One Heart (7 page)

“Who is it?”

Her voice rang out into the dark woods.

“Gladys,” I whispered loudly. “Be quiet.”

There she was, standing in the doorway of the cabin with a long white T-shirt on and those long bare legs.

“What's up?” she said. She didn't sound friendly as usual.

“I came to check on you. Are you all right?”

“Sure, I'm fine. I'm feeling better. No big deal.”

She didn't move out of the doorway.

“Well okay then,” I said, and turned to walk away.

I headed down the path, and then she called out my name, and told me to come back.

I suppose that's the night we became real friends. Raelene's cabin was a nice place. She had little impatiens on the sills and a stuffed bear sitting next to them, real cute. Screens on the windows with flittery moths all over them. She had two cots, with white sheets and scratchy blankets. And I sat down on the one that was made, and she sat down on hers. She lit a lantern and set it on the floor. On the wall she had taped up some snapshots. Her mother. A lady on a couch with tall, dark hair. She didn't look like the sort to run away, don't ask me what I mean by that. Her father in a baseball cap holding a small white dog on the front stoop of a brick row house. Just how I pictured Philadelphia. Another snapshot was Raelene with some long-haired boy with an open shirt. Hambone.

Soon we had both stretched out. We were there stretched out talking with our eyes on the ceiling.

Raelene said she felt like she didn't belong at the camp, that the other counselors didn't like her, and that she wasn't good enough with the kids.

“You could get yourself some preppy clothes from a catalog and do something cute with your hairdo,” I told her. “And new shoes. But why would you want to? What the hell do you care?”

“Feeling alone gets old,” she said. “I never felt like I was the weird duck back in Philly.” She laughed. “Up here's like a different country. I never thought I'd get homesick for Philly, man.” Laughed again. Then she told me a bit about her father. “When I left he was high as a kite. I tested him by saying I was going off to Texas to get married. He was so high, and so was Peggy, that's his girlfriend, they just got teary eyed and said, ‘Aw, you're gettin' married! You found true love! Aw, Raelene, that's so sweet.'”

I didn't know what to say to that. It was quiet, then Raelene said, “You know, Gladys, I been up here worrying he's dead.”

“He's fine,” I told her, “I can feel it.”

“You can feel it?”

“Sure. I can feel things.”

“Psychic?”

“Hell no, I just feel things.”

I remember she laughed too hard and too long at things like that, then she'd catch her nervous breath.

“So you think my dad's fine, huh?”

“Yes he is, and he'll be fine in the future too. He'll find his way. So don't fret it.”

Was it true that I could feel this? I thought I could. Or did I just assume that everyone would be fine, in one painful way or another? I thought I could see her father sitting in a dark kitchen at night with a radio ball game. A man in a dark cap wondering why he ruined his life. The radio ball game reminding him he was once half normal. He was once a boy who collected baseball cards. It's true I could feel things like that. I could sometimes look at a person and see their mother and father or maybe their true love, even before they showed their snapshots. Just some trick my mind played?

I could feel certain things about James too, my lost husband. I knew he was alive, and living far away. I even had a sense he was in a warmer climate.

Slowly but surely, I worked James right into our talk without even knowing I was doing it. Once I started, I felt a kind of pressure inside. Like the words had been waiting to come out. Waiting for years. I'd started, and there was no shutting my big trap now. The words were coming out.

Of course Raelene was curious. She was interested in me. In every little chirp that came out of me. Interest is
bait
. I mean someone interested in you like this can make you talk, if you feel the interest is pure, and not just some kind of idle curiosity. Most people you meet in life, let's face it. They're not interested, they just got a case of idle curiosity.

But then someone comes along with their interest. Their pure interest, and it gets you interested again.

*  *  *

It was that way with Raelene there in the cabin. I told her all about James, how after he got back from a year in Korea he and Wendell and I once lived in a house not much bigger than the cabin, a place Ivy found for us about a half hour away from the camp, a view of the Adirondacks out the back window. How we just let Wendell paint and crayon all over the walls, and how that looked just fine. I told her of the claw foot bathtub in the backyard with the makeshift wall around it that I decorated with pictures cut from
Look
and
Life
magazines and how Wendell loved it. Never wanted to get out of the nice warm water we'd heat on the woodstove. And how he would sing to himself “Silent Night, Holy Night,” no matter what the season. His voice was sturdy and made my eyes water on certain nights back then. I was a sentimental girl at least when it came to that child. I also told Raelene how James worked in a lumberyard and came home smelling like fresh wood and fresh air. And always had a story to tell me, though he was not a real talker. Could I believe I was saying all this to Raelene, a camp counselor in a cabin? No. She kept asking questions anytime I'd pause. Questions mainly about Wendell, which was natural.

James and I, we'd eat supper with Wendell, then put him in to play with his trains and cars and stuffed whatnots. We had a whole room for his pleasure. We never made him pick up his toys in that room. He could do what the hell he wanted in there. His father and I believed in letting him be natural. It was our own idea. We'd tell him, “Go use your imagination.” And sometimes we'd play with him. And other times, maybe two or three times a week, we'd get out the Jack Daniel's and listen to music, and talk. Sometimes Ivy would come over and join us.

We never thought much about it, James and I. His father and my father, and sometimes my mother, they drank like sailors. And their friends did too. So we never thought even for a minute, Maybe there's a problem here. Maybe it's not good for Wendell to see us drinking. We just thought, The wars are over for a while, so here's to what we call life.

Raelene said, “People back then didn't know any better.”

She was trying to make me feel better.

We drank. We played our music. Everything from Bill Monroe to B.B. King. Some nights we were perfectly sober. We were never really out of control. We loved Wendell to death. And sometimes the three of us would sleep right out under the stars, Wendell in the middle in a blue hooded jacket.

Meanwhile all my old friends from Delaware were moving to houses with natural gas furnaces and H-bomb shelters. I'd get a letter from someone and they'd have to tell me about watching
The Aldrich Family
or Milton Berle on the television, and what did I think of Betty Furness, the Westinghouse lady. I visited once or twice and saw how they thought they had the good life under their belts because their houses were brand-new and clean. You could eat a meal in their toilet bowls. Sparkling clean and new! Out with the old. New everything. And they'd send me
Reader's Digest
articles that said the Communists were taking over our children's minds in the schools. They believed the articles were true. They were smack in the middle of things.

We were out of it. Our house looked like Hogan's alley. We read the paper, sometimes we went to David Walton's bar to watch Ed Sullivan. And we had a radio. But other than that, we entertained ourselves. The more McCarthy stirred up the fear of reds, the crazier people got. We had neighbors two miles away who were crazy like that. They avoided us entirely.

But things were booming out there. It was boom time. The country was rich. Clean! Happy! A new car born every second, and two or three lucky babies. America the beautiful. But we could feel the lie of that. James and me could feel the evil in the air. After Fat Boy and the other bomb, what the hell did they call it, I forget, but we could feel how the air was different, the world was different. No matter how new the houses were, no matter how many sprung up, no matter how clean.

So, we could feel some things, but we were out of it. Wanted to be.

*  *  *

Then one day when Wendell was twelve I thought I might be pregnant, and I went to the doctor, Doctor Elwin Fry. He looked exactly like a walrus, I'll never forget that. Doctor Elwin Fry said to me, “You don't want to gain weight now, Gladys. You want to keep your figure.” I did have a nice Betty Grable–type figure, if you can believe that. I had every eye on my legs when I walked down a street in those days.

So the walrus says, “When you get the urge to snack, have a cigarette and a highball.” Raelene didn't believe this. I had to explain. Things were just different back then. The doctors didn't want the ladies losing their figures. This was the biggest concern. The ladies cannot lose their figures! No figure loss by the ladies allowed! You could hear the doctors saying this throughout the land of plenty.

I was used to that. My father, to save me from turning to fat, made me run and swim until I wanted to die. But that's a whole other tale.

So I was pregnant and happy. It weren't planned. We'd wanted to wait for a while. But we were so happy. About three months into that pregnancy, James's father died. We all went to Kentucky for the funeral, and James and I cried together with his mother. This was the mid-fifties. Later that year we moved from New York back to the state of Delaware for a few years. Only we lived in the north, in Wilmington, an hour from where I'd grown up. My father ended up landing James a job down on the docks as a loader. We were happy and Wendell was happy too. He was thirteen now, and he was looking forward to a brother or sister. I missed our old house up in New York State, our old way of living. Ivy missed us and kept saying, “When you coming back?” But James was making decent money at his job. And whenever we got the chance we got out of the city and camped.

We missed the land. Both James and me loved land. There weren't so many real land lovers back then like there are now. Or if there were they didn't talk about it as much and hang so many posters. I'd grown up on a farm, and land was in my blood. I weren't so big on loving animals, but I loved the
land
. James had grown up in a town, where he said he felt “shackled.” Part of why he fell for me I think is because I had the land in my blood. The old farm in my heart.

One night by a river he and I made a pact to avoid boredom. We drank to that promise. We were so young we believed boredom would be the worst possible thing to face in this life.

Now how do I describe A.?

Well, not yet. Not yet. It's not that time yet. I'll just tell you she was nice. She was a good baby that didn't keep us up all night too much. I can't hardly stand thinking of her so I won't. I'll talk but I won't think. Not about this. Yet.

Now one day A. was three years old, Wendell was a teenager, and James and myself took them on a little trip to a pond. This lake was back in New York State. (We were there for good this time, in another decent little house in the woods.) We had never been to the pond before. Bennet Thane, a man James worked with, recommended it. He had a cabin nearby. He said we could use the cabin and swim in the pond, have us a getaway.

So there we were, a family by a pond. Sunshine, a little bench of old stones by the edge of the water. Woods all around.

Wendell was a quick-eyed, handsome boy, with his short black hair and his hawk nose. He looked older than sixteen. He had the usual recklessness of that age. Well, that day at the pond he met a girl. Her name was Jan. She was fifteen in a green and yellow flowered two-piece. They ended up running around together in the woods. I don't know what happened in those woods. We didn't worry much then. I remember we watched Jan and Wendell swimming off together in the green water, laughing.

“He's a young man now, isn't he?” James said with mixed emotion.

“He is. And he's turned out fine,” I told James.

“Everything happens too fast,” James said. He was pouring us some white wine into small glasses. I ended up throwing those glasses out. Along with everything else we had with us on that trip.

The glasses had Scotty dogs on the side, white and black. I think they were from James's father. I can see the golden liquid shot with sun and pouring into the glass. A. was sound asleep on the blue blanket she loved. I had her face covered up with a sheet. She was pale skinned and burned easy. On her feet were blue socks. They made her legs look whiter. She still had some baby fat then. This is a picture frozen too clearly in my mind. I thought of covering her legs and then thought, no, I should let her get a little color. I can't for the rest of her life protect her from all the sun in the world.

When really, as it turns out, I could have.

I began to feel the strange sensation that I was a girl again when I talked with Raelene in the cabin that night. Because I spent my whole young life talking in the dark to Ivy. Twin beds, windows, summer night, quiet voices . . . it was familiar at the very core, even though it was Raelene over there and not Ivy. Even though the things I was saying, that girl I was had never dreamed possible. I weren't comfortable. But I kept talking. Not able to control it, really.

I told her how James and me kept drinking that day. We weren't completely out of control. It was never like that with us. We could hold it. And it was only wine. We had tolerance like nobody's business. The sun was brilliant. Way high up there in a great blue summer sky. We were on the pink blanket lying down now and turned toward each other. That's how we were, we just liked to lay there and stare at each other, and laugh and try to feel young. Sounds stupid but it was a good feeling. To feel comfortable like that. There's no denying I felt at home with that man for a while.