The Stories of Richard Bausch (29 page)

“Mom was skinny and pretty.”

He says nothing.

“Am I double trouble?”

“No,” he says.

“Is that really why you never got married again?”

“Well, no one would have me, either.”

“Mom said you liked it.”

“Liked what?”

“Being a widow.”

“Yes, well,” he says.

“Did you?”

“All these questions,” he says.

“Do you think about Grandmom a lot?”

“Yes,” he says. “That’s—you know, we remember our loved ones.”

She stands and tries to touch her toes without bending her legs. “Sometimes I dream that Mom’s yelling at you and you’re yelling back.”

“Oh, well,” he says, hearing himself say it, feeling himself back down from something. “That’s—that’s just a dream. You know, it’s nothing to think about at all. People who love each other don’t agree sometimes—it’s—it’s nothing. And I’ll bet these exercises are going to do the trick.”

“I’m very smart, aren’t I?”

He feels sick, very deep down. “You’re the smartest little girl I ever saw.”

“You don’t have to come tonight if you don’t want to,” she says. “You can drop me off if you want, and come get me when it’s over.”

“Why would I do that?”

She mutters, “I would.”

“Then why don’t we skip it?”

“Lot of good
that
would do,” she says.

For dinner they
drink apple juice, and he gets her to eat two slices of dry toast. The apple juice is for energy. She drinks it slowly and then goes into her room to lie down, to conserve her strength. She uses the word
conserve,
and he tells her he’s so proud of her vocabulary. She thanks him. While she rests, he does a few household chores, trying really just to keep busy. The week’s newspapers have been piling up on the coffee table in the living room, the carpets need to be vacuumed, and the whole house needs dusting. None of it takes long enough; none of it quite distracts him. For a while he sits in the living room with a newspaper in his lap and pretends to be reading it. She’s restless too. She comes back through to the kitchen, drinks another glass of apple juice, and then joins him in the living room, turns the
television on. The news is full of traffic deaths, and she turns to one of the local stations that shows reruns of old situation comedies. They both watch
M*A*S*H
without really taking it in. She bites the cuticles of her nails, and her gaze wanders around the room. It comes to him that he could speak to her now, could make his way through to her grief—and yet he knows that he will do no such thing; he can’t even bring himself to speak at all. There are regions of his own sorrow that he simply lacks the strength to explore, and so he sits there watching her restlessness, and at last it’s time to go over to the school. Jane Eberhard makes a surprise visit, bearing a handsome good-luck card she’s fashioned herself. She kisses Brenda, behaves exactly as if Brenda were going off to some dangerous, faraway place. She stands in the street and waves at them as they pull away, and Brenda leans out the window to shout goodbye. A moment later, sitting back and staring out at the dusky light, she says she feels a surge of energy, and he tells her she’s way ahead of all the others in her class, knowing words like
conserve
and
surge.
“I’ve always known them,” she says.

It’s beginning to rain again. Clouds have been rolling in from the east, and the wind shakes the trees. Lightning flickers on the other side of the clouds. Everything seems threatening, relentless. He slows down. There are many cars parked along both sides of the street. “Quite a turnout,” he manages.

“Don’t worry,” she tells him brightly. “I still feel my surge of energy.”

It begins to rain as they get out of the car, and he holds his sport coat like a cape to shield her from it. By the time they get to the open front doors, it’s raining very hard. People are crowding into the cafeteria, which has been transformed into an arena for the event—chairs set up on four sides of the room as though for a wrestling match. In the center, at the end of the long, bright-red mat, are the vaulting horse and the mini-trampoline. The physical-education teacher, Mr. Clayton, stands at the entrance. He’s tall, thin, scraggly-looking, a boy really, no older than twenty-five.

“There’s Mr. Clayton,” Brenda says.

“I see him.”

“Hello, Mr. Clayton.”

Mr. Clayton is quite distracted, and he nods quickly, leans toward Brenda, and points to a doorway across the hall. “Go on ahead,” he says. Then he nods at her grandfather.

“This is it,” Brenda says.

Her grandfather squeezes her shoulder, means to find the best thing to tell her, but in the next confusing minute he’s lost her; she’s gone among the others and he’s being swept along with the crowd entering the cafeteria. He makes his way along the walls behind the chairs, where a few other people have already gathered and are standing. At the other end of the room a man is speaking from a lectern about old business, new officers for the fall. Brenda’s grandfather recognizes some of the people in the crowd. A woman looks at him and nods, a familiar face he can’t quite place. She turns to look at the speaker. She’s holding a baby, and the baby’s staring at him over her shoulder. A moment later, she steps back to stand beside him, hefting the baby higher and patting its bottom.

“What a crowd,” she says.

He nods.

“It’s not usually this crowded.” Again, he nods.

The baby protests, and he touches the miniature fingers of one hand—just a baby, he thinks, and everything still to go through.

“How is—um … Brenda?” she says.

“Oh,” he says, “fine.” And he remembers that she was Brenda’s kindergarden teacher. She’s heavier than she was then, and her hair is darker. She has a baby now.

“I don’t remember all my students,” she says, shifting the baby to the other shoulder. “I’ve been home now for eighteen months, and I’ll tell you, it’s being at the PTA meeting that makes me see how much I
don’t
miss teaching.”

He smiles at her and nods again. He’s beginning to feel awkward. The man is still speaking from the lectern, a meeting is going on, and this woman’s voice is carrying beyond them, though she says everything out of the side of her mouth.

“I remember the way you used to walk Brenda to school every morning. Do you still walk her to school?”

“Yes.”

“That’s so nice.”

He pretends an interest in what the speaker is saying.

“I always thought it was so nice to see how you two got along together—
I mean these days it’s really rare for the kids even to know who their grandparents
are,
much less have one to walk them to school in the morning. I always thought it was really something.” She seems to watch the lectern for a moment, and then speaks to him again, this time in a near whisper. “I hope you won’t take this the wrong way or anything, but I just wanted to say how sorry I was about your daughter. I saw it in the paper when Brenda’s mother…. Well. You know, I just wanted to tell you how sorry. When I saw it in the paper, I thought of Brenda, and how you used to walk her to school. I lost my sister in an automobile accident, so I know how you feel—it’s a terrible thing. Terrible. An awful thing to have happen. I mean it’s much too sudden and final and everything. I’m afraid now every time I get into a car.” She pauses, pats the baby’s back, then takes something off its ear. “Anyway, I just wanted to say how sorry I was.”

“You’re very kind,” he says.

“It seems so senseless,” she murmurs. “There’s something so senseless about it when it happens. My sister went through a stop sign. She just didn’t see it, I guess. But it wasn’t a busy road or anything. If she’d come along one second later or sooner nothing would’ve happened. So senseless. Two people driving two different cars coming along on two roads on a sunny afternoon and they come together like that. I mean—what’re the chances, really?”

He doesn’t say anything.

“How’s Brenda handling it?”

“She’s strong,” he says.

“I would’ve said that,” the woman tells him. “Sometimes I think the children take these things better than the adults do. I remember when she first came to my class. She told everyone in the first minute that she’d come from Oregon. That she was living with her grandfather, and her mother was divorced.”

“She was a baby when the divorce—when she moved here from Oregon.”

This seems to surprise the woman. “Really,” she says, low. “I got the impression it was recent for her. I mean, you know, that she had just come from it all. It was all very vivid for her, I remember that.”

“She was a baby,” he says. It’s almost as if he were insisting on it. He’s heard this in his voice, and he wonders if she has, too.

“Well,” she says, “I always had a special place for Brenda. I always thought she was very special. A very special little girl.”

The PTA meeting is over, and Mr. Clayton is now standing at the far door with the first of his charges. They’re all lining up outside the door, and Mr. Clayton walks to the microphone to announce the program. The demonstration will commence with the mini-trampoline and the vaulting horse: a performance by the fifth- and sixth-graders. There will also be a breakdancing demonstration by the fourth-grade class.

“Here we go,” the woman says. “My nephew’s afraid of the mini-tramp.”

“They shouldn’t make them do these things,” Brenda’s grandfather says, with a passion that surprises him. He draws in a breath. “It’s too hard,” he says, loudly. He can’t believe himself. “They shouldn’t have to go through a thing like this.”

“I don’t know,” she says vaguely, turning from him a little. He has drawn attention to himself. Others in the crowd are regarding him now—one, a man with a sparse red beard and wild red hair, looking at him with something he takes for agreement.

“It’s too much,” he says, still louder. “Too much to put on a child. There’s just so much a child can take.”

Someone asks gently for quiet.

The first child is running down the long mat to the mini-trampoline; it’s a girl, and she times her jump perfectly, soars over the horse. One by one, other children follow. Mr. Clayton and another man stand on either side of the horse and help those who go over on their hands. Two or three go over without any assistance at all, with remarkable effortlessness and grace.

“Well,” Brenda’s kindergarden teacher says, “there’s my nephew.”

The boy hits the mini-tramp and does a perfect forward flip in the air over the horse, landing upright and then rolling forward in a somersault.

“Yea, Jack!” she cheers. “No sweat! Yea, Jackie boy!”

The boy trots to the other end of the room and stands with the others; the crowd is applauding. The last of the sixth-graders goes over the horse, and Mr. Clayton says into the microphone that the fifth-graders are next. It’s Brenda who’s next. She stands in the doorway, her cheeks flushed, her legs looking too heavy in the tights. She’s rocking back and forth on the balls of her feet, getting ready. It grows quiet. Her arms swing slightly, back and
forth, and now, just for a moment, she’s looking at the crowd, her face hiding whatever she’s feeling. It’s as if she were merely curious as to who is out there, but he knows she’s looking for him, searching the crowd for her grandfather, who stands on his toes, unseen against the far wall, stands there thinking his heart might break, lifting his hand to wave.

In the car
on the way south, after hours of quiet between them, of only the rattle and static of the radio, she began to talk about growing up so close to Washington: how it was to have all the shrines of Democracy as a part of one’s daily idea of home; she had taken it all for granted, of course. “But your father was always a tourist in his own city,” she said. “It really excited him. That’s why we spent our honeymoon there. Everybody thought we’d got tickets to travel, and we weren’t fifteen minutes from home. We checked into the Lafayette Hotel, right across from the White House. The nicest old hotel. I was eighteen years old, and all my heroes were folksingers. Jack Kennedy was president. Lord, it seems so much closer than it is.” She was watching the country glide past the window, and so Charles couldn’t see her face. He was driving. The road was wet, probably icy in places. On either side were brown, snowpatched hills, and the sky seemed to move like a smoke along the crests. “My God. Charles, I was exactly your age now. Isn’t that amazing. Well, I don’t suppose you find it so amazing.”

“It’s amazing, Mom.” He smiled at her.
would ever be able to let her out of his sight. “Mom,” he said, “let’s travel somewhere.”

“I thought we were doing just that,” she said.

“Let’s close the house up and go to Europe or someplace.”

“We don’t have that kind of money; are you kidding? There’s money for you to go to school, and that’s about it. And you know it, Charles.”

“It wouldn’t cost that much to go somewhere for a while. There’s all kinds of package deals—discounts and special fares—it wouldn’t cost that much.”

“Why don’t
you
go?”

“By myself?”