The Walking People (43 page)

Julia used her nails to claw at the tin's top, which was jammed tight. She tried to twist the top off, tried to pull in different places in search of a weak spot. Finally, with the help of an old nail file stuck in with the junk Greta had cleared out from under the sink in the bathroom, she finally pried off the lid. Two dozen or so letters were bundled together; others were loose inside the box. Julia plucked out one and looked at it. It was the only piece of paper that did not have an envelope, and she recognized her own handwriting as it had looked almost ten years earlier. It was an old phone message, written on paper from a pad magnet that used to be stuck on the fridge.

"I remember this," Julia said, trying to remember more details of the day. She'd been at school, Mrs. Olarski's class, eighth grade, and had just come home. No, she'd been home sick. No, school had been canceled because of a burst pipe in one of the classrooms. No, it was a Sunday, Greta was at work, Michael had gotten called in, Julia was
minding Eavan. James wasn't born yet. Pam from across the street had just buzzed to see if Julia wanted to take turns doing each other's hair in fishbones. She'd just learned how. Then the phone rang, and this was the message Julia had taken from Aunt Johanna, who had not called since. Breaking the news was the first time in her life Julia had felt the same age as her mother.

"Hmm?" Greta said absently, her back turned to Julia as she held some old blouses to the light of the window and searched for stains or pulls beyond repair.

Yes, Julia remembered now. That afternoon they prayed the rosary for the first and last time in Julia's recollection, and when Michael came home, Greta sent Julia to her room so she could tell him. "Does he know her?" Julia had asked. It was confusing enough imagining what her parents had looked like and how they'd acted before she was born. It was harder still to imagine how they came together, who had said what, when they had known they were in love. How did her father know her Nana if he and Greta met on a ship on their way to America and had never gone back home? Instead of answering, Greta had just pulled Julia close and hugged her, squeezing and rocking until Julia could feel her hair weighed down with her mother's hot breath and runny nose.

Julia refolded the note along the old creases and reached for another of the loose letters shoved in beside and on top of the main bundle.

"What's that?" Greta asked, stepping away from the window and wading through the clutter on the floor toward Julia's side of the pile. "What are you reading?"

"I think they're old letters," Julia said, sliding a piece of lined blue paper out from an envelope that was postmarked October 16, 1966. "This one is —"

"Give it here," Greta said, stopping in front of Julia and holding out her hand.

"Why?" Julia smiled. "Is it a love letter?" She cleared her throat as if to begin a dramatic reading. She had unfolded the letter to the first crease when Greta snatched it out of her hand.

"Does it have your name on it.?" Greta asked, grabbing hold of Julia's upper arm and squeezing hard. "Does it? No. It says Greta,
doesn't it? Did I raise you to poke your nose in places it doesn't belong?"

"Jesus, Ma. I was only joking around."

"It's fine," Greta said, calmer now that she had returned the letter to the box and jammed the lid on tight. "I'm just exhausted. And that cake, Christ Almighty, the kitchen was so hot with the oven on. You keep going here, but leave out anything for the garbage so I see it first. I want to see how Eavan is doing with the icing."

She left the room with the cookie tin tucked under her arm.

 

After this first stage, the process of moving swung in the opposite direction, and it seemed as if something major disappeared every day. First the rugs were rolled up tight and leaned up against the growing stack of boxes in the hall. Then the vases and knickknacks, the extra bedding, the pictures that hung on the wall, all the dishes, glasses, mugs, utensils. The large pieces of furniture — the couch, the armchair, their beds — seemed frank and lonesome as they waited in bare rooms. Julia's bed, a twin, would be the only one left behind on the curb. A new full-sized bed would be there to greet her in Recess when they arrived. This is our whole life, Julia thought, staring at the pile in the hall and then at the dusty and cobwebbed corners of her bedroom. As Greta had happily informed them the day before, they would need only a medium-sized truck.

On June 29, the evening before moving day, Greta walked into the living room, where Michael was on the couch watching
All in the Family,
Eavan and James on the floor in front of the couch, begging him to change the channel.

"No way I'm turning on that oven in this heat," Greta said. "I'm getting a pizza." At the news, James pumped his little fist in the air and Eavan clapped her hands together. "I need Windex as well. Anyone need anything?"

Michael shook his head. "Need help?" he asked out of habit, and then shook his head as he remembered.

James and Eavan looked at each other. "Ice cream?" Eavan ventured.

"Yes," Greta said. "I think we can do ice cream on our last night
ever living on Eighty-fourth Street." James and Eavan turned back to the television and were very still, as if afraid one false move might disrupt their streak of good fortune.

"Julia?" Greta called toward the kitchen, where Julia was on the phone with her friend, saying how easy it was to get from Manhattan to Recess, how often the buses went back and forth, how it wouldn't feel like she'd left the city at all, how she could still do a birthday party if she wanted to, maybe in the country, on her new deck, why not give her friends a chance to get out of the city for a day. The girls could bring bathing suits and lie out on the grass.

"Yeah?" Julia answered, covering the mouthpiece of the phone with her hand.

"You want anything from the store while I'm out?"

Julia shook her head. "You want me to go?"

"No, I'll go. I need the walk. The house will be clean, I hope, when we get there. Do you think? No one said anything about that at the closing. Or if they did, I don't remember. They looked like decent people when we met them. They looked like clean, decent people."

"We can always buy what we need when we get there, can't we?" Julia pointed out. "Worse comes to worst, we'll just clean it ourselves."

"That's true," Greta said. "Yes, that's good. Wait and see."

Julia finished her call right after Greta left, and she sat in the kitchen listening to Archie Bunker yell for Edith from the other side of the door. Her clothes had all fit in one large black plastic bag, the same type of bag Michael had used for the building's garbage cans before his duties had been passed over to the new management. In another large garbage bag were her makeup bag, her hair dryer, hot rollers, hairbrushes, and random pairs of shoes that had not fit in the box with Eavan's. In her backpack, which she would keep with her in her father's car, which she was in charge of driving, she had a few of the books she hadn't returned to the university bookstore, her wallet, the hand-carved wooden box an ex-boyfriend had brought home for her from New Mexico, and a framed photo of herself holding James on the day he was born, his face wrinkled under the cotton blue cap, Eavan beside her on tiptoes, peering up to see the bundle in her big sister's arms.

Greta had reserved a truck for eight
A.M.
, and Ned Powers was supposed to arrive at the apartment by seven-thirty for tea and bagels. Julia looked up at the wall where the clock had been for so long and then at the watch on her wrist. It was already past six, an hour later than they usually ate dinner. All day she'd been waiting for the fact of leaving the city to hit her. She waited for the tears, even stared at herself in the small bathroom mirror and instructed herself, once again, on what was happening. Sitting in the kitchen, she tried it again. They're going to knock down the walls of your home, she thought sternly, as if reprimanding herself for something. Someone else is going to pee in your toilet, look out your window.

She left the kitchen and passed through the living room, where Eavan and James had climbed up on the couch and tucked in by Michael's feet. All three were staring at the flickering TV screen in perfect contentment, smiling at Dingbat, smiling at Meathead, smiling at Lionel Jefferson, who'd just come to the door. She passed James's room, his clothes for tomorrow already laid out on his bed, and headed down to her parents' room, which was still, with just a few hours to go, littered with odds and ends: new linens in their plastic cases, new undershirts for Michael, socks without mates, underwear, hangers, old cooking magazines stuffed under the bed long ago and recently rediscovered, presents received for various occasions too dear to ever be displayed. Julia picked up one of the smaller boxes and opened it to find a sterling silver baby spoon.

"She's hopeless," Julia said, sighing. There was probably a name for this thing her mother had, this impulse to collect and collect but never let anything go. Without deciding to do so, after a few minutes Julia found herself sorting what was on the floor, making neat piles, shoving anything that looked like something her mother would never miss into an empty grocery bag hanging from the knob of the door. She took the last unused box from the hall and taped the bottom. Then she filled it with anything that would fit. Finally, when most of the floor was clear, Julia noticed at the back of her mother's closet the red tin cookie box. She picked it up and, moving over to the edge of the bed, held it in her lap.

Once, when Julia was a senior in high school, Greta had forbidden her to go out with a boy she'd met in a pool hall on Seventy-ninth. They'd fought about it, Julia telling Greta she was going to a movie or shopping or over to the park to meet a girlfriend, Greta finding out about it each and every time, saying to Julia "You're grounded," though they both knew she had only a vague idea of what that meant. Greta disconnected the phone; Julia used a pay phone. Greta walked with Julia to and from school; Julia made up after-school activities and forged her teachers' names. "He's a bad one," was all Greta could say. "I can see it in his face." Back then, that was reason enough to go out with him, or at least to be seen going out with him. Four years later Julia knew what her mother meant. He was mean then, and he was still mean, what little Julia had heard about him. Once, as he was kissing her, he put his thumb against her throat and pushed, stopping Julia's breath in her lungs and trapping it there. Julia coughed; he pushed harder. Julia slapped his hand away, and he laughed. "You're an asshole," she said as she walked out, and he laughed her all the way out the door.

Maybe here, Julia thought, looking at the box on her lap, is the answer to how her mother knew he was bad with one glance. There couldn't be too many secrets. She already knew that her mother had had her at sixteen. There would be no references to smoking up, dropping acid, all the things she should have been doing when she was new to America in the 1960s. Her mother, Julia decided, was underestimating her.

Julia listened for the dead bolts of the apartment door, and once she was sure it was safe, she pried the lid off the box, easier this time, and reached for the same letter Greta had snatched out of her hands. October 16, 1966. She took it in first as a whole, with one glance, her eyes sweeping over the penmanship and the length before she absorbed any of the words. It was from her Aunt Johanna, her mother's only sister, the one who happened to be in Ireland when their mother got sick and had never left.

This is going to be good, Julia thought, but before she let herself read the letter slowly from beginning to end, she lifted the tied bundle from the center of the box and broke the aging string.

J
ULIA, RIGHT HAND
on the wheel at six o'clock, left hand out the window to feel the force of the air as it rushed by at seventy-seven miles per hour, eased the car left, left again, and left once more, onto the ramp that would bring them across the upper level of the George Washington Bridge. Greta, who'd adjusted her seat to the most upright position, sat on the passenger's side of Michael's Chevy Cavalier with her right hand gripping the handle of the door, her left in a fist that pushed into the worn vinyl of the bucket seat. Julia was a good driver, but aggressive, like a long-distance runner determined to pick off the runners in front of her one by one. She was a rare thing in the city, a lifelong Manhattanite with a driver's license and occasional access to a car. But she was out of practice and more used to the quick and jerky movements of city driving than the relaxed, we'll-get-there-when-we-get-there style of the highway. Eavan, holding tight to the single Barbie Greta told her she didn't have to pack, was quiet in the backseat. James had gone in the truck with Michael and Ned Powers. "All boys in here," James had said as Greta took the end of his lap belt and pulled it tight, "girls in there." He'd pointed at Michael's car parked across Eighty-fourth Street. Julia had braided Eavan's hair for the occasion, but with the open windows up front Eavan could already feel pieces coming loose.

"Hey!" she said after a while, dropping Barbie and using both hands to hold her hair in place. "Hey, Jule! The window! Mom!"

But the same wind that plucked so many strands out of the tight braid and whipped them around her head also turned her voice into something small and soundless. She gave up on shouting and bent over to tuck her head between her knees. Don't cry, she warned herself. Do not cry. Thirty minutes, Greta had said when Julia first turned the key in the ignition. Twenty more to go. Then Eavan remembered: there were kids living on the block. An eight-year-old, an eleven-year-old, and who knows what others she hadn't heard about yet. They'd see her with her hair a strealy mess and think that's what kids were like who lived in the city. She held her breath against the pressure that was building behind her eyes and her nose, but like a dam where one small log breaks free, when the first tear came, the flood followed quickly in its track.

"How many people were there?" Greta turned her head and shouted at Julia, whose long ponytail was lashing her headrest. Without waiting for an answer, Greta rattled off names, called them over the roar of the wind and the car's diesel engine. She ticked them off on her fingers. "There was Mr. Ricci and the other barber. What's his name? The assistant? And there was the five of us, of course. Ned Powers. There was Mrs. Strom, and Jackie, and Jackie's son Mel. Mrs. Kraus. Everyone on the first floor came out, didn't they? Was anyone missing? The Morgans from 220, and the Magstaniks from 216. Remember when their girl used to babysit you? She's all the way in Minneapolis now. Did you know? Who came from Eighty-fifth Street? Mrs. Levy and Mrs. Schmidt. Did I tell you Mrs. Levy found a lump in her breast? Is that it? Am I missing anyone?"