Up From the Blue (14 page)
“Well, who could it be behind this big book?” Mr. Woodson asked, squatting beside me, and spinning his keys on his finger. “How about a quick story before I head home?”
I considered telling him about dogs with blue coats, and dolmen tombs that looked like they would fall at any moment, but I knew what he liked best were stories about the people I met when I went to work with Dad—the national security adviser, men from the DoD and DARPA. In truth, they were forgettable men with good posture and firm handshakes, but I liked how he listened with such interest.
“Once,” I told him, “my dad introduced me to the secretary of defense and, right away, he signed his autograph on a piece of paper for me, even though I didn’t ask for one. So I said, ‘Do you have another piece of paper? I’ll write
my
name down for
you
.’”
“And you gave him your autograph?”
“I
did
.”
We both laughed, and I did not tell him the end of the story, how when I started to sign my name Dad took the pen from me and shook his head.
When Mr. Woodson had to go, I walked with him to the parking lot. He must have been seven feet tall if you counted
his Afro, and so slim in his flare slacks, he was like a man on stilts from the circus. He put his hand on the top of my head before folding himself into his tiny MG sports car and zipping away. I didn’t want to move from the spot where he’d touched me. Dots of sunlight moved up and down my arm, like he’d put them there.
M
Y FATHER’S FIRST VISIT
to my school was the evening of my parent-teacher conference. I sat at a table in the center of the pod while he and Mr. Woodson, both in suits, talked in my classroom with my school papers and the green ledger between them. The room was still decorated for Halloween, though the holiday had come and gone. Phil and I had dressed as ghosts that year, a last-minute decision to celebrate. We wore white sheets that would later go back on our beds with holes where we’d cut out eyes. It was a somber holiday, the first one without Momma that had mattered to us. We collected very little, calling it quits after a couple of blocks. And when we came home, rather than categorizing our candy and having fierce trade wars over Peppermint Patties and Red Hots, we both went straight to our rooms. I unwrapped one candy after another, in no order at all, just eating to get full.
When the conference finished, Dad handed me the jack-o’-lantern made of faded construction paper that I was now allowed
to take home. We didn’t speak at all as we walked through the school and then the parking lot, where he opened the door to the backseat of his car and reminded me to buckle. He did not begin the lecture until we pulled onto the road. Then the calm disappeared.
“Your teacher says your behavior in the classroom is erratic,” he said. “Some days you stare into the fluorescent lights and he can’t get your attention, and other days you’re shouting out answers without raising your hand.” He passed our street because his lecture still had a ways to go. “Listen carefully, Tillie. You need to choose the right thing to do and then do it
consistently
.”
School had been one of the few places I was free from Dad’s rules. It was hard enough to stand in the PE line knowing I’d be picked last for sports, just after Shirl, or sitting alone in the cafeteria with my encyclopedia. Now I had to pretend my dad was in school with me, telling me what to do.
“You score just fine on your tests, but your teacher can’t predict what kind of work you’ll turn in. If he asks you to write two paragraphs, don’t turn in ten or fifteen pages. That’s ridiculous and burdensome.”
Sometimes Dad’s talking became like the sound at the end of a record, before you removed the needle.
Fuff fuff fuff.
Everyone likes to tell you the ways you’re wrong and ways you can improve yourself and what you should and shouldn’t do. Sometimes you have to tune it out or there’s nothing left of you that’s right.
I pressed my nose and lips against the window, and the world slid by sideways—clouds, guardrails, bumper stickers, and the faces of other children in the backseats of their own cars. I wondered if they had also come from these conferences and were hearing similar lectures. I waved to them, one prisoner to another.
“Wait,” I said, sitting up tall in my seat as we crossed the Cabin John Bridge. “Isn’t that Phil? There. Down by the water?”
Dad swerved a little, trying to see. “That couldn’t be him,” he said. “Phil’s at home.”
It’s not like you could miss Phil. His hair had gone curly at the start of the school year—something he felt was as cruel and unfair as the silver tooth—and every morning, after his shower, he put a knit ski cap on his head while his hair was still wet. The idea was to press the curls fat, though they still puffed out at the bottom.
“You don’t think that’s his jacket?” I asked. I’d never seen anyone but Phil wearing the logo of our old air force base.
Dad tried to look again, then quickly turned off the road and backtracked under the bridge. It only took a minute to be sure it was Phil, ankle-deep and pitching rocks. We parked as close as we could, but we wouldn’t be able to get within talking distance unless we got out of the car and stepped across the wet stones.
“He’s making a mess of his sneakers,” Dad said as he leaned on the horn. “Roll down the window, Tillie.”
Soon we were both yelling to him. “Get in the car! What do you think you’re doing?”
Phil had gathered everything in such a hurry—the fishing pole, a mayonnaise jar full of worms, and the lid for it—that he had trouble walking without something slipping out of his hands.
“Is that my rod?” Dad said.
“No.”
“Leave it, then.”
“Dad, the pole’s mine.”
“I said, ‘Leave it,’” and he bolted out of the car so fast, Phil dropped everything he’d been carrying.
Dad had won another battle. He could make Phil leave the pole and the worms, and he could demand that Phil wash the mud out of the car when we got back. He might even make me keep my eyes on Mr. Woodson instead of the lights on the ceiling, though I doubted either of us could control the way my mind wandered.
I
HAD NOT SEEN MY
mother through summer or fall, and when winter came, filling our swimming pool with snow and dead branches, it seemed unbearable that we’d spend Christmas without her. Christmas had been Momma’s specialty—a time when she decorated every room of the house with a snow globe or a tiny Christmas tree or a tea towel with Santa Claus on it. All of our ornaments were handmade. She cut the patterns from felt, then sewed detailed faces with shiny embroidery thread.
As the holiday approached, Mr. Woodson carefully suggested that we could make cards and gifts for any of the “important adults” in our lives. This was so everyone would feel included. Even someone living in the custody of their grandparents. Or, say, a father who would not tell his children where their mother was.
I spent most of my time on a card for Momma. I drew a picture of my ruby cup and my old bedroom. I drew seventy-two small holes in each ceiling tile, and other details I knew from
days I spent by myself, such as the 346 red pieces of yarn that made up the fringe around my bedspread until you got to the clump where I had once spilled some of my drink.
“Tillie, do you think you want to move on?” Mr. Woodson pointed to the red fringe in my drawing. “Maybe it’s time to write some words on your card.”
I wrote the words with my hands cupped over the paper the whole time. When we were told to put our projects away I quickly cut out a snowflake for Dad.
The next day at school, we were meant to make gifts. There was a basket of crafts on the table filled with yarn, buttons, glitter, pipe cleaners. I removed one of my socks, stuffed it with paper and set about making a sock doll. I glued fabric and glitter to my sock, remembering how Momma could always make something beautiful out of scraps. At the end of the week, when it had finally dried enough to handle, the doll was so hideous, I could not even bear to wrap it.
“It’s good enough, Tillie,” Mr. Woodson said. “Your father will see it comes from your heart.”
There was a Christmas party that day in the empty wing of the school. So much of the building was not in use because most of the children in the neighborhood had enrolled in private school, just as Hope had said. Our classes were small, with the students from Bus 14 carefully distributed, no more than one to a room. The party felt the same as walking into the cafeteria at lunchtime and not having anyone to sit with, so I stayed beside a table decorated in colorful paper, eating cookies.
“Enjoying yourself?” It was Mr. Woodson, picking up a cup and a plate.
I scanned the room more confidently now that he stood next
to me. “How come Shirl isn’t here?” I asked. “Why is she always in trouble?”
“Tillie, she’s not in trouble,” he said, bending low and speaking quietly. “She’s just nervous. She feels better staying in our classroom.”
“Oh.”
“Here,” he said, “I was just going to take this back to her. Would you like to help?”
I followed him back through our empty pod and to the classroom, where he unlocked a metal closet behind his desk and took out a record player. Shirl helped him plug it in. That day, while our class stayed in the other wing of the school, we listened to Sammy Davis Jr.’ s “The Candy Man” and then military parade tunes. I knew all of the songs by heart and wanted to sing out loud, but was surprised by a lump in my throat that made the notes come out wrong.
As I stood there listening, hands in my pockets, Shirl ran to her cubby and searched inside. She returned with a record of her own—a 45 of the Hues Corporation with visible scratches in the vinyl. She lifted the arm off of the big record, and when it stopped turning, held it by the edges and handed it to Mr. Woodson. Then she set the smaller record on the turntable. When the music started she was so excited every part of her seemed to move in a different direction at once, like a jellyfish swimming.
“Bump your hips into mine,” she shouted over the music. “Like this.”
“Ow!”
I tried to bump into
her
and somehow missed. The next try was too hard. By the middle of the song, we had it down. We both sang along with the chorus:
Rock the boat, don’t rock the boat, baby. Rock the boat, don’t tip the boat over.
When the music began to fade out, we kept singing at full volume. Maybe it was the influence of living in a mostly Irish neighborhood, but I thought the words were “Rockin’ on my shamrock.”
It was the first time I saw Shirl smile, her teeth too bright against her skin. She grabbed my sleeves as if that would keep her from falling to the floor. “No!” she laughed. “It’s ‘Rock on wit yer bad self.’”
It was then, as we were laughing and holding each other, that our classmates walked back into the room. I did not hear what they said, only the sound of Shirl smashing the record, two-handed, against the table.
“In your seats!” Mr. Woodson shouted, and we all ran because he almost never raised his voice.
Shirl sat at her desk, the record still in her hands. It was broken into five sharp pieces, held together only by the record label at its center. When Mr. Woodson turned his back, I whispered to her, “If you’re not going to keep it, can I have it?”
Leaving school, I heard Shirl behind me. It was not just the sound of her bells but also the whispers of the other students. When she came up beside me, she opened her book bag and handed me the broken record.
“You said you wanted it.”
We walked as far as her bus together, where she got in a line and said, “My mom showed me in the newspaper how people drive through your neighborhood to see all the lights.”
“Yeah,” I said, surprised to know she’d talked to her mom about me.
People often drove up our street just to see how our neighbors had framed their houses and hedges with strings of color. You could look through the living room windows and see their huge decorated trees. And when they opened their double doors, you’d hear holiday music. But that wasn’t the case with our family. There were none of the details that had once come with Christmas—no reindeer hand towels, no marshmallow snowmen with pretzel sticks for arms. I wasn’t even certain we’d celebrate this year.
“Tillie,” she said, “why don’t you invite me over some time?”
I stood there, holding my first vinyl record, hoping it wouldn’t break into any more pieces before I could tape it back together. I looked at Shirl, trying to imagine her sitting in our empty living room, and said, “Get permission, I guess.”
Dad had never specifically told us not to have visitors, but he didn’t encourage the idea because visitors tended to ask questions that were tricky to answer. Still, the next day, with a note from her mom, we set off for my house—Shirl with a hood of spotted fake fur framing her face and bells ringing with each step. I’d never walked home from school with another classmate before. And other than Hope and the Orkin man, who sprayed for bugs, we’d never had a guest in our home. It felt nice, imagining my neighborhood through Shirl’s eyes—the neatly raked yards, the groomed gardens under burlap until spring, the painted mailboxes, and of course, the Christmas lights.
“I feel like people are staring at me,” she said.
Once she said it, I noticed, too: housewives and elderly couples pressed against their windows or walking very slowly
down the sidewalk. They looked for too long, and one woman smiled so hard her lip stuck above her teeth.
“I’m nervous,” she said.
It was such an odd thing to imagine anyone being afraid in my neighborhood where many kept their doors unlocked at night. And while other communities were in the newspaper for fires or shootings, ours was more likely to be featured for charity drives and garden club awards.
