The Window (3 page)

T
HE WIND GUSTS
again, and I'm moving with it, spiraling from November to summer, from dark to light, tumbling until I'm really seeing, watching another girl. She hangs by her knees from a tree limb, one hand holding up her skirt, the other dragging in the dirt. She looks about my age.

A little boy is with her, in the shade under the big tree, and I can hear him talking....

"Gwen, you better come down out of that tree. Mama's looking for you everywhere."

"Go away, Abe."

"Mama will get you, Gwen. You know she said you're too big to be climbing trees. I can see your underpants."

"And you're too little to matter." Gwen pulled herself up, then dropped back to hang from her knees so fast that bark scraped her legs and the little boy sucked in his breath. "Tell Mama I'll be along in a bit."

She stretched down both hands and dragged the tips of her fingers in the summer dust.

I stand back from the window, touch its frame.

What has happened?

My question is smothered in an answer that wells up, scary and impossible and, especially, exciting. Can I have seen into another time?

Mandy, I tell myself, you're losing it. Imagination plus.

But the sharp detail of leg and cotton dress is bright inside my eyelids, and the Texas accents echo in my ears. They're so real, and that moment of being able to see again so clear in my mind, that I feel disoriented.

I go to the closet and find my new clothes. Count the four pair of jeans.

Go to the door.

"Uncle Abe?" I call.

"Yes?" he calls back, his voice full and deep and ragged, a grown man's voice. "You need something, Mandy?"

"No," I call back. "No, it's nothing."

So I am where I think I am. But...

I go back to the window, let the chilled air blow over me. I could pull the window shut, could close out the wind. But instead, I lean out, strain to hear the voices again. Hear them, and see the people again....

"I'm not going without you, Gwen," Abe said, his face puckering. "Mama'll get mad. Please come down, before she comes out and sees you."

"And tells me I'm a disgrace, at fifteen I should know better?"

"Please, Gwenny?"

A motor sounded on the road. A car, an ancient black one, turned in, making dust cloud up from the drive. Gwen grabbed the tree limb and somersaulted down.

A boy was looking out the driver's window. "Nice," he said to Gwen, as he stopped the car close by her. His smile was just fresh enough to bring uncertainty to Gwen's face. "Your mother home?"

Then he was getting out of the car, pulling out a black case, and setting it on the running board. "I've got some good brushes, made by the blind, good prices."

"You're a salesman?" Gwen asked. "You don't look old enough."

"Old enough for what, sugar?" he asked, his smile wider and teasing.

"I'll get my mother."

Why did he think he could talk to her that way? Maybe her mother was right, maybe she did behave in a way that asked for trouble.

"Mandeeeeee."

Emma's calling wakes me up. I'm on my bed, and someone has closed the window and pulled one side of the quilt over me. I stay still, sorting out sounds and smells. A television commercial. Rolls and something sweet baking.

Lunch, I think, and then realize it feels too late for that. Aunt Emma must be fixing dinner. I ought to be starving, but I'm not. I'm too mixed up to want to eat.

At the window I press my face against a cold pane and try to see through my darkness into the darkness outside. I didn't imagine you, Gwen, did I? But who are you? And
when
are you?

I gather one of the curtains, feel its rough lace pattern. How can Aunt Emma say there's no one outside this window?

Monday, the day I start school, comes quickly and goes wrong before I've even left home.

I'm in the kitchen, about to ask Aunt Emma if my hair's OK, when she says, "Oh, Mandy, let me get that tag off your jeans for you." She snips threads from the corners of a sewn-on label, and I worry about what else I've missed.

My nervousness makes me extra awkward getting in the car, and my stomach hurts so bad I wonder if I'm going to be sick.

Uncle Gabriel drives and Emma sits in the front seat. "Aren't you coming, Abe?" she asks through the window.

"No, Mandy doesn't need a parade," Abe says. He's so right. I certainly don't need a bigger production than this is going to be anyway.

I've gone to the school once already, on Friday, and met the principal and the aide who runs the resource room where I'll go in the afternoons, at least for a while. There's not a regular teacher there all the time, but just specialized ones who come in for individual kids.

When we went in on Friday, though, classes were going on and we walked through silent halls. I don't think any kids saw me.

Today, this is for real.

It's late, 12:30, but Ms. Zeisloff—she's the aide—said that maybe for the first few days coming after lunch would be best. She's waiting for us in front of the school.

She tells my aunt and uncle, "We'll take good care of Mandy."

There's a pause, and I realize Emma and Gabriel had thought they'd come in and get me settled.

"Well, I ... Mandy?" my aunt says. Then, when I don't answer, she says, "Well, call if you need anything. We'll be back for you at three."

"You have quarters?" Gabriel asks. "For the phone?"

And suddenly it's all I can do not to say, Please don't go, don't leave me here. Their footsteps click away, down the pavement.

A door opens behind me, and Ms. Zeisloff says, "Oh, Hannah, here you are."

"Locker disaster, everything crashed out. Hi."

"Mandy," says Ms. Zeisloff, "this is Hannah Welsh."

"Hi," the girl says again, "I'm taking you around for a few days. You scared?"

I can't believe she's asked me that. What right does she have to ask how I feel? That's private and I don't even know her.

"Thank you," I say, "I will appreciate your help."

And then, like I've leaned in to invite it, this Hannah girl hugs me. Where does she get off, thinking just because I'm blind I can be hugged?

The three of us go into the school together, Ms. Zeisloff doing a running commentary about where we are.

"This is the main hall," she says. "To get to my room we turn right and go through the outside doors at the end."

Hannah's by my side. "What's the best thing for me to do?"

"I'll take your elbow," I say, grateful she asked instead of just taking hold of my arm.

We pass a room with an open door and I hear a man talking about simultaneous equations. Some kind of blower keeps coming on and off up above us, and far away a phone is ringing.

I don't know what to do with my cane and I wish I wasn't carrying it. It screams what I am.

I try tucking it under my arm, but I realize how dumb that must look.

Sooner or later, Mandy, I tell myself, you're going to have to use this thing here. May as well be now.

I stretch the cane out in front, begin the side-to-side sweeping that's still hard for me to do, that makes my wrist and whole forearm ache. Sweep it side to side and back along the hard, smooth floor. Drag it along the wall that I'm going to have to remember.

We reach the end of the hall.

"This door pushes out, Mandy," Ms. Zeisloff says, and I think she's going to make me try it right then, but Hannah opens and holds it for me.

The resource room is at the other side of a courtyard, in a building by itself. "It's a temporary," Hannah says, "but it's been here as long as I can remember."

Then she's saying, "This is where I leave you, but I'll come back before school lets out."

Ms. Zeisloff and I go in together, into a room of electronic clicks and whirs, of electric smells, a room just a little bit too cold.

"Everybody," Ms. Zeisloff says, rapping on something tinny-sounding for attention. Most of the clicking noises stop. I wish I knew how many people were in the room.

I wait for Ms. Zeisloff to say, "This is Mandy," but instead a boy breaks in.

"Welcome to the land of the blind, deaf, lame, maimed, outraged, and outrageous," the guy says, his voice not far from my ear. "You anything besides blind?"

"Ted, sit down!" Ms. Zeisloff seems exasperated but not angry.

"All right, Ms. Z., all right," says the boy. "Just welcoming the new inmate."

"Don't mind him," a girl says. "In my opinion, Ted's got some functional psychological behavioral disorder. Besides not being able to hear, of course."

It's like being in the middle of circling madness, and I want to make it hold still so I can get a clear look. I grab on to the one thing that seems a solid lie.

"If Ted's deaf, how did he hear Ms. Zeisloff?" I ask.

"Not really deaf," the girl says, "hearing impaired. Also, he reads lips. Also, he can be a real jerk."

"But, Stace," says Ted, "now we know our new inmate talks as well as walks. And she's not stupid, folks. There's a questioning brain behind those sightless eyes."

Talk about first days.

E
VERYONE'S WAITING
for me when school lets out.

I try to do the introductions right. "Hannah, this is my great-aunt Emma and my great-uncle Gabriel and my great-uncle Abe." I hear how awkward it sounds, those rolling
greats,
and I wonder why I've bothered with them.

But if the others find them funny, they don't say.

Aunt Emma tells Hannah she believes she knows her mother and asks what all Hannah does. It seems to be almost everything from student government to baby-sitting.

I'd wondered why Hannah was messing with me, but hearing the list I can guess: I'm probably some sort of service club project.

Then we're driving home and I know Emma, Gabriel, and Abe all want me to tell them how things went. But I don't know myself and I'm too tired to sort it all out.

I sag back into the car seat.

At home I go to my room and flop on my bed. I am so tired.

For a long time the afternoon happens again and again in my mind, names and voices and snatches of talk and how the bumps of one, two, and three felt under my fingers.

"Some people think braille is on its way out," Ms. Zeisloff told me, "but I don't believe that."

Teaching me braille will be the job of one of the itinerant teachers, a woman who'll work with me for a couple of hours three afternoons a week beginning Wednesday or Thursday.

Meanwhile, Ms. Z. says she knows just enough to get me started.

Braille dots under my fingertips...

I think of Gwen, whoever she is. Gwen, whose fingertips dragged in summer dirt when she hung upside down from a tree limb.

Had I made her up?

I go to my window, open it. Run my hand down a lace curtain.

It's just a curtain, I'm thinking, when the breeze quickens, pulls it from my hand, pulls on me.

This time I lean into the dark wind, give myself over to it. In another moment I'm back all those years again, back to seeing, watching another girl in another time....

Gwen snatched up her shoes and ran around to the back of the house, before her mother could come to the door and see her. She slipped into the kitchen, turned the radio on softly, and then went back outside.

Sitting against the house in the cool shade, her bare legs on the cold, rough concrete of the side walkway, she waited for her program to come on. The salesman was here with a lot of things for her mother to look at. Maybe Gwen would have a whole half hour, long enough to hear an entire program, which didn't happen often.

But news came on instead, more about Korea.

Gwen had heard it first the evening before, from Abe, who'd heard it on the radio and run to tell. "We're at war," he had shouted. "The radio says we're at war and we got eight of their planes, but they didn't shoot down any of ours."

"Nonsense," their mother had said. "Don't make things up."

But of course the story had been in this morning's paper, and then all their mother could say was, "Well, here we go again."

Gwen thought about the salesman. Would he have to go to war? How old was he, eighteen maybe? Old enough to be drafted?

A screen door slapped shut in the front. He was leaving.

Gwen ran along the side of the house.

"Bye," she called, stopping him as he got in his car. "I just..." She searched for something to say. Stepped closer. "My mother buy any brushes?"

"You got a name, sugar?" he asked.

She looked carefully, decided his smile was not a smirk.

"Gwen," she said. "What's yours?"

"Paul."

Paul started his car, getting the motor to catch on the third try. Wiggled the stick shift into reverse. "Be seeing you, Gwendolyn," he said. "Don't do anything I wouldn't do."

"Gwen, not Gwendolyn. And I don't see how you'll be seeing me."

"Thursday," he said. "Thursday I sell soap. I'll be back."

"Mandy," Aunt Emma says, giving my shoulder a light shake. "You've got to get up now if you're not going to be late."

I wish I didn't have to go.

It's Thursday morning, my fourth day of school, but so far I've only gone for afternoons, only dealt with the resource room. Kids are in there on varying, overlapping schedules, but I'm starting to get them figured out.