One Heart (21 page)

Between breakfast and lunch the next day after Nadine went home I followed Gladys out of the kitchen, all the way back to our house. About ten feet from the door leading into the kitchen I finally said, “Gladys? Did you know I was following you?”

“Yes,” she said, and walked inside. And I followed her into the kitchen. It was half in shadow, half lit up by the morning sun. I said, “Gladys, I'm worried about you. I'm just nervous you're not doing so well. I can't tell where you are, how you're doing.”

“Fine. I'm fine.”

“What I mean is, I can't tell if you hate me or if you're just sad.”

“Well, I can't tell either,” she said, running the water at the sink.

“Don't hate me, Gladys,” I said. “James doesn't even love me. We're over.” I waited, holding my breath after I said this, and she waited before she said anything. She kept her back to me, kept on running the water over her hands.

“I don't hate you, Ivy. I'm too tired to hate people.”

“What is it, Gladys?”

“Ivy, you wouldn't understand. You're a different person.”

“How do you know I wouldn't understand?”

“Ivy, I don't have the words. All you need to do is let me be.”

“No, I can't. I can't because I feel guilty as Adam's house cat. I think I did a wrong thing, Gladys, and I don't know why but I need to make it up to you.”

“This isn't about you, Ivy. I can tell you that.”

“Well, Gladys, why don't you do yourself a favor and talk to me!” I was getting upset, my voice was rising, and tears were in my eyes now. “Just talk to me instead of keeping me shut out of your whole life! You don't even turn around to look at me.”

I have to say a part of me was in a state of shock that all this was coming out of my mouth.

Gladys sat down at the table.

“I feel confused,” she said. And the second after she said that she said, “And now I feel angry as hell because I said ‘I feel confused.' That sounds like the biggest goddamned understatement I ever came out with, goddamnit.”

She got up from the table.

“You gotta start somewhere,” I said to her, and winced because I was figuring she'd turn around and scream at me, but she didn't.

She walked away from me, through the living room and into the bedroom. She closed her bedroom door. Any other time I would've just walked out of that house and let my sister alone, but something just pushed me toward the bedroom door and had me knocking before I knew it, and had me opening the door and saying, “What's wrong? If you want James back don't worry because he's going to visit you. He told me. He wants to see you. He'll be back, Gladys. I bet he still loves you.”

It didn't feel too good saying that. It felt terrible, and I felt a burst of warmth come into my face, and I figured it was the truth I'd blurted out.

She was sitting on her bed with her back to me, looking out the window and taking a deep breath while I said what I said.

“I'm not a little girl on a television soap opera, Ivy. Don't talk to me if all you know how to come out with is horseshit.”

“I'm not saying horseshit, I'm just trying to find out what your problem is. You just waste your life like this! You just waste your whole precious life!”

Then, real quiet, Gladys says, “Bingo.”

I don't say anything. So she says, “I wasted my life. That might be what's ailing me.” She turned around to me, and for a second her face looked like someone else's face, some stranger's face you see in the street and think, What happened to that poor soul?

“Maybe you wasted your life too,” she said to me, and then she smiled.

And in my head a voice was saying, “Certainly did. We all do. You could look at it that way, couldn't you.”

But to Gladys I said, “I didn't waste my life. And neither did you.”

“You wasted your life pretending you were happy,” she said.

“I am happy.”

“Horseshit, Ivy.”

“I am happy!”

“Ivy, what in the goddamn world do you got to be happy about?”

And a voice in my head was saying,
Not much, not much
. But another voice was saying
No. Don't be like her. Be yourself! Be Ivy. You are Ivy
.

“I got a lot to be happy about! I got people I love, I got a good job, I got a good home, and I got my health. I got a nice son who visits a few times a year. I'm not starving out in Africa and I'm not dying of leukemia. I count my blessings, Gladys! All you do is look at the bad side of things!”

“So when's your nice son coming to visit?” she said. She stared at me like she was putting holes in my head.

“I don't know, sometime in July he usually comes.”

“You don't know what the hell it is to lose a nice son, do you, Ivy?”

“No, I don't.”

“Do you know what the hell it is to feel your life go down the drain when you lose a nice daughter, Ivy?”

“No, I don't. But if I did lose one, if I did lose one, I wouldn't waste the rest of my life over it licking my wound.”

My face turned bright red. I could feel it. I was saying something without thinking about it, but as I said it, I realized I'd thought it all along, and I was glad I finally said it.

“Get out.”

“I can't.”

“I said get the hell out of this room.”

“I can't. I can't move.” It was true, I couldn't. I felt like my sneakers were glued to the floor.

A long silence fell. I just stared at her back and tried to pick one of my feet up off the floor, but I couldn't. Something shifted in the room when Gladys sighed.

I said, “You can't just go on and on and never get over it.”

“I can't?”

“Well, maybe you can. Maybe you can. If that's your choice.”

Then I left the room.

Next thing I knew things got worse. Gladys with her face dark red and her green eyes on fire came out of her room yelling at me, “Just because you ran off and had a love affair with my husband doesn't mean you got the goddamn answers to my life!”

“He's your ex-husband!”

“What the hell difference does that make? You think you got all the answers now. You think you can march back in here and tell me I wasted my life! Maybe I got reasons for how I live. Maybe I think about that. Maybe I'd rather live by my losses, Ivy. You want me to whistle through this goddamn shithouse of a life? Would that suit you?”

“He was your ex-husband and he came here for you and you weren't even here! You left me first! You got on that bus with an oddball little girl and went way the hell across the country and couldn't have cared less that you left me behind. You didn't even miss me and didn't care if I missed you, and when I told you James was here you didn't even say you'd like to talk to him! You acted like you didn't give a damn about the man, and I did. I do. I care about him! I got ways of showing I care! And I loved Wendell and Ann too! Maybe not like you did, but I loved them both!”

Gladys just kept looking out the window.

I didn't say anything, I just stood there, feeling how everything between us was different now. A terrible feeling came into my stomach, and I missed us, I missed the old Gladys and Ivy, where Gladys was strong and somehow kept to herself and Ivy tried to cheer her up and never crossed the line. I wanted to take back everything I said to her and just start acting like the old Ivy, but I really wasn't the old Ivy anymore. I was shaking.

“Ivy, can you stand here and tell me you really thought I didn't care about James anymore?”

I couldn't.

“I want you to know something, Ivy. This is not about James. We're talking like it's all about James. What it's really about is something bigger. It's about my life, Ivy. My whole life. And yours. And as far as I'm concerned, you went off with James because it was your chance to get back at me for being our father's favorite.”

“What?”

First thing I'm thinking is, Gladys, you finally lost your last marbles. Then I'm thinking, Does she have a little point?

“You felt left out your whole life because he loved me. And didn't give a cow's last shit about you.”

“Don't tell me that. I didn't feel left out.”

“Oh yes you did. That's why you had to turn on the cheer. A welcome wagon lady. You had to whistle and smile so you wouldn't know how left out you felt. I know how you felt. Like you're not worth a cow's last shit.”

“Maybe that's how you felt,” I said, talking real quiet now, because it was like she punched me hard with something and I didn't yet know how I felt. “Maybe you felt like that because he made you into his little wife. That's not exactly the right thing to do, Gladys. If you had a nine-year-old girl would you buy her fifteen aprons and make her cook you dinner every night?”

She didn't say anything for a long time, and I knew why. I knew she was sitting there thinking,
If I had a nine-year-old girl, if I had a nine-year-old girl
. But I didn't respect that feeling of hers just then. I didn't feel like just saying nothing anymore and I didn't feel like walking away, and I didn't feel like going way back into the past where our father made some oddball decisions, because that time was over and I don't care if I was loved or unloved in that time, it was gone, and it always would be gone, and I said as much to Gladys. And then I said she ought to try to see things different, she ought to try to appreciate what she does have instead of mourning her whole life away. I even told her in the old days people lost dozens of children and they just picked their feet up and went on, including our great-grandmother, whose picture used to hang in our bedroom in a big frame and scare us at night until Gladys begged our father to put her in the basement.

“All those people might have lost their children, Ivy, but they didn't kill their children. They didn't turn their backs and let their children drown.”

“You made a mistake!” I said, and all the sudden I started crying when I said that. “Can't you understand you made a human mistake?”

Gladys looked down at her hands in her lap and wouldn't look at me, and I kept crying and wishing she would cry too, wishing she would come over to my arms, but she didn't move.

She said, “If someone else let her drown, I'd never forgive them. Why should I forgive myself?”

I sat there for a while. I looked at her. She had her head bent down and her eyes closed. I said, “Because that's all you got, Gladys.”

And then she didn't say a word, and we had to gather ourselves together to go back to work. It was a relief to be in the kitchen with a big supper to prepare, to go through the motions of shelling beans and stirring sauces and mashing potatoes and chopping carrots and onions. After that, we got out the rolling pins for pies. “You two sure are quiet today,” Nadine said. And we were quiet like that for days before the ice broke.

The children from the winter school were going home now, and the summer campers and counselors would arrive soon. The last night the winter school kids ate in the dining room their teachers told them to sing “For they are jolly good ladies” to the familiar tune of “For he's a jolly good fella.” We were in the kitchen still refilling the bowls of food, and we didn't even think much about the kids' singing. They sang a lot of songs. But then we started hearing our names, “For Gladys's a jolly good lady! Which nobody can deny!” “For Ivy's a jolly good lady! Which nobody can deny!” “For Nadine's a jolly good lady! Which nobody can deny!”

Well, we felt like we should open the wooden shutter that closed our view to the dining room so we could thank the children for their song, so we did, we rolled up the shutter.

One of the teachers started them off clapping, and we stood there looking at them. They looked like nice little kids, and a few even put their heart into the song, and two little girls were waving at Gladys. Then Gladys took a bow. So I took a bow and Nadine took one too. Then Gladys took about ten more little tiny bows, and I watched her and started laughing, and she started laughing too, and the kids kept clapping and then they sang another round of their song, and Gladys spread her arms out wide and took a more dramatic bow and said “thank you thank you thank you” the way Ed Sullivan used to, and Nadine and I just bowed right along with her.

Afterward we pulled the shutter back down and Gladys shook her head and said, “It's hard being a star, ain't it girls? Now let's be jolly good ladies and clean these damn pots so we can go the hell home.”

We stepped out the back door of the kitchen into the evening of bright stars and moon in a dusky pink sky, and I thought we'd just walk down the hill and up the hill back to our house as usual, but Gladys was real quiet with a small smile on her lips and then right out of the clear blue she started singing. She started off in a real quiet voice. “For I'm a jolly good lady, for I'm a jolly good lady, for I'm a jolly good lady! Which nobody can deny!” She started singing it louder, then real loud, and she swung her arms, and I thought she was either going crazy or getting better, it was hard to tell. She just sang and sang and marched with her swinging arms and from the distance we heard Brent Quinn yell “Encore!” when she stopped. So she sang another round, and then one of the teachers yelled from her shack in the woods, “Again!” and she sang it again, and then decided she would march all over the flat field behind the dining hall, so I kept walking with her, sort've running almost because she was going fast, and when I said, “Where are we going?” for an answer she just sang louder, “Which nobody can deny!” Soon a bunch of kids were racing toward us and following us like Gladys was the pied piper, and they were laughing at her or with her, I wasn't sure, but they kept following and she kept marching and singing, and walking down the path through the dusky woods. A little girl with a wayward eye walked right beside her, looking up at her the whole time like Gladys was her hero. In the woods the kids started singing along with her. “For she's a jolly good lady,” some of them sang, while others sang, “For I'm a jolly good girl,” and some boys sang, “For I'm a jolly good fella,” and some wiseacre kid named Tony Ramoni sang, “For I'm a jolly good asshole!” which inspired a few cronies to join in, and all the different voices and words were bumping around in the dark and sounding so good I wanted it to keep going and never stop even though a part of me was afraid Gladys was about to walk off the deep end.