One Heart (2 page)

I sat in the truck outside of The Duke of Bubbles Car Wash (a man who believed he was a duke owned it) on a stone cold gray winter day and read what Gladys wrote to Raelene. She wrote,

I remember I sat in the truck wanting to cross out “Little Girl” and write in “Raelene.” Why couldn't Gladys at least use the soulful child's name? Not many people ever reached out to Gladys anymore, and I didn't want her to miss this opportunity, whatever it was. Even then I guess I was sensing this little Philadelphia girl was important in some way.

It was around this time Gladys nearly got fired from the winter school because of some parents complaining she beat their kids. This wasn't true at all; what was true is Gladys and me were getting our windows soaped and egged in February, so don't think it was Halloween pranksters. Gladys stayed up late one night and spied in the dark at the window while the two boys, Sinclair Barnes and Cale McGovern, wrote with white soap on our windows
HOUSE OF WHORES
,
EAT ME RAW
, and other pleasant things of this nature.

Gladys has an old rifle (she found it in the woods once and never loaded it), so she went out there in her white robe and yelled, “Freeze or I'll shoot your ass to the moon!” I was in bed, listening with a rattled stomach. It wasn't what Gladys said, it was how she made the whole house feel, like the air was made of sharp bits of rage.

The boys saw the rifle and froze. She said, “Get your skinny asses in here.” They must've walked into the kitchen like scared sheep; I heard the door slam shut.

Then I heard the sound of four slaps. She had slapped their faces hard, quick, twice for each boy.

“You can't do that!” one of them cried. “We'll sue you!”

She slapped them again.

“You fat bitch!” the same boy cried.

“You get the hell out of here, both of you; I don't want your kind stinkin' up my house!” Gladys's voice was almost always strong and steady, but that night it was shaking and higher pitched.

They ran out. I watched at my window as they tore through the snowy fields, two scared, skinny animals under the moon. I know Gladys was standing at the door with the rifle, watching them, and somehow I knew her eyes were wet, and it made me think of when she was a girl, when she could still cry, when she wasn't all dammed up. And I missed that girl terribly.

Gladys came into the bedroom that night and sat on the edge of her bed and watched what she thought was my sleeping face. She sat there breathing. She watched me for ten minutes or so, and then she looked at Wendell's picture, picked it up, and sat it in her lap so his handsome face was staring up into hers.

I missed Wendell too. I thought of how he ran as a small child, with so much coordination and grace his father said he'd play ball. Why, when children are gone from you, do you so often call up not the recent memory but the memory of when they were smaller, needier? Gladys brushed her fingers over the features of his face. Then she laid down on top of the covers and slept.

The next morning she said, in a voice that wasn't like her own somehow, a softer voice with an almost smile, “I dreamed of that child from Philadelphia. I could see her. She wore red shoes walking by a river and a bird was flying above her, following her. A captain on a white boat was sailing by, but he didn't see the child and she didn't see him. It was in a different country. Maybe Portugal. It weren't clear.”

I knew right away there was more to that dream than red shoes and a captain on a Portuguese river.

More letters came, more horses, not all with blue saddles, fact they got more colorful, imaginary colors for the horses like purple with green dots, and one with sunglasses and platform shoes; Gladys got a kick out of that one and put it on her mirror. And every letter told of how hard she was praying, how much she was sacrificing, she had given up Almond Joys and wearing socks, for instance—and how she thought Wendell was like a big brother to her. She never had a big or little brother, she said, she just had a cousin and the cousin was unsuccessful as a Philadelphia puppeteer so had to live elsewhere. I believe Miami. And the father with the nipple on his cane, turns out he was a drug user, with a new drug-user girlfriend who he wanted Raelene to call “Mom,” so mostly the poor thing tried staying out of that house late as possible, and leaving in the morning soon as she woke.

But there came a time when Gladys didn't read me the letters anymore. I don't remember when that was, but she didn't leave them around for the likes of my deceitful eyes either. And Wendell didn't come home, and didn't come home. Tim McGreen had been back for months. Another boy we knew, Lad Kane, he was back without a leg. I worried about Gladys then more than I could tell her. She'd already lost one child, and that's a whole other story. I watched her closely, I couldn't help it, I'm protective of others. Maybe she hated that. I kept wondering when she was going to cry. I know I felt like crying all the time; I loved Wendell too. But I was waiting for Gladys.

Then we found out he was never coming home.

When she got the news it was a windy spring day, the kind that bangs the shutters, and after she closed the door on the officers Gladys just bent in half. She had her hands on her stomach and she bent completely in half.
Oh
, she said,
Oh
.

She stayed bent in half with her hands on her stomach for less than a minute. Her face was dark red. I was afraid to speak. She finally straightened up and walked back to the bedroom and closed the door quietly behind her. She came back out in five seconds, left the house with a stone face, and walked down the hill.

Gladys came back an hour later. I remember I had made macaroni and cheese. I could tell by Gladys's face she hadn't cried yet. Gladys was conversational that night, drinking her whiskey. She said things like, “I'm bored with the Sunday stew we make. I'm bored to tears with the same damn thing. We should get some new cookbooks, Ivy. I need some variety in life. We need to change the menu. No wonder those children are half insane. Jesus, Mary and Josephine, Ivy, what have we been thinking?” I remember her eyes were wet, but it was like the tears that wouldn't fall were clear, solid shields, and she kept smiling, and then her eyes weren't even wet anymore. Before she went to bed that night she sat on the couch and read one of her books (she usually read the classics, and never the excellent mysteries that I recommended). She looked up from that book and said, “I wonder if James will ever know.”

James was Wendell's father. We hadn't heard from him in almost a year, and hadn't seen him in five. He must've felt something. He called just six days after we'd heard Wendell died, and I answered the phone, and he said, “Ivy, hello, this is James. Just calling to check on Wendell.”

“Hold on,” I said. “Hold on.”

Then I held the receiver in my hand with my heart pounding. “Gladys?” I said. She was asleep in the bedroom; it was six in the morning. “James is on the phone, Gladys.” And so she gets out of bed smoothly like she'd rehearsed all this a million times and she comes and takes the phone from me and says, “James?” And then she puts her hand on her throat and her chin lifts itself up in the air and she hands the phone back to me, and goes to stand over by the window.

“Bad news, James, Wendell died over there.”

He didn't gasp or make a single sound.

“James? You there?”

I talked to him about the service we were having for Wendell in the Unitarian chapel, and he said he'd be there, but he never made it.

“Let me talk to Gladys,” he said before hanging up.

So I gave the phone to Gladys and the only thing she said was, “I'm okay, yes.

Are you?” And that was that.

Raelene's letters didn't stop coming. Gladys put them in the night table drawer. I didn't read them, or ask Gladys whether she ever wrote back. When I think back to those days, it's like Gladys and me are all alone in that house, two women in our early forties already feeling old, and the house is underground, like Wendell took us right down with him somehow.

When you looked out the window all you saw is the earth, and it was filled up with boys.

You can be a sister to Gladys and feel your own luck as evil, or not quite evil, but unfair. Like I said, Wendell's not the only one she's lost. No sir. And the fact is, I haven't had a single tragedy. My son Louis grew up flat-footed with asthma, and missed the war. His father and I parted early, both of us happy to do so; it was back in the days where you married up after knowing someone only a few weeks, and that's what we done, when I was just a girl, and him a boy, and soon we said to each other, “We're opposites, but we don't attract.” It weren't too painful and Harry and Louis kept in touch, and after Louis was six he had the counselors at camp to spoil him. He was always riding on someone's shoulders wearing his plastic fireman's hat and laughing his quiet laugh. I was blessed with a soft-spoken child with just the right mixture of mischief and pity in his heart. He cared for hurt animals; the asthma must've gave him sympathy. I remember he liked to serve me breakfast in bed when I was on the melba toast diet. He'd smear peanut butter on melba toast and top it off with Christmas cookie sprinkles, but I ate it anyway. His eyes were a shade bluer than my own, shining under the fireman's hat he never took off, not even in the bathtub. He was husky voiced with a funny way of winking at you like he was an old man, don't know where he got that. One of those little boys who wouldn't look too abnormal with a cigar in his mouth. Now he's on a ship. A fisherman by trade. Calls me from various ports, and visits when I least expect it, always with a present. Last time he called he mentioned he was getting serious with a woman and I'd meet her soon, maybe.

So you might think to yourself that I've been a lucky woman, and you're right, though it hasn't all been a dream. I'm not deaf to the world. I'm not blind to the veterans of one war after another. And there's part of me that knows the bomb is bound to be dropped soon enough. I'm not like Louise Daley down the road who feels safe just because we don't live in D.C. or New York City. I'm not someone ignorant about the powers of destruction.

On a personal level, the Italian Catholic broke my heart years ago; I thought I loved him and cried for a month, and sometimes in my mind I still see the way he looked when he drove, like he was always expecting to happen upon something great, but who needs to think back on that? It's not my habit. And Gladys said he was a fool. Finally I came to agree.

See, Gladys had an opposite sort of life, a life of one thing happening after another. It started happening after she was seventeen, when she met James.

His full name was James Gehrig Pittman. Gehrig for Lou, the great ballplayer. We called him James or Jimmy, or sometimes Gladys called him
Louie the hula boy
, some private joke of theirs. They were always that way—Mrs. and Mr. Private Jokes. Jimmy was originally from Kentucky, but Gladys met him back when we lived in southern Delaware, near Rehoboth Beach. One May evening Gladys met James Gehrig Pittman on the boardwalk. A warm night with a dark pink sky, the beach and the ocean empty. Gladys had always loved the off-season.

That night James was sitting on a bench with his legs out and his arms crossed. One of his feet was moving like he was nervous; the rest of him was still. Gladys had gone to the boardwalk to talk to her friend Jean Ann Reilly, who worked in a french fry and vinegar joint looking right out at the ocean back then. I'm talking years ago, when Gladys was seventeen, and the war was over but still a feeling in the air (fading fast), so remember, she's not a fat lady in this story. She's not a thin girl, she's a girl with meat on her bones, but Jimmy must've liked it that way. Back then it weren't like a girl had to starve to be cute.

Gladys with her dyed red hair was walking in her skirt and sweater in the early June night, maybe the sun not all the way down yet, but nice and sparkly on the water. Maybe she was walking like she used to walk with her arms crossed, thinking to herself about the world across the sea, where the Nazis had been. She wasn't the sort who could walk near the sea in 1946 and not think about what had happened on the other side a few years back. I knew because she would talk to me at night when we laid awake in the dark with the cows looking in.

So on that old boardwalk, Gladys and James looked at each other and knew, both of them knew, something was happening. He was not quite your movie star, but he was exactly Gladys's type.

That's hard to put into words what her type is. Her type is a man who is not good but whose goal is to be good, who works to be good because he believes in it. She liked that in Jimmy, I think, that struggle. You could see in Jimmy's face that he was struggling. Yes, struggling men is what attracted Gladys. The hidden motion they had in their faces was the motion of their troubled thoughts. Jimmy wasn't really her first struggling man, that was Ben, a farm boy, a two-night stand when Gladys was fifteen, something else entirely. I had my share of a boy like Ben too, don't think a heavy girl gets no experience. We were looking for love, like any girls, and it interfered with our morals early on, but I can't say I ever cried too hard over that spilled milk.

So this James, or Jimmy as only I mostly called him then, he had a child already, the child was Wendell, soon to be Gladys's adopted son. Wendell was three years old then. That night on the boardwalk Wendell was on the carousel in the pavilion with his grandfather, Jimmy's father, who was exactly Jimmy twenty years down the road (still struggling). Jimmy said to Gladys after their eyes met, “Will you sit down?” He patted the bench beside him. I think she probably looked out at the ocean for a second, narrowing her eyes, then sat down, and crossed her arms.