Carter Clay (22 page)

“I know it's pathetic, but she doesn't have many pleasures, poor baby.”

M.B. nods, and soon after, she makes her excuses and heads back to #335.

In #335, Jersey is driving her chair back and forth across the framed photos of her grandfather that normally sit on top of M.B.'s entertainment center. Even before M.B. has the door open all the way, she hears the sound of the glass breaking against the carpet—a kind of crisp
crack.

“What are you doing?” she demands, though now she can see.

The girl looks up. She is crying, but she also grins and says, in mush-voiced imitation of Tweety Bird, “I cannot tell a wie! I dwove acwoss da pwitty pitchers wid my funny wittle car.”

M.B. yanks the wheelchair back from the smashed frames and photos. “What have you done?” she asks. “My pictures! You—monster!”

Ineffectually, the girl tries to slap M.B.'s hands away. “Just you remember,” she shrieks, “you'll never get me in Fair Oaks! Never!”

“The neighbors!” M.B. says, but Jersey goes on, her face twisted and dark.

“I'd kill myself first! I'd kill myself now, if it weren't for Mom! And that fucker that hit us! I'm going to find that fucker and kill him, too!”

“Quiet!” M.B. drops down on her knees in the wreckage and, from that vantage point, spies the bottle on the coffee table. “You're drunk!”

Jersey neither agrees nor disagrees, merely lets her head loll forward. She has never before been called a monster, never said
the word
fuck.
The words are claws. They rip something in her chest. They tear at her temples.

“That wine”—M.B. tries to sound utterly reasonable as she gathers up the photos and broken frames and pieces of glass from the carpet—“that's Patsy's. Oh!” she breaks into a wail. “Look!” She holds up a photo in which Lorne's face has been torn in half by the weight of the chair's wheels.

Jersey sees, then, that what she has done is terrible. Her grandmother: an aging woman who has lost her husband, and she, Jersey, has increased her hurt. Of course, this is what Jersey meant to do, and so she can only sob from blue-grape lips, “I'll fix them, M.B. I'll fix them.”

“Fix them?” Now it is M.B.'s turn to shriek. “You can't fix them! The only thing I have left—you'll never get near them again in your life!”

The two do not speak to one another until the next evening, when Pastor Bitner comes by, drawn to the condo by a tearful telephone call from M.B.

A most unsatisfactory call, as far as M.B. was concerned, but Pastor Bitner winks at M.B. as she comes to answer the door, and he says in a jolly voice, “Just in the neighborhood!”

Though Pastor Bitner always tries to be cheerful, tonight he is rather tired, having just come from a painful session with another parishioner, the new man, Carter Clay. (
“But how do you know when you're really forgiven and loved by God?”
Clay pleaded.
“Does God talk to you, or give you some kind of sign in your heart, or what?”
)

When M.B. shows Pastor Bitner inside, Jersey is seated at M.B.'s dinette, taking apart an owl plug she recently found in the parking lot. She flushes as she looks up to say hello. She feels certain that M.B. would not have told Pastor Bitner about last night's drinking episode—M.B. would not want him to know she kept wine—but she might have told him about the photos.

“And what have we here?” asks Pastor Bitner.

“It's what an owl spits out after it's digested all that it can
digest of its prey.” Because most people do not like to see the pulverized fur and feathers, she points only to the little rows of ribs the size of eyelashes, tiny yellow teeth and claws, the weight-sparing bones and skulls of the small birds upon which the larger dined. “It shows you what the owl's been eating.”

“At my table!” M.B. means to sound both amused and put out, but suspects she succeeds only at the latter.

“Good to have a hobby,” says Pastor Bitner. Pastor Bitner has considered his speech beforehand, but feels on slightly shaky ground with this particular girl. “Jersey?”

She looks up.

“You know your grandmother loves you, don't you?”

The girl clasps her hands in her lap, and looks down.

“Isn't that right, Marybelle?” Pastor Bitner says.

“That's right.”

Pastor Bitner explains what he and her grandmother discussed on the telephone: the need for Jersey to face the fact that her mother lives in Fair Oaks; the need for Jersey to start school here, in the fall, and for her grandmother to put the Seca house up for sale.

Jersey looks at M.B. M.B. does not appear happy with what Pastor Bitner says, and so, without arguing, Jersey wheels herself down the hall and into the guest room—which is not her room, will never be her room—and there she picks up several of the books and articles on brain injury that she has collected, and she wheels herself out into the hall and back to the dinette, where she looks right into Pastor Bitner's blue eyes while she explains that Fair Oaks is doing nothing to rehabilitate her mother. That plenty of rehabilitation is possible. That the brain-injury patient will do best when surrounded by the familiar. That recognition is easier than recall, and, also, that helping her mother would provide Jersey with an excellent cross to bear.

Straight-faced—meaning it—Jersey says, “If she were here with us, Pastor, I'd see that she got to church at least twice a week. And out for walks. She needs to go for walks. My grandmother shouldn't sell the Arizona house yet”—here Jersey looks M.B. in the eye—“because, you know, my mom and I should go
home, eventually, if we can. M.B. could come, too, if she wanted.” Her lips tremble, but she goes on. “There's a clinic in Phoenix that could maybe even help me—and I don't see how we'll ever know what my mom can do while she's at Fair Oaks. They dope her up, Pastor. They're not supposed to do that—”

At this, M.B. interrupts to say, “That's for her seizures!”

“I don't mean the stuff for her seizures—”

“Well, maybe they need to—give her things!” M.B. protests. “She can be wild, Pastor, believe me. And I only put her in Fair Oaks because—you don't know! Those physical therapists at the rehab hurt her. I was there once. She was
screaming
!”

“She screamed because it hurt!” Jersey says. “But they were
helping
her get better!”

Well!
Pastor Bitner has an idea!
How about you girls give weekend visits from Katherine a try?
Pastor Bitner knew a couple whose son did just that till he got well enough to go home for good.

Jersey nods. Her voice fogs with emotion. “I'd go get her and take her back, M.B. That way she'd get a good walk both ways and you wouldn't have to do anything.”

M.B. does not respond, but busies herself with folding up one edge of that sheet of aluminum foil upon which the girl was making her owl pellet mess.

“Did you two ever think”—Pastor Bitner picks up an amber rodent's tooth from the foil, turns it this way and that—“maybe you're here to bear each other up?” He smiles expectantly though neither female looks his way. “Be strong and cheerful when the other one's weary and downhearted?”

This notion so clearly refreshes Pastor Bitner that M.B. knows she is licked, and, sure enough, not ten minutes pass before Pastor Bitner is on the telephone to Fair Oaks, establishing that Katherine will spend the next weekend at Palm Gate Village with M.B. and Jersey.

“This ought to be good,” M.B. mutters to Jersey while Pastor Bitner talks to Fair Oaks. She means to sound funny—like a comrade. She gives Jersey a wink. Jersey, however, keeps her eyes on Pastor Bitner. Holds her head cocked to one side, as if she is an attentive pooch who cares only for the words of her master.

In the fairy tale “Rumpelstiltskin,” the trouble all begins when, to make himself look important, a miller brags to the king that his daughter can spin straw into gold. The king asks for a demonstration, noting that he will kill the girl if she fails to do this thing her father says she can do. By great good luck, the girl is saved when a little fellow appears to her and, for a price, performs the magical spinning each of the three nights the king sets the girl to the task. The first night, the manikin spins straw into gold in exchange for the girl's necklace; the second, he spins for her ring. In some versions of the tale, after that second night, we learn from the narrator that the king is a greedy fellow, and that it occurs to him:
with such a girl for my wife, I would always be rich.
The third night, then, the king promises to marry the girl if she spins a tremendous roomful of straw into gold.

However, by the third night, the girl has nothing left to offer the little man in exchange for his spinning.

“I will spin for you this night if you promise to give me your firstborn,” says the manikin; and the desperate girl agrees.

Time passes, as time will. The girl, now queen, bears a child, and the little man comes to fetch the baby. Frantic, the queen offers him all of the land's riches if he will only let her keep the babe, and from pity the manikin makes the queen this allowance:
if she is able in three days' time to discover his name, he will let her keep the child.

On the third day, after the queen has guessed all the names of which she can think, and after her minions have gathered novel names from far and wide—each the wrong name—one final scout returns from overhearing, at the end of the forest, a ridiculous little fellow singing a song that announces that he bears the name Rumpelstiltskin.

Thus the queen is able to tell Rumpelstiltskin his name; he loses his claim to the baby and becomes so furious that he tears himself in two.

Is it the continuing rescue of the girl-queen from disaster that makes this story such a favorite?

But consider who put her in the initial position from which she needs to be saved: her father! And consider who rescues her: Rumpelstiltskin!

A question: shouldn't the miller have been the one threatened with death? Or is the story a warning to parents?
Don't be like the miller—or, for that matter, his rash baby-promising daughter—and put your children in positions of danger.

No. “Rumpelstiltskin” turns out to be, by and large, a tale of luck and magic, and of pity that comes from the most unlikely source. The miller's daughter and her child are saved not by a demonstration of bravery or morality or intelligence but by (1) Rumpelstiltskin's magical ability to spin straw into gold, (2) the unanticipated pity that moves Rumpelstiltskin to change the terms of the bargain, (3) the incredible good fortune of the scout's passing by as Rumpelstiltskin sings out his improbable name, and (4) the fact that, apparently, the king never again asks the girl to spin straw into gold.

As a boy, the fairy tale that Carter Clay—and Joe Alitz, too—liked best was “Rapunzel.” Both wanted to be the brave prince who
climbs up the rope of the beautiful princess's hair into the tower of her imprisonment and kills the imprisoning witch. Neither Joe nor Carter was familiar, however, with those grisly versions of the tale in which the witch throws the prince from the tower into terrible brambles that scratch out his eyes and leave him to wander, blind, through the forests for seven years.

Katherine and M.B., no doubt to their detriment, longed to be Cinderella, while Jersey—who encountered the Greek myths some years before the Grimms'—considered Cinderella a wimp and identified with the brave and adventurous Perseus.

It would be a convenient lie to say that “Rumpelstiltskin” was a favorite of Finis Pruitt's. Finis, however, never liked to think of himself as a person with favorites. Or alliances of any kind. He had, rather, “enthusiasms,” “positions in relation to.” In high school, for instance, in tandem with reading Kerouac and Ginsberg and Henry Miller, he completed all—and mentally staged many—of the plays of O'Neill, Ibsen, Shaw, and Arthur Miller.
Just to get a feel for them
, was how Finis thought of it. For a time after he was booted from the service—before he discovered that someone else had created much the same sort of publication—he threw himself into creating a parody of his high school yearbook. During another period, for several months, he moved back into the New Mexico home of his cleaning-woman mom with the idea of organizing—and pitching to some tony New York gallery—an art exhibit made up of the discards that his mother received from her employers (wives of the three major hotshots at the copper mine). There would be porcelain Virgins missing, say, nose or hand; half-filled containers of bath powder; rusted lawn chairs; a defunct cuckoo clock; a stuffed doggy made of genuine raccoon fur and sporting a plaid tam; the odd piece of glassware or eating utensil; a cabinet that once housed a television set; electric hair curlers; wood and metal wall ornaments made by somebody's son in “shop”; a laminated picture of Jesus, bubbled from a houseguest's careless transfer of a space heater to a dresser; several space heaters; a box of bath oil capsules that had melted into a kind of gorgeous jam; daisy bedsheets and bedsheets that looked like bandannas; striped towels that came, free, in boxes of
Duz detergent; assorted pieces of ugly or defective jewelry; bathrobes; a set of salt and pepper shakers in the shape of an eggplant and a tomato; a large framed photograph of Venetian rooftops; extra envelopes from boxes of note cards; wire hangers; battered lamps; incomplete craft projects—

No!

He would make his parents'
house
the exhibit—complete with his parents! And the paneled wall in the little front room that held, along with photos of his many brothers and sisters, a senior photo of Finis himself (who had practiced the pursed-lip expression he believed made him look like Kerouac, but had no control over the lemonade-colored hair of his ancestors, the skin pale as that bleached flour from which most of the Pruitt meals were made).

A wonderful exhibit, he felt certain, but the next thing he knew his mother was chasing him from the house with a red-hot curling iron—or was it an electric charcoal briquette starter? Some dangerous discard, at any rate—and soon after, the mines ate the land upon which that house stood, and the Pruitt parents moved to Las Cruces, and Finis sallied out into the world once more, alone.