One Heart (24 page)

“Check him out!” the girls said. “Sleepin' like an angel.” They'd pat his head, kiss his cheek, stare down at him with expressions of longing. None of them were keeping their babies, as far as they knew.

I would call Gladys that year, late at night, on the pay phone in the halfway house when everyone else was sleeping. I had thanked her a thousand times for coming to the hospital, but each time she said, “I think it's me who should thank you.” And when I asked her why, she said, “Doesn't matter why, just accept my thanks.”

I knew why, anyhow, of course. I knew she and James had gotten to the other side of their grief.

She didn't tell me much about James, but I know he stayed around New York State for a while. It's difficult to say what was happening between the two of them. Because Gladys would tell me things like, “Later on I'm sneaking out to meet James in the woods,” and then she'd laugh. “Really?” I'd say. “Just to take a walk,” she'd say. “Just a walk with a friend.”

And one night Ivy came home and told Gladys, “I'm in love.” She had fallen in love with a sixty-eight-year-old man named Brent Quinn, and the two of them planned to live happily ever after in Brent's cabin. Since I had worked at that camp when I was a girl, I knew who Brent Quinn was, and had even seen his cabin once. I had even looked at him as a girl and thought, If I ever loved an old man, it would be a man like him. He had an odd, comfortable habit of wearing old striped pajamas and worn work boots, and his face had aged real nicely. The one time I saw his cabin, on a late spring night when he had an open house for the counselors, it was filled with bright, beautiful colors—quilts and flowers and paintings. His walls lined with books. He had great food on the table, though I didn't recognize what any of it was. Stuff from other parts of the world. And he had several jugs of wine. He loved life, I guess you could say. He seemed to know what matters.

I couldn't go to their wedding, but when I talked to Gladys, and asked her how badly she'd miss Ivy, she didn't have much to say. Gladys never wanted to say much about her loneliness. Instead, she told me what she thought Ivy would miss: “It'll be our music, trust me. That foreign music Brent Quinn listens to is gonna drive her crazy. All that singing about how happy someone is, or how sad, and you can't understand a damn word about why. All you get is the feeling. And I don't think Ivy's the type to be satisfied with that. Ivy's the type to want the story behind the feeling. Ivy likes George Jones. Johnny Cash. She's got taste.”

The next year on the telephone when I asked Gladys about James, Gladys said he had gone south to New Orleans where he worked on a boat, but that the two of them kept in touch, but not all that often.

“He's my friend, Raelene,” was what she said. “My old friend.”

*  *  *

That year, when Gladys was fifty-four, she enrolled herself in the community college. She took all kinds of night courses—English, history, economics, math, physics. “I think I'll be a professional student,” she told me in a letter. “Or maybe I'll get a real degree and start teaching the little winter school kids. Imagine that. Gladys at the chalkboard.”

As it turned out, she was a teacher the last time I saw her.

Me, I was a mail carrier. I was making decent money—twelve bucks an hour. And I liked the job. I liked being out in the elements. I took some days off and decided to visit Gladys.

I hadn't called ahead to tell her I was going to visit. I guess that's an odd habit of mine. I don't like to call ahead. I like to pop in. “You're afraid if you call ahead they'll say don't come,” a friend once said, but I don't think that's it. I think I'm afraid of visiting, so I don't call ahead, part of me hoping they won't be home when I get there. But whatever it is, this isn't a good habit to have these days. People's lives are too full of structure and privacy to allow for droppers-by. But with Gladys I didn't fear she'd mind. I had not seen her since that day in the hospital. Over eleven years ago! It didn't seem that long. I hadn't been able to make it up to her graduation from Mercury Teachers College. She sent me a picture of herself in blue cap and gown, unsmiling, one eyebrow cocked up, classic Gladys. Her friend Doreen who she'd written me about, standing beside her grinning.

A neighbor girl stayed with Moses, someone named Nancy who was twenty and always brought her cassette player and turned him on to funky music. So I took myself up to see Gladys like I'd wanted to do for years.

On the bus I sat next to this kid who looked about seventeen or eighteen with a Walkman on his head. He was slumped down, all pissed off in his seat, and his face was set in anger. I recognized the look. I probably never wore it on my own face in high school, I was too busy trying to pretend I was good, but I recognized it all the same.

When I had first sat down, the boy had looked at me with hatred I took personally at first, until I realized I looked old to him. I was a grown woman now. To a seventeen-year-old who hated the world, I was old. I was of the world. Settled. An adult. Part of the group who betrayed him, in whatever way. Why was it shocking that this kid would see me like that? Why did I feel like defending myself?
Hey, kid, I'm just a letter carrier, a mail deliverer rain or shine, just a person trying to get by, I'm not an enemy
. A few miles into the trip, when that boy shifted in his seat and touched my arm, I felt an electric charge from his body, something I hadn't felt from anyone's body in a long time. After this happened I spent an hour or so shifting my own body in order to brush against him. I know that's warped. He shifted toward me too. It was a kind of conversation I'll never forget. I hadn't had a serious romance in three years, and this boy's touch told me I'd been starved.

We sat that way until it was time for him to get off the bus. Neither of us even said good-bye, though before he stood he grabbed my arm until it hurt, then turned and gave me a small smile before he stepped off the bus, a smile that pretty much shocked me, because I saw what a baby he was. I watched him walk down the street of a small, dead-looking town in upstate New York, the street lined with spindly bare trees, the gas station like something from 1950 with old Coke signs in the window. Someone in a dark coat stood under an awning before a small newsstand, holding a cup of coffee. Watching the boy walk away I felt like I was losing him, like he'd been a part of my life for years, like he was leaving for no good reason. I pressed my forehead into the window as hard as it would go. But the smaller he got, the more he moved into that place, the more the feeling went away, and it was gone when I realized I was old enough to be his mother.

It came to me that we're not really one age at all. We're all the ages we've ever been.

As I rode the cab to Gladys's house, I might've been the girl I was the first time I surprised her. My racing heart was slamming inside my chest. Like I said, I'm afraid of visits, so the closer I get, the more nervous, the more excited, the more uncertain I am about who it is I'm going to see, and who I am. My palms sweat, my stomach swirls, I talk to myself like an old woman.

I knocked on Gladys's door, and Gladys's friend Doreen Manchester answered. Gladys had written to me about her—how she was a good friend, the divorced mother of four grown sons, how she was constantly asking people to call her “Door” and how nobody, for some reason, ever did. She was tall and sort've bony with burnt orange hair and tight lips that seemed permanently amused, as if any second now a huge laugh might escape her. The sight of her at Gladys's door surprised me.

“I'm Door at the door and you're?” she said, eyebrows raised.

“Raelene Francis from Philadelphia.”

She waited, thinking for a second.

“Raelene, Raelene. Well come on in. Don't I know all about you. Gladys is out back, she'll be in soon enough. She's getting some wood. I'll fix you cider with a cinnamon stick in the meantime unless you got somethin' against it.”

We sat at the old Formica kitchen table, the same one that had been there years ago, white with silver boomerangs. The kitchen had been painted bright yellow, and a beautiful painting had been hung of a pretty woman in a rowboat. On another wall was a framed diploma. Doreen began telling me about the antics of her sons, as if she'd always known me. “One of them likes a girl named Hildegaard. You know, like the saint? Can you imagine naming a baby Hildegaard. The last name's Smith, so I guess they thought they'd give her a real stunner of a first name. Well, this Hildegaard's no saint. Last Sunday she spends the night at our house— that's right, I allow them to live in sin. I tell myself there's worse things than sex, but sometimes I'm not sure, you know what I'm saying? So this girl, who by the way won't let anyone call her Hildy, no sir, it's always Hildegaard, anyhow she wakes up in the morning and comes down to my kitchen hanging out of her nightgown like Fritz the Cat's wife and says, ‘Mrs. Manchester, Brendan wants to know if you have any frosted Pop-Tarts. . . .'”

The kitchen was filled with the warmth of this new friend, and I imagined Gladys and Doreen Manchester had spent a lot of days together, and I knew even before I saw Gladys that she was doing better than I could've imagined. I relaxed.

Gladys walked in and said my name, dropped a few logs on the floor, and said, “I'll be damned.” Her face was thinner, her eyes greener, her hair completely white, a beautiful color on her. She was dressed in a big fisherman's sweater and red wool pants. Her skin glowed from the cold air. I thought she looked perfect.

“So what brings you up here?” she said.

“You,” I said. “What else?”

She smiled. “Long way to travel to see the likes of me.”

“Oh, Gladys,” Doreen said. “She'd come round the world to see you, isn't it obvious?”

“Poor thing,” said Gladys. She picked up the logs and went to the living room to stoke the fire. We followed her.

Gladys stoked the fire and said she hoped I planned on staying at least until Monday, so I could see her teach fourth grade. Then she turned around and studied me, smiling.

“You don't look half bad,” she said. “You got a new boyfriend?”

“No.”

“What's the problem? I'd think they'd be lining up at the door.”

I had Monday and Tuesday off, so I decided to stay, after calling Moses. Doreen was there for most of that weekend too, and Ivy and Brent came by for Sunday dinner. Brent looked fragile to me that winter day, but also happy. He'd developed Parkinson's disease and looked like he was constantly shaking his head no. Meanwhile his bright eyes were always saying yes. Ivy, who wore sapphire earrings and her silver hair in a braid now, brought most of the dinner over.

“Here's to our faraway guest,” Ivy said, toasting me at the table.

We ate her excellent vegetable stew and rolls. Beyond the kitchen window the snow fell whiter than the thin curtains. The sky behind the falling snow was dark, dark gray. The sort of air that makes everyone inside feel huddled together.

“This is real good, Ivy,” Gladys said.

“Good for what ails ya.” Ivy winked.

Gladys and Ivy, I noticed, studied each other whenever either of them spoke. They might have looked alike, but Ivy studied Gladys with an interesting expression. A kind of confusion and awe. Meanwhile Gladys studied Ivy from a sort of amused distance. But it was a softer look than it had been years before. It seemed to me she had a kind of tenderness in her face.

“So today Brent and I were out driving, and we see this big fat man selling flowers in the parking lot of the Duke of Bubbles. The duke was standing there in his lace-up boots talking to the man.”

“Who's the Duke of Bubbles?” I said.

“Oh, some car wash fanatic, thinks he's a duke, so anyhow, this fat man's selling his flowers and we pull over to see what they are, well, they're all roses. All different colors. So I lean out of the car and say, ‘Hey, Duke, what's your friend charging for those roses?' so the duke asks the fat man, who says, ‘You can have a hundred for three dollars!'”

“My God!” Doreen said. “I would've died!”

“Well,” Ivy said, “don't get too excited. These roses had one foot on the banana peel. They'll only last one more day, but it's worth it. To have a hundred roses in your house for a day. Right Brent?”

“Oh, yes, it's lovely,” said Brent, all the while shaking his head no. Later that day he joked about it, saying it was a new dance he was trying to make popular called “The Perpetually Disagreeable.” I had to laugh at that.

I ate my soup and watched Gladys listening to Ivy. It was clear to me that she was thinking about the fact of Ivy's existence as Ivy talked, and not the story Ivy told. Later, when Gladys talked about one of her students whose mother called and yelled at her, Ivy hung on Gladys's every word, as if she believed that if she could listen hard enough she might finally understand the mystery of her sister. Watching them, I started to wish I had a sister of my own. It wasn't a small wish, it was a deep wish, it was a desire that made me lonely at that table. I kept watching. I was thinking that for all the great space between Gladys and Ivy, for all the stuff they were never able to protect each other from, a real closeness existed between them, one that nobody else at that table could touch. I think that with a sister, that kind of closeness could be made up of confusion, misunderstanding, and a kind of distance.

After that meal, we had pie by the fire. Gladys smiling at me across the room.

*  *  *

“So before ya leave, you should come to my classroom.”

“Of course.”

Gladys had been teaching for five years. This was her first year with fourth graders. I sat in the back seat and imagined being one of her fourth graders. What would she look like to me? I don't know if I would've liked her. I would've feared her. I would've tried to impress her. She was not a natural for the job because she grew too easily bored with the children's answers, which tended to be rambly or too short.