Where I'm Calling From (35 page)

They drove around behind the bakery and parked. They got out of the car. There was a lighted window too high up for them to see inside. A sign near the back door said THE PANTRY BAKERY, SPECIALORDERS. She could hear faintly a radio playing inside and something creak—an oven door as it was pulled down? She knocked on the door and waited. Then she knocked again, louder. The radio was turned down and there was a scraping sound now, the distinct sound of something, a drawer, being pulled open and then closed.

Someone unlocked the door and opened it. The baker stood in the light and peered out at them. “I’m closed for business,” he said. “What do you want at this hour? It’s midnight. Are you drunk or something?”

She stepped into the light that fell through the open door. He blinked his heavy eyelids as he recognized her. “It’s you,” he said.

“It’s me,” she said. “Scotty’s mother. This is Scotty’s father. We’d like to come in.”

The baker said, “I’m busy now. I have work to do.”

She had stepped inside the doorway anyway. Howard came in behind her. The baker moved back. “It smells like a bakery in here. Doesn’t it smell like a bakery in here, Howard?”

“What do you want?” the baker said. “Maybe you want your cake? That’s it, you decided you want your cake. You ordered a cake, didn’t you?”

“You’re pretty smart for a baker,” she said. “Howard, this is the man who’s been calling us.” She clenched her fists. She stared at him fiercely. There was a deep burning inside her, an anger that made her feel larger than herself, larger than either of these men.

“Just a minute here,” the baker said. “You want to pick up your three-day-old cake? That it? I don’t want to argue with you, lady. There it sits over there, getting stale. I’ll give it to you for half of what I quoted you. No. You want it? You can have it. It’s no good to me, no good to anyone now. It cost me time and money to make that cake. If you want it, okay, if you don’t, that’s okay, too. I have to get back to work.”

He looked at them and rolled his tongue behind his teeth.

“More cakes,” she said. She knew she was in control of it, of what was increasing in her. She was calm.

“Lady, I work sixteen hours a day in this place to earn a living,” the baker said. He wiped his hands on his apron. “I work night and day in here, trying to make ends meet.” A look crossed Ann’s face that made the baker move back and say, “No trouble, now.” He reached to the counter and picked up a rolling pin with his right hand and began to tap it against the palm of his other hand. “You want the cake or not? I have to get back to work. Bakers work at night,” he said again. His eyes were small, meanlooking, she thought, nearly lost in the bristly flesh around his cheeks. His neck was thick with fat.

“I know bakers work at night,” Ann said. “They make phone calls at night, too. You bastard,” she said.

The baker continued to tap the rolling pin against his hand. He glanced at Howard. “Careful, careful,” he said to Howard.

“My son’s dead,” she said with a cold, even finality. “He was hit by a car Monday morning. We’ve been waiting with him until he died. But, of course, you couldn’t be expected to know that, could you? Bakers can’t know everything—can they, Mr. Baker? But he’s dead. He’s dead, you bastard!” Just as suddenly as it had welled in her, the anger dwindled, gave way to something else, a dizzy feeling of nausea. She leaned against the wooden table that was sprinkled with flour, put her hands over her face, and began to cry, her shoulders rocking back and forth. “It isn’t fair,” she said. “It isn’t, isn’t fair.”

Howard put his hand at the small of her back and looked at the baker. “Shame on you,” Howard said to him. “Shame.”

The baker put the rolling pin back on the counter. He undid his apron and threw it on the counter. He looked at them, and then he shook his head slowly. He pulled a chair out from under the card table that held papers and receipts, an adding machine, and a telephone directory. “Please sit down,” he said. “Let me get you a chair,” he said to Howard. “Sit down now, please.” The baker went into the front of the shop and returned with two little wrought-iron chairs. “Please sit down, you people.”

Ann wiped her eyes and looked at the baker. “I wanted to kill you,” she said. “I wanted you dead.”

The baker had cleared a space for them at the table. He shoved the adding machine to one side, along with the stacks of notepaper and receipts. He pushed the telephone directory onto the floor, where it landed with a thud. Howard and Ann sat down and pulled their chairs up to the table. The baker sat down, too.

“Let me say how sorry I am,” the baker said, putting his elbows on the table. “God alone knows how sorry. Listen to me. I’m just a baker. I don’t claim to be anything else. Maybe once, maybe years ago, I was a different kind of human being. I’ve forgotten, I don’t know for sure. But I’m not any longer, if I ever was. Now I’m just a baker. That don’t excuse my doing what I did, I know. But I’m deeply sorry.

I’m sorry for your son, and sorry for my part in this,” the baker said. He spread his hands out on the table and turned them over to reveal his palms. “I don’t have any children myself, so I can only imagine what you must be feeling. All I can say to you now is that I’m sorry. Forgive me, if you can,” the baker said.

“I’m not an evil man, I don’t think. Not evil, like you said on the phone. You got to understand what it comes down to is I don’t know how to act anymore, it would seem. Please,” the man said, “let me ask you if you can find it in your hearts to forgive me?”

It was warm inside the bakery. Howard stood up from the table and took off his coat. He helped Ann from her coat. The baker looked at them for a minute and then nodded and got up from the table. He went to the oven and turned off some switches. He found cups and poured coffee from an electric coffeemaker. He put a carton of cream on the table, and a bowl of sugar.

“You probably need to eat something,” the baker said. “I hope you’ll eat some of my hot rolls. You have to eat and keep going. Eating is a small, good thing in a time like this,” he said.

He served them warm cinnamon rolls just out of the oven, the icing still runny. He put butter on the table and knives to spread the butter. Then the baker sat down at the table with them. He waited. He waited until they each took a roll from the platter and began to eat. “It’s good to eat something,” he said, watching them. “There’s more. Eat up. Eat all you want. There’s all the rolls in the world in here.”

They ate rolls and drank coffee. Ann was suddenly hungry, and the rolls were warm and sweet. She ate three of them, which pleased the baker. Then he began to talk. They listened carefully. Although they were tired and in anguish, they listened to what the baker had to say. They nodded when the baker began to speak of loneliness, and of the sense of doubt and limitation that had come to him in his middle years.

He told them what it was like to be childless all these years. To repeat the days with the ovens endlessly full and endlessly empty. The party food, the celebrations he’d worked over. Icing knuckle-deep. The tiny wedding couples stuck into cakes. Hundreds of them, no, thousands by now. Birthdays. Just imagine all those candles burning. He had a necessary trade. He was a baker. He was glad he wasn’t a florist. It was better to be feeding people. This was a better smell anytime than flowers.

“Smell this,” the baker said, breaking open a dark loaf. “It’s a heavy bread, but rich.” They smelled it, then he had them taste it. It had the taste of molasses and coarse grains. They listened to him. They ate what they could. They swallowed the dark bread. It was like daylight under the fluorescent trays of light.

They talked on into the early morning, the high, pale cast of light in the windows, and they did not think of leaving.

NEW STORIES

My mother is packed and ready to move. But Sunday afternoon, at the last minute, she calls and says for us to come eat with her. “My icebox is defrosting,” she tells me. “I have to fry up this chicken before it rots.” She says we should bring our own plates and some knives and forks. She’s packed most of her dishes and kitchen things. “Come on and eat with me one last time,” she says. “You and Jill.”

I hang up the phone and stand at the window for a minute longer, wishing I could figure this thing out.

But I can’t. So finally I turn to Jill and say, “Let’s go to my mother’s for a good-bye meal.”

Jill is at the table with a Sears catalogue in front of her, trying to find us some curtains. But she’s been listening. She makes a face. “Do we have to?” she says. She bends down the corner of a page and closes the catalogue. She sighs. “God, we been over there to eat two or three times in this last month alone. Is she ever actually going to leave?”

Jill always says what’s on her mind. She’s thirty-five years old, wears her hair short, and grooms dogs for a living. Before she became a groomer, something she likes, she used to be a housewife and mother.

Then all hell broke loose. Her two children were kidnapped by her first husband and taken to live in Australia. Her second husband, who drank, left her with a broken eardrum before he drove their car through a bridge into the Elwha River. He didn’t have life insurance, not to mention property-damage insurance. Jill had to borrow money to bury him, and then—can you beat it?—she was presented with a bill for the bridge repair. Plus, she had her own medical bills. She can tell this story now. She’s bounced back. But she has run out of patience with my mother. I’ve run out of patience, too. But I don’t see my options.

“She’s leaving day after tomorrow,” I say. “Hey, Jill, don’t do any favors. Do you want to come with me or not?” I tell her it doesn’t matter to me one way or the other. I’ll say she has a migraine. It’s not like I’ve never told a lie before.

“I’m coming,” she says. And like that she gets up and goes into the bathroom, where she likes to pout.

We’ve been together since last August, about the time my mother picked to move up here to Longview from California. Jill tried to make the best of it. But my mother pulling into town just when we were trying to get our act together was nothing either of us had bargained for. Jill said it reminded her of the situation with her first husband’s mother. “She was a clinger,” Jill said. “You know what I mean? I thought I was going to suffocate.

It’s fair to say that my mother sees Jill as an intruder. As far as she’s concerned, Jill is just another girl in a series of girls who have appeared in my life since my wife left me. Someone, to her mind, likely to take away affection, attention, maybe even some money that might otherwise come to her. But someone deserving of respect? No way. I remember—how can I forget it?—she called my wife a whore before we were married, and then called her a whore fifteen years later, after she left me for someone else.

Jill and my mother act friendly enough when they find themselves together. They hug each other when they say hello or good-bye. They talk about shopping specials. But Jill dreads the time she has to spend in my mother’s company. She claims my mother bums her out. She says my mother is negative about everything and everybody and ought to find an outlet, like other people in her age bracket. Crocheting, maybe, or card games at the Senior Citizens Center, or else going to church. Something, anyway, so that she’ll leave us in peace. But my mother had her own way of solving things. She announced she was moving back to California. The hell with everything and everybody in this town. What a place to live!

She wouldn’t continue to live in this town if they gave her the place and six more like it.

Within a day or two of deciding to move, she’d packed her things into boxes. That was last January. Or maybe it was February. Anyway, last winter sometime. Now it’s the end of June. Boxes have been sitting around inside her house for months. You have to walk around them or step over them to get from one room to another. This is no way for anyone’s mother to live.

After a while, ten minutes or so, Jill comes out of the bathroom. I’ve found a roach and am trying to smoke that and drink a bottle of ginger ale while I watch one of the neighbors change the oil in his car. Jill doesn’t look at me. Instead, she goes into the kitchen and puts some plates and utensils into a paper sack. But when she comes back through the living room I stand up, and we hug each other. Jill says, “It’s okay.” What’s okay, I wonder. As far as I can see, nothing’s okay. But she holds me and keeps patting my shoulder. I can smell the pet shampoo on her. She comes home from work wearing the stuff. It’s everywhere. Even when we’re in bed together.

She gives me a final pat. Then we go out to the car and drive across town to my mother’s.

I like where I live. I didn’t when I first moved here. There was nothing to do at night, and I was lonely. Then I met Jill. Pretty soon, after a few weeks, she brought her things over and started living with me. We didn’t set any long-term goals.

We were happy and we had a life together. We told each other we’d finally got lucky. But my mother didn’t have anything going in her life. So she wrote me and said she’d decided on moving here. I wrote her back and said I didn’t think it was such a good idea. The weather’s terrible in the winter, I said.

They’re building a prison a few miles from town, I told her. The place is bumper-to-bumper tourists all summer, I said. But she acted as if she never got my letters, and came anyway. Then, after she’d been in town a little less than a month, she told me she hated the place. She acted as if it were my fault she’d moved here and my fault she found everything so disagreeable. She started calling me up and telling me how crummy the place was. “Laying guilt trips,” Jill called it. She told me the bus service was terrible and the drivers unfriendly. As for the people at the Senior Citizens—well, she didn’t want to play casino.

“They can go to hell,” she said, “and take their card games with them.” The clerks at the supermarket were surly, the guys in the service station didn’t give a damn about her or her car. And she’d made up her mind about the man she rented from, Larry Hadlock. King Larry, she called him. “He thinks he’s superior to everyone because he has some shacks for rent and a few dollars. I wish to God I’d never laid eyes on him.”

It was too hot for her when she arrived, in August, and in September it started to rain. It rained almost every day for weeks. In October it turned cold. There was snow in November and December. But long before that she began to put the bad mouth on the place and the people to the extent that I didn’t want to hear about it anymore, and I told her so finally. She cried, and I hugged her and thought that was the end of it. But a few days later she started in again, same stuff. Just before Christmas she called to see when I was coming by with her presents. She hadn’t put up a tree and didn’t intend to, she said. Then she said something else. She said if this weather didn’t improve she was going to kill herself.

“Don’t talk crazy,” I said.

She said, “I mean it, honey. I don’t want to see this place again except from my coffin. I hate this g.d. place. I don’t know why I moved here. I wish I could just die and get it over with.”

I remember hanging on to the phone and watching a man high up on a pole doing something to a power line. Snow whirled around his head. As I watched, he leaned out from the pole, supported only by his safety belt. Suppose he falls, I thought. I didn’t have any idea what I was going to say next. I had to say something. But I was filled with unworthy feelings, thoughts no son should admit to. “You’re my mother,” I said finally. “What can I do to help?”

“Honey, you can’t do anything,” she said. “The time for doing anything has come and gone. It’s too late to do anything. I wanted to like it here. I thought we’d go on picnics and take drives together. But none of that happened. You’re always busy. You’re off working, you and Jill. You’re never at home. Or else if you are at home you have the phone off the hook all day. Anyway, I never see you,” she said.

“That’s not true,” I said. And it wasn’t. But she went on as if she hadn’t heard me. Maybe she hadn’t.

“Besides,” she said, “this weather’s killing me. It’s too damned cold here. Why didn’t you tell me this was the North Pole? If you had, I’d never have come. I want to go back to California, honey. I can get out and go places there. I don’t know anywhere to go here. There are people back in California. I’ve got friends there who care what happens to me. Nobody gives a damn here. Well, I just pray I can get through to June. If I can make it that long, if I can last to June, I’m leaving this place forever. This is the worst place I’ve ever lived in.”

What could I say? I didn’t know what to say. I couldn’t even say anything about the weather. Weather was a real sore point. We said good-bye and hung up.

Other people take vacations in the summer, but my mother moves. She started moving years ago, after my dad lost his job. When that happened, when he was laid off, they sold their home, as if this were what they should do, and went to where they thought things would be better. But things weren’t any better there, either. They moved again. They kept on moving. They lived in rented houses, apartments, mobile homes, and motel units even. They kept moving, lightening their load with each move they made. A couple of times they landed in a town where I lived. They’d move in with my wife and me for a while and then they’d move on again. They were like migrating animals in this regard, except there was no pattern to their movement. They moved around for years, sometimes even leaving the state for what they thought would be greener pastures. But mostly they stayed in Northern California and did their moving there. Then my dad died, and I thought my mother would stop moving and stay in one place for a while.

But she didn’t. She kept moving. I suggested once that she go to a psychiatrist. I even said I’d pay for it.

But she wouldn’t hear of it. She packed and moved out of town instead. I was desperate about things or I wouldn’t have said that about the psychiatrist.

She was always in the process of packing or else unpacking. Sometimes she’d move two or three times in the same year. She talked bitterly about the place she was leaving and optimistically about the place she was going to. Her mail got fouled up, her benefit checks went off somewhere else, and she spent hours writing letters, trying to get it all straightened out. Sometimes she’d move out of an apartment house, move to another one a few blocks away, and then, a month later, move back to the place she’d left, only to a different floor or a different side of the building. That’s why when she moved here I rented a house for her, and saw to it that it was furnished to her liking. “Moving around keeps her alive,” Jill said. “It gives her something to do. She must get some kind of weird enjoyment out of it, I guess.” But enjoyment or not, Jill thinks my mother must be losing her mind. I think so, too. But how do you tell your mother this? How do you deal with her if this is the case? Crazy doesn’t stop her from planning and getting on with her next move.

He is waiting at the back door for us when we pull in. She’s seventy years old, has gray hair, wears glasses with rhinestone frames, and has never been sick a day in her life. She hugs Jill, and then she hugs me. Her eyes are bright, as if she’s been drinking. But she doesn’t drink. She quit years ago, after my dad went on the wagon. We finish hugging and go inside. It’s around five in the afternoon. I smell whatever it is drifting out of her kitchen and remember I haven’t eaten since breakfast. My buzz has worn off.

“I’m starved,” I say.

“Something smells good,” Jill says.

“I hope it tastes good,” my mother says. “I hope this chicken’s done.” She raises the lid on a fry pan and pushes a fork into a chicken breast. “If there’s anything I can’t stand, it’s raw chicken. I think it’s done.

Why don’t you sit down? Sit anyplace. I still can’t regulate my stove. The burners heat up too fast. I don’t like electric stoves and never have. Move that junk off the chair, Jill. I’m living here like a damned gypsy. But not for much longer, I hope.” She sees me looking around for the ashtray. “Behind you,” she says. “On the windowsill, honey. Before you sit down, why don’t you pour us some of that Pepsi? You’ll have to use these paper cups. I should have told you to bring some glasses. Is the Pepsi cold? I don’t have any ice. This icebox won’t keep anything cold. It isn’t worth a damn. My ice cream turns to soup.

It’s the worst icebox I’ve ever had.”

She forks the chicken onto a plate and puts the plate on the table along with beans and coleslaw and white bread. Then she looks to see if there is anything she’s forgetting. Salt and pepper! “Sit down,” she says.

We draw our chairs up to the table, and Jill takes the plates out of the sack and hands them around the table to us. “Where are you going to live when you go back?” she says. “Do you have a place lined up?”

My mother passes the chicken to Jill and says, “I wrote that lady I rented from before. She wrote back and said she had a nice first-floor place I could have. It’s close to the bus stop and there’s lots of stores in the area. There’s a bank and a Safeway. It’s the nicest place. I don’t know why I left there.” She says that and helps herself to some coleslaw.

“Why’d you leave then?” Jill says. “If it was so nice and all.” She picks up her drumstick, looks at it, and takes a bite of the meat.

“I’ll tell you why. There was an old alcoholic woman who lived next door to me. She drank from morning to night. The walls were so thin I could hear her munching ice cubes all day. She had to use a walker to get around, but that still didn’t stop her. I’d hear that walker scrape, scrape against the floor from morning to night. That and her icebox door closing.” She shakes her head at all she had to put up with. “I had to get out of there. Scrape, scrape all day. I couldn’t stand it. I just couldn’t live like that.

This time I told the manager I didn’t want to be next to any alcoholics. And I didn’t want anything on the second floor. The second floor looks out on the parking lot. Nothing to see from there.” She waits for Jill to say something more. But Jill doesn’t comment. My mother looks over at me.