One Heart (4 page)

So the first time I noticed Gladys taking a shine to Raelene was one morning when Gladys was standing by the kitchen window with a mug of coffee watching Raelene sing. Gladys almost never smiled, but she did that morning. It was like Raelene's bird voice got into Gladys's body. She was singing that song called “The Dutchman.” On Gladys's lips was just a small smile, a gentle smile, but somehow it seemed like her whole body was smiling. Gladys didn't know I was watching her, and I wish I didn't do what I did; I said, “Isn't that a pretty voice?” and wrecked the spell Gladys was under. The smile fell off her face, her body went back to itself, and she looked over at me without saying a word. I had trespassed. I had caught her beginning to love.

It's strange that she's no longer cooking here. Gladys always cooked.

My first memory of Gladys is when she's only five years old, standing in the old sunny kitchen and she's stirring something in a bowl. Since I'm barely four, she looks big to me, and so wonderful. I wanted to be her. Who wouldn't? She was five years old and she could make a cake!

My father said when she was a little older, maybe nine, “Gladys, you cook better than your mother. Now how is that? What side of the family are you taking after? Not mine. Not your mother's. Where do you come from, girl?”

He was always asking Gladys that, about once a week. It was his little joke to pretend Gladys came from somewhere else, that she was so fine you couldn't explain her origins. Me, he could explain too easy. He would peer at me and say, “You're just like my mother. You look like her, you talk like her, you screw up like her.” He'd say it smiling. I'd always laugh like he was just joking with me, but I knew all the same it was not really joking; even when he rubbed my head it was too forceful. But I had my mother there to love me; I did all right. She would make excuses for the man. “Your father's had a long day, honey.” “Your father's gruff on the outside, but inside he's tender.” “Your father loves you, he just don't know how to show it.” Some women are born to make excuses this way.

I'd pretend to believe her. She was a fragile sort.

For years Gladys would cook the family dinner because my father said she was such a fine cook, that she had the knack, that it was inborn, that my mother never spiced anything up and burned half of everything.
Burned the shit out of it
.

“Really, Frank, you're exaggerating. I can cook. I can put more spices in. Just ask! Gladys shouldn't take over, she's a child.”

“It's practical,” he'd say. “If you got a natural cook in the house, you make her the cook.”

He was not a man who needed to yell to get people to follow his orders. In fact, he was usually soft-spoken, and used big words he learned at night school. But somehow he made you feel if you stepped out of line, if you said the wrong thing, if you asked too many questions, he'd kill you. You knew he'd never really kill you, but that was what you felt anyways.

He bought Gladys four aprons, all pretty, some with hand-sewn flowers from the Farmers Market, one from a department store. I remember he tied an apron on her and had her spin around the kitchen like it was a ballerina dress. “Beautiful,” he said that day, and whistled, still in his work clothes, his hands and nails dirty. He was learning to build houses. He ran with the Italian stone mason crowd up north in the city of Wilmington. They were good craftsmen like you don't see anymore. He was also slowly going to college at night. He was a book-smart man, I'll give him that. He could pass a test when he was drunk. He was often drunk, but also in control. He wasn't a sloppy kind of drunk, usually. He wouldn't have stood himself being out of control.

So maybe Gladys was ten then. But she was cooking every day after school, and she liked it, because my father made her feel like a special queen, and she made casseroles and stews and simple chicken or beef with green beans. And she made pies—pumpkin, apple, peach, cherry, key lime. And when she was older she made bread. And my father would rave every night; he couldn't get over it. He would tell the neighbors and all our relatives about Gladys, and she would smile and feel proud. He said she was not just a cook, she was an artist.

Maybe you'd think my mother felt bad, like she wished she was still cooking, but it weren't that way. My mother thought my father was right, she always thought that; it was ground into her early on that the man knew better. They got married in 1927. I guess most of your 1927 brides weren't asking a lot of questions. My mother weren't exactly a suffragette in comfortable trousers.

So instead of getting upset that she was ex-head cook she used the free time to make a great big garden, and to grow her rosebushes. She liked being out of the house in her old sleeveless dresses and her scarves on her head. The scarf never did match the dress. It was a sin the way she looked sometimes. Kneesocks rolled down like sausage links around the ankles. Who was looking? Who cared? Well, I cared. She would get red shoulders from the sun and her skin would peel and she liked that too. She would sit there on the back stoop and peel off her skin like she wanted to peel her whole self away. It was hard for me to look at that thin little daydreaming woman sometimes. She had bright green eyes, same color as Gladys's only softer, and they'd look up at me as if to say, Don't worry, honey, life is long, you won't always be watching your sunburned mother like this.

But if Gladys went out in the sun my father made her wear a hat to protect her skin, which was snow white. He wouldn't let her go out in the garden without sleeves.

Maybe Gladys didn't get fat when she lived there because she was always cooking and a cook never eats as much as others. They get bored with their own creations. I should know.

I ate too much of what Gladys cooked and went from being a plump child to a plumper teenager, and my father never told me to sign up for reducing classes or sent me off to fat girls' camp. But if Gladys started looking too plump, which sometimes she did, he'd have her walk ten miles into town and back, or swim laps in this bay down in Lewes, or maybe run back and forth on Slaughter Beach. He'd drive her down there, sit in the car, and watch her swim and run. Meanwhile he was no slim-jim himself, but it never occurred to us then that a man should reduce. You look back and things seem obvious, but at the time you're being hypnotized every step of the way.

Gladys didn't mind. He was her hero absolutely, and nobody could say a bad word about her father, including me. She was a little like him, you didn't want to push any wrong buttons. So I just swallowed up everything I thought about the man and when we talked at night and she said something about how fine Daddy was I'd say, “Uh-huh.”

So when James came on the scene, when Gladys was only seventeen, my father at first told her no, she could
not
see a man who was twenty-two, he was too old for her, and he had a child.

“You'll regret it, dammit, you don't want to be mother to some other woman's child!”

“How do you know what I want?” Gladys said that night. The two of them were on the front porch, on the swing. I was on the steps. My mother was in her own little world out there in the garden, suffering, I think now. I remember Gladys saying, “How do you know what I want?” because it wasn't her habit to snap at him like that, and the way she said it was a real snap crackle pop.

For a long time he was quiet. You could hear the sound of my mother's shears snipping in the garden.

“I suppose I don't know what you want. Suppose I never did,” my father finally said, and then he gets up off the swing and walks inside. I turn and watch him walk through the light of the doorway, a big man in his work boots, and secretly I'm thrilled his feelings got hurt.

The squeak of the chains is all I hear now. Gladys is swinging on the swing with her arms crossed. It's quiet, and I wanted to say something but I just could never figure out what to say. Then the swinging stops and there's a stillness, and all the sudden Gladys is crying, crying hard, like I never heard her cry before.

I stood up and walked over to her. “Gladys?”

She said through her crying, “Get away from me!”

So I did.

And by the time of her wedding day, which my father did attend, Gladys and him weren't talking. He walked her up the aisle of the small white Baptist church none of us had ever set our heathen feet in; he wore a suit and had his hair slicked down and walked tall, but they hadn't talked to each other in over two months.

I cried my eyes out at that wedding. People cry at weddings, especially young girls, so nobody thought a thing. They thought, Sweet Ivy. Sweet Ivy is so happy for her sister. But I was crying with a dark heart. Watching my father hand her over like a present to James, I knew the future of our house. I knew my father would disappear. He wouldn't know how to live in the house with Gladys gone. I wouldn't miss him, exactly, I'd miss who he'd never been, some father who never was. I wouldn't see him for a long time. He wouldn't even show up at my wedding.

Gladys and Jimmy would just ride away with Wendell. My mother and I would be left behind. She wouldn't know what hit her. She'd just milk the cows and work the garden and maybe try to figure it all out. She wouldn't try too hard to. She'd tell herself, That's life. I wouldn't really have any words to explain anything either. I watched my sister, the beautiful bride in the lace wedding dress, her cheeks rouged up and her lips painted too red and clashing with her dyed red hair, but the gown fitting her curvy body perfectly, Jimmy tall and painful looking and handsome, and Wendell the ring boy in pants that were too short and patent leather shoes that looked like girl shoes if you asked me.

I now pronounce you man and wife!

It started raining just as he said it. I kid you not. The rain slithered down the colored glass windows. So the reception couldn't be outside under the elms. We had it in the fire hall. My father danced to the sound of thunder and Nat King Cole with Gladys, kissed the top of her head, and then he was gone, and nobody knew where to.

The fire hall was decked out in pink and white streamers. Flowers on every table. The small high windows framing hard rain and lightning. I danced one with Wendell. I can see him looking up at me with his smiling boy face and his dark hair slicked back like a man's. I also danced with Herman Lock, a prematurely gray boy from Gladys's grade in school. Mostly I watched Gladys and James, how they were always looking at each other even when they were talking to other people. And James kept checking his watch. They weren't holy people who had to wait to get married before they knew each other in the biblical sense. As I told before, they had been lovers in the fields. But still they didn't want much part of the big reception, you could see that. They wanted to drive off and be married. They had their own private little world going. My mother sat at one of the tables in a blue dress smiling and being sweet when people came up to say congratulations. If she noticed my father gone, she weren't letting on.

And when I stood out on the gravel road and watched the bride and groom and child drive away that evening, I could feel they weren't headed for easy street, even though the rain had cleared and the sky was soft and blue. Under that pretty setting sun I thought to myself, That little world of love they have between them, it's just too nice. Something's going to bust it right open. How I knew this I can't say, it was a feeling in my stomach, and as it turns out, I was right.

Wendell turned around and waved. I knew that wave was for me. I realized then how much I loved that child, but I couldn't bring myself to wave back. Maybe, I thought to myself, if I don't wave, they won't go. I just froze up there for a moment, maybe saying to myself, if I don't feel this departure, it's not happening.

Now I'm hoping for some luck when I finally visit Edgel Greely. Almost forty-seven years old, and I'm on a diet for a man named Edgel Greely. You might think it's a strange time for me to decide to reduce. Why didn't I try sooner? What's the point?

The point is, I have a plan. In Edgel I have a man I could love, and I believe he will love me, in about twenty pounds. This sounds foolish, but I have a feeling about it. I am not and never was unsightly, fact I'm far from it. I am not the kind of fat you worry will get stuck in the doorway. But I am heavy, and I'm a woman, and the two don't go together in this world lately, do they now.

But it didn't matter for years. For years it was me and Gladys, and sometimes I had a man, and most times I didn't, but I was so busy, so tired, and so occupied with Gladys somehow, I never gave much thought to my body. I always knew I could lose fifty pounds and be a beauty, but the beauties I knew didn't seem much happier than anyone else so what was the point.

But now, especially in the early mornings cooking thousands of blueberry pancakes with my new coworker Mike Stanley, a whistling man twenty years my junior who talks about politics like he's Jimmy Carter's best friend, and who objects when I pour salt on the bacon grease we spill on the floor when we don't have time to stop and clean it up, and who won't wear frozen towels around his neck, which anyone who works in a 120-degree kitchen knows is part of the uniform, the fact that Gladys isn't with me is still a surprise. On one level. On another level I'm used to the absence. And I like checking the mail each day because it turns out Gladys is a letter writer. She doesn't write so often, but the letters she does write, it's worth the wait, if you can read the penmanship.

No campers this year have taken to talking with me. Usually a few of the little ones like to come by and get an extra cookie. This year they don't. I guess I'm not the same woman; I don't invite them with my smile as much. I'm still cheerful, but work isn't the same. I make the hotcakes and eggs and bacon, the stews and sandwiches, the huge bowls of fruit, and the whole time I've got my mind on a certain man I plan to drift toward. And if my mind isn't on that, it flies to Gladys.