She wouldn't talk much to me. She had her chin lifted high. She was holding on to dignity. That's Ivy. That's what she did her whole life.

“Well, whatever, James. I mean, if you want to see it, why not go see it?”

“I want you to go with me.”

“That's fine then, I'll go.”

All I had to do was close my eyes and I could see the pond in my mind anytime I wanted. But I went along to help James through it. It helped me to be in my own skin to feel like I was helping out James.

“It's so strange, being with you,” he said in the car. It was autumn, but the air was strangely warmed up with Indian summer. The leaves were all fiery yellows and reds. And it was evening. I just smiled over at him. Wasn't like him to say something so obvious. Made me sad, somehow. He was not the old James.

“I thought about you plenty,” he said.

“Well, me too,” I said. “Me too.”

But our words weren't sinking into the other's heart. You could feel that. You could feel the words just stuck in the air of the car. Homesick words. I thought to myself,
Where do the homesick words end up? Where do they go if they don't sink in?

And I knew it was hopeless, but James kept trying.

“What's your read on Jimmy Carter?” he said.

“James, I don't pretend to know. What about you?”

“I've arrived at the age where I think anyone who manages to be president doesn't deserve to be.”

“You were born at that age, James, weren't you?”

He laughed a little.

“I know I was,” I said, though that was a lie.

Silence. I watched the trees rush by.

“Remember that old dog called Wilma?” he said. He looked over at me with his dark blue eyes, then turned back to the road.

“Wilma—one ear,” I said. “She thought you were her mother.”

He tried to laugh.

I was thinking, Why Wilma? Why bring up that stray dog we got in Wilmington, Delaware? Of all memories, why Wilma? I couldn't figure.

“And the cat, Mr. Horse?”

“Mr. Horse,” I said. “I always liked that old cat. Course even that cat liked you better than me.”

And then James began to laugh at the wheel. It wasn't his old laugh. Fact, it scared me because it didn't sound a thing like him. And his hands were holding too tight to the wheel. His knuckles were all white. And then just as quick he stopped laughing. And I could see he'd laughed himself into his tears.

They just sat in his eyes. I was glad. I wouldn't have known what to say if James had tears running down his face.

“The last time I saw Wendell, that time he visited me before getting shipped off, he talked about all the pets we ever had,” James said. “I think about that day a lot. He kept saying he was grateful that we'd had all those pets, really grateful.”

“I should give you some pictures,” I said. “Of him. I have them all.”

It wasn't seeing the pond itself. It wasn't even the swim we took. It was the dreams that came afterward that changed me most. Because in the dreams there was a door. A door on the bottom of that pond. Under the water I'd bang on the door, bang on the door, using all my strength. In the dream was hope. A hope that somehow the door could be opened. Somehow I'd step through the door at the bottom of the pond and there she would be. There she would be. In the white sundress Ivy made her. Patiently waiting.

But the swim, it's not forgettable. James and me stood at the edge of the pond. I didn't want him to talk. But he felt like he had to. He said, “I never said good-bye to her. I never knew how.”

“That's why we're here,” I said. I wanted to say, Just be quiet. But I wasn't about to.