Help Wanted

by Gary Soto

  "Which way?" Richard asked.

  "That way," the woman answered, pointing, vaguely. A cloud of smoke broke from her mouth.

  The two walked in silence for three blocks. Richard tried to think of something to ask her, but his mind was disturbed by her smoking. Where does she find money to buy cigarettes, anyhow? he wondered. Isn't she supposed to be poor and unable to afford such a trashy luxury?

  Finally he managed to ask a question he believed might get them talking: "Have you always lived around here?"

  "What?" the woman asked, cupping her wrinkled ear toward him.

  "Are you from around here?" he tried. He was upset at the sight of an old ear that had heard truths and lies and—somewhere, at some time, by someone—words of love?

  "Yeah, I live nearby." She pointed in the direction of a tall apartment building with torn awnings. Two men in greasy jackets were changing a flat tire.

  "In that building?" Richard asked. He jerked his chin toward the apartment building.

  "Yeah, I live nearby."

  Richard pleated his brow with lines of confusion. He had to wonder if she was all right in her head. After that Richard just kept a slow pace, but in one weak moment he nearly asked that she hurry up. The bags of groceries were hurting his arms. Once he had to stop and place the bags on the hood of a car and rest. It was during this two-minute break that she took out her unfinished cigarette, lit it, and took a few puffs that had her mouth gathering into deep and dark lines. She then again wet her thumb and stubbed the cigarette against its moisture. It sizzled.

  Richard was glad that he finally got to her place, which was not an apartment but a house. The front yard was full of weeds, and the grass was dead where a parked car had leaked oil. He climbed the steps ahead of her, placed the bags of groceries in front of the door, and waited for her to climb the steps.

  "Let me help," Richard, a good cadet, said. He clomped down the steps and hooked his arm under hers, creating an image of a mother and good son to a passerby. At that moment he felt a sharp weight in her pockets—it took no smarts for Richard to figure that she had helped herself to a few cans without asking. Still, he wasn't about to say anything. He just wanted to get away. He waited for her to open the front door so he could say, "You're home! I gotta go."

  "You can put the bags on the table," she told him. She shoved the door open and entered.

  He bent down and picked up the two bags. Following close on her heels, he was overwhelmed by the stench of cigarettes and—he sniffed, nose moving like a rabbit's—an odor he recognized. Then he saw where it came from: What he imagined was a furry couch was actually layers and layers of cats. Their glowing eyes seized his attention. Three stood up, stretched with gaping mouths, and climbed down from the couch.

  "Oh, man," Richard muttered.

  "What?" the woman asked as she took off her hat. Richard could see the white roots of her dyed hair.

  "Nothing," he said. He hurriedly set the grocery bags on what he believed was the kitchen table. On the table lay two more cats, asleep, though their tails were twitching. His steps didn't disturb the sleeping cats. And the cats didn't spring awake when cans of soup dropped from the old woman's coat pocket with a loud bang—she had taken off the coat and hastily swung it onto a chair.

  Richard picked up one of the cans that had rolled near his feet. A can of creamed corn. He set it on the table.

  "I'm hungry," the old woman said. "I like vegetable soup."

  Richard bit his lip. He didn't like her, and he didn't like the house. Three cats were rubbing against his ankle. "I have to go."

  "Help me." Her eyes had a pleading look of someone clinging to a cliff.

  Richard wondered what she meant.

  "Change a lightbulb for me." She waved a hand toward the darkened hallway.

  "Yeah, I guess," Richard answered lamely. He had to wonder if the lightbulb was in her head—she seemed dim.

  Then a sound of water running in the bathroom made them turn their heads. They both held their breath.

  "Is anyone home?" Richard asked. He was ready to pitch a can of creamed corn if an intruder showed himself.

  "What?"

  Richard repeated himself. He asked if anyone was there.

  "I didn't hear anything." The woman cupped her ear in order for its ancient hole to pick up a sound as quiet as a knock.

  "I think there's someone in the bathroom," Richard said.

  She winced. "Maybe..."

  The bathroom door swung open. A voice called roughly, "Grandma?"

  Instead of relaxing from hearing what only could be a familiar voice, her face grew tense. The old woman grew scared. She turned to Richard and, in a near whisper, repeated, "Help me." Scared, Richard backed away when her hand rested on his shoulder.

  From the darkened hallway appeared Jared, the kid from school. Smoke was rolling from his nostrils. Jared stopped. He looked at his grandmother, then Richard, a fanglike snarl creeping from the corner of his mouth. He stepped into the dining room and, eyes still on Richard, asked his grandmother, "What's he doing here?"

  Richard explained.

  "He's a nice boy," the old woman added.

  Richard stood nearly at attention, his hands curled at his sides, his shoes angled and pointed outward.

  "Your grandmother asked me to help her," Richard said.

  "Yeah, but you're done now, ain't you?" Jared walked around the table, and for a second, Richard thought Jared was going to hit him. But Jared just plunged his hand into his grandmother's pocket and brought out a crushed pack of cigarettes.

  "Don't—" his grandmother started to say, but her hand instinctively came up and swatted those words from her lips.

  Richard turned away, head down. Let them fight over cigarettes. Let them put in their own lightbulbs. Two cats, like sentries, stood by the door. Both of them were washing their paws with the buds of pinkish tongues.

  He left the house. The sunlight had him squinting his eyes. This time, however, he wasn't hugging bags of groceries, and he was able to raise a hand to shield his sight. He appeared to be giving a cadet salute, and he realized that. He realized also that the world needed discipline and that maybe it was a soldier's duty to provide it.

  "Why is it like this?" he asked himself. "Why are people like this?" His mind flashed on his father, who had disappeared on a bicycle, and then his mother, who was probably at the sink peeling carrots or potatoes. His mind flashed on Desiree Sanchez. He would never catch up with her.

  "That's the way it is," he found himself saying.

  He climbed down the steps and took a sharp left. Soon he was marching in a clipped step and wondering about that community service ribbon he would earn, imagining a future that did not include smoke billowing from bitter mouths.

  The Sounds of Love

  When Norma Lucero opened up her locker, she wasn't sorry to find that her flute was gone. In fact, she smiled and stomped her shoes, an action that made her skirt jump around her knees. And was that a rush of blood into her heart? She touched her heart, then her cheeks. Her temperature had risen.

  "Yes," she said to herself. She raised a fist and repeated, "Yes." She closed the locker, turned, and leaned against it. Her smile was like a bright orchid on a cold winter day.

  It wasn't that Norma hated playing the flute or the long hours of band practice in the musty basement of Franklin D. Roosevelt Middle School, a dingy room where the furnaces clanged, rattled, and messed up everyone's musical timing. And it wasn't that she hated looking like a nerd as she carried her instrument in a black case. No, the disappearance of her flute meant love: Samuel Ortega, a boy she liked a lot, had pulled her case from her grip the week before, and she'd had to run after him until he relented and gave it back. Now, she assumed, he had stolen it. Love was a kind of thief, she believed. Love involved taking something and giving it back.

  She didn't have to dig deep into her memory to recall the day when Samuel had spit a mouthful of sunflower-seed shells and then asked, "Wh
y don't you kiss me instead of that flute?" That a sunflower-seed shell stuck to his lower lip didn't destroy the beauty of that moment for her. It would soon fall off, and he would return to being the perfect boy for her. Sure, he was a little heavy, but wasn't she, too? Didn't that make them a perfect match?

  That Samuel knew nothing about her music didn't keep her from liking him, either. "You'd like that, huh?" she told him, not too loudly, then giggled with a hand in front of her mouth. She had to admit that the way she pursed her lips when she played the flute was something like kissing—or so she believed. She had never kissed anyone, except Mom and Grandma, and her dad, when he was still around.

  "Samuel's taken it," she told herself, and strode off to the cafeteria to buy some hot chocolate. "I'm sure of it."

  "Hey," Rachael Duran called. Rachael, a member of band, was carrying a flute, too. "Let me copy your math."

  Norma stopped in her pigeon-toed tracks. "Oh no," she moaned.

  Rachael was a girl who wrote answers to quizzes up and down her arm, who pestered you with e-mail ("How do you spell Venice?" or "Who's Thomas Jefferson again?"), and who borrowed things and never gave them back. Norma noticed that Rachael was wearing Norma's barrette. She had lent it to Rachael during a parade march and never got it back.

  "No, I can't," she yelled, and hurried toward the cafeteria to buy herself a morning treat. She let sixty-five cents, mostly in nickels, rain into the outstretched palm of the cashier. The cashier gave her a nickel back—she had paid too much.

  When she blew on her hot chocolate, she saw in the reflection of that heavy brew that her lips were pursed—Kiss, kiss, kiss, she thought. Her giggling shook the surface of the hot chocolate into ripples. As she put her drink down on the table, she heard the sound of approaching footsteps. She put up her hand, as if stopping traffic.

  "No, I said," she said to Rachael. "I can't let you copy my homework."

  Rachael pouted. "Come onl"

  "It's not right!"

  "I'm your friend."

  Friend? Norma thought angrily. A pest, you mean. A bug in my ear. A foxtail in my sock.

  "I won't ask except this one time. I promise." Rachael crossed her heart to make her point.

  "I said no." Norma shouldered her backpack, picked up her hot chocolate, and walked away, indifferent to Rachael's snarl. "You better watch your back, girl."

  Norma had been in such a good mood. Sip-sip-sipping from her hot chocolate. She had had the best thing she owned, her flute—sip-sip—taken from her by Samuel Ortega. What a guy! Sip-sip.

  She fought her way through a crowd of students exiting through the glass doors of the cafeteria into the yard. She perched, knees together, on a cement bench, where she dreamily watched the steamy hot chocolate. When she exhaled, she saw her breath hang in the frosty air of midwinter.

  "He likes me!" she exclaimed. She smiled. "Why else would he steal my flute?"

  She had never had a boyfriend. She didn't even have many friends, and those friends were at church. In elementary school she had spent most of her time alone under a tree, where she read books. Her best friend then was Melissa Campbell, who, like Norma, was a little heavy. Their knees were pink, as were their faces and chubby little hands. Any kind of exertion made them pink—even climbing the three steps to their bungalow classroom. Together she and Melissa had spent a lot of time combing the manes of their My Little Ponies. They combed and combed them until the nylon hair fell out.

  Norma's ears perked up when she suddenly heard a flute call above the sounds of shuffling students and skateboards. She stood up, the folds of her skirt falling out evenly. "Samuel?" She swallowed the rest of her hot chocolate in three quick gulps and grabbed her backpack, which was as heavy as an anchor—the math and biology books alone were as heavy as gym weights.

  She walked in the direction of the sound.

  "Samuel, give it back!" Of course, she was prepared to run after Samuel. She liked the idea of a chase on a cold morning.

  "Samuel, you're going to be in big trouble!"

  Norma made her way quickly through the students, some of whom were holding cups of hot chocolate. She thought she could still make out the sounds of her flute but wasn't sure. When the bell rang, the huddling students broke apart and headed noisily off to class.

  "Samuel!" she called one last time. She imagined her voice as a flute, and imagined Samuel answering back. "Samuel, it's time for you to give it back!"

  But Norma stopped when she saw Rachael seated at a bench and rushing answers to her math homework onto binder paper. She had gotten Jason Harvey to share his homework. Jason, Norma knew, wasn't good at math. He wasn't good at anything except basketball. Rachael finished copying Jason's homework and gave him a kiss. Her tongue, like a fat worm, touched Jason's tongue.

  Norma's hand flew to her mouth to hold back a groan. How disgusting, she thought.

  When band rehearsal was canceled, Norma stayed at school to do homework in the library. But first she wandered around the school grounds and hallways in search of Samuel. She checked the basketball court and metal shop. She had even hollered into one of the boys' bathrooms, "Samuel!" She was embarrassed when the janitor came out with a pipe wrench in his hand.

  Norma had seen Samuel earlier in the day walking across the school grounds to deliver, she suspected, attendance slips. But she was seated in biology with a dissected frog in her hands and was in no position to scream out the window, "Hey, where's my flute?" And she had seen him at lunch surrounded by pimply boys stomping on their milk cartons. But she dared not confront him with his friends standing around.

  In the library Norma did some of her homework and walked home at three-thirty, kicking through leaves that resembled soggy cereal. But she didn't go straight home. No, she stopped at Baskin-Robbins 31 Flavors—double chocolate, she discovered after trying all the flavors, was her favorite. She stopped at the ice-cream store to see if Samuel might be there with one of his friends. He wasn't, though her heart did jump when she heard the sound of a flute.

  "Samuel," Norma whispered, then pulled her long hair in front of her face to hide her giggles. "It's the radio." She looked up at the ceiling and caught sight of a speaker with tiny, tiny holes. She placed a hand over her mouth and proclaimed, "I'm in love. I have to be!" She didn't care if the young man behind the counter heard her, or the woman who had just entered.

  At home she found three messages on the message machine. Two were for her mother, and one was from Rachael, who wanted to know if she had sheet music for "Here Comes the Bride." She pressed the delete button in anger, as if she were squishing a mosquito.

  "She's such a pest!" Her mood had soured.

  She went into the kitchen, where she read a note from her mother: Take the frozen chicken out of the freezer and put it in the sink. At 5:30 peel the carrots and potatoes, and dice the celery. Home at 6:00. Love, Mom.

  Soup. Chicken soup.

  Norma had heard that chicken soup was good for your soul, and at that hour of the day, she was beginning to think that she might slurp up a big bowl and be cured of everything that ailed her. Only a half hour before, she had been feeling pretty, and then she realized that she might have to face her mother's anger if her flute had really been stolen, not just swiped by her lover boy, Samuel Ortega.

  "But he has got to have it," she said, then jumped when the telephone rang. When she picked it up, it was Rachael.

  "Hey, do you have—"

  Norma cut her off. "No!"

  "Gee, don't get so mad, girl." She hung up without a good-bye.

  That night there was no soup to make her feel better. Instead, it was a chicken lathered in creamy sauce. Under the sauce, there were bits of mushrooms, a food that Norma despised. She rounded them up like they were enemies and scooted them around the edge of her plate. Later she would scrape them down the garbage disposal without mercy.

  The next day she finally confronted Samuel at a drinking fountain. She decided to be nice. She used her mouth like a musical in
strument and asked in a lilting voice, "Do you have my flute?" She asked this while her left hand held her right, and her body twisted, slightly.

  "No," he answered bluntly.

  Norma noticed that some of his breakfast—grease from eggs and bacon?—was splattered on the front of his shirt. His dark hair was uncombed. The knees of his pants were stained green with grass.

  "You don't?" she asked meekly. Her left hand dropped the right hand. The courtship, it seemed, was off.

  Samuel looked into her eyes and bit his lower lip. Finally he said, "Norma, quit following me."

  Norma rocked on her heels.

  "You do it every day."

  "What do I do?"

  "Pester me."

  Hurt, she staggered backward. All last night she had lain in bed thinking of him. She dreamily conjured up his hair, the tenderness of his teddy bear eyes, and his voice that went up and down, not unlike a bird's, or that of her missing flute. All night she had pictured the two of them at Baskin-Robbins 31 Flavors sampling every delicate flavor. They were lapping the ice cream from the same cone, which, for her, was kind of like kissing. Their tongues almost touched, almost became flavored with something like love.

  "I'm not following you!" Norma shot back.

  Samuel grimaced. "Norma, I don't like you." He judged her response before he sucked in a lot of air. "I mean I like you like, you know..."

  She did know. He liked her as a friend, or maybe just a classmate. She felt her heart shatter and spill gallons of blood. Yes, that was it! She was bleeding inside! She turned and walked away, her head down for a moment, then up again because she had to keep her pride. "I don't care," she heard herself say, and she ventured into the cafeteria to get her morning hot chocolate. Tears blurred her vision, but she knew the route. Plus, the breakfasty smells of hot chocolate and doughnuts led the way.

  "I hate him," she sniveled, and wiped the warm salty tears that had meandered down her cheeks. She sat alone at a table, where she composed herself and then, suddenly, punched her backpack three times. Feeling better, she got up and got herself some hot chocolate.