The Window (10 page)

E
MMA'S WAITING
for me on the front lawn when I get home. She tells me right away that the opossum is alive. "Cute little thing," she says. "And hungry! He's been eating all day, eating and sleeping."

Emma's been busy, made some phone calls, bought some stuff that is supposed to be better than the cow milk replacer. "Not," she says, "that he doesn't seem just as happy eating bugs."

She leads me to where she's got him in a big carton on the front porch. The opossum's half hidden in a pile of leaves in one corner, and Emma tells me he moved them there himself.

"I'll sit out here with him awhile," I say. Then, as she goes inside, I add, "Thank you, Aunt Emma."

"You're welcome," she says, and she sounds enormously pleased.

The uncles have missed all this, the opossum, I mean, because they've been gone since before dawn to a stock show. Now their car turns in the drive. Uncle Gabriel calls to me that he's going out to the barn and will be along in a while, and Abe comes up the steps.

"What have you got there?" he asks.

"An opossum. An orphan."

"It's pretty big," he says. "Probably born in September and about ready to go out on its own."

"I'd wondered why there would be a baby now, instead of spring."

"Possums have young different times of the year," Abe says. "Carry them around in pouches like kangaroos until they grow a decent size. When they're born they're about the size of my thumbnail."

The one I'm holding suddenly seems a lot bigger, as I try to picture him just a bit bigger than my thumbnail. Without warning he wraps his tail around my finger and drops to my lap. The tail, unwrapping itself, tickles. "I think this one's going to be a circus performer."

I say that and a memory clicks in sharp, clicks in about circuses. Without taking time to think I say, "You used to have a circus, didn't you? When you Were little? A pill bug circus?"

I hear Abe catch his breath, then the silence of him holding it, like he can't breathe. Then his harsh, "What makes you say that?"

And I'm frightened to tell him, frightened and feeling that I'm at the edge of something terribly sad.

"Oh," I say, "I don't know. I guess I was just thinking most kids like bugs."

This night there's no calling when I first lean out the window. I lean out farther and wait a long time, wait in air cold and heavy. And then I hear the child's thin, crying voice, little Abe's voice....

"Gwen, Gwen? Please, Gwenny, come back."

"I miss Gwen," Abe said. "Will she ever come back?" He was standing close by his mother, as if standing so close would make her answer.

"Gwen's best forgotten," she said. "Go play."

But after he went outside, she stepped to the secretary, took an envelope off the top. She pulled out a letter and read over it quickly, as if she was looking again at something she'd already memorized. Pressed her lips together. Murmured, "Just what do you expect from me?"

She tore the letter three times across and three times down, and after that she tore up the envelope. "I told you I wouldn't have you back."

Then she sat in a rocker, closed her eyes, and murmured, "I did what was right, didn't I? Told you the consequences if you left?"

After a while she went to the wastebasket, pulled out the pieces of paper, and tried to fit the envelope back together. Tried, and couldn't, and gave up.

It's Saturday again. Aunt Emma is standing at the kitchen table, wiring pine boughs into a wreath. The uncles have put a Christmas tree up in the living room, and the boughs are what they cut off the bottom.

"They smell so good," I say, picking one up. Sap sticks to my fingers and I try to roll it off. The wonder is the boughs can be smelled at all among all the other smells. Aunt Emma has spiced cider heating on the stove and cookies baking. Ginger and cinnamon and apple run into the cool air that comes from a window she's cracked open, air that smells just a little of damp earth and cows and hay.

"Aunt Emma," I start, and then don't know quite what I want to say. That this is like a book, maybe, or a TV family. "Aunt Emma," I say, "you've made this house nice."

"It's you that's made it nice, Mandy. You can't imagine what pleasure you're giving your uncles and me."

Then she hugs me. Something scratchy, a piece of pine branch caught on her dress maybe, tickles my neck, and her cheek next to mine feels floury.

I start to pull away, but then I think, why? And so I give her a little hug back. I'm not sure what to do with my arms, which makes the whole thing clumsy, but I guess it's an OK hug. Emma says, "How about pouring us some cider?" and her voice tells me how pleased she is.

I take down two mugs and position them on the counter, where they'll be easy to find after I pick up the saucepan. I hear wire being clipped, so I know my aunt has returned to her wreath making. She's not even watching me, is she? She knows that I can do this. It's silly, I guess, but I feel quite proud of myself.

I'm proud of Aunt Emma, too. I know it was hard for her the day my caseworker said sooner or later I'd have to learn to cook for myself and it might as well be sooner.

"But it's so easy to get burned," Aunt Emma had protested. "And there are sharp knives, and..."

And we'd all gone out into the kitchen and the caseworker had marked the stove dials with a 3-D marker. "One line at twelve o'clock for
off,
Mandy, two lines at three o'clock for
high.
"

And now, thinking about Aunt Emma and me, how we're working together in the kitchen, this leads to another thought. It's one that's tangled, but I like it—a thought that I'm fitting in here.

Me pouring us cider and it not being something to especially notice, that doesn't have anything to do with how well I can get about on my own. It's because I'm family. Doing for each other, it's how a family is.

Or should be.

"Aunt Emma?" I say.

"Yes?"

"Will you answer a question?"

"If I know the answer."

"When Uncle Abe and Uncle Gabriel were little, what was it like here?"

She takes awhile, as though she's searching through details. Finally she says, "They've never talked much about when they were little. But I can imagine."

She shuffles pine boughs before continuing. "The first year we were married, your uncle Gabriel and I, I wanted to buy the most beautiful Christmas tree we could and decorate it with him. But his mother—this was her house, and we were living with her then—said if we had so much money we ought to be able to find a better use for it. She set a scrawny little tree out on a table, put it up one day when nobody was home, like it was just one more job that needed doing."

"Do you think she loved Gabriel and Abe?" I ask.

Aunt Emma blows on the cider I hand her, then sips a bit. "I don't know. I suppose, as much as she was able. I probably shouldn't say, I was just a daughter-in-law, but ... I always thought she didn't know how to love."

Emma's next words come in a rush. "I wish you could see the old photo albums, Mandy. Her, and her mother, and her mother's mother. Like, like..."

"Like coldness passed on?" I ask.

"Exactly," Aunt Emma says, sounding surprised, as if I've shown her something she's never seen before. "Like coldness passed on."

I
HEAR
the crying outside my bedroom window, hear it even though I stay in bed, try to smother my ears with covers.

I hear the boy's voice, crying for Gwen.

I hear Gwen's voice from a far distance, awful cries...

"Paul, stop falling. Please God, don't let him, don't ... Paulllll!"

...Gwen?...

"How can he be dead? What do I do now?"

Monday is Big-Little Day at school, something done around here for enough years that no one thinks the name is funny. All the second graders in the district spend the morning in high school, parceled out one-on-one to sophomores and juniors.

"I think they're supposed to see how much they have to look forward to," Hannah tells me when I ask why.

Ted, who is standing with us, says, "Which we'll demonstrate by coloring Santa pictures, serving snacks in every class, and limiting the academics to rented videos."

"Not really," I say.

"Really," they answer in unison.

"What?" Ted adds. "You expected truth in advertising from a school district?"

Anyway, today I am to personally convince Robert Carlo, who is seven years old and wants to be called by his whole name, that high school is a great place to be.

Robert Carlo is more interested in me than in high school.

"I've never met a blind person before," he says.

"We go to math first," I tell him. "I bet we have juice and something to eat and watch a movie."

"How do you find the room?"

"With my cane."

"How does your cane tell you?"

"It's got an electronic elf inside that sends radio wave messages to my brain. In code."

There's a long pause while Robert Carlo considers the possibility. I laugh.

"My math class is around the first corner from where we are now, then six doors down. I use my cane to count the doors."

Wrong thing to tell Robert Carlo. "You ever, lose count?" he asks as we walk. "Two, six, nine. Can you add forty-three, thirteen, and a hundred and fifty-five?" he jabbers. "Eight, eleven, one million..."

Charla goes by. "He's my next-door neighbor," she says. "You've got my sympathy."

We reach a second corner and I realize we've missed the room. "We have to go back," I say. "This time, Robert Carlo, shut up."

A small, grimy-feeling hand slips into mine, and a moment later I hear, "Mandy? I'm sorry."

Robert Carlo eats doughnuts and asks questions nonstop. Fortunately, the TV volume is so loud our whispering during the movie doesn't seem to bother anyone.

Robert Carlo wants to know if being blind hurts.

Why I bother to keep my eyes open.

If my fingers get sore when I read braille, and I have to tell him I don't read braille very well yet.

He wants to know if I can see anything at all.

"Light, sometimes, if it's very strong. And once in a great while I feel what color something is."

"No way," he says. "You can't feel color."

And of course he grabs my hand, sticks it on a book, and demands, "What color? Can you feel what color this is?"

"I said,
sometimes.
"

How do I explain what I don't understand myself? How every once in a while I'll touch something and my brain will be flooded with an image of red, or blue, and when I ask I find out that's what color the thing really is?

The movie sound snaps off midsentence. For the first time I am aware that other kids have edged in close to Robert Carlo and me. A boy who sounds like another second grader asks, "How do you take tests?"

A girl asks, "Do you have to help at home?"

Some snot says, "What could she do?"

"Plenty," I say, I guess a bit snappy. "I set the table, dust, help with feeding the cows. I wash my own clothes, make my bed every morning..."

The same kid says, "Your folks must be dictators."

"Right," I tell him. I start to leave it at that and then realize I can't. What if it got back to Aunt Emma and my uncles?

"My folks are not dictators," I say. "They just want me to know how much I can do."

The bell rings but nobody moves. Then Mr. Casie says, "Thank you, Mandy."

Robert Carlo takes possession of my hand again. And a little girl says, "Mandy, you have pretty eyes."

The days are going by quickly, punctuated by feeding times for my opossum. It seems every time I pick him up, he's grown a bit and become a bit more independent.

Hannah comes over on Wednesday afternoon. The weather has turned cold and rainy, and we take cookies and soda up to my room, which is the warmest place in the house. I ask Hannah if there's ever snow in Texas for Christmas.

"I suppose, but not often, except maybe in the panhandle," she says. "Not over here, anyway. Mandy, everyone in town seems to know my folks are considering a divorce. Every place I go, people are nice." After a moment she adds, "I hate it that everyone feels sorry for me."

"Welcome to the club."

"Mandy," she says, "I'm scared."

She sighs and then, like she's forgetting the whole subject, gets up and goes to my dressing table. I hear her picking up first one thing, then another.

"Mandy," she says, "tell me again who the man is."

"My grandfather."

"He's so young in the picture. Is he still alive?"

"No," I say, "I never met him. He died years ago, before I was born, even before my mother was born."

"Then why do you have his picture out?"

I answer carefully because I've been thinking about that myself. "I guess because it was important to my mother," I say. "She always kept that picture on her dresser."

I think back, wondering how much to tell Hannah.

Think back to how my mother would look at that picture, sometimes for ten, fifteen minutes without moving. Then she'd tell me, "That's my father, Mandy, your grandfather, wearing his airman's jacket. Did you ever see anyone so proud? I think he must have just learned my mom was going to have me."