One Heart (12 page)

“Hi,” she said, smiling.

I must've looked at her funny, and mumbled hello. Then I reached out to her, and gave her a hug, but it was stiff.

“What's wrong? Something wrong? Am I a stranger?”

She had made her way into the house. I followed her. Then the toilet flushed.

“James is here,” I explained.

“He came back for another visit?”

“He stayed.”

James walked out of the bathroom and saw Gladys standing there still holding her suitcase.

Those two looked at each other for a long moment, and I'm feeling a sort of crumbling take place inside me.

“Hi, James,” Gladys said. It looked to me like she suddenly had tears in her eyes.

“Hi,” he said. Then he looked over at me for a split second.

“It's all right,” I said. I was talking to myself but James thought I was talking to him and he looked over at me like he was thanking me for saying it was all right.

A small part of me was glad to see Gladys. Most of me just kept on crumbling.

Gladys started walking back toward the bedroom with her suitcase and I stepped in front of her and said, “Let me take that for you, here, sit down on the couch, James get her some cranberry juice, she still loves it, I'm sure. . . ”

Gladys let me steer her toward the couch. She was tired. She had been on a Trailways bus for three days.

I let James wait on her while I took the suitcase back in the bedroom, closed the door behind me, and hurried around that room to gather James's shoes and his books and his pants and shirts on the hook by the window. I stood there with all of it in my arms and thought I'd throw it all out the window then go out and deal with it later.

But I remembered I was not a child and not a fool or a liar. I wasn't sure what I was but I knew what I wasn't. And the smell and feel of James's belongings began to pierce my heart just as if he were wrapped around me saying,
Good-bye, Ivy, it's all over now
.

I finally set it all down on the bed. I could hear Gladys's voice out there in the living room and I heard what I thought was James's laugh once. I figured Gladys was thinking I was back in the bedroom to give them a little privacy.

So all his belongings were on the bed and I began to fold his shirts and pants neatly. The maroon flannel, the two worn plaids, the gold T-shirt, the two white T-shirts, a robe I bought him, his jeans, his underwear. I put his shoes on the floor.

Then I walked back into the living room and for a second saw it like I'd never seen it before, saw that oil painting of the ship on the rough sea at night, saw the way the couch sagged underneath it, saw the little statue of the girl in the yellow dress like it was brand-new.

I didn't really
see
Gladys and James now. They were blurs, and I took my seat on the couch next to Gladys and across from James and for a few seconds it was silent.

“I think we oughta tell Gladys something,” I said to James.

And the odd thing was I wasn't a bit nervous about it, mainly because I knew I'd lost everything that really mattered to me then, meaning James's love and companionship, and whenever a person loses like that a kind of bravery sets in, maybe a hopeless bravery but it's better than being afraid.

James looked at the floor and said, “Well, I guess so. Seems an odd way to say hello to her after so long, but I guess you're right, Ivy.”

So I looked at Gladys and said, “James has been mine for a while.”

“James has been yours for a while,” she said. “Now what's that supposed to mean?” She was smiling. She knew what it meant.

“James and I are lovers,” I said.

“Whoah!” she said. “Whoah Nilly!” She was still smiling.

“I'm sorry, Gladys, it just happened,” I told her. I felt no emotion at this point other than a bit confused about that smile on her face.

Then she starts laughing. She throws her head back and laughs and says, “Ivy! Ivy and James!” And she keeps on laughing.

*  *  *

I went for a walk alone when that laughter died. Gladys wouldn't look at me. I wasn't sure what to make of it all, but I knew that I was the third wheel in that room, that James and Gladys had a long life together that maybe happened long ago, but it was there in the room just the same, and I felt like a girl again, a girl excluded, alone on a porch swing in the dark.

But I couldn't stay on that swing in that dark because I was a whole different person now, and my heart was in great pain, and all I wanted was to turn around and head back to that house and say to James, “James, tell Gladys you love me. I know you love me. I know you do, James.”

But of course I kept walking into that autumn night because I knew James didn't love me.

When I was twenty-two a man named Stewart Rivers dated me half a year. Stewart was a nice man in most ways, and a handsome man too, often in a tie because he was an architecture student. My mother told me he was the best I'd ever get. He might have been, but I didn't love him, so I had to break his heart. Stewart didn't take that heartbreak well, in fact he called me on the phone crying, he showed up at my house with roses once a week for three months straight, and he wrote me about sixty letters signing them “Love, Stew” when all I'd ever called him was Stewart.

I walked that night straight out of the camp and down the dark road that led to town, and the whole time I thought of how Stewart Rivers became smaller and smaller and less like someone I could love the more he persisted that way.

I would not be Stewart Rivers with James. I'd be the opposite.

I'd go on with my life, and whatever he wanted to do, well that was plainly his business.

There was no moon that night, only stars. I couldn't see where I was going, but I didn't much care.

Next thing a car is shining headlights on my backside and Gladys is hanging out the window saying, “Ivy, get in!” And I turn around and walk back toward James's car and get into the backseat. Gladys is at the wheel, James is in the passenger seat, and a football game is on the radio for a second until Gladys changes the station and now we've got the singer Al Green.

I'll never forget it.

Gladys drove straight and James turned sideways in the passenger seat, reached back and squeezed my hand, and all the sudden I'm filled with the most painful hope I ever had. I squeezed his hand back.

“We going to the Little Moon?” I said.

“We just came out to rescue you, sister,” Gladys said.

“So where
are
we going?”

“Back home,” James said. “Gladys and me need some time to talk.”

“So why can't I walk if you two need to talk?” I was angry all the sudden. Terribly angry.

“It's too dangerous out here, Ivy. You could get hit by a car.”

He squeezed my hand again.

Al Green kept on singing.

I let them take me home.

G
US
G
UNADOS WAS A MAN
I
DRANK WITH AT THE
VFW
IN
Eugene, Oregon. That's where we got off the bus for good. When I say we, I'm speaking of myself and Raelene and Anthony, boy of her dreams.

Gus was no veteran. And the VFW was not your typical old soldier bar. It was the misfit watering hole. Doors wide open for your down-and-outers. Bums spent the night in the booths. Some mornings, the odor was sickening. But you had to admire an operation like that. Course there were vets in there, but they weren't the sort to hold it against you if your feet never wore combat boots. They played old music in there. Glenn Miller and Fats Domino, mainly. Sometimes Johnny Cash. I liked to sit and talk to Gus and hear Johnny Cash in the background.

Gus was a flat-foot in thick glasses. He and I hit it off, mainly because we were both afternoon drinkers at the time. It was company for a while. Nothing to compare to James. In fact, just being with Gus got me thinking of James.

We stopped there in Eugene, Oregon, because that's where Hambone West lived in a big old house with a few other youngsters. One of those young people called himself an artist. He'd paint the Pillsbury dough boy, Mary the Virgin, and an automobile on a tin can, then sell the damn thing for fifty-five bucks at the Saturday market. I just kept my mouth shut about that.

The other young person was a college girl. Hardly saw her. She had an older man professor in her life. Tell you the truth, he was my age. Bumped into him one night in the hallway. He had a towel wrapped around his waist. We just looked at each other, then moved on.

It was a place to stay for a while.

I was all pains and aches after that bus ride. Raelene and Anthony and myself got off the bus and there was Hambone West. He had himself a car the size and color of a toad. “Get on in,” he told us. I looked at the car and thought, How? Raelene squeezed into the back, and I sat beside our chauffeur.

Hambone was a curly red-haired boy who talked too fast and too much. The sort of young man who blasts off like a rocket when he's sixteen, then crashes down to earth by age twenty-five. He was still blasting when I met him. I looked at him and pictures came right into my mind. An exhausted mother and a General Motors father, hardworking folks with dark circles under their eyes, and all their dreams in Hambone. I liked him. He didn't seem to care that I was old enough to be his mother. When he talked, he talked to both Raelene and myself. He didn't pretend I wasn't there, and he didn't change himself because I was. Every other word out of Hambone's mouth was
shit
. And it brought out the cusser in Raelene and Anthony. “Are you shittin' me?” they'd all say.

“You people got cute mouths,” I'd say. “But use your imaginations. You got a lot of curse words out there, why stick to one?”

The house was surrounded by roses. Two blocks away was the Willamette River. I would go for walks on a path there. Thundercloud plum trees lined our street, dazzling deep purple if your eyes never saw one. My room had a bed and a rusty mirror on the wall. And two windows. I wasn't complaining. Something in me was different. Maybe I just made myself enjoy the distractions of novelty. I knew it wouldn't last long.

But I see now it was good that I headed west on that bus. It was good getting away from my life. They say you can't run away from your problems, but I found that's not true. You need to sometimes, and you can. It's possible. It's not like you stay the same if you put your carcass on a Greyhound and take it to a house of youths across the country. You don't tend to haul that same old carcass with you. You change.

Not in a big way, but that's all right. You need little changes. You need a stranger on a bus to sit across the aisle and tell you the story of the time her uncle painted everything in his house bright red. I said to the baffled niece from Detroit, “Everything? Even the toilet paper?”

“Even the toilet paper,” the woman says.

And that's when I knew I left myself behind. Laughing with an ease I hadn't felt since being a girl. My eyes tearing up with the laugh. I turned toward the window. I thought of the uncle with his paintbrush not being satisfied with a red house. He'd want to paint the sidewalk next. He was trying to make the world simple with his paint. For a while I sat and rode and thought about that man and laughed.

It weren't like me, and I liked it.

Old Raelene. She stirred it all up. I can see she's a mystery now. The fact that she came into my life. Mystery. Where would I be without it.

For employment in Eugene, I cleaned houses for three families—it was easy work, and the one family paid a fortune because the father was one of those men who hate exploitation of any kind. For decorations in that house they had posters from this protest, that protest. “Want to join us on an antigrape march?” the mother said one day when I was eating lunch. “I'm not a marcher,” I said. And the mother got very interested, pulled up a chair, like I'm a scholar on not marching. She says, “Really? Why? How did you come to that decision?” No matter what I said, that family thought it was interesting, so I just said, “Bad feet.”

Meanwhile Raelene picked strawberries. Walked around with stained hands. Still wearing Chinese slippers, only black ones now. She'd bring home baskets of the very ripe ones, and we ate.

Anthony worked with some carpenters. He got brown and muscled in the sun, started looking too much like Omar Sharif for his own good. Grew a thin mustache. Raelene told me she was going to marry him. “That's how much I love Anthony,” she said one night on the front porch. They would have three kids (she had three god-awful names picked out, including Illuminata). They'd stay “out west where the air was vury clean.” And maybe she'd eventually look up her mother, she said. Her mother was out west, had been for years.

“Out west is not an address,” I said. I looked at her face. She was biting down on her lower lip.

She said, “Oh, I got the address. I got the address exactly.”

I understood then that the girl had wanted to go out west not just to see Hambone. Not just for the adventure. And I figured she wouldn't be able to wait. Marriage and babies would come later. Tracking the mother, sooner. I could see it in her face.

Wasn't too long before Raelene says, “Will you go visit my mother with me?”

She needed my company. Omar Sharif had to work, and she couldn't face it alone. Part of me wanted to go so I could say to the mother, what ails you?

Turns out the mother lived in the city of Portland, Oregon. Raelene borrowed the tin can artist's car. Away we went with the twin Virgin Marys on every door. Raelene at the wheel.

Here's what that girl told me on the way to Portland: “Gladys, I'm going to have a baby.” The way she says it, soft with a big smile, her eyes all lit up, I know I was supposed to say, “Congratulations.” But I just stared at her. Then I said, “What?” And she says it again, with the same innocent happiness. She was like a film star playing a farm girl. Odd, because she weren't much of an actress usually.