Heft (29 page)

It’s his job, says Lindsay. His whole job is helping students.

She gets a look on her face like she is protecting her family’s honor, so I say OK, maybe.

Good, she says. When he gets home.

Maybe, I say again.

What about college? she asks.

I’m not smart enough, I say. I know it is a self-pitying thing to say.

But Lindsay doesn’t object. Well, she says. What about baseball?

I have a private practice with a scout for the Mets, I say, a little proudly. But after I say it I despair.

When?

Next week, I say.

Lindsay looks at me pointedly.

When’s the last time you threw a baseball? she asks.

I shrug. I’ve been playing football all fall, I say.

You better eat something before next week, says Lindsay. A lot of things.

Then her face changes suddenly and she says Kel, Kel.

What?

I’m sorry. I’m so sorry for you.

Later, we go downstairs to the kitchen again. You should start eating now, says Lindsay.

Pasta, I say.

No, meat. Lots of meat, she says. Like, eggs and whole milk and meat.

She gets out what she can find from her fridge and puts it all in front of me. OK, go, she says.

She watches me.

After a few minutes she says, What about Arthur Opp?

• • •

Y
olanda & I have begun to read the obituaries together. I
read them aloud to her or she reads them aloud to me. It is not as morbid as it seems. Yolanda saw me looking at them one day & asked me what I was reading. I told her.

“Why?” she asked me.

& I told her I thought of it as an act of service, a way of commemorating & respecting. To think of each person individually, just for a moment, & to contemplate each life. The lonely ones especially, the childless or the left behind. It is my church—because I do not go.

“Who died?” asked Yolanda, & this was how it began.

This evening, I was reading them aloud to Yolanda as she chopped carrots in the kitchen. Every now & then I would pause to open a cabinet & close it again. I was very hungry but I was embarrassed to eat anything in front of her. I still have not grown used to it. She had been chopping carrots for a very long time.

“What do you want?” she asked me, finally.

“O nothing,” I told her. But I stopped wandering & I stood in the doorframe instead. I could feel both sides of it pressing into me. Comfortingly.

“If you eat too many carrots the baby will be yellow,” I said.

“No she won’t,” said Yolanda.

“She will indeed,” I said.

“Fine,” said Yolanda, and she went to the refrigerator & got out a cucumber, & chopped that all up as well. “Can you order some more cucumbers next time?”

“Yes I certainly can,” I said, & I thought of all the things that can be done with cucumbers, including salting them & pickling them & putting them with cream cheese on a sandwich or a bagel.

Yolanda turned to me and wiped her brow with the back of her wrist & then put her other hand on her back & stretched like a cat. She made a little groaning noise as if she were in pain & I asked her was she.

“Just my back,” she said. “I can’t sleep well anymore.”

At this I became gravely concerned & embarrassed at once. I wanted to offer her someplace else to sleep, for the mattresses in this house were bought in the 1960s and the sheets & pillows are just as old. But I had no offer to make, so I did not make one.

“I talked to my mom again,” she said, and suddenly I saw her for the little girl she was, for her face sort of crumbled as she said it, the way anyone’s does when one is talking about one’s mother.

“What did you talk about?” I said.

“The baby,” said Yolanda. She looked at me as if to say
What else.
Then she said Come on, and walked swiftly toward me carrying a plate of carrots and cucumbers, & I backed up out of her way, & she stomped firmly into the dining room, placing her snack on the table.

We sat down there. It felt formal & appropriate. I felt she had something to tell me. She ate her vegetables & offered me some & I declined at first but not for long.

“Would you like to tell me about it?” I asked. This is what I used to say to my students. They would sit across from me just as Yolanda was sitting. They would cast their eyes downward when upset or embarrassed. It is amazing what students will tell you. Everything. I felt at times like a priest or a therapist. I loved it. I miss it now, the feeling of being confessed to.

“Why would I?” said Yolanda. “I don’t know anything about you.” & she said this very gloomily & propped her head up on her little hands.

It stung. We both ate a carrot & let her pronouncement linger in the air.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m not very good at such things.”

Marty had been the only one to drag it out of me. & Marty was gone.

Yolanda shrugged. We sat together silently until the room was full of silence & I was afraid to say anything for fear that I would break something. I was still as a flower.

Finally Yolanda spoke. “My mother was thirty when she had me,” she said. “She was old. She didn’t think she could have kids even.”

“Not
old . . .
” I said.

“Whatever, she didn’t think she could have kids. She prayed for a baby every day. When I was born it was a miracle. Then she never had any other kids after me.”

“An only child,” I said.

I asked her where her parents were from. “Argentina,” she said.

“Buenos Aires? Rosario? Córdoba?” I asked, with a wish to be connected to her past. When I was a child I was obsessive about geography and what I learned then has, with surprising consistency, remained intact.

“In the country,” she said. “In the mountains.”

She said a favorite uncle brought her mother and father over when they were young and in love and newly married. The uncle got her mother a job cleaning houses, which is still how she makes a living. But for Yolanda she had wanted something different.

“What did she want you to do?” I asked her.

“I don’t really know,” said Yolanda.

“Go to college?”

“I don’t really know,” she said again, sadly. She was wearing her too-large sweat outfit that I hope is not Junior’s and she put the hood of it up and played with the drawstrings of it, pulling them taut until only her nose was showing. She was jigging her legs up and down, which she always does when she’s sitting.

“I met Junior through a friend,” she said, muffledly. “I never brought him around because I knew they wouldn’t like him. Then when I got pregnant I had to bring him over and I was right. They didn’t.”

“Do you?”

“Not anymore,” she said. “Not even at all. I don’t know why I ever did,” she said. She was tying the drawstrings of her hood into a bow, blindly. Her whole face was obscured by the gray fabric. She looked like a helmeted knight.

“When I told them I was pregnant they said that’s it. They said, you’re an adult now and you have to work now. They took me out of school. I was about to be a senior in high school. I would have graduated this spring.”

“O no,” I said.

“I deserved it,” said Yolanda. She nodded through the hood. “I did.”

I began eating carrots to have something to do. I crunched them very brutally. I did not want to think that I was doing Yolanda a disservice by having her here. But things were coming into focus.

“My mom got me a job at Home-Maid and the first place they sent me was your house.”

I swallowed the carrots before they were fully chewed.

She undid her hood, slowly, and then took it down from her head. Her hair, which is normally pulled back tightly, was loose and slightly fuzzy. Like a chick. In general she reminds me of a chick. It is in how she moves & in her general greenness, her dearness. She is something to be cradled.

“Do you want to go back to school?” I asked her.

“Maybe someday,” said Yolanda. “I don’t care. Maybe.”

“Once the baby’s born?”

“Maybe,” she said again, & then I could tell she was done with the subject. She looked at me with her eyebrows raised then.

“Go,” she said. “Your turn. You have to go now.”

She was looking at me fiercely. I could tell she was waiting to be betrayed.

So I had to do as she said.

“I was born here,” I said.

“Here in this house?”

“Here in Brooklyn.”

“How old are you?”

“Fifty-eight years old.”

“Go.”

“I was not a happy child. I was not well liked.”

“Why not?”

“I did not know how to act like the people I went to school with.”

“Why not?”

“Because they all had parents that had grown up here too. And grandparents.”

“And your parents were born in England.”

“Yes.”

“So they had accents?”

“They did indeed.”

“Why did they move here?”

“For his work.”

“He was an architect.”

“Is. Yes.”

“Go ahead.”

“My father was not kind to my mother. He was very infrequently home, and when he was he was berating her in one way or another.”

“Berating?”

“Insulting.”

“For what?”

“For her weight, mostly. She was large.”

“As big as you?”

I paused. It stung. I let it sting. It was her honesty.

“No. Not as large as I am. Still large. She was always trying things. Mail-order brochures for calisthenics programs. The lentil soup diet. The grapefruit diet. She was always stuffing herself into dresses that didn’t fasten.”

“What was her name?”

“Her name was Anna.”

“Pretty.”

“She was pretty. She had a face that looked like the moon. When I was a child I would look up at it and think about the moon.”

I ate a carrot.

“What was school like for you?” I asked her.

“Fun,” she said. “I liked it.”

But she would say no more. This is a standard Yolanda answer.

“She called herself Anna Ordinary. Or she called herself Mrs. Tubbs,” I said.

“What did she eat?”

“Everything she could think of. My father was away on business much of the time. When he was gone we would have special treats. The night before he came back she would stand in front of her mirror and force herself into her corset and then force herself into whatever dress she planned on greeting him in. Often I was in charge of fastening it, and often it would not go.”

“What would she do?”

“She would buy another dress.”

A teakettle whistled in the kitchen and Yolanda got up to answer it. I hadn’t known she had put any on. She doesn’t drink tea. I realized that it must have been for me, & the great weight of my appreciation for Yolanda settled into my gut.

She returned with a mug of it and a quart of milk. I thanked her kindly.

“Go,” she said.

“My father left us.”

“They got divorced?”

“No, he left. I was eight years old, almost nine. They never divorced. He said he was going to work on a building in England so he’d be over there for quite some time. He never came back.”

“Did you go there?”

“Once. Much later.”

“Did your mom want to move back?”

Yolanda has a very charming habit of, when she is asking questions, looking absolutely fascinated with your responses, her chin on her hand, leaning toward you slightly, smiling when it is appropriate, widening her eyes, gasping in horror, clapping, even. She shakes her head in disgust when things disgust her. She moans, “Oh
no
,” when she hears something she does not like.

“I believe she would have liked to, yes. But she would not allow herself to.”

“Why not?”

“It would have meant that she had failed. She came from a good family. They both did. My father continued to support us from abroad. He still supports me.”

I paused. There were parts of this story that I had never articulated. Perhaps not even allowed myself to think. But in that moment Yolanda seemed a safe vessel for them.

“She—my mother—always insisted he would return. Even after he stopped calling altogether. She would dress herself up sometimes as if she expected him to walk in the door. When she wrote to her relatives she always referenced him, and the projects he was working on in England, as if he had told her about them.”

“When’s the last time you saw him?”

“Just after my mother died. I was eighteen. He wrote to me—it was the first letter I’d had from him in almost a decade—and said he was very sorry to hear about Anna, and would I like to come see him in England.”

“So you went?”

“I went on the
QE2
. A big ship. I used a suitcase that was my father’s, one that he had left behind. When he left he did not pack most of his things, so they stayed in this house for years until I threw them all out in my twenties.”

I became embarrassed suddenly. I pressed one hand to my cheek and felt its hotness.

“I thought perhaps he would recognize me by his old suitcase. If he did not recognize me by my person, which had changed quite a bit since I was ten.”

“You got fat?”

“I did. Yes.”

Yes. I did. Not as fat as I am now. But fat all the same. It got very bad when I was a teenager. On the
QE2
, I spent a week at sea avoiding the formal dinners they had because I was too embarrassed to eat how much I really wanted to. Additionally I was by myself and the concept of being thrown together with a group of strangers every evening was too much for me to bear. So instead I requested dinners in my room. Dinners that would have been enough for three. For six. In the daytime sometimes I went up on deck and looked out at the vast sea & felt sorry for myself. Or I read. But most of that trip I spent holed up in my room, eating.

I had brought light blue bell-bottom pants, a sort of turtleneck sweater, & brown suede shoes. I had saved this outfit for the day I would meet my father. I imagined that this was a very smart outfit. I had long hair then. Down to my shoulders. It was 1971. The day of our arrival, I panicked: I realized that I could hardly button the pants. In a week I had gained enough weight to make them tight. I squeezed & squeezed myself into them. I thought of my mother doing the same thing, years ago, before my father left. I strained the fabric, I forced myself into them, & finally the button went through the hole. I couldn’t breathe out. I felt trapped.