Anywhere But Here (69 page)

They all got a kick out of what I wore, their old sweaters, earrings from the thirties and forties. They thought it was hilariously funny.

“I don’t bullshit them,” Hal said. “Whatever they want to know, I tell it to them straight. I tell them what that life did to me.”

Hal lectured at Catholic schools in Bay City, about his troubles with drugs and alcohol. He told seventh and eighth graders how he lived with Merry in their silver trailer on the Oneida lot by the airport and what had happened to him.

I asked if it was still the same in school with drugs, wasn’t it different then, with Vietnam, the times.

Hal said no, he knew from Tina there was still temptation.

“Tina, come out here and tell your cousin about the marijuana in school.” He looked up at the small, added-on breezeway bathroom, one of Jimmy’s projects years ago.

“Can I wait just a minute, Dad, I’m doing my makeup.”

“She knows everything,” he said. “She knows everything I did and she forgives me.”

Hal told me he didn’t write the lectures. He improvised. He said before he spoke to a class he needed quiet, he needed to be alone in a room. He said he stood in those coat closets, the white tangled safety patrol belts in a cardboard box on the floor, stacked cases of pencils, the gleaming pale green arm of the paper cutter, waiting to see what would come to his mind, some bit of conversation left from his marriage, some morning, drug-laden, in the dirty trailer.

Then Tina came bounding down the three stairs, the wings of her hair swooping out, her chin tilted up, offering us her face.

Carol followed behind. “Look at her, thirteen years old and a half hour in the bathroom already. When she first told me she wore makeup, I said, not around me you’re not, but then I saw what little she did and it does look nice. Isn’t it something, but you know, even at her age, I can tell the difference, she really does look better with that little color around the eyes. Even at that young age.”

Tina flopped down on the couch and operated the TV by remote control.

“So this year, I’m going all over Ohio, Illinois, Michigan, Minnesota
and Nebraska,” Hal said. “And they’re going to have me do a record.”

Jimmy and Carol showed me the blueprint of their home, in Hanger’s Cove, Florida. They had a brochure with a model of the houses in four color photos. But their house, though model B, was not really like the picture. Jimmy had built onto it, he’d added a patio and a second breezeway.

“We had to go to court and fight,” Carol told me, passing Griling’s house. “They wanted to put in a junkyard here on Lime Kiln Road, across from Guns. The city tried.”

Bub Griling was dead now, his dump overfilled, rotting, a hazard.

Carol mentioned Indians and the Vietnamese. Part of the old water softener store on Three Corners stood empty. The paint shop that had been there closed. Evenings, Carol and I drove over in the car, to show the storefront to prospective leasers who answered the ad in the
Press Gazette
.

It was a shabby empty space, with concrete floors and low ceilings, not carpeted like the Rug Doctor office next door. Carol and I paced, waiting for a woman who wanted to turn it into a dance studio. The rent was sixty-five dollars a month. “One of these little Vietnamese wanted to rent it. Yah! He wanted to put a fruit market in here and he wanted to write on the window, in
Vietnamese
. Yah! Can you believe that?”

The week I stayed, I couldn’t convince Carol and Jimmy that the Vietnamese in Bay City were not the same Vietnamese we’d fought.

She stood, shaking her head, looking at her feet on the floor. “We lose so many boys over there and then they come here and get money from the government. Yah. All those little people. There’s lot of them, here, we have the H’mong.

“And the Indians, now they want to put up a hotel, across the highway from the airport. They gave them all that land, to the
Oneidas, they said that was their land. Yah! And now they want to put a hotel up. They’ve got bingo games there every Saturday night already.”

Driving through the dark city, I saw apartments; old buildings, pretty like New England, turn-of-the-century stone by the river with glass windows and that yellow light. I’d think of coming here and renting an apartment and living. It seemed amazing, how cheap it was. I could easily afford a pretty place, little rooms off a hallway, an old white stove in the kitchen, crannies, closets, maybe a clawfoot tub. But I couldn’t live there, I knew it. The feeling always passed.

Every day, Jimmy got up at eight o’clock the way he had when he drove to the store on Three Corners, ate breakfast and began work at nine. He still took an hour lunch break, the only difference was that now he hiked five miles, doctor’s orders. He had a machine to walk on in the laundry room for days when it was too cold outside. In the same room, Carol kept a machine which suspended her in the air, hanging her upside down on a series of metal tubes and bars. She said it helped with her back.

I sat in the breezeway talking to Mary Griling, who’d grown up to be six feet tall. She told me what had happened to everyone on our road.

Of the Grilings, Mary ended up being the one who stayed at home. She took care of her father until he died. Now she lived in the house with her brother and oldest sister, she worked in a computer shop in town.

She said she might go to Florida. “My dad’s dead, there’s nothing for me here.”

“But you’re close to your family. To Rosie.”

“I am, then I’m not,” she said. “I am and I’m not. Not like it was with my dad.”

After we’d left, she’d had polio. She limped a little and her smile twisted up to the left. She was still very neat, careful. Theresa was the one who’d gone away.

“Coming tonight, Mare?” Jimmy walked through the breeze-way, lifting a tray of chickens for the barbecue. Hal was giving a party.

“Working. But Terry’ll come. She’ll come with the baby.”

“Yah, Theresa’s home,” Carol said. “She was stationed in Japan and she met a fellow over there who can speak and understand Russian. Oh, and a real handsome boy. So he flies one of those planes out of Japan and listens to what they say over there.”

Carol stood on the porch hollering. “Handy! Handy!” She waited, fists on her hips, until the dog came running through the back field. She bent to pat him.

“You know Ralph Brozek, Jay’s brother? Yeah, he was staying at my place, freakin’ out right and left, one flashback after another. He couldn’t get out of my bathtub once, he thought he was in a ship on fire, that’s where all the other guys with him died. I say, ‘Hey, my brother’s dead, too. They’re in the same place.’ But I don’t know one single person who came back from Vietnam the way they started.

“My mom and pop think I got out because of the leg. But that’s not how it happened. Air force was messing with my head. They decided they wanted to operate. I said no, you’re not going to operate. This went on, I don’t know, six or eight weeks. Then I was lying, they didn’t know what I was talking about. I was seeing the shrinkologist. I told them a little fairy tale. Asshole doctors. I told them, I’m going to kill myself. You’re going to find me hanging from the rafters. I sat down. I couldn’t control my emotions. They sent me home.”

We sat on the edge of the patio.

“So what made you religious?” I said.

“I needed more than just what was in this world.”

Theresa and I stood breast deep in the hot tub, leaning against the underwater benches with our hands. Theresa was tall now, a woman, no signs of what she had been. She’d left the baby at home with her brother’s wife, she grabbed my arm and said we
had to talk. We sat for a long time in the hot water, steam rising around us, the party continuing, further on the patio near the pool, a stereo blaring in the solar house.

“I miss the trees,” she said. She was holding her elbows and shaking her head. I recognized the expression. “I miss the open space.”

She lived outside Kyoto and sometimes her husband was gone, flying, for two or three weeks. She took care of the baby herself. She lived on a base, though she was no longer in the army.

“Just a wife,” she said. She told me the Japanese were very good with children, that they revered infants. She said she was studying Ikebana.

I looked at her and understood the crooked smile, the rue. We both sat staring into the dark yards, the old barn a pure black, vacant fields.

“They told me they rented out your gramma’s house,” she said. “That doesn’t seem right.” I shook my head. “They’re putting my dad’s house up for sale, too, and that doesn’t seem right either.”

The pool gleamed turquoise from underwater lights, tropical plants hung in the bathhouse. “It’s so different.”

“I guess when you go away, you want it to be the same, but when you stay you want it to change.”

In the kitchen, before she walked home, Theresa wrote down her address on a square paint-color sample of Jimmy’s. Theresa Lambert, FPO Seattle, 98767, Japan.

“You won’t believe it. I bought a re-yall Seth Thomas grandfather clock,
signed
. Do you know how rare they are now? They’re in museums, you just can’t find them anymore. It’s here already, in the closet for now, I don’t want anybody to see it and get ideas, these doors are like nothing, but won’t that be something when I have my little house? Someday. You won’t believe, Honey, how beautiful it is.”

She called me a lot, whenever she wanted to talk.

Someone from “Santa Fe” had sued, and they paid us all back royalties.

It was easy, sending the check, signing it over—then it was gone and I was only as poor as anyone else in Providence.

I remembered something I’d forgotten for a long time, the job I’d had in a department store wrapping packages. It was like a TV game show, a bonanza, where all around were prizes. My mother had come in on Saturdays as extra help. In three weeks, we ripped them off blind. We stole slacks, dresses, everything.

I still wear some of those shirts. That’s one thing about stealing, you wear something long enough and it seems as though it was always yours. It’s the same as if you bought it. Those years, I never felt scared. Now I think it’s crazy, the risks we took. We could have been in the backseat of a squad car, booked on felonies, both caught. We did a lot for money, things meant so much to us. And it seemed hard for my mother. Since I’ve been gone, money has come to me. People have given me things. I always feel a little bad at how hard my mother tries.

The thing I keep thinking, when I remember my mother, is how young she was.

One day I read it in the newspaper, Buffy died. The girl who was an actress that everyone wanted to be when I was nine. She’d been nine too. She looked younger, she played a twin on “Family Affair” with two high blond pigtails. Mattel put out a Buffy doll and they also made one of Mrs. Beasley, Buffy’s doll on television. Buffy was famous. When I lived in Bay City, I read everything there was about Buffy. I found an interview with her in
TV Guide
. I remember it said she lived in Pacific Palisades. She talked about working, she said once when she came home her brother had eaten all the strawberries. I knew she had a mother and no father, like me. I thought of her now, enormous, full grown, but with the pale thin legs and white anklets, a nineteen-year-old girl in blond pigtails. I kept thinking of paper around her, the long woman’s legs, eerie where they met the white anklets, in a shoe box. She died of a drug overdose in an apartment on the Palisades. I guess she’d never gone too far away.

A while later, my mother talked about a house, how I had to come home and see it.

Finally, I went to LA.

“I have everything,” my mother says, hugging me. “There’s all different kinds of cheese and a salami in the refrigerator. And fruit. I’ve got peaches and plums and watermelon and strawberries …”

She’s still listing fruit as I set down my suitcase and walk over the carpet to the sliding glass doors. We’re on the ocean, in Malibu. Waves unroll below us on the sand, muscular and glassy.

“Kiwi and kiwi and kiwi …” My mother sticks on kiwi when she runs out of fruits. “Oh, and I have white wine and red wine and Kahlua, I remember you like Kahlua, and gin and tonic. And oh, I have limes.”