Tending to Grace
Table of Contents
For Steven
1
We drive out Route 6 on a silent day at the end of May, my mother, the boyfriend, and I. We pass villages with daisies at the doorsteps and laundry hung in soft rows of bleached white. I want to jump out of the car as it rushes along and wrap myself in a row of sheets hanging so low their feet tap the grass. I want to hide because my life, if it were a clothesline, would be the one with a sweater dangling by one sleeve, a blanket dragging in the mud, and a sock, unpaired and alone, tumbling to the road with the wind at its heel.
But I don't say anything as we head east.
My mother is a look-away.
2
My teacher is a look-away.
I am a bookworm, a bibliophile, a passionate lover of books. I know metaphor and active voice and poetic meter, and I understand that the difference between the right word and the almost right word, as Samuel Clemens said, is the difference between lightning and the lightning bug.
But I don't talk, so no one knows. All they see are the days I miss school, thirty-five one year, twenty-seven the next, forty-two the year after that. I am a silent red flag, waving to them, and they send me to their counselors and they ask me, “When are you going to talk about it, Cornelia?” I curl myself into a ball and squish the feelings down to my toes and they don't know what to make of me so they send me back to this class where we get the watered-down
Tom Sawyer
with pages stripped of soul and sentences as straight and flat as a train track.
We read that the new boy in
Tom Sawyer
ran like a deer, while the kids in the honors class read that he “turned tail and ran like an antelope.”
I know because I read that book, too.
3
Sam finishes reading; Allison begins. Up one row and down another we go like a set of dominoes, each kid taking a turn at reading aloud and me waiting for my morning to collapse.
“ âIt was Monday morning and Tom Sawyer was miserable,' ” Allison reads. “ âHe was always miserable on Monday mornings because it meant he had to go to school.' ”
The copy of
Tom Sawyer
they use for this class sits open on my desk. The one Mark Twain wrote sits on my lap. I match paragraphs to keep my mind on something other than my approaching turn:
“Monday morning found Tom Sawyer miserable. Monday morning always found him soâbecause it began another week's slow suffering in school.”
Allison finishes and Betsy begins. We read aloud in this class because the teacher doesn't believe we read at home. And so I wait, my stomach rolling, a lost ship at sea. We may be reading
Tom Sawyer
for babies, but Betsy's voice, as strong and supple as a dancer, hardly notices. She skips along the tops of passive verbs and flies over the adjectives and adverbs that stack and pile up like too many Playskool blocks. When Betsy finishes, the teacher looks over at me and her eyes widen just a bit.
“Cornelia, will you be reading today?” Her voice pitches too high, too singsong. Kids turn around. Everyone knows she gives no one else a choice.
I shake my head and look at my feet.
4
I am a shadow. I burrow deeper within myself and pray that if the other kids don't see me, they won't talk to me. I pretend I am the desk, the book, the floor, and we all expect less of me each day. I try not to lose myself, but the shame of always looking at my feet beats me deeper and deeper into the earth, planting me as surely as my mother planted gardenia bulbs one summer, facedown.
5
No one likes the new girl. Her name is Ruth. She wears the goofiest glasses I've ever seen. But I like her. I like the way she looks me in the eye when I tell her something. She is kind underneath those glasses and she smiles when I joke around. I want to tell her my whole life story in ten minutes, quicklike so the words tumble down fast and furious, like my mother's promises. But I don't know how to begin, so we talk about books, which is another reason why I like her so much.
We have just read
Oliver Twist,
me for the second time, and we are trying to figure out how Oliver survived on the gruel they made him eat at the workhouse. We've made a pact to live on gruel for one day, cold and without sugar, but unlike Oliver's, our portions are unlimited. Ruth has brought Cream of Wheat. I've brought oatmeal, and it sits like cold clotted gravy on my tongue.
The girls in the lunch line point to us. The empty seats beside us are magnets. I concentrate on my spoon. I wonder if they'll notice our lunch.
How disgusting. How odd. How much of a loser can you be,
Cornelia Thornhill?
I stuff my bowl into my bag and push it into my backpack.
“Hey, we're not done,” Ruth says. Her back is to the girls; she hasn't noticed. I nod toward them. She turns and hides her bowl in her notebook and stands up to leave. She is sturdier than I, more of an eggplant to my celery stick. I am so hungry.
“Oh, don't go on account of us,” says Eleanor, the tallest of the three, breezing toward us. She has had a perfect mouth from the beginning of time, one that never has neededâand never will needâbraces. I stare absently into the crowded lunchroom.
“How are you today, Cornelia?” Eleanor takes her napkin, puts it on her lap, and ignores Ruth. I take my napkin and wipe my mouth.
I smile quickly and sip my milk.
“Did you get the last answer on the test?” Eleanor asks.
I shake my head. The other girls are snickering behind their napkins.
She tries again. “You didn't read again today. How come?”
I take another sip and shrug. Eleanor is waiting for me to answer. I take another sip and wipe my mouth. I start wiping my lips with each sip now, afraid something else horrible will fall out of my mouth. Seven, eight, nine times, I mop my mouth.
Eleanor laughs and then her friends laugh and when I can't listen anymore, I stand up and run out the side door of the cafeteria. The lunch aide hollers and the force of it follows me all the way to the street, where my tears mix with rain.
6
The boyfriend is there when I get home. My mother flicks away the thin wisps of whatever it is they've been smoking.
“Hey, Corns,” she says.
I walk past them to my room.
“Why don't she never talk?” the boyfriend asks, the man with the brain smaller than my little toe, the kind of guy just made for watered-down literature.
I slam my door.
They don't ask why I'm home two hours early. You got a kid, you notice things. Send her to school. Make her lunch. Ask about homework. Simple as that.
A teacher told me I should be an honor student. “Imagine,
Wuthering Heights
. Where do you get all those books, Cornelia?”
This is what I should have said: I walk right out the door, as soon as my mother falls asleep on the couch. I walk past the other apartments in the projects, past the health center and the day care center and the sign at the entrance that used to say WELCOME TO HARDINGTON STREET, but now because of all the graffiti it doesn't say anything at all.
I climb on a city bus and get off at the library. No one pays attention to you in a library as long as you're quiet. They think a kid with a book is a good thing. That's how I ran around New York City with
Harriet the Spy,
wandered the Ozarks with
Where the Red Fern Grows,
went to prep school with
The Chocolate War.
I learned about sex from Judy Blume and about God from the Bible. Honor your mother, it says. I have to laugh over that. I really do.
7
I hear them talking that night. “Come on, babe, let's me and you go to Vegas.”
My mother laughs.
“I'm serious, babe.”
My mother stops laughing.
“What about Corns?”
“We can't take no kid to Vegas.”
8
The boyfriend reads the car ads at breakfast.
I want coffee. Thick and strong, the mug filled halfway with heavy cream, two teaspoons of sugar, the way I make it every day. Sometimes I eat one of the Little Debbie cakes my mother hides at the back of the refrigerator, but most days I just drink coffee.
Since the boyfriend moved in a few months ago, empty beer cans pile up in the kitchen sink. I have to clear them out to brush my teeth because he broke the faucet in the bathroom. He doesn't twist the bag of coffee closed and he forgets to put the bag in the freezer to keep it fresh; it's on the counter in a crumpled heap beside the coffeepot. Beans scatter all the way to the stove. He mixes up my spice bottles, which I've been keeping in alphabetical order since my mother gave up cooking. Milk dribbles across the floor.
“Your ma and me think we'll head out to Vegas.”
I spoon coffee into the filter.
“What you think of that?”
I pour water into the top of the coffeepot and turn the power on.
“Why don't you never answer me, girl?”
I reach up and pull my Frosty the Snowman cup out of the cupboard.
“I'm talking to you. Don't you sass me.”
Sass,
I want to point out, means talking back. I'm not talking at all.
My mother drifts into the room, wearing the boyfriend's pajamas, and slumps at the table, resting her head in her hands. The pajama sleeves hide a mascara line that cuts into the thin skin below her eyes.
“Leave her be, Joe.”
“I was just asking what she thought of our trip. She won't answer me.”
“She don't talk to nobody, Joe.”
“She damn well better talk.” He stands, but I am already out the door.
