One Heart (20 page)

I put some things in the closet, undressed, showered, and got into bed. It was the loneliest, strangest sort of feeling, to be in a single bed again, just myself, waiting for my sister and not knowing what she would say when she saw me. I waited and thought of Gladys but also my mind was still on James. James was in my mind, stuck there no matter how many other things I thought.

I laid under the sheets with my eyes closed and soon enough my head started to feel like it was stretching out behind me like a road, and James was driving and driving and driving, and my head was getting longer and longer and longer, and I felt there was no end to what shape your head could take when a man was driving in it. I tried to imagine him stopping the car so the road could end and I could drift to sleep, but it didn't work, he just kept on going with the windows down and the spring night blowing in his hair. So I sat up in bed and looked through the curtains into the starry sky and shook my head until I finally got that road out of my mind, and laid back down with a normal-shaped head. Still I could smell his body, and see his hands on the wheel, but gradually it all faded and for a minute or so all I saw was the room I was in, the curtains, the moonlight, the night-stand between the two beds, the sheets, and the mirror on the back of the bathroom door like silver.

Then I had about an hour of just lying there in that bed, with my thoughts drifting way back into my childhood, way back to my mother, who would walk down the hall and come into our first-floor room at night when she thought we were asleep. I remembered how she'd stand and just watch us for a few minutes, her two little girls sleeping, and I'd be awake and wondering what she was thinking as she watched her sleepers, and I always had the feeling she was praying for us, just praying that we'd be happy in our lives, happier than her, that we'd find love and happiness as we grew and turned into women. And when I was about eight she'd still do this and I'd feel her own unhappiness, or sadness, but I never really thought about it much, never really asked myself why she seemed sad. It was just the way she was, a sweet but sad type of woman, with big dark eyes, married to a man who hardly ever spoke a word to her, and now here I was, a grown-up woman nearing fifty all the sudden missing her more than I ever had since she died years ago. Because I thought if she was alive I would call her on the phone and tell her I was heartbroken and she wouldn't say, “Serves ya right for runnin' around with your sister's man.” She would say, “Oh, Ivy.”

She would listen, and she would say, “I'm sorry.” And she wouldn't know what else to say, and she was always a woman who just said nothing unless she knew exactly what to say, and she hardly ever did. So I'd just fill in the silence on that telephone and tell her not to worry, I'd be all right, and then we'd hang up. But since she was dead of course I couldn't make that call, so I just lay with my eyes closed and started feeling like she was in the room, like I was a child again pretending to be asleep and she was in the room watching me and thinking, Let her be happy. Let her turn out a happy woman. Let her have a good life, Lord.

I had the oddest sense that my whole life was stretched out in front of me for me to live.

That was when I heard the kitchen door squeak open, slam shut, and the old, familiar, solid footsteps of Gladys head toward the bedroom, while my heart pounded in my ears.

“Gladys?” I called out, to warn her.

I heard her footsteps stop.

“It's Ivy.” I sat up in my bed.

She wasn't moving, and she didn't say hello. Not for a minute or so. I didn't say anything either. We just felt each other in the house, and I tried to slow down my pounding heart. She seemed to be rifling through some papers or a book out there, and I heard her clear her throat.

Finally she came back to the bedroom and stood in the doorway and looked at me.

“So. When did you get here?”

“Just a while ago.”

“Where's James?”

“He dropped me off.”

“He dropped you off?”

“Yes.”

She went and sat on her bed, took off her Cuban-heeled black shoes. She wore a blue dress with three-quarter-length sleeves that I'd never seen before. It weren't her style, it was one of those baggy dresses with a real low waist and some kind of black embroidery around the hem which I can't say was fancy or pretty. It actually scared me for a second because I thought it meant she lost all her good taste, and if she lost her good taste, what else did she lose?

“This old girl had a blind date tonight,” Gladys said. “With a man who installed us a new industrial dishwasher.”

“Was it a nice time?” My heart was still pounding. Her voice sounded flattened out to me.

“I don't know. Is listening to someone talk about industrial dishwashers for three hours a nice time?”

“I'd guess not.”

“The fella took me to his apartment,” Gladys said. “Showed me his collection of empty cough syrup bottles.”

“Empty cough syrup bottles?”

“He's got over eight hundred.”

“Does he fill them up with colored water?”

“No.”

“Little stones?”

“No.”

“Does he decorate the outsides or something like that?”

“No, Ivy. Stop hoping it's normal. It's not normal to have over eight hundred empty cough syrup bottles. Why the hell would you think that was normal for one second?”

“Sorry.”

Of course I didn't think it was normal, I was just trying to fill up the air in that room with something other than the strangeness I was feeling.

“So did you have a good time in Canada?” she said, but I could hear something in her voice that made me feel cold. “Did you have a real good time?”

“I'm sorry” just spilled right out of my mouth.

“Are you? What are you sorry for?”

“I'm sorry if I hurt you.”

She shook her head, then gave me a kind of laugh, or chuckle, one of those unreadable chuckles she gave me all her life, then said she was tired and went into the bathroom. When she came out she was in a nightgown and her hair was brushed and she didn't say a word. She got into bed and turned away from me.

“Gladys?”

“Ivy, I'm tired.”

“I was going to say I'm real glad to see you.”

“Okay.”

I lay awake half that night, and wished I could whisper over to Gladys, I was thinkin' of Mama, and how she'd come in and watch us sleep, and it made me miss her. But soon even when I tried to think of my mother, I couldn't. I couldn't see anything but a pair of her old blue sneakers she would set by the door in the kitchen. And remembering my actions with James seemed to pin me down on the bed so I couldn't really move at all.

I lay there trying to figure out why I'd been with James when deep inside me the whole time I knew that Gladys loved him and always would. Or did I know that? Maybe it only seems that way now, looking back. Maybe at the time I didn't know if Gladys really cared all that much. The problem is, I don't really know. So I couldn't sleep.

*  *  *

The next morning Gladys had these sad-looking red sneakers on her feet, the kind you buy from those big bins at the supermarket and then never wear, hopefully. She wore a pair of white shorts and a shirt with a flower print. She had dyed her hair darker and her face was made up like I'd never seen it before, with mascara and smoky eye shadow and dark pink lips, and she had her old cat-eyed glasses on that I hadn't seen in years. She looked all right, she had nice legs and everything, but actually she also looked a few bricks short. I don't know why she was in those 1950s glasses, and I don't know why her hair was so dark, but she thought she looked good.

“The worse you feel, the better you need to look,” she said when she caught me staring at the breakfast table. Then she winked and laughed.

“So you better go talk to Brent Quinn, Ivy. You might not have a job anymore. You were gone longer than Brent thought you'd be. Hell, you better go talk to him now.”

I didn't know why she said that, because we both knew Brent was absolutely not the firing sort, not just because he was nice and liked the two of us, not even because he had one of these big hearts that just forgives every human foible, but because he was lazy and wouldn't want to go through the trouble of firing someone, he'd just rather shuffle us around, put me back in the garden or something.

I went to see Brent that night. His cabin was filled with the purplish light of a spring evening, and jars of wildflowers all over the place. He was in his pajamas as he often was, only he had work boots on instead of bare feet or slippers. He said, “Hello there, mystery woman.” He poured me beer in a big mug that was all frosted up from being in his freezer. We sat at his table and he didn't turn any lights on because his whole house ran on solar energy and golf cart batteries. So his white hair looked like it glowed in the dark.

As it turned out, he wanted me back in the kitchen with Gladys and Nadine because he said there would be more campers this year, but I got the feeling Brent really just wanted me back in the kitchen so Gladys and I would work side by side because he liked the idea of that, he told me a long time ago that he had a brother he hardly ever spoke to because they'd had a terrible falling out years ago, and every time he saw me and Gladys together he envied us and admired us. Well, I felt like saying to him that night in his cabin, “Brent, you can stop your admiring now.” Because I could feel how things with me and Gladys weren't the same, and maybe never could be.

So there I was, back in the kitchen with the new dishwasher that didn't make much noise like the old one, and Nadine the bird woman who started wearing all kinds of gypsy jewelry and smiled too wide whenever I looked at her, and Gladys in her cat-eyed glasses, who bit down on her lower lip and hardly said a word. We weren't exactly three happy clams on the half shell. But we were busy, it was orientation week for the new summer counselors, and we were supposed to cook our best meals for these kids so they'd look forward to coming back up for three and a half months. Things like blueberry pancakes with whip cream, pizza on prebaked shells, melted cheese on their baked potatoes at night. I'd cook and whistle and try not to think, but I could feel something, even with the oven blasting out its heat, something I didn't have words for, and maybe all it was was Gladys. I could feel Gladys. And she didn't much feel like the old Gladys to me.

“You should come with Gladys and me bird-watchin' sometime,” Nadine said.

“Gladys and you go bird-watchin'?” I said. I looked at Gladys, trying to picture her with binoculars and rolled-up pants.

“What the hell is so surprising about that?” Gladys snapped out at me all the sudden. It was the strangest thing, and I just stared at her for a few seconds.

“Nothing,” I said. “I just . . . ”

“You think I wouldn't be the sort to like birds.”

“No, I don't think that.”

Gladys looked at me and I couldn't read her expression.

“Ivy,” Nadine said, “why don't you come with us this evening? We'll be looking for the red-winged blackbirds this evening. They're just stunning, aren't they Gladys?”

“Stunning little buggers,” Gladys said, nodding.

So that evening I walked through the woods with Gladys over to see Nadine, and I was feeling happier because Gladys was acting more normal, more like herself, and telling me a story about Nadine's crazy sister.

“Her name's Carmella but they just call her Mel. Isn't that cute? So Carmella's got these damn twins. She hauls them up from Camden, New Jersey, to see Nadine for Easter time. Well, here's what happened. Mel is just driving along. Driving along in her banged-up Futura. One of the twins looks up ahead and sees a little rabbit. A little brown rabbit by the side of the road. This little twin is named Leanne, by the way. Leanne and Stan are the twins' names. ‘Look at the cute rabbit,' Leanne says. So her mother says, ‘Honey, I think that's the Easter bunny!' She drives another few seconds. ‘Why, it
is
the Easter bunny!' So the twins get excited and start bouncing up and down. ‘The Easter bunny! Mommy can we stop! Can we stop and see the Easter bunny?' Well, the rabbit darts right out into the road. Poor Mel just slams on those brakes. But it was too late. She kills the damn thing. So now she's got little Leanne and Stan crying with red faces and tears. They're saying, ‘Mommy killed the Easter bunny, Mommy killed the Easter bunny.' They cried and chanted for miles. Mel said they must've said it two hundred times. She said she was ready to stop the car and kill them too.”

I laughed at that story, laughed until my eyes teared, mostly because I was grateful for my sister's company as we walked through the woods, grateful to hear the tone of her old voice, and grateful to hear her laugh.

“Carmella tried to tell me the story like she thought it was a sad story,” Gladys said. “Like her kids would be scarred. But I started laughing. So she started laughing too. She said I had what she'd call a sick sense of humor.”

“I don't think so.”

“I don't either. You could just tell it was the kind of thing that always happened to Carmella. You could tell by looking at her. She might as well have been voted ‘most likely to kill the Easter bunny in front of her children' back in high school.”

I laughed, and then I smiled over at Gladys. I thought maybe it would be a nice moment and she'd smile back, but she just got an odd look on her face and the green in her eyes got darker. They got about as dark as the pine trees in Canada, I thought to myself.

Nadine and Gladys and I took turns with binoculars down by the river, spotting red-winged blackbirds. I had a nice enough time, but every time my sister spoke she looked at Nadine, and not at me, so I began to feel terrible. We all walked back up to the old blue house about eight at night. Nadine wanted us all to sit on her back porch and listen to the wind in the chimes and drink some beer, but I just thanked her for the bird-watching and said I'd go on home, and I did, I went on home.