Anywhere But Here (47 page)

“Yes,” I said, not knowing what this meant.

“Do you like … oranges?”

“Yes.”

Then the bell rang. The older girl held on to her index finger, waiting until the noise stopped. All through the building there was an echo of steps, my classmates marching single file down halls, upstairs and into classrooms.

“Last thing,” the girl said. “Do you like bananas?”

Bananas. Bananas. I thought hard, deliberating. The room was still. I was sure the question meant something else and that the answer would determine the rest of my life. If I would be a child star or just me. The older girl and I were breathing together, our ribs moving out in unison, like fish hanging in an aquarium.

“Yes,” I said.

The older girl picked up the wrinkled brown bag. “Then, how come, in your lunch today, did you throw out a banana and an apple and an orange?”

The Mother Superior’s hands, folded on the desk top, looked smooth as those of a statue. I understood now; I’d been caught. I pictured the garbage bin and all the lunch bags. They must have fished out mine.

The older girl led me down the stairs, past closed classroom doors, to the lunch table. A novice stood there, waiting. They set my bag at the place I ate my lunch every day. I started peeling the orange. I took out all the little packets in my lunch and set them up, like a village.

“Everyone else gets a sandwich and a Twinkie. And that’s all. Nobody else gets a fruit.”

“Honey, other mothers don’t put in the time I do. That’s why. I can see now you don’t appreciate it. You’d rather have a piece of cheap lunch meat slapped between packaged bread. I stay up late, after working all day, and how many mothers do you think work?”

“Hush now. I’ll fix her lunch,” my grandmother said. “You two just go to bed.”

“Mom, why should you have to, just because she—”

“Let Gramma. I want Gramma to make my lunch.”

“Okay, fine. Go ahead. I can see no one needs me around here.”

We looked at the door my mother slammed. My grandmother pulled out the cutting board and began to make me a sandwich. My mother was banging drawers shut in the bedroom.

It is always the people like my mother, who start the noise and bang things, who make you feel the worst; they are the ones who get your love. When I opened the door, the lights were off and my mother was already under the covers. I climbed up and crawled over her and as I moved, I hit her knee. It made a creaking sound, like wood.

“Watch it, why don’t you?”

I slid under the covers, facing the wall. “I’m sorry, Mom.”

She didn’t say anything. It was as bad as I’d thought. When it seemed she was asleep for sure, I turned around, put my hands on her shoulders and curled against her spine, but she shuddered, shrugging me off, I couldn’t get comfortable. My eyes hurt behind my eyes. My arms didn’t seem joined to my shoulders right. I turned and turned. I couldn’t seem to do anything to get warm.

Finally, I crept to the bottom of the bed, slipped down and walked out of the room. With each creak of the steps as I climbed, I felt safer and more sleepy. The upstairs was like another house. The air seemed colder and clean. While I was pulling the heavy
quilts back to crawl into the small bed, my grandmothers sheets rustled.

“Sleep tight,” she said, but maybe I only imagined it.

My mother added coffeecake squares to my lunches, squares she bought specially from Krim’s, as if all she remembered about our fight was that my lunches should be better, which to her meant bigger. One morning that fall, on the school bus, Theresa Griling sat next to me and pressed up close against my ribs. “I heard you got in trouble with the Mother Superior.” She shifted in the seat, moving her legs. “I got a bag, you can give me half and I’ll trade you for my apple.” She held a small, very creased paper bag in her lap. Out of her pocket, she pulled a bruised crab apple, from one of the trees in old Brozek’s yard. I had my enormous lunch propped up on my schoolbooks. It stood as high as my head. Then as if she’d been holding out, she produced a Milky Way, the brown wrapper twisted, making white lines, and set it on the bag next to the apple.

“You want my stuff?” I said.

“Sure.” She studied the ribbed rubber floor of the bus, she waited after she said it. It was the first time I’d ever seen her like that. She used to stare at me behind my bag on the bus in the morning. There were others who’d looked at me in the lunchroom at school. I’d always thought they were making fun, because my lunch was different and silly. Now I saw: they were hungry.

I nudged Theresa’s side and we dug our arms in the bag. From that day on we had a deal.

In the spring, a boy from on television was coming to town for a cerebral palsy benefit. After the rains, posters of his face peeled off telephone poles, next to larger posters of Leonard Nimoy. My mother drove the twenty miles to the telethon through a storm. Inside the Civic Auditorium, on a stage, tables of women answered ringing telephones, taking pledges. The boy from on television walked with the cerebral palsy children, who looked
complicated and stiff and fragile, as if you wouldn’t know where to touch them.

Leonard Nimoy, in Spock ears, sat in the orchestra pit, next to a huge bin. People lined up around the auditorium to shake his hand and throw in their coins and dollars. My mother nudged me into line. “See that little girl? You’re cuter than her. Sit on his lap like that and just ask him how he got into show business. Say you were wondering because you’d like to act, too.”

“I don know.”

“Go on. You have to get discovered somewhere. Who knows? Maybe it’ll be here.”

Onstage, the boy from on television stood at the microphone singing. He belted out “Every Little Boy Can Be President,” opening his arms toward the cerebral palsy children, who were lined up behind him in a row of plastic chairs. On television, he played Buffy’s brother. His real name was Timmy Kennedy.

My mother stuck a dollar into my hand. In front of me two boys in matching shirts pushed each other’s chests, fighting for the first place in line. I stood straight, thinking about looking right and talking right. When it was my turn I walked up, but I was afraid to sit on Leonard Nimoy’s lap. I stood close enough to smell the foreign, chemical smell of his shaved cheek, a man’s smell, like the electricity around Jimmy Measey’s towel, and I whispered into his ear. “How did you get started as an actor?”

He turned and looked at me, puzzled. “Just a minute.” A child handed him her autograph book and he signed, with big loopy letters, smiling. The line moved forward but I stayed.

“Because I’d like to get into show business, too,” I said.

He looked at me a little regretfully. “Oh, Honey, it’s a long story. Too long for now.” He gave me a sideways hug and then turned back to the line. “Bless you, thank you,” he was saying, as I walked out towards my mother. I was ashamed. Leonard Nimoy hadn’t taken an interest in me. I wondered if he would have if I’d sat on his lap.

Onstage, the celebrities led the CP children around in a circle. The boy from on television walked bending over, to reach the
arms of a much smaller girl. The children sang, in partial, shrill voices, looking at their braced feet as they marched.

My mother found out what flight the celebrities were taking back to California and we drove to the airport that night. We discovered the celebrities sitting quietly in an upstairs waiting room like other people. Leonard Nimoy had taken his Spock ears off, he was reading a magazine. The boy from on television sat playing checkers. He was wearing a velour shirt with a zipper, just like any other kid. But I knew he wasn’t. I’d seen him on television.

His father told my mother that he was a gym teacher and that his family was Mormon.

“Mother used to do all her own canning and of course that’s had to stop. One or the other of us travels with him. He has eight brothers and sisters, and they’ve had to make sacrifices for him to be on the show. So with part of his money, we’ve taken out insurance policies for each of them.”

The father asked the boy to say hello to me. He looked up politely from his checker game and smiled. He seemed anxious to turn back to the magnetic checkers. No matter what my mother said, I wasn’t pretty enough.

The boy’s father told us that Buffy snubbed Timmy on the set. In real life, she was years older, almost in junior high.

“You wouldn’t happen to know a songwriter out there,” my mother asked. She said my father’s name.

“I can’t say that I do.” He shrugged.

We watched the airplane wheels start spinning as it ran down the runway. “They must be tired,” my mother sighed. When we couldn’t see the lights anymore, we walked out to the parking lot. I huddled against the outside of my door. We both felt solemn for a moment, watching the plane in the sky. We both wished we were on it, in one of those small yellow windows.

My mother clapped. “Well, should we go get some sundaes to celebrate?” She unlocked our doors and rubbed her hands together.

“Celebrate what?”

“Well, I think I should give his agent a call, don’t you?”

“What?”

“Didn’t you hear me asking him who their agent was? She’s apparently
the
agent to go to. All the child stars have her. Her name is Ellen Arcade and she’s in Riverside. So I think she’s the one we should get for you.” My mother bent down closer to the heat vent. “A high school gym teacher,” she mused. “What do you know.”

Benny could be impatient, but sometimes in summer you saw him taking a long time reading to one of the neighbor kids, a story from her cardboard children’s book. He helped littler kids with their math problems, pondering the elaborate boxes of numbers on their papers for hours. He tried to teach everything he didn’t understand. If you asked him how he made a stone skip seven times on the surface of a pond, or where he found the birds’ nests he carried home, perfectly whole, in two hands while running, how he balanced on water skis, he would shrug and grin, I dunno. He couldn’t teach you because he had no idea how he did these things. I once asked him to show me how to dance. We put Hal’s 45s on the console in their living room.
Would you like some of my tangerine?
Ben moved and shuffled. “How do you do that?” I looked at myself in Carol’s huge, gilt-edged mirror. I was all wrong.

“You’re fine, Ann,” he said. “Forget it.”

Once, at night that summer, Benny rode me on his handlebars, down by the tracks. We let the bike fall on the ground and we walked to the creek. Then Benny ran back to his bike and took off.

He threw me his flashlight so it landed in the field.

I screamed no, but he rode away anyway, the light on the front of his bike farther and farther away like a match going out.

I was afraid of the dark. Benny knew. A dog barked in the far distance. Then the country seemed immense, as if there were only small houses far apart and small clearings around them, not networks of electricity, of sound. It felt like a randomly settled wilderness, where you could disappear and no one would know. Then, I picked up the cold flashlight from the ground by my feet, touched the metal, fumbled it on and the night changed. Benny was right. It wasn’t him. The world softened instantly in light. For the first time I could imagine angels, the halo looked so real. I walked slowly and the sounds receded to crickets and a hum of far-off power lines. With the flashlight, you could see one thing at a time, the fitted seeds of one weed, a rough milkpod stem.

When I came to our road, I could see the shades of gray with just my eyes. I turned the flashlight off. The fields went on to the bare plain barn, a pure black. The land seemed different at night, another place, belonging to anyone who saw it. The light changed everything, made it look still and permanent, meant, like a city.