Ordinary Life (16 page)

The summer I turned eleven, I played matchmaker. I wanted Anna Gunther, the seventy-five-year-old woman to whom I tried to teach English, and Artie Miller, the seventy-six-year-old man who lived down the street, to fall in love. My intentions were not entirely philanthropic. If Anna and Artie worked, I thought I might learn enough about love to garner the affections of Billy Croucher, in whom I was newly and greatly interested. He was a class ahead of me in school, a fine baseball player, and indisputably handsome. He never paid any attention to me, though I played baseball nearly as well as he, but I believed that at any moment something would break through inside him, and he would see me clear. Then we would sit together on the bus. The notion of his hand resting on the seat near mine was enough to alter my breathing pattern.

Right after school was out, I got my Junior Scientist of America card in the mail. I wrapped it in Saran wrap and put it in a prominent place in my red plastic wallet. Then I ventured forth into the natural world, a recognized member of the scientific community
at last, looking for important work. Sometimes I cracked open rocks, searching for elaborate crystal patterns. Sometimes I followed insects—secretly, I thought—to find out what they
really
did. Mostly, I gathered things to stare at under my microscope. The best things were always specimens from inside, though: salt crystals, sugar crystals, a hair from my head. Often I would look quickly from the eyepiece to the object on the slide, to make sure nobody was fooling me. How could those translucent, multidimensional blocks I saw in the microscope really be the same sugar I so casually sprinkled on my oatmeal?

In time, I grew tired of playing scientist. My best friend, Carol Conroy (who was my best friend mostly because she was an only child and therefore fascinating to me), had gone to Seattle on vacation. My other friend, the untidily overweight Kathy O’Connor, was not speaking to me due to the seriousness of our last argument, which had to do with whether or not playing waitress was babyish.

Anna Gunther came to me at exactly the right time: I needed a new project and a new friend. I first saw her when I emerged from some bushes where I’d been trying to catch a baby rabbit. He had eluded me, and I was hot and frustrated. She was sitting on the back porch of her house wearing a print sundress, sandals with short black socks, and a kerchief on her head.

“Hi,” I said.

She smiled and nodded.

“I almost caught a baby rabbit,” I said.

Again she smiled and nodded. I came in for a closer view. “You live there?” I asked.

She smiled yet again, and made some motion that indicated that she didn’t understand me. I noticed her legs were unshaven. “No English?” I asked.

She nodded happily. “No English. No English.”

I grew very excited. I’d never met anyone who didn’t speak English before. I licked my lips and stood up straighter. I pointed to myself. “Sarah,” I said. And then again, “Sarah.”

“Sarah,” she repeated, and then, pointing to herself, she said, “Anna.”

“Anna,” I said, and she beamed.

This was going very well, I thought. “I teach you English?” I asked, and she stared blankly at me. I wondered how to pantomime “teach.” We studied each other in friendly expectation. Then I picked up a rock. “Rock,” I said, pointing to it.

“Rock,” she answered seriously.

“Yes!” I said, and picked up a stick.

We went on that way for some time. It never occurred to me that she might not want to be doing this. At one point, a younger woman came to the door and spoke in German to Anna. Then she looked at me and said, “Hello. You’re teaching my mother English?”

I blushed. “Well …”

“That’s fine,” she said. “My mother just came here from Stuttgart a week ago—she doesn’t know any English. And she loves children.”

She spoke German to her mother again, and Anna nodded enthusiastically. I’m hired, I thought.

I came over to Anna’s back porch each afternoon. She would be waiting for me with a plate of cookies. We would have a little treat together, and then commence our lesson of the day. I thought it was important for Anna to learn animals, because I liked them. I brought over a huge volume depicting wildlife, and we would look at the pictures together. “Tiger,” I would say, pointing. “Boa
constrictor.” Sometimes she would tell me the names of the animals in German, and when I haltingly repeated them back, she would nod approvingly.

One day as I was preparing to go to Anna’s, I noticed that my turtle was looking sickly. I’d forgotten to feed him the day before, and I wasn’t sure I’d remembered the day before that, either. In addition to that, his water had nearly all evaporated. I felt terrible. I filled his bowl with fresh water and gave him a generous serving of assorted fly parts, and brought him with me to Anna’s.

She was properly concerned when I managed to communicate that the turtle was sick. (This I had done by making retching sounds while pointing to the turtle.) She picked him up and laid him gently on her skirt and stroked his tiny head on the diamond-shaped depression between his eyes. If turtles sigh, he did then. She spoke a little German to him, soft, incomprehensible words of comfort, and put him back by his plastic palm tree. Then she turned her attention to me to begin learning the names of wildflowers.

The next morning, I found the turtle dead. I cried about it to my mother, who was kind enough to not point out that it was all my fault, and she gave me a velvet-lined jewelry box to be the turtle’s casket. I put him in the box, gave him a kiss good-bye, and took him outside to bury him. It seemed to me that a turtle who had been so much abused in life ought to be buried in a magnificent place as compensation. The best place I knew was the gully, a large valley near my house where I would often play. The grass was eye high there, and rich smelling. There was a stream that ran through it, with water so clear it was almost invisible, and with smooth stones and patches of moss all along the banks. I thought it would be good to have the turtle overlook the stream, to be
high up on a hill with the sunshine while the water ran steadily below. I found a rock suitable for digging and had just begun when I was suddenly overwhelmed with grief. I dropped the rock and covered my face with my hands. I wasn’t done with that turtle—why did he have to die? Did he hurt when he died? Did he hold a grudge against me? When he got to heaven and God asked him how it had gone, would he say, “Oh, it was fine until Sarah Harris starved me to death”?

“
Sarah Harris
?” God would say.

Oh, it was terrible. Pain and neglect were in the world, and suffering, but when it was
your fault
 … I wept.

I was interrupted by the sound of someone clearing his throat. I looked up to see an older man wearing corduroy pants, a blue shirt, and a cardigan sweater. He had slippers on, too, the kind my dad wore.

“Lose a pet?” he asked.

I nodded miserably.

“What kind?”

“A turtle,” I said. “He was from the dime store.”

The man nodded and began helping me dig. “I used to have a turtle,” he said, and I thought that he sounded sad. This seemed a fitting enough tribute for a turtle, to have two people thinking sorrowful and kind thoughts about him at the same time, one even an adult, and I began to feel better.

“You live here?” I asked the man.

“About half a block down the street from you.”

I was surprised. “I’ve never seen you.”

“My wife was sick for a long time,” he said. “I couldn’t get out much—busy taking care of her.”

“Is she okay now?”

“She died.”

My eyes widened. A turtle was one thing, but a person! “Oh!” I said. “That’s sad.”

He looked down at me and smiled. “We had a good life together,” he said.

I patted the turtle’s grave. “My grandpa died,” I said. “But I didn’t know him. He was seventy-six.”

“So am I,” the man said.

I felt extremely awkward. “My other grandpa is eighty,” I said. “He’s still alive.”

“What’s your name?” the man asked. I told him and asked him his. “Artie Miller,” he said, and shook my hand. It made me feel very grown-up, and I decided I liked him.

“Would you like to meet a woman your age?” I asked.

“I don’t think so,” he said. “Not yet.”

“She doesn’t speak English. She lives on the block next to ours.”

“Maybe another time. Okay?”

“Okay.” I watched him go.

“Hearts,” I said to Anna the next afternoon. I had an Archie comic book and I was showing Anna the hearts that came out of Betty when she watched Archie walk by. Archie didn’t even notice Betty, besotted the way he was with the raven-haired Veronica.

“Hearts,” Anna said dutifully.

I pointed to my chest. “My heart,” I said.

Anna pointed to her ample bosom. “My-heart,” she said.

“Yes. Very good,” I said, and then rose, indicating a transition. I pointed again to my chest, saying, “Heart?” Then I fluttered my eyelashes and sighed and said, “Love.”

Anna seemed not to understand me.

I embraced the air, closed my eyes, and made loud kissing sounds. Then I opened my eyes and said in a dreamy voice, “Loooovvvve.”

“Acht
!” she said. “Love!
Ja
!”

Her face softened. She knew what I meant. That was enough of that for today. It never paid to rush a fragile thing. I pulled a pile of my favorite baseball cards from my jeans pocket and sat beside her. “Minnesota Twins,” I said.

Anna selected a chocolate cookie from the plate between us. “Minn-ah-so-ta,” she said carefully, and took a bite. Then, “Twins!” she said triumphantly.

“Perfect!” I said.

Kathy O’Connor came to my door the next morning and stared sullenly at me. “Do you want to make up?”

I shrugged. “Okay.” I came outside and we sat on the grass in front of my house to discuss what we might do. Kathy wanted to play the Barbie game, but I thought this could easily lead to trouble. The object of the game was to “win” the handsome Ken as your date to the prom. The problem was that I preferred the bespectacled Tom, who I assumed was vastly more intelligent than Ken and therefore better equipped to appreciate my charms, which were not entirely visible to the casual observer. Kathy thought that if you weren’t trying to win Ken, you were cheating. I had once suggested that we both try to win Tom, but it was no good—Kathy pointed to the rules printed on the box top, her lips whitely pressed together. As our relationship was in the delicate healing process, I suggested we stay outside. “Want to play Indian?” I asked.

She thought about it for a while, staring off into the distance while I did cartwheels to loosen up. Then she agreed, and we
went to the gully, to the tepee. Carol Conroy and I had, after Christmas, gathered many of the neighbors’ thrown-out trees and brought them to the gully to construct living quarters next to the stream. The house occasionally fell down, and constantly lost needles; but on the whole it functioned quite well. It was mainly background anyway, as the bulk of our time was spent foraging for food. After elaborate searches, we would always end up with the same fare: red berries wrapped in green leaves, which were then speared onto a stick and roasted over our “campfire.”

While Kathy and I were busy cooking that day, I noticed the sun getting higher in the sky, and remembered Anna. “I’ve got to go,” I said.

“Where?” Kathy asked, annoyed. She was bending over the circle of rocks that made our campfire, trying to stabilize our spit, two Y-shaped twigs. I told her about Anna. “But I want to stay down here some more,” she said. “Come on.”

“You can stay,” I said. “I want to go.”

She rose up and the twigs fell down. “I can’t stay,” she said petulantly. “I can’t be down here alone.”

“Why not?” I had spent hours in the gully alone, did some of my best thinking there.

“Because there are bad boys down here,” she said. “My mom told me.”

One reason that Kathy O’Connor could never be my best friend was that she was always saying ridiculous things like that. Just when you were having a fine time, she’d say something like if you swallowed an orange seed, you could die.

“You can stay here, Kathy,” I said. “There are no bad boys. I have to go.”

She sighed loudly and followed me out of the gully, maintaining enough distance to clearly communicate her anger. Apparently
we were at it again. I didn’t mind. Anna was more interesting than playing Indians with Kathy, who never did it right anyway. It was Carol Conroy who was a good Indian, probably because, as she so often pointed out, she was
part
Indian. “My mother is a Cherokee,” Carol once told me. “They can cut stone with their fingernails.” I had great respect for Carol’s mother after that, and maintained a respectful silence around her.

Anna was happy to see me. I had brought no teaching aides along today, and she seemed surprised. But I had a plan. I knew that Artie Miller took daily afternoon walks. I’d seen him often after our meeting at the funeral. I hoped to arrange an “accidental” meeting between the two of them. I was pleased to see that Anna looked very nice that day, with her hair braided and pinned up over her head and with her foreign, dangling earrings reflecting the sunlight whenever she moved.