Anywhere But Here (46 page)

I always wanted more. I ended up running to Benny’s house to see if he was home yet. If he wasn’t there, I would have gone to look for my mother. The wind was always the same. It was like loving someone who didn’t know my name.

Aunt Carol said, yes, Benny was in his room, she would go get him. She opened the sliding glass door, asking would I like to come into the breezeway, but I said no, and leaned against the back of the house. The sky was enormous with pink and gold-veined clouds. It was almost suppertime. With Benny on his way to see me, walking through his house, I felt I didn’t need anyone, anymore. I didn’t mind being alone. I could look at other things. I suppose it would have been that way with my father, if he was there. I looked and as far as I could see, the sky was all there was. I imagined a whole continent of men, stopping and leaning on implements, looking up.

We went to school far away, in town. Benny was a year older, so he went first. A school bus came in the morning, and picked him up at the end of Lime Kiln Road.

On Benny’s sixth birthday, Carol wrote a note so I could go to school with him and safety-pinned it to my sleeve. That day the class made hats. I loved it. I glued a lace veil and plastic lilies of the valley to a blue construction paper oval. The boys made black
top hats. We posed in the afternoon outside the school in our hats. In the photograph, we look old, like tiny country men and women.

Benny and I lay next to each other on our mats during rest period and when we woke up, the teacher brought out a cake in the shape of a lamb, with flaky coconut frosting. My grandmother had baked it that morning and driven it to the school in a box. The teacher passed around napkins with two tiny squares of cake on each one.

The first bite tasted better than anything, it was so sweet and soft. Then I remembered my mother and felt bad, so I wrapped my second piece carefully in the napkin and slipped it into my jacket pocket to take home to her. That day I didn’t mind parting with Benny at the edge of our lawns. I had gone somewhere too.

“Well, sit down and tell me what all you did.” My grandmother’s back was to me as she poured a glass of milk.

“We made hats.”

I was feeling the napkin in my pocket, trying to assure myself that the cake was still there. I’d held the piece inside my pocket all the way home on the school bus. I’d held it tight. I was worried now; the napkin was still there, but it seemed empty, the cake must have somehow slipped out. My fingers dug into the pocket, touching every part of the lining. It seemed amazing, impossible. It never occurred to me that I might have crumbled it, holding too hard. Finally, while my grandmother dealt cards for double solitaire, I took the napkin out under the table and spread it open on my thighs. There was nothing but a pile of crumbs.

While my grandmother shuffled, I got up and threw the napkin away. I had nothing to give my mother now, and I wasn’t even going to mention it. Without the cake, she wouldn’t understand.

The next year, when I started school, a hygienist came to my class and passed out new boxed toothbrushes.

“How many of you have your own toothbrush already?” she asked.

Most of us raised our hands. The few who didn’t kept their hands folded on their desk tops and looked down. But Theresa Griling was bold in her dumbness. She got into trouble because
you couldn’t humiliate her. When people didn’t like her, she dared them.

“I got one that’s my brother’s, too. It used to be my papa’s,” she said.

The hygienist sucked in her breath and looked at Theresa Griling as if she’d said something so wrong that the best thing to do was to keep very, very quiet. She walked to Theresa Griling’s desk and stacked two more boxes of toothbrushes.

“Kin I have a red and a green instead of two greens?”

The hygienist silently made the exchange. “How many people are there in your family?” she said, then.

“Five, six counting my papa.”

“Four, five, six. There. You can give them each a present.”

“But my papa don’t use one no more.”

“Anymore,”
the nun said gently, from the back of the room, her beads clicking softly in her hands.

The hygienist smiled enormously at Theresa. “Well, perhaps you can persuade him with your good example how important brushing is. He could lose his teeth prematurely.”

“He already did. That’s why he don’t brush.”

We laughed out loud and the hygienist looked around herself, touching her skirt, as if there were invisible flies. Theresa won that time; we could see it. The hygienist lost control. She walked to the front of the room and looked at Theresa with pure hate. The hygienist had huge, square teeth. She pointed to the blackboard where she’d drawn a picture of a cavity. Her face was perfectly colored with makeup. “I’ll get you in the end,” her large smile seemed to say. She was wearing a neat belted navy blue dress with matching navy blue shoes. Theresa’s blouse was yellowed and her gray anklets sank down below the heels of her shoes. I was thinking of Theresa at home, where we lived, the flat fields and long rails.

I told my mother about the hygienist that night. We were driving around by the river and her friend Lolly was in the car with us. “You watch out for those Griling kids, because they are filthy, let me tell you,” my mother said. “He is, Bub is. When their mother died and he just let them run around like they do, the city
carne out and took them away. They put them in the orphanage.” She was talking to Lolly now, in the front seat. “And the nuns gave them baths and combed their hair; they said their hair was all matted and one of them had burrs in her skin. And they cleaned them all up and gave them new clothes and fixed their hair nice, you know how the nuns are, but the kids ran away and went home again. And when the social workers came to the house, the kids said they’d rather stay with their dad. No matter how terrible, kids just always want their parents.”

“Isn’t that funny,” Lolly said.

When we came home from Las Vegas, the winter I was seven, my mother seemed to lose interest in me. She spent more time with Lolly. I went outside after school, and stayed sometimes into the dark. I ran and played with the kids on Lime Kiln Road because of Benny. Benny was my cousin and that gave me something.

After school, I skidded into the kitchen, my grandmother flipped up the hood of my sweat shirt and then I ran through the yard to the fields. I met Benny and the other kids from our road down by the tracks where the rails were empty and dull silver as far as we could see. We got down on our heels and hit rocks on the rails while we thought about what we would do. We only played made-up games. We didn’t use anything bought. Around us, the country seemed so big. Later, when I moved to Carriage Court, the kids played sports on the street with names: Capture the Flag, Red Rover, Kick the Can.

Finally, we started running. At the top of a hill, Benny turned and fell and rolled with his arms spread open. I lay down and let go after him, my arms crossed tight over my chest like a prayer and we turned, rolling, trusting it all, trusting the swatches of sky to come back, the sweetness of grass in our mouths, the bumps, rocks hitting off our heads, our feet coming unfurled and, finally, Benny and I were tangled together in the soft muddy ditch at the end.

We woke up in each other’s arms. We’d played all our lives, but we were conscious now when we unfitted ourselves. We were older. I spit out the grass and my spit was mixed with green. We
ran to the top again and this time we skidded, our arms out, our chests falling in front of us, to gravity. We tripped over roots and rocks, the steepness pushing our speed, like a hand on the smalls of our backs. The breath cleaned out of our lungs, we fell, rolling onto our backs, looking up at the sky. We lay in the ditch, holding on, as if our own arms braced the land and air in the hurling speed of the planet’s fall. We dug our hands into the soft grass until our nails were crammed with dirt.

Benny crawled over to where I was and sat with his knees on my knees. He held my wrists down and wrestled with me and we turned and fought and as we moved, the ground felt hard under us, like another body.

Then from far away the train whistle started and we all ran back to the tracks. We laid pop bottle tops and nickels in rows and we knelt there with both hands lightly on the rails. There was a humming. The metal was warm, holding in the last sun and giving it back slowly; we lay our cheeks down so whole halves of our faces vibrated with the coming of the train. From our ears to under our chins, it felt like a helmet of air. Benny said we should all close our eyes.

I didn’t close mine. I knelt there, the field of vibration growing a thicker layer under my cheek, and watched Benny’s face, his eyes shut smooth, his mouth moving as he breathed. It was best to be the last to leave but I wasn’t that brave. I went back when Theresa Griling yelled; we were the first to go running up the hill, pulling our hair, screaming, so glad to be free, and scared, shouting the names of the boys still there, and we could see the train then, the big front light like an eye. The boys peeled off one by one, rolling down by the ditch and tripping up again, running.

The train came, a moment of pure vision. You couldn’t think, you couldn’t move, you couldn’t see. That moment of suspense; noise of the highway, shudder of the train before we knew—yes, every day we were forgotten again. The wind pushed up and there was a whirl of steel and colors, the last sun drizzling the rails, and we hung on to the weeds by the road with our fists and the rest of us let go. Your face moved without you, your voice just went as if someone was pulling it out in one string, your body
shook and you were left in a heap on the dusty road when the train was half a mile up in front of you, a train again, something you could wholly see, something your eye could end.

We gathered the flattened pop tops in our pockets as if they were money.

My mother and I made up a secret. It started one evening, a usual evening in our house, when my grandmother and I sat watching “Family Affair” on television. A branch beat against the wall. I walked to the window and saw the same blue light cast from front windows over the yards on our road. In every house the TV was on. There was comfort in that.

My mother stayed in the bathroom, wearing only a slip, practicing with makeup. She stood for minutes, fully absorbed, looking at her face in the mirror as she pushed up the cartilage on the tip of her nose. In the kitchen, she had Kris Miss Facial Herbs boiling in a pot. She steamed her pores open and then ran to the bathroom, where she had her mirror. During one of her migrations, she stopped in the living room and stood for a few moments watching TV with us.

“Ann, come here. I want to talk to you for a second.

“You know, you’re cuter than Buffy,” she whispered, looking down hard, as if she were appraising me. She took my face by the chin and turned it. I stood very still, my arms straight at my sides. She clicked her tongue. “You know, I’ve been thinking. We ought to get you on TV.”

That moment something started.

“Come here.” She began to brush makeup on my face, holding my chin with two tight fingers. “Like this.” She puckered her lips. “Close. Now open.” I felt her warm breath on my eyelids. “Let’s see.” She stood up to look from different angles. “You’re going to make it, kid, I’m telling you, you are going to make it.” Then she peered into the mirror and sighed. “And I’m not so bad myself, for a mother.”

“You’re beautiful,” I said, meaning it.

“Do you really think so?” Her face was poised, waiting.

I nodded my head hard, up and down.

“Close your eyes,” my mother said, smearing shadow on me with her fingers, so I saw colored lights inside.

We decided we would go to California, but it was our secret. I knew I’d have to be different from other children. I’d have to be better than the other kids to be picked and make all that money. My mother started to read to me from magazines at night. We knew all about the children on television. We knew how much money they made, we knew about the Jackie Coogan law, we knew that the camera adds ten pounds.

“Maybe your dad can even help,” she whispered.

The next year at school, Theresa Griling walked behind me in the lunch line and every day she stepped on my heel, crushing my saddle shoe down. We ate at two long tables, watched by a novice who stood at the door.

My mother fixed me lunches that were always too big. I got a sandwich so thick the pieces fell apart when I tried to eat it, two eggs that weren’t hard-boiled enough, bakery cookies, a bag of sliced carrots, celery and radishes, a banana, an apple and an orange. On both sides of me at the table, girls had standard lunches: a thin sandwich which pressed down even thinner while they ate, and a Hostess Twinkie. Theresa Griling had just one thing every day: a battered apple or a candy bar, sometimes a chicken leg or one slice of bologna. I longed for the other lunches. I was full after half my sandwich. Even my bag sitting open in front of me was bigger than the other bags. It looked sloppy and wrinkled, like an old elephant’s thick leg. I threw most of my lunch out, tossing the whole bag into the garbage bin we passed on our way to the playground. It didn’t look like the other lunches and some girls stared at me.

One recess, an older girl tapped my arm while I turned a jump rope. She said the Mother Superior would like to see me in her office. I glanced up from the playground; the sky was bordered and fenced with power lines, planted with three-story buildings and the steeple. The girl led me up two flights of stairs and opened a wooden door.

The Mother Superior stood by a window of honeycomb glass. I
knew I was probably in trouble, but I thought it was possible I’d be told I’d done something good enough to change my life. Only, I couldn’t think of anything I’d done yet. Maybe a Hollywood agent had come to our lunchroom and seen me eat with good table manners. Then I noticed something familiar on the edge of the Mother Superior’s desk: a large, brown, wilted lunch bag, like my own.

The Mother Superior nodded, letting her eyes close. The older girl began, pulling back three fingers.

“First thing. Do you like apples?”