Songbird (8 page)
“Shall we?” Clarke asked.
“Of course, darling.” Cecile sat down at the other end of the table and Richard and I sat across from each other.
I’d like to say, all these years later, that I remember the conversation, but I don't. They talked about family members I felt no connection to. See, even then, I viewed that house as just a layover in my life, a little stop in a purposeful journey. I didn't know the reason then, but I know now. Richard was why. And I count it a good thing that I hadn't heard about
Lolita
by then because I would never have left with him. I would have been wise about men obsessed with young girls.
T
hat evening after Richard left I snuck out and walked up to the nursing home. Good old grandma sat right there in the TV lounge.
“I was just praying for you, Myrtle.”
“I guess I can use all the prayers you've got.”
I sat down on the aqua-blue vinyl chair across from her. The TV blared
The Gong Show.
“I’m sorry, Peach. I’m sorry you're over there without family around every day.”
“Yeah, well.” I shrugged. “Nothing's ever going to feel like home again, anyway.”
And Grandma turned toward me and she laid her gnarled old hands atop the flames of my hair. She closed her eyes. “A hedge of protection, Jesus. I’m praying for that now with all the faith you've ever given me. Amen. A hedge of protection, Lord. That's what I’m asking for.”
I realized all of a sudden, I’d gotten what I came for. So we sat and watched Gene Gene the Dancin’ Machine and the more alert folks in the room just blew out their wheezy laughs or squealed their cackles.
After the show, Grandma said to this fellow in denim overalls and a kelly-green cardigan sweater buttoned up beneath the bib, “Get out your accordion, Gerald.”
So he shuffled down the hallway to his room, brought back one of those little European kind of accordions, not the Lawrence Welk kind. “What'll it be, Sara?”
“Let my granddaughter here sing, ‘Redeemed How I Love to Proclaim It.’”
So he started off with a bellowy blow of the instrument, playing the last line of the chorus. And I jumped right in finishing up with “His child and forever I am!”
Just like the song says.
We sang some more and nurses wheeled patients in. We sang “Glory to His Name.” “Blessed Assurance.” “Calvary Covers It All.” “In Times Like These.” Old women smiled to “Trust and Obey.” Old men wiped their eyes during “I’d Rather Have Jesus.” The real crazies danced some wonderful little jigs but I didn't mind. People worship like they worship. I learned that there at the home.
When I left, one of the orderlies, a black man the size of a chess piece, said, “You got the gift, child. Yes, you do.”
And I remembered the woman who had told me that years and years before. And I thought about that little gift-wrapped package in my throat, the one in blue paper with gold stars. And for the first time since Mrs. Evans died, I wept. I ran out of the home, down Langhorne Road and I cried and I cried and I cried and I didn't care who saw. The sun had died long since. The stars fused their light behind my eyes and I wondered what in heaven God thought He was doing.
“You tell her, Lord! You tell her I loved her!” I cried into the blackness as I cut through Cecile and Clarke's backyard and laid myself down on the frigid grass.
Blood flowed warm from my left nostril, running down the side of my face to burrow deep into the soil.
I
think about Richard Lewellyn now and a wolf comes to mind. But not a bad wolf, like a fairytale wolf or a big bad wolf. Just a wild, canine creature without, the majesty of a lion, but with more gusto than, say, a fox or a bobcat. Nothing feline outlined Rich, but a doglike cast hallmarked his overall description as a free running winter wolf with a great mane of feathery hair blowing in the breeze.
We left together three days after he came to dinner. During those days we walked the grounds, the avenue, and when Cecile and Clarke declared they had a dinner date with a couple from the club, Rich ushered me down to the Cavalier. He never took my hand. He only ventured but one small kiss, and that on my cheekbone.
I prayed the entire time I wouldn't see Mr. Evans. Not only did I not want to explain that I’d given my heart to a twenty-one-year-old world traveler, I didn't think I could.
But he never even walked by the dingy plateglass window of the restaurant. I use the term “restaurant” quite loosely. Pretty much a beer-and-hot-dog joint, but that night, it might have been some swanky place in Paris for all the magic it conjured.
My heart kept pounding in my chest, never letting up, filling my head with the wine of new emotion.
“You seem older than fourteen,” he said. And I really must credit him with gentlemanly conduct up until this time.
“Well, I’m almost fifteen and I’ve been through a lot, I guess.”
His large blue eyes, drooping down a bit at the corners, were like vacuums, sucking my soul from between my lips as I told him my life story.
I don't know much about much, but I say, when you have an incredible life story at the age of fourteen, something's just not right.
I had more in common with a juicy peach than was good for me. A lot of people don't understand this. Well, how could this be? Didn't she find God there in the Evanses’ kitchen that day? Did she turn down the voice of the Holy Spirit?
I’m no theologian, but I know that God never lets anything go to waste. I still believe that Jesus became my Lord and Savior in the Evanses’ kitchen that day. But I knew nothing about God as my Father. Nothing. Mr. Evans, the only father I ever knew, stayed away most of the time. So fathers became people who carted you off for ice cream and if their schedule allowed, sat in hard metal chairs at the school plays. And then, when times got rough, they sloughed you off onto somebody else because they had a job to do. Mr. Evans wouldn't have done that to Stacy or Francie.
I don't blame him. It's just the way life works. Mr. Evans never loved me like a real daughter. He only did what he did for his wife. And I guess that makes all the sense in the world, but it left a mark under my skin. Nothing anybody would see as they walked by, but I knew it was there.
As the words flowed out to Richard, I knew I’d been dealt a raw hand. I’d tried to play the cards right, as Mama always said, and I believe I succeeded. But now, what did it all matter, anyway? Here I sat in a beer-and-dog joint with a stranger, telling a tale of woe that would inspire even a country singer.
Yes, I could have been abused.
Yes, I could have been foraging on the street.
Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes!
I could have also been in a home with a mother who loved me, my own father who worked all day and came home at night with a sucker in his pocket for me and my brother and maybe even a baby sister.
Real brothers. Real sisters.
I knew, biologically speaking, someone sired me, but here I sat in the traffic of life waiting for someone to pick me up in his car and spirit me away from the boring mayhem.
So, if the rest of my story offends, all I can say is, you had to have been there to understand.
I
ran away with Richard, suddenly enveloped in the world of Sandinistas and NPR, and the aftermath of Watergate. On and on he'd blabber there in his big Mercedes, obviously a cast-off family car, about that blankety-blank Richard Nixon and his cronies. Oh, my lands! I just heard “Blah, blah, blah—curse, curse —blah, blah, blah, blah,” and watched the passion in his profile as he spoke, negotiating the roads out of Virginia and up to Vermont. We slept in the car that night, lucky for me, I guess. No room for fooling around, and we still did no more than kiss a little bit. He kept asking me to sing for him. But only for so long. “Shh, for a minute, sweetie pie.
Morning Edition's
coming back on.”
I didn't mind that show one bit. It bored me, of course, but I didn't mind. The little musical interludes, the self-important Eastern accents, the stories about the environment. So different from anything I’d ever heard before. An entire world opened up before me like a beautiful scallop. Pretty on its face, but the real meat a bit mysterious.
That was it exactly. Lynchburg was fine and all, but I never really knew much else existed before that time with Richard. Places became more than just black moles on the veiny skin of a map. Sights worthy of picture postcards or magazine photos belonged to me. People lived and died in these places, raised families, ate popcorn on Friday nights, snuck cigarettes out back, and shopped for necessities like toilet paper, deodorant, mousetraps, shoelaces, or even yards of yellow rickrack and notions like that.
It took us two entire days to get to Vermont because Richard, always talking about his desire to be a journalist, kept stopping to take pictures. I didn't mind. The colder it grew the more apt I was to stay in the car and flip through the buttons on the radio, always making sure, however, to get it back to the lower public radio portion of the dial because Richard had a look about him that told me I shouldn't mess with stuff like that.
Driving north, eating peanuts from long plastic sleeves, Richard started going on and on about the horrible inequality between the classes in our country.
“Take somebody like you,” he said. “You're so bright and beautiful and talented, and I’ll bet you've never thought about what it would be like to attend college, have you, baby?”
“Well, actually—”
“You've been too busy
surviving
to dream, sweetie pie.”
He sounded so sure of himself.
“Right?” he said.
“Well, I don't know. I’d like to be a singer. Maybe even an actress. I’ve dreamed about that.”
“But what about
education
? What about expanding your mind, leading others in the world of knowledge, impacting society?”
Oh, my lands!
I looked over at this guy and realized he didn't have a clue! He thought he cared about “somebody like me” but not even a ghost of self-doubt haunted his upper crust. So I decided to play along with him.
“Of course not. A girl from the wrong side of the tracks like me? What could a girl like me know about anything? What could someone like me offer all those smart people at college? And society? Well, even the very word scares me silly.” I poured my accent on thicker than syrup straight from the maple tree.
“My point exactly, sweetie pie!”
There had been no point. And certainly no constructive idea, just a stupid, condescending observation based on what he thought it must be like to be “someone like me.”
We stopped for a few hours in a rest area in Pennsylvania and he took me in his arms. But things changed. I was only an experiment, and this only a research trip, and he'd return to UVA and write some fancy paper as if he knew what it was like to be alone and without any hope other than what you have in God, and so far He'd pretty much stuck to the bare bones. He would go back to his lodgings and his keg parties and think he'd really done something for mankind, figure he'd given some waif a better turn than anyone else would give, and what would happen to me? I’d left no note for the Ferrises. I’d just disappeared.
By the time we reached Vermont, we were rounding our way from second base and zooming like a race car into third.
T
he snow piled up a good two feet on either side of the walkways, and drifts that looked like miniature, frozen-lipped mountains towered around.
“Its beautiful!” I cried out. “I’ve never seen anything like this.”
“There are a lot of things you'll never see, sweetie pie, if you stick with me.” Richard smiled.
“Why do you call me ‘sweetie pie’? Why don't you ever call me Myrtle?”
“I’ve never been fond of the name Myrtle.”
“Me, either. I don't why Mama named me that. If you'd have known her, you wouldn't think her the type.”
“What's your middle name?”
“Charmaine.”
“Now, that's pretty.”
We got out of the car and headed for the cabin. Tendrils of smoke wove themselves up into the crisp sky, only to be unraveled by the icy breeze.
“I think I’ll call you Charmaine, then.”
“Okay.”
“I’ll introduce you around as Charmaine.”
“Okay.”
I entered the cabin with him.
A smoky haze heavied the air. Cigarette smoke and something smelling sweetish. Kind of cloying, really, but I didn't analyze it then, because the prettiest woman I’d ever seen sat on the couch. And she held hands with two men.
“Hey, y'all, this is Charmaine,” said Richard.
“Hallo.” From the girl.
“Hi.” From the thin guy with running shorts, a torn T-shirt, and bare feet.
“Hey.” From the heavyset guy with jeans and a plaid flannel shirt.
The woman's outfit suggested all manner of escapades. European travel. Asian nights. African markets. “Jingle, jangle, jingle,” you could hear her jewelry sing. Copious ebony ringlets piled like a sheep shearer's finale atop her small head. And then … these bangs, pencil straight bangs caught on her lashes.
So, with my barely pubescent body, my frizz cloud of orange hair, my stick arms and legs (which thankfully hid themselves in my coat and pants), my big teeth, and breasts with a lot more to look forward to than their present situation, I wondered what crazy person took over my brain and steered my naive body into the car of Mr. NPR. A nice warm bed, two crackpot foster parents, a voice teacher, and a cookie jar on the counter always stuffed with either peanut butter kisses or snickerdoodles, or if luck smiled, chocolate chip cookies with walnuts, waited for me in the only town I’d ever known.
Not to mention a willowware plate on my nightstand.
Thank the Lord I thought to bring my pillow!
I took a deep breath and clasped my hands in front of me.
“Beer's in the fridge,” said flannel man. “My name's Lou, Charmaine.”
“Hey.”
“Oh, she's darling, Rich!” The exotic lady spoke with an English accent.
Goodness gracious, I
am
an idiot! What was I thinking just going on the road with a college boy?
