Anywhere But Here (30 page)

And while my mother rested, my grandmother and I stole out of the house on expeditions, to see the maple syrup tapped out of trees in fall, to feed ducks and geese cans of corn at the Wildlife Preservation Center in winter, to search in spring for trilliums and wild violets in the fields. Perhaps my grandmother and I could have lived like that forever, moving quietly, playing, she on top of the kitchen table with her cards, me underneath with my colors; but by summer, my mother regained her strength. We watched it happen. One day she stopped taking naps. The next week she didn’t go to bed with me after supper. And by that time, she was already bored.

She enrolled the two of us in figure skating classes Saturday evenings. She bought us matching short dresses made of stretch fabric and skin-colored tights. The rink seemed silent, the only sound was a humming, like the inside of a refrigerator. The ice was divided into eight rectangular patches and my mother and I shared one.

We concentrated, our necks bent over like horses’, as we followed the lines our blades made. My skates had double runners. Then, at eight o’clock, scratchy music started up on the PA system and we free-skated, wild around the rink.

“This is how you really lose the pounds,” my mother called, slapping her thigh, “skating fast.”

A man did a T-stop in front of her, shaving a comet of ice into the air. They skated off together, while I stood there, wiping the melting ice from my face. That was the first time we saw Ted.

When the music stopped, my mother pulled me over to the barrier, where we ran our skate tips into the soft wood.

“See, when you’re older, you can bring a boy you’re dating here to see you skate. He can watch you and think, hey, she’s not just another pretty girl. She can really do something.” She nodded up to the rows of empty seats. They were maroon velvet, with the plush worn down in the centers. My mother looked at me with a slanted gaze as if, through a crack, she could see what I’d become. I knew what I wanted to be: I wanted to be just like her.

But my mother felt restless, waiting. We drove slowly through the winding streets of the good neighborhoods by the river, her friend Lolly from college in the front seat. We ate soft ice cream cones which melted fast, the chocolate dripping down our shirts.

“Boy, wouldn’t you love to live there?” my mother said, slamming on the brakes.

Behind a long dark lawn stood a house with white pillars. “But, go on, Lolly.”

They spoke in low voices. “Who would have thought, here in Bay City? Would you, the next time, I mean, before the, shall-we-say, ring? You know what I mean?”

“I know what you mean. And I think I would,” my mother said.

“And so do I know what you mean,” I yelled from the backseat, although of course I didn’t. I just felt left out and I wanted them to stop.

They sipped coffee outside on the back porch. I pretended to be taking apart a lady’s slipper, studying it, setting the soft red
pieces out on the boards between my legs, so they wouldn’t think I was listening. They were talking about how many times a week Lolly should wash her hair and how many shampooings per wash.

My mother sighed and looked out over the fields. Serrated red and yellow leaves stuck in the grass, and all the corn was down.

“So have you heard anything from, a-hem, California?”

My mother didn’t talk for a while. I didn’t dare look at her. I moved the stem of the lady’s slipper up and down on my palm. My father had been gone for two years.

“Ann, go inside and watch TV with Mom,” she said finally. “Go sit and keep her company.”

I dragged my slippers on the boards. They were quiet until I was gone. My mother had both hands around her coffee cup and she stared down into it, blowing. The living room was dim because all the curtains were closed. I sat on the floor next to my grandmothers legs.

I liked the smell of nylon stockings. They were everywhere in our house: hanging from the shower curtain rod, brushing my face in the bathroom, tucked in the top drawers of dressers next to silver cases of lipsticks, which, at that time, had their own rich waxy smell. The stockings smelled different with legs inside the nylon, they smelled like something burnt.

“Well, now, let’s get up and do something,” my grandmother said, at the commercial. “Not just S-I-T in front of the TV all day. Should we drive out to the cemetery and water? We can stop at the dairy on the way and you can get your chocolate milk.”

“Okay, Gramma,” I said.

While my grandmother backed the Oldsmobile out of the garage, I stood on the porch, listening to my mother and Lolly again.

“And so he said, he said to me, Well, come on, Adele, you’ve been married before. Let’s try and see if we like it. Like it? I said, Like it? Well, what happens if I don’t?”

My mother and Lolly bent over, hugging their knees, laughing. A hawk drifted in the sky.

“Why is that funny?” I said. “Will someone please tell me what’s so funny about that?”

They looked at each other and laughed some more. I started walking to my grandmother’s car, my hands trembling at my sides.

“It’s something that’s only funny for grown-ups,” my mother called.

I slammed the door and then turned, smiled at my grandmother. The tin cans we used for watering at the cemetery rattled in the backseat. I was glad we were going because I didn’t want my grandmother to stay inside all day and get pale and soft like an old person. She thought she was taking me for my benefit. Neither of us imagined that we were the one in any trouble.

Once, when he was still at home with us, my father tried to mow the lawn. In the morning, he left from the back door, with his black case of vacuum cleaners and vacuum cleaner attachments. My father was a salesman then. He loaded the trunk of the car, our Valiant, the color of root beer Popsicles.

The lawn mower was a piece of furniture, orange metal like a tractor. It was the kind you sat on and rode. Grass sprayed off in a fountain from one side.

My cousin Benny stood on the driveway, bare-legged, fidgeting by the lawn mower. Even as a child, he was always moving. When he had to wait for us, he’d go out in the backyard, with a stick as tall as he was, spinning, and you could run up to him and clap your hands and he wouldn’t hear. He was blond as an unlit wick.

“You wanna ride?” Benny’s sneaker stuck up against the orange metal, bracing to pull the cord. Jimmy Measey walked out of the garage carrying a tin can of oil. It was still on the ground, empty, after.

“Me?” My father’s fingers opened on his chest, lightly. He’d been in Wisconsin five years. In Egypt, where he came from, they had no lawns.

Just then the metal of the screen door rang. My grandmother walked outside with a hoe and a white cotton glove. She wore men’s clothes, overalls, plaid shirt, a different plaid scarf. Since her husband died, she’d begun to get up early and she had taken to wearing his clothes.

My father wavered. Jimmy Measey told me later he was trying to impress my grandmother.

“Sure,” my father said. He looked down at Benny, touched the chalky yellow of his hair. My father was always sorry I wasn’t blond. I looked like him, not my mother. “Would you like to ride along?”

“Can’t. Only one person at a time.”

“All right.”

“Here’s the gas, here’s the brake,” Jimmy Measey explained, swiveling the wheel.

Benny snapped the cord and my father shot off, his backbone a ruler, taking the ride hard. He went in one straight line. All of a sudden, the velvety grass turned bumpy. My father’s hand waved, the arm flapping back behind him.

“Hey, get off, slam the brake!” Benny’s yell scratched a sharp red line on the sky. I saw it years, a long time, after.

“Jump off,” Jimmy Measey said, running after the lawn mower. “Jump.”

No one understood what my father was yelling, and he went through the hedge, crashing corn stalks. Finally he fell off. Silky corn hair stuck on his collar when Jimmy Measey caught up to him, on the ground. The mower was still going, towards the barn. Benny chased it. My mother started out of the house then, her high heels catching in the grass.

“I don’t know why you didn’t just slug on the brake.” Jimmy Measey demonstrated, crushing a corncob under his boot, even though my father was walking, towards the house and my mother. Jimmy Measey felt impatient to go, he was late. He liked to drive to Bob’s Big Boy on the highway before work and order coffee and unbuttered toast. He liked to sit at the counter and hear the other voices, familiar and unfamiliar at the same time. He’d made a rule for himself, to be in the water softener store by ten. Jimmy Measey was a salesman, too. But he never left. He might have looked at cars on the highway overpass, wishing he were a stranger in one of the small windows, going west. But even in imagination, he always returned, back to Lime Kiln Road.

“What have they done to you?” my mother screamed, but my
father shrugged her off his elbow and walked ahead fast and alone.

Benny rode the mower in, his sneakers bouncing up off the sides. Benny loved machines.

Jimmy Measey’s hands rocked my shoulders, tilting me back. “You miss your dad, don’t you? You miss your daddy, I can feel that in you.” We stood outside, by a fire, burning leaves. Jimmy Measey was behind me, I felt all his weight. Benny stood there too, impatient to move, his blue sneaker pawing the ground. Smoke poured into the sky.

My eyes closed, I was dizzy. When I opened them again, we were all still standing, watching the light black ghosts of leaves escape, up into the air. Across the road, a light came on in the kitchen. Old Mrs. Brozek set her table. From where we were, it all looked like wax. Jimmy Measey put his hands over my ears.

“See that hole?” He pointed my head. His fingers pressed into my temples, as if they were denting them. “That’s where your dad went through the hedge.”

It was an ordinary hole, just a lapse in the dark bushes.

“He’s yelling away something in Egyptian, whatever they talk over there. You couldn’t understand it. I tried to stop him.”

I felt the fat jiggle on Jimmy Measey’s belly, warm and deep.

“Practically needed a lasso. He went right through the hedge.”

Our oak tree was over a hundred years old. We’d been raking for days. That year the leaves were the size of Benny’s and my hands. We’d knelt on the ground, matching them. From the noise in the wind and the silvery outlines of branches swaying, there was something enormous above us. There were still about a million leaves.

We stood there watching leaves collapse and fizzle into light black ash. A rusty sunset streaked the sky for miles, making our houses look small.

“Whenever I look out my sliding glass doors and see that hole, I think of your dad,” Jimmy said. “I wonder where he is now.”

I’d been staring at the oak tree, the patches of the sky through
the fists of dry, curled leaves. They rattled like brown paper bags being crumpled.

“Dad,” Benny said, his sneaker rubbing the soft lawn. “When are we going to eat?”

All of a sudden, I thought of my mother and wondered where she was. I left them there and ran inside. My grandmother stood up to her elbows in flour. Flour seemed suspended all through the kitchen, mixing in the soft yellow air. I found my mother sitting on the bathroom rug in a shortie flannel nightgown, tweezing. She was holding a small round mirror up to her face.

“What is it, Honey,” she said, studying her left eyebrow.

“Uncle Jimmy asked if I still missed my dad.”

Now she was doing the lip. She pulled it down over her top teeth.

“Oh, Honey, you didn’t even know your dad. You were too young to really know him. How could you miss him?” She sighed. “When people ask you that, you just say, No, not really, I’m very close to my mom. That’s what you say.”

“Okay,” I said and still stood there.

“I’m the one who misses my dad,” she said. “But you never had that real total love. Maybe you’re lucky, you know, maybe it’ll be better for you. You’ll never know enough to miss it.”

I walked into Jimmy Measey’s house without knocking. I let the screen door slam. Jimmy Measey sat in the kitchen, holding a beer can beaded with water.

“Is Benny here?” I asked.

He lifted the can of beer and took a drink. Then he looked at me, grinning, and held up his hand. “I hit him,” he said. “I smacked him a good one.” For an instant, he seemed to be licking his lip. Then he swung his chair to face the wall. “He’s in the bathroom,” he said.

Benny stood on the plush-covered toilet seat examining his cheek in the mirror. There was a big red handprint on his nose and over the left side of his face. He carefully dabbed cold cream on the indentation. He looked solemn as if he were adjusting, as
if it would never go away. His mother stood helplessly below, holding up the open jar of cream.

“Jimmy hit him,” she said, shaking her head.

Benny turned around to look at me. “I was bad,” he said.

I was afraid of Jimmy Measey, but sometimes he was different. He took Benny and me for a walk down to the railroad tracks and when Benny ran ahead and got a milkweed stem, saying “Lookit this, Dad,” I wanted to remind Benny of the red handprint and, at the same time, I wished Jimmy was my father too.

Before we’d left the house, my grandmother tied a wool scarf on me, her knuckles hurting under my chin as she made the knot. Benny didn’t have to wear a scarf because Jimmy Measey thought we didn’t need them, but he let my grandmother put mine on me. I was the women’s and Benny was his.

Near the ditch, Jimmy Measey took my hand. His hand felt dry and hard, like a foot. Down the tracks, two kids balanced on one rail, their arms out to the sides. We knew who they were; they were Grilings.

Jimmy Measey rummaged in his pants pocket and took out a dime and handed it to me. “Here.” He looked down the tracks. I thought he wanted me to give it to Grilings, so I started running on the coals.

“Annie, no.”

“I’ll do it, Dad.” Benny stooped and left the dime on the rail. The kids were still a long ways down the tracks in what was left of the sun.

We heard from my father in the middle of winter three years after he left. There was a long-distance phone call from Las Vegas and it was him.