One Heart (13 page)

“You tell Anthony yet?”

“Not yet. I want to take him somewhere nice, like down to the river, make it vury, vury special when I tell him.”

“Uh-huh.”

“You're the godmother, if that's all right with you.”

“Raelene,” I said. For a moment I clenched my eyes shut. I was overcome with an emotion. A kind of sorrow for Raelene, maybe. For all she was going to lose. And besides this sorrow, I felt something like jealousy. A grown woman jealous of a girl in trouble. It alarmed me.

“Don't worry,” she said. She smiled over at me. Then she turned back to the road, still smiling.

“You're tough,” I said.

“I am,” she said.

“I can't stick around much longer,” I told her.

She looked over at me.

“This little trip's not my life, Raelene,” I said. “This is diversion.”

She smiled. “You never know, Gladdy,” she said. She had started calling me Gladdy. First and only person to ever give me a nickname. Gladdy.

Raelene's mother's apartment building looked like a motel. It was on the second floor. This was a gray day in July. I had stopped in a bar for a drink. I was eager to knock on the mother's door and get this over with.

But Raelene was a wreck. She stood on the balcony with a pocket mirror. Chomping her nails like a war bride on D day. Pushing her hair behind her ears which weren't flattering. She wore a long olive green dress. “I look terrible,” she said.

“You look fine.”

“I can't do this,” she said.

“You got every right.”

I said all sorts of things, but words didn't help. I thought this whole idea was a bad one. I could feel it.

When we knocked the mother answered. Raelene lowered her eyes. Couldn't look up. So the woman says to me, “Yes?”

“I'm Gladys, this is Raelene,” I said.

I didn't like the woman. Never had, ever since I heard of her. She was a pretty woman, I'll give her that. Even in an ugly brown pants suit with gold buttons. She was an hourglass redhead with blue eyes. Only thing she had like Raelene was crooked teeth.

“Can I help you?” she said.

Raelene still couldn't look up. So I said, “I'm Gladys, and this is RAELENE.”

The hourglass stepped back.

“Come in,” she said. Her face went whiter. We stepped in. She led us into a long, narrow kitchen. Three toddlers sat at a little table. One was a little Chinaman. Red bowls full of lima beans on the table. I can still see it. Raelene just stared at the children.

“Can you say hello to our visitors, kids?” the mother said. She said it singsong.

“Hello,” they sang.

“You kids be golden while I sit and have a grown-up time,” she said. She led us to the other end of the long, spare kitchen. Toward the horizontal window framing Portland sky. She walked real fast like she was racing. Then slowed down all the sudden. Slammed on her brakes, so I nearly fell on top of her. Raelene looked at the floor. Then we were all on a sagging couch set under the window.

“Surprise, surprise,” Raelene mumbled to herself, smiling. She had a nervous laughter brewing in her, I could see that.

In the corner a small TV with tin foil antennas was tuned into a talk show.

“I didn't think I'd ever see you again,” the mother said. “Is this your stepmother?” she said, big blue eyes looking at me.

“No, no, just my friend,” she said. Then her nervous laughter spills out.

The mother's hands rose to cover her pretty face. She had long red nails.

“Go ahead, tell me you hate me, get it over with,” she said behind her hands. Raelene stopped laughing.

“I don't hate you,” she said in a small voice.

“Can't hate what you don't know,” I said. Hadn't planned on talking.

The mother's hands left her face. She looked at me.

“Who are those kids?” Raelene said.

“It's my job. Got to make a living somehow.”

“All done!” the kids called.

“Go read
Miss Moppet
,” Raelene's mother hollered. The anger she felt at being surprised got stuck inside the word
Moppet
.

“I'll be there in a while,” she called, trying to sound nicer.

She turned to Raelene with her blue eyes. She said, “I know what you're thinking. I know you're thinking it's damn funny of me to take care of other people's children when I can't take care of my own. But I have to. Only job I could get, Rae. My middle name's not exactly Skills and Education.”

Raelene looked at me, then at her mother.

“Delia won't give me the book!” one child shouted.

The mother got up and started talking to the kids like a foul-tempered Donald Duck. Very talented. Raelene's mouth hung open at this. I wanted to reach over and close it.

“Be good for ten minutes, then we'll have cookies,” said Donald Duck.

I looked at Raelene and widened my eyes. She rolled her eyes up in her head. But then those same eyes landed on her mother. And stayed there. Desperate. All the sudden I felt I shouldn't be there.

“Maybe I should go,” I said to Raelene.

“No,” she said. “No.” Looked at me, just as desperate.

The mother came back. “I memorized a whole speech for you a long time ago, Rae, and the damn thing's gone now.” She slapped the side of her head. “My mind's a sponge somebody wrung out too many times. I still remember the Gettysburg Address, but not my own speech to my daughter.”

“I don't want a speech,” Raelene said.

The mother was digging under the couch now. She brought out a shoe box. “I'll show you some photos,” said the mother. Here, let me sit down.

So I stood up and let the mother sit down. I sat on the chair across from them and looked out at the sky. I said to myself, Of all the places in this world, here I am.

“This one's your great-aunt Sara in her Jackie O. glasses. She was like a mother to me. She took care of me when I first came out here.”

“She looks nice,” Raelene said.

“Nice? Nice? That's not the word, sugar. She was the one who understood. She was a survivor. Everybody else was saying, ‘Cheer up, honey, keep your chin up!' But not Sara. Sara knew how heavy a chin could get.”

Raelene's mother turned the snapshot so I could see. It shook in her hand. I nodded my head.

“And here's my friend Dot. She was my roommate in the bin. Dot Miller. Not very attractive, but kind. We did the Thorazine shuffle together for years. Be glad you got your daddy's genes, Raelene, or you'd be Thorazine shufflin' yourself. See those fuzzy slippers? We called them our dancing shoes.”

Raelene held the snapshot. She couldn't look up. She couldn't talk.

The kids started coming toward us, crawling on the floor pushing cars.

“This is me, believe it or not,” she said, turning the picture toward me. She was on the beach in a plaid two-piece. Next to her a handsome man in sunglasses. A towel gripped in his hand.

“He was a piano player. Vury jazzy. When I got walloped he thought he could cheer me by playing some music. I'd lay on his couch and he'd play for hours. Vury jazzy stuff.”

“Sounds great,” Raelene said.

“But he didn't love me, he just loved my body. He admitted that in the end. They all do, you know. Nobody loves you when you're walloped.”

“Walloped?” Raelene said.

“Way far deep down in the dark-ass walloped.” She laughed, her eyes watered. “Depressed,” she said. She pulled out another handful of pictures, her hands shaking. Then she put them back in the box. One of the kids was singing loud, right by her feet. She yawned a big, sudden yawn. Loud and rude, but she couldn't control it.

“I don't know what else I can tell you,” she said. “Maybe come back tomorrow. It'll be a better day tomorrow. I'm so tired. It's nap time here.”

The children had turned into dogs, crawling and barking. We stood up. She saw us to the door.

Raelene and I got into the car. I was at the wheel. I figured she could sit back and digest it. I started up the car, I pulled out to the road. Then we hear, “Hey, Raelene, stop, stop, stop, stop!”

The mother is at my window. Leaning in and saying, “Stay with me, Rae, stay and have coffee and sleep one night at my place. I'll get you back in the morning. I'm, I'm, I'm . . . I have to go back up there now, please . . . ”

Raelene looked at her like she was undecided, but she weren't, really. “Go on, Raelene, go on,” I said.

“Are you all right?” she said.

“Raelene, I'm a grown woman. Don't think I need you, I don't.”

She looked hurt, I remember that. But it was true. I didn't need anybody.

She got out of the car, and away I drove. Too fast, probably. I didn't much care for the whole journey. I wished I'd never come. I found a telephone booth. I thought I'd call Ivy and tell her, “I'm headed home. The whole trip's been abnormal.” I stood in that glass booth on the side of the road and the phone rang and rang.

The next night was the night Gus Gunados and I danced to some sorrowful old man band called The Starlights. The old fart who sang was a 112 and still using Great Day on the three and a half hairs he had on his head.

Gus was handsome for a sixty-year-old in bifocals. I suspected we were headed toward romance. I'd known him for weeks and I was lonely. I'd been lonely for years but now I was lonely in a strange place. It's better that way. It's worse being lonely in a place you know well. So alongside the loneliness was a kind of pleasure. And I liked Gus's way of telling stories. He had six kids scattered across the country. He talked to three of them every Sunday. And they were all doing crazy things. He'd tell me about them in that dark bar with Johnny Cash singing “I Still Miss Someone” or “San Quentin” and he'd get me laughing. For instance his oldest boy was a shepherd who didn't speak between the months of December and February. He didn't say a damn word. He told Gus it was his winter cleansing. He told Gus he needed “a world without words” in the winter. The only word he wanted in his head was
baaa
from the sheep. This boy changed his name from Johnny to Shepherd. Gus said, “Am I wrong, Gladys, or does this sound like the behavior of a lunatic?” It's not that funny, but to hear Gus talk about it, it was. Because he was so damned confused about every last kid he ever had. Gus was the sort to try to figure them out. His one daughter, Olympia, she had two husbands named Jack and the second one she married under water.

Your life might not pan out, but you can still tell your story. Gus knew that much. He never put me to sleep with all this. Fact he never bored me much at all.

Which is why I started missing James. Because the feeling of not being bored was what I had with James. Yet James never had to talk as much as Gus to give me that feeling. And I believe James understood the world more and was more generally offended way down deep.

Gus and me danced and drank. I'm talking whiskey or rum. That one night after dancing to the Starlights, Gus and me decide we're going to the hot springs. We heard about it from some young girl named Stacy. Stacy was one of your Greyhound gals escaped from a group home in West Virginia. She had streetwalker blonde hair and hippie clothes and was always getting loaded. She had a boyfriend named Stephen who was handsome except for an obvious Adam's apple, but not wrapped too tight.

Stacy and Stephen did their slow dancing next to Gus and me. The elderly Starlights are destroying a good song, “The Great Pretender.” Gus and me are dancing the old-fashioned way; he's leading and there's space between our bodies. Our feet know something about where to step. He's looking to the side or over my head. Meantime Stacy and Stephen are draped over each other like they're dead. Hardly moving. Eyes closed. I always found that modern style a little pitiful. As I moved around the floor with Gus, I kept my eyes on Stacy's face. She looked too young to be dead.

After the song Stacy says to me and Gus, “Stephen wants to take us to these, like,
hot springs
. It's like a cure. You just go there and sit down or something.”

Tall, long-necked Stephen said, “It's like up in the mountains. It's like a dream world up there. And it's free.”

Everything was always “like.”

Gus said, “Whatever you want, Gladys, I'm like too old to think.”

I said, “Let's like go.” I said it because as I danced to that bad music with Gus and looked at Stacy's young face with her eyes closed I started feeling a need to be distracted from the loneliness of it all.

So we traveled, the four of us, up to the mountain. One of the Cascades. I had to hand it to Stephen. He had a sense of direction. He found where we were going quick. So he parked his Dodge on the side of a pitch black road. I could see the mountain was covered with trees. You could smell the leaves. I said, “I don't see any hot springs.” Gus said, “Gladys and me aren't big on hiking.” Stacy laughed. Stephen said, “There's a path, just follow old Stephen.”

So we all follow old Stephen single file. The path is wet dirt soaking through my sneakers. First I complained. “What the hell are you getting us into?” But then I didn't much care. Because it smelled so good in there, and the stars were so bright and low it was like a dream. And after a while we reached the springs.

Now if the path was a dream, the springs was a nightmare. I mean initially. The air was steamy and moonlit. The two pools in the ground, I mean the two hot springs, were filled up with naked people. In the one hot spring was three men and two women. They were all crammed in there. It didn't look too kosher if you want an understatement. We stood a ways back. A small fire burned to the left. I guess they'd had a cookout.

In the other spring was just one man. And he was reading a book. He was the one I looked at, not the others. I looked at him and felt almost right away like I wanted to be beside him. Not talking, not touching, but reading a book. I hadn't read a book in a long time. And the man looked so peaceful.