One Heart (16 page)

The man with the Walkman came over to my booth, his small gray eyes open now. “Rice pudding?” he said.

“Yes,” I said, though it was only him saying it that made me want it. “How did you know?”

“I been in the business long enough to know a rice pudding night owl from a burger-and-fries night owl,” he said. He was too young to talk that way. He was acting. Who could blame him? And he saved me from myself that night. He brought back a small dish of rice pudding and a tin of cinnamon, set it down and said, “So what brings you out tonight? Can't sleep?”

“Can't sleep at all.”

“I myself haven't been a night sleeper since I was eleven,” he said, “which is why I got this job. It's perfect. You meet all these interesting folks. And they all got a philosophy of life. I truly hope you don't have one. Or if you do I hope you keep it to yourself.” He looked right at me but he smiled like he thought a hidden camera was on him. One of these people who watched so much television they think they're
on
television.

“Don't worry, Buster.” I had the urge to call this man Buster. So I did.

“Really? You're just here to eat some pudding?”

“That's right, Buster.”

“I think I'm in love,” he said, and put his hand on his heart. I smiled at him like I thought he was cute.

“Will you marry me?” he said, and went down on his knee, down to the dirty floor. “I've been looking for someone with no philosophy for fifteen years now. Marry me.”

I laughed a little laugh. The baked bean man turned on his stool to look back at us, then went directly back to his food.

“Sure, let's go get married,” I said. “Let's go get married and adopt seventeen unwanted crippled children and live happily ever after, Buster.”

He was taken aback. He didn't want someone joining in like this, he wanted to be the entertainer, the only joker.

He yawned. “So. More pudding?”

“I'll pay up.”

I went to the counter with two dollar bills and told him good night.

“Stop in again, we'll talk about the wedding,” he tried, just the sort of fellow not to know when the mood was all gone.

I walked outside. I started up the road. It was still pitch dark. But I felt somewhat better. Comforted somehow. I inhaled the leaf smell. In the air I could catch a hint of real winter. Of snow coming soon. I crunched some leaves under my feet. And then after a minute of walking I hear someone saying, “Miss! Miss!” and I turn and it's the old man.

He stood there, his hat off his head, his hair all white. He stood up straight.

“Good night!” he said.

“Good night!” I called back.

We waved at each other.

When I got home, I slept. I hung on for a month before I got a phone call. It wasn't James.

“Gladys, it's Ivy. I'm on a pay phone. We're in Canada. I miss you. I just wanted to say I miss you.”

“What the hell are you two doing in Canada?”

“James has some friend out here. Some woman.”

“Is that right?”

“Are you mad at me, Gladys?”

“Mad at you? Why the hell would I be mad at you?”

The operator came on and told Ivy to feed the phone.

“I'm out of quarters.”

“Put James on,” I said.

But that was it, she was out of quarters, the line was dead.

And I waited and worked and drank too much through a sunless winter before I got the next call that mattered.

“Raelene had a boy!”

It was her friend, Hambone West. He'd been in the delivery room.

I wanted to say,
Hambone, come on out here, bring Raelene and the baby boy, come on out here and stay with me a while, I'd like that, so just come on out whenever you can, stay with me and save a little money
.

“We're headed to Philly,” he was saying. “Anthony too. We're all going back to the East. I'm the godfather,” Hambone said, in Marlon Brando's voice.

“Baby's name?” I said.

“Moses. You like it?”

“Uh-huh.”
Moses? Someone tell me he didn't say Moses
.

“Well, Raelene'll call you sometime from Philly. Raelene would've called you now but she's passed out. But you were number two on her list of people to call.”

“Who was number one?” I said, in spite of myself.

“Raelene's father. I had to call him first. He didn't have too much to say.”

“Really.”

“He's sending her some cash, though.”

“Well, good luck,” I said.

Somehow I knew I'd never hear from Raelene ever again. Why should I? She had her new life.

So, I said to myself. Time to stop waiting. Time to start over. Time to move on.

But I didn't know how to move on.

Rage had me stuck. Rage at my whole life. Rage at Ivy, James, but mostly myself. And then the rage turned into something else, a kind of despair, where nothing in the world was interesting to me. Of course the girls, Kate and Marie, they stopped coming by. Because when they tried to talk to me, I just looked at them. I didn't have any words. I couldn't have small talk. They got scared of me. The woman I worked with, Nadine Fisher, with her Wrigley's gum and love for birds, she was the only person I talked to for months on end. Because all I needed to say is “We need more batter for the hotcakes,” or “Does the walk-in feel a little warm to you?” and things like that. In the spring Nadine wore binoculars like a necklace. Tried to share the views. “Oh,” I'd say, “that is one nice bird.”

“It's a nuthatch,” said Nadine Fisher. She wanted to teach me.

“A nuthatch. So that's a nuthatch.”

I wish I could've fallen for those birds. James could've. Maybe even Ivy could've. Not Gladys, I told myself. I was not a woman who could fall for birds. In my mind a voice would say that over and over again, like it was some kind of explanation.

I kept on going through those days because I just never believed in the alternative. Not that I don't respect others who do. Just isn't for me, never was.

One foot in front of the other. Go through the days, I'd tell myself. Go through the days.

I
WANTED
G
LADYS AND
I
TO GO INTO THE POND WHERE
we'd lost our daughter. I wanted some kind of healing to take place. I confused that idea of immersion with healing, I suppose.

Gladys was angry that she had gone into the water, and later told me it had felt like a sacrilege to her. She wouldn't explain any further, but I think I understood. I hated being in that pond too, finding out it wasn't deep, as if Ann's death was all the more preventable in my memory now, which is absurd, but that was what I felt when I felt the shallowness of that water.

I remember us sitting on the ground, shivering next to each other, and me touching Gladys, and thinking that I finally knew that she and I would not make our way back to each other, ever. That whoever we had been, we were now something else, two people who did not fit together.

I sat there in silence. It surprised me when I was overcome with a sudden feeling of longing for Ivy, and shocked me when the very next moment I wanted Gladys, and pulled her to me, and told her we weren't strangers. It was like a chant,
we're not strangers, we're not strangers we're not strangers
. And it worked. For a few moments, it worked. But only for those moments, and these had dissipated before we'd returned to the car.

Gladys stood in the driveway and watched me and Ivy leave, not waving, not smiling, but looking somehow bemused. But I couldn't read that face with any degree of certainty anymore. I didn't really know her at all anymore. Or so I felt then.

I had told Ivy that we were going to Ontario, where I knew an old Quaker woman who had a farm. I told her we could go up there and live, and work the farm. This woman was named Muriel; I had met her down south when she was visiting her daughters—two chefs upstairs from me whose apartment was too hot, so Muriel had slept on my couch for a while. She had given me her address, told me she'd put me up anytime. She was a nice woman, a Quaker like my mother had been. She wore her white hair in a long braid down her thin back. I described all this to Ivy as we drove, and the more I talked, the wearier I felt. I felt I didn't have it in me to go there, to go to a new place, to start up a new life with a woman named Muriel who was virtually a stranger, even if she had slept on my couch for a few months. But I would conjure the will; I didn't know what else to do, and money was a problem. I had lived frugally and worked hard on a series of shrimp boats and managed to save some, but I needed to find work as soon as possible in order to feel right.

Ivy sat beside me in the car. “Gladys seemed happy for us,” she said. “But almost like a person gets happy after hearing a good joke.”

“I wouldn't spend too much time worrying about that.”

I drove on, drove north, going faster than usual, as if with speed I could get through my resistance.

Ivy said, “Traveling's not something I ever thought I'd like so much, James. Now I got an idea of how you must've felt all those years driving into new places.”

It gets old, I wanted to say, but I didn't. I didn't have it in me to ruin her enthusiasm. The woman deserved to be traveling with a man who could look out the window and be grateful for the beautiful blue dusk. So instead I said, “Look at the sky over there, Ivy.”

She whistled appreciatively, then smiled over at me.

I drove on, and on.

*  *  *

When we found Muriel's farm it was late morning, and up there the heart of autumn had passed and most of the leaves had already fallen. Muriel was out by the side of her house. I parked and got out of the car and she stood up with her hand over her eyes, peering out at us. She didn't recognize me from a distance. Ivy was saying, “This place is sure nice,” and looking all around. I was looking at Muriel, as if I could will her to feel more familiar.

“James?” she finally said, and her hand came down. “The fisherman with the good couch! Am I seeing right?”

I went and shook her hand, introduced Ivy, and told her we were there to help her out.

“I do have to tell you this is a big surprise,” she said. “And a welcome one. Come in, come in.”

We followed her into the old white house. It was set way back from the road, and looked solitary and peaceful. Up close it looked like it needed a lot of work, but it had the feel of contentedness, somehow, not neglect. The feel of a house that was happy to be neglected, proud to fall into a kind of natural disarray, which I knew from experience was just the kind of house that responded best to being fixed up. A house with life in it, a house that seemed accepting of whatever shape you wanted it to take, a house that breathed as long as it was respected. On the porch a few cats slept next to a pair of men's work boots that turned out to be Muriel's.

She insisted on making tea and feeding us sandwiches. She said she had plenty for us to do, that we should feel free to stay as long as we wanted, that we shouldn't look at her as a sad old lonely woman who needed our company, because she'd never been happier in all her life. But it would be nice to have us around, she added, and she certainly could stand some help. Her intelligent face was lined and lit up, radiant, as if she'd somehow absorbed all that brilliant color in the last of the autumn leaves.

Initially we worked outside: she had two cows, four goats, and a bunch of chickens. One coop had been torn up in a storm. The barn needed patching. The loft had been virtually destroyed by carpenter ants. All the work waiting to be done told me I was in the right place.

She had a small tractor that I rode around on under the gray sky, or the sometimes shocking blue sky that would fill me with hope. I would take it into my lungs, that northern blue Ontario air, and I would be able to stay focused for long hours on what I was doing, on where I was, and the hope would change to happiness. Ivy and I worked on patching up the barn together. It was when we were working hard enough that I felt especially good. I would drive those eight-penny galvanized finishing nails into the siding of the one wall and feel like nothing else mattered but how the nail went in. Ivy knew how to work quietly, which surprised me because I remembered Gladys talking about how she talked too much when they cooked. Also, Ivy loved to paint, and knew her tools, and she also loved to hammer and sand. In the evenings—the muscles in our backs so sore it was hard to swing our arms at first—we took walks with Muriel along an endless narrow road that was lined with tall pines. Sometimes we'd walk down to Superior, and stand looking out at what might have been the ocean. A few dogs would always follow us down there, which I liked. Muriel wore old dresses, big sweaters, and boots. From behind she could have been mistaken for a child were it not for the bright white of her hair. She had a spring in her step, and she'd kick stones. She loved the landscape passionately, and this was easy for me to understand, because a great clarity seemed to be the thing that held the place together. The clarity of rock, pine, water, road. When we were up there at Superior, the air felt scrubbed with cold light. The trees on that road dwarfed us. I appreciated the feeling that gave me because I had long ago arrived at the age where I felt my own smallness in the scheme of things as a comfort.

During the winter months we worked inside that house, painting, wiring, sanding, and fixing floorboards. Muriel loved it. She worked at various charities in the town most of the day, and had given us permission to do whatever we wanted when she was gone. “Go to town,” was how she'd put it. We got Muriel's old Christmas decorations out of the attic and dressed that house up and the three of us had a white Christmas, sitting up half the night listening to her old radio, watching the fire and the lights on the tree, fifty old-time figurines skating and singing on the white cotton snow of the mantel. Ivy talked all about her childhood Christmases that night, but I knew she was glossing over the stories, and she didn't mention Gladys in any of them. I found myself feeling grateful for that ability of hers to weed out the unsettling. Muriel listened and told some stories of her own, mostly about what Christmas was like during the Depression, how she and her husband had managed to create joy out of thin air.