We Are All Welcome Here (12 page)

“Hurry up!” Suralee said. “They’ll be here any minute!”

“Maybe…” I said.

“What? Maybe
what
?” The doorbell rang, and Suralee gasped and covered her mouth. Then she moved to her dresser mirror for a quick look at herself. She pushed at one side of her hair, smoothed the front of her skirt. “Hurry and get dressed,” she said. “I’ll keep them busy.” She started out of the room and then turned back to me. “I’m glad you’re here. What would I have done with two of them?”

For the first time, Suralee’s acting talent failed her. I knew she would have been just fine with both of the boys. She would have preferred it. I wondered if she had done this before.

I stood still in Suralee’s bedroom, listening to her welcoming the boys, telling them that she had a surprise for them. I looked at the dress again, weighed my options, then took off my pedal pushers and blouse.

“You’ve got to get out of here!” Suralee said. It was almost two hours later, and I lay ill on her bed. I’d thrown up, which made me feel somewhat better, but the room still spun. “My mother will be coming home soon,” she said.

“She knows me,” I said. Only I said
noash.
I began to laugh. “It’s okay if I’m here.” My words were lazy and slow.

Suralee came over and grabbed my arm. “Get up,” she said. “Oh, I knew I shouldn’t have let you stay!” She began undoing the zipper to her dress and caught my flesh in it.

“Ow!”
I yelled, from both the physical injury and the pain of her words.

“Shhhh!”
She got the zipper undone and pulled the dress down. “Step out of this.”

I did, with some difficulty. I was never going to see Suralee again. “I’m not coming tomorrow,” I said.
So there.

“No kidding,” Suralee muttered.

“What,” I said. “You invited me!”

Suralee threw my pedal pushers and blouse at me. “I’m not even going to talk to you about this! You are drunk!”

“Ha!” I said.

“You need to go home. And of course we’re not doing anything tomorrow—they don’t even like you. Now get dressed!”

I started to cry. “Why are you being like this?”

She softened, just the slightest bit. “Diana. I have to get you out of here or we’ll both be in a whole lot of trouble. We all will. Go home. We’ll talk tomorrow; I’ll call you as soon as I get up.”

I raised a leg to put on my pedal pushers and fell down. “Whoopsh,” I said, and started laughing again, though I also felt an enormous sadness expanding within. The boy I’d let touch me in both places already didn’t like me anymore.

Suralee knelt beside me and helped me get dressed. Then she walked me to the door and pushed me outside. “Go!” she whispered. “And when you get home, don’t talk to anyone! Just go right to bed!”

“Aye, aye, captain,” I said, walking backward. I saluted smartly, then turned around and wove my way down the sidewalk toward home.

By the time I got there, the night air had sobered me up a bit. My mother wouldn’t be home for an hour; she’d told me she’d be back at nine-thirty. That way Mrs. Gruder would have enough time to get her ready for bed and not have to stay late. I’d be able to speak a few words to Mrs. Gruder and go to bed—she wouldn’t suspect a thing. She was dense that way.

My mother, however, was not dense that way. And she was home. As soon as I walked in the door I heard, “Diana?”

I drew in a breath and willed myself to be normal, then went into the dining room, where I leaned against the wall. “Hi,” I said. Well done. Just a normal hi.

“Where have you been?” she asked, and I saw that I had not fooled her at all.

Mrs. Gruder was straightening bottles of pills on the nightstand, and I saw my mother’s bare shoulders rising above the clean sheet laid over her—she slept nude to avoid the problems caused by wrinkled pajamas pressing into her skin. The large sheepskin she rested against at night had been placed behind her back; two pillows were under her knees; and a smaller pillow she used at her feet to keep them from flopping down was also in place. Obviously, my mother had been home for a while. When Mrs. Gruder heard the tone of my mother’s voice as she spoke to me, she started for the kitchen. “I’ll just finish up a few things out there,” she said.

“Why don’t you go home, Eleanor?” my mother said, but she wasn’t looking at Mrs. Gruder at all. Her eyes had not left me. “Go ahead and call Otto.”

“…All right, then.” Mrs. Gruder went to the phone and dialed. Her number had a lot of zeros; I thought she’d never finish. “Come and get me now; I’ll wait on the porch,” I heard her tell Otto. She hung up the phone, and I heard the rustling sounds of her gathering up her things. Then, “Good night,” she called out doubtfully, and my mother called back good night, again without taking her eyes from me.

After we heard the click of the front door, my mother said, “Come here, Diana.”

I hesitated. “What. I’m here.”

“I said, come here.”

I stepped a bit closer to her bedside. She was still sitting up high; Mrs. Gruder had not yet lowered her to the forty-five-degree angle at which she slept.
“Here!”
she said angrily, and I moved to sit beside her.

She looked closely into my face for a long while, saying nothing. Then, “Light me a cigarette,” she said, and I did, then held it up for her to puff on. All the while she smoked, she said nothing. Finally, I couldn’t stand it any longer.
“What?!”
I said.

She drew in a last puff, exhaled over my head. “Finished.”

I ground out the butt in the ashtray for what was perhaps too long a time, then turned back to her. “Do you want me to lower you down now? Do you want to sleep?”

“No.” She worked at dislodging a piece of tobacco from her tongue. I picked it off and flicked it away.

“All gone,” I said cheerfully.

“Where were you? And what did you drink?”

“What do you mean?”

“Diana.”

I looked down. “I was at Suralee’s. And she…just…made some drinks. Just for fun.”

“What drinks?”

“Coke with a little rum, just a little.” I looked up at her. “But did you have fun? On your date?”

My mother readjusted her head on her pillow. “No. I did not have fun. I was ridiculed and stared at. And then I was thrown out.”

“Why?” I felt dangerously close to tears, but oddly, my sorrow was for me.

“It seems the proprietor had no idea about the extent of my disability. At first he didn’t say much, just looked at me, you know that look?”

I made a pulled-in kind of face and my mother nodded. “Exactly,” she said, with grim pleasure.

“And then sometimes they do like this,” I said, and made a frankly horrified face, which made my mother smile. Maybe we were done with my sins and could move on to her humiliations.

“I’ll tell you what happened next, Diana. Though I had my back to the rest of the room, as Brooks had promised, it seemed I was upsetting the other diners. They didn’t like the noise of my respirator. They didn’t like it that I had to be fed. One man came up to me on his way out. He said, ‘What can you have been thinking, to come out to a public restaurant this way?’”

“What did you say?” I asked.

“At first, nothing,” my mother said. “My mouth was full. I kept chewing and I just looked at him.
‘Well?’
he said, and then he said it again, louder, so I spit my food out at him. And then I said, ‘Sorry, my mouth was full. Now we can have a conversation.’”

I saw the scene, some scowling man standing before my mother while his indignant wife waited by the door, holding tightly on to her purse, her jaw dropping after my mother spit food at her husband.

“What did Brooks and Holt do?” I asked, giggling in a kind of loose way that let me know I was still not quite myself. I cleared my throat, overcorrected my posture.

“They escorted me out,” my mother said. “Because right after that I was told to leave. And never to come back. But I will go back.”

“Why?”
I said. “Why would you ever want to go back there?”

Her respirator was on inspiration, but I could see the answer burning in her eyes. Then she said, “You know, it’s so funny. What keeps any of those people in that dining room from being like me is just a virus, a thing in my body over which I had no control. Why did I get it and not them? Fate. Circumstance. Luck. But I have a place on the earth, just as they do. I have rights.

“When I was in the lung, I had people tell me every day that I had to get used to the fact that I could never have a normal life. Every day, they told me that I would have to come to terms with all I could no longer do.” She shook her head, remembering. “But I decided to concentrate on what I
could
do. When the shrink talked about how the disease would affect my personality, I talked about how my personality would affect the disease. I didn’t understand why nobody…I kept thinking, ‘I am me! I am still
me
!’” Her voice began to shake, and she closed her eyes, then opened them. “Wipe my tears away and give me a chocolate,” she said.

I put a tissue to her eyes and then lifted the box up so she could see in. “Which one?” I asked.

She surveyed the candies carefully.

“The chocolate-covered cherry?” I asked.

“The Messenger Boy,” she said, and I gave it to her with regret. I put the box back down, hoping she would say, around her mouthful of chocolate, “You take one, too.” But she did not. She chewed slowly, swallowed, and then, in a more deliberate tone, she began speaking again.

“I promised myself that I would raise you, though everyone advised me against it. I promised myself I would pay attention to the world and keep on learning, maybe go back to school someday, though I knew how hard it would be. I thought I might even get married again. Everyone,
everyone,
said I shouldn’t get my hopes up for that kind of relationship. I’ve given up on that, but I learned tonight that I can at least go out. I can leave the house. It’s scary, but I can do it. And maybe someday I will go back to school. I know I’ll be looked at. I know it’ll bother people to see me. I know most people would say I should stay home, where it’s easier for me and my caretakers. But what most people think isn’t always the right thing.”

I sat still, hardly breathing. I had never heard my mother talk so much about this all at once. Everywhere around me, it seemed, people were saying odd, charged things.

“All your life, Diana, you’re going to run into situations where you have to decide whether or not to take a stand. Sometimes it just isn’t worth it. But other times it is. Not only is it worth it, it’s vital. It makes you the person that you are. You have to honor what you know is true, or bit by bit, you die inside.” She smiled. “So. Now let’s talk about
your
evening.”

Ah. “That’s pretty much all,” I said. “What I told you. It was just for fun, the rum. It was just a little. I didn’t even like it, really. It made me feel sick. I won’t do it again, I didn’t even like it. So…” I leaned over to look at her clock and had to stop myself from falling on my face. “I think I’ll go to bed.”

“Oh, I think not,” my mother said.

“Why not? I’m tired.”

“Are you.”

“Yes.”

“Well, I’m not quite through talking to you. Let’s talk some more. Who else was at Suralee’s?”

How did she
know
these things? I considered lying, but she’d been all right about the rum. Maybe she just wanted to continue our mother-daughter talk—she was very talky tonight.

“Oh yeah, she had these two guys over.”

“And where was Noreen?”

I wanted to say,
Well, you’re so smart about these things, why don’t you tell me?
Instead I said, “She wasn’t there the
whole
time.”

“Oh?”

“No, she had a date, so she wasn’t there. The whole time.”

“Uh-huh. And who are these boys?”

I know this one.
“Just friends of Suralee’s. She’s known them a long time. They’re brothers. They play baseball.”

My mother waited.

“They’re real nice.”

“So the nice boys and you and Suralee had some drinks.”

I stared into space, as if trying to remember.

“Diana.”

“Yes!”

“Anything else happen?”

I stared at my hands.
The little prickly hairs of his blond crew cut, the way he smelled so good. How nice it was to be hugged. But the way he forced my mouth open when he kissed me and slung his tongue around, the way he stopped talking to me. The rocking motion of his hips against mine when we lay on the floor, so hard I thought he’d leave bruises.
“What do you mean?” I said.

“I mean, did anything else happen.”

“Well, we talked. And…that’s about it.”

She said nothing, and I burst into tears.

“What happened?” she said, and in a rush, I told her. We kissed, he touched me, I threw up, Suralee got mad, I came home. That’s all. The end.

My mother nodded. Then she said, “Well. You’re growing up quickly, aren’t you?”

I shrugged.

“It’s wonderful to grow up—all these exciting adventures, all these new privileges.”

I said nothing.

“Of course, with any privilege comes responsibility, wouldn’t you say that’s true?”

“I’m
really
tired. Can I just go to bed now? Can we just talk about this tomorrow?”

It was as though she hadn’t heard me at all. “Now, in this case, we’re talking about sex. Huh. I would have thought you were a bit young for that. But you’ve decided otherwise. Now, you told me this young man touched you. Did you like it?”

I was deeply embarrassed. “No.”

“Is that all he did, was touch you?”

“Yes!”

“All right. Well, here’s what I can tell you, Diana. You say you didn’t like it. And maybe that’s true.”

“It is true!”

“But if you didn’t like it this time, it doesn’t mean you won’t like it next time.”

“What next time.” My foot started wiggling, and I stopped it. I was now past giddiness and into a kind of ragged irritation. I really was tired; I so much wanted to go to bed. I was still dizzy, and I could feel some nausea returning.

“Oh, there will be a next time,” she said. “And a time after that. And what you’re going to have to know is how to handle yourself when those situations arise. Now, this time maybe you just felt awkward.”