The Sound of Gravel

by Ruth Wariner

  Mom held my hand and Luke’s as Matt walked on ahead, his skinny body quickly lost in the shadows of a building as wide as two city blocks. Our new school was covered in stucco and painted a neutral cream color, which somehow made its tall trees look taller and its grass greener.

  At the end of a wide cement staircase lay bronze doorknobs and double glass doors. Inside the doors, phones rang, smartly dressed people talked professionally, and women with long, well-maintained fingernails tapped on typewriters. The registration office was bigger than my entire Mexican classroom had been, and it was crowded with framed photos, trophies, plaques, and green potted plants on every desk and in every corner. I was so busy looking around that I hardly noticed when Mom announced she needed to get back home to the other children and kissed us good-bye.

  A school secretary walked me to the first-grade classroom, which was adjacent to the most elaborate playground I had ever seen: it had two swing sets, a teeter-totter, a monument of a slide, two tetherball poles, and a set of monkey bars. As we entered the classroom, I noticed it smelled serious—all crayons and pencil shavings—and was filled with individual wooden desks and big, round tables surrounded by shelves crowded with books. I heard my teacher’s voice behind a wall of cubby compartments before I ever saw her. I liked her from that instant, and not just because she spoke English.

  “I’m Mrs. Tabousky,” said a tall woman with short brown hair sprayed stiff with a thick coat of hair spray. I took note of her light, lavender lipstick and black mascara and the bright pink blush on her cheeks, as well as the way her soft, warm hand confidently gripped mine. Understanding every word she said made me feel smart, and the desk I was assigned fit perfectly. I settled into it, ran my elbows over the shiny, smooth surface, and smiled.

  The days flew by, and before I knew it, the school year was almost over and I had turned seven. I woke every morning to the protection of thick, warm blankets, and in the mornings when Audrey’s diaper leaked, I’d never be wet or cold for long because I could always take a hot shower. After breakfast, I’d skip across the street to the playground and play with my classmates. They were nice and welcoming, not at all wicked the way church elders in LeBaron had said Americans always behaved.

  One afternoon in June, the week before school was out, Mom folded her arms over her belly, narrowed her eyes, and inspected me. “Did you get into trouble at school, Ruthie?”

  The suggestion surprised me. I shook my head and tried to think of what I might have done.

  “Your teacher wants to meet with me after school tomorrow.”

  I couldn’t sleep that night, I was so nervous about Mom’s meeting at school. The next day was even longer. At last the final bell rang; I stayed at my desk as my classmates filed out. I spied Mom waiting in the doorway, tugging at the bottom of a tight, pinstripe blouse like a nervous schoolkid waiting to talk to the principal. Once it was quiet, the two women greeted each other.

  Mom fixed her hair with her fingers, acting as nervous as I felt. “Ruthie’s not in any kind of trouble, is she? I know she really loves your class. She comes home talking about it every day.”

  “No, no, not at all.” My teacher turned to me. “Ruthie, I’m going to talk to your mom in private for a little while. Do you have anything to work on while we talk?”

  “Can I color when I’m finished with my math?”

  “Yes. I just copied some new color-by-number worksheets. You know where they are.”

  Mom observed the exchange in silence and followed Mrs. Tabousky up the aisle, where the two sat at students’ desks to talk. Mom’s large breasts nearly covered the cream-colored desktop, and her bottom hung off the sides of the chair. My teacher showed her a pile of papers, pointing out certain parts with the tip of her ballpoint pen. Gradually, Mom’s body began to relax into the chair to the extent it could; she even seemed happy, happier than I’d seen her in a long time. At last, the women got up from their desks and my teacher waved me over.

  “Ruthie, your mom and I think it’s a good idea if you spend the next school year with me. Would you like that?” Mrs. Tabousky asked.

  “Do I get to stay in this classroom?” I asked excitedly.

  “Yes, you will be in this classroom with me for all of next year. We’re going to work on your pronunciation, and I’ll help you practice your reading every day.”

  I couldn’t have been happier about the idea of repeating first grade. I loved Mrs. Tabousky, and after all our going back and forth between LeBaron and El Paso, staying in one place sounded good to me. I was dreading the approaching summer break—I couldn’t imagine why all the other kids were so excited. I had an uneasy feeling that summer wouldn’t be much fun.

  “I like your teacher, Ruthie,” Mom said as we walked home hand in hand. “Are you happy to have her again next year?—Oh, no!” Mom screamed before I could answer. She dropped my hand in the middle of the crosswalk. I followed her gaze to my grandparents’ yard, where Audrey was running, naked from the waist up. Matt was chasing her with a pink cotton blouse.

  “I think Audrey’s gonna make us all nutty,” Mom said to herself, her voice grave. A car honked for us to cross the street, and Mom ran toward the house as Audrey ran in the opposite direction on the sidewalk. Even though she still wore diapers and didn’t talk much, Audrey’s body had begun to change. Suddenly she was almost as tall as my mom and had some of Mom’s curvy softness. Audrey’s breasts bounced when she ran, and her nipples looked like brand-new pencil erasers.

  “What the heck are you doin’?” Mom yelled. “Put your shirt back on!”

  Audrey stopped short and blinked several times, her face expressionless. I felt frozen when she acted that way, and I didn’t know what to do. My instincts told me to keep away from my older sister, and I stayed back at the corner while Mom and Matt approached Audrey from different directions, Mom having snatched the blouse from his hand. Even after they had practically tackled Audrey, the shirt barely made it over her head.

  “Lift up your arms, Audrey. We gotta get this shirt on ya, Sis. Be still.”

  I made my way to them, close enough to see that Audrey’s blank expression had been replaced by a delirious smile. Her moaning was emanating from deeper in her throat than ever. Her tongue licked her upper lip and lapped up the mucus that streamed from her nose. Her body was rigid as she refused Mom’s commands.

  “Audrey, put your arms up!” Mom said.

  Completely isolated in her own world, my sister kept her arms stubbornly straight at her sides, her hands in tight fists as she rocked back and forth and stamped her feet—first left, then right, left, right. Mom kept struggling with her and finally got Audrey’s blouse over her head. Matt stood behind her, body-blocking Audrey in case she tried to make a run for it. Frustrated, Mom’s pale pink lips stretched taut as she pulled the blouse down past Audrey’s breasts and belly.

  We heard laughter from across the street. Three boys were standing on one of Strathmore’s pristine sidewalks, snickering with their hands over their mouths. I recognized them as some of the boys Matt played basketball with at school. My brother’s face was bright red with humiliation. He smiled, trying to make it seem as if the whole scene hadn’t been a big deal, but I could see that he was blinking as he tried to hold back tears. He pulled down the brim of his cap, bowed his head, and walked back to the house with his arms across his chest. Mom panted, her chest expanding and contracting furiously as she pulled Audrey toward the door. I wished summer were over, a summer that hadn’t even begun.

  12

  School had been out less than a week when Mom announced that she had found us a home of our own, a rental she would pay for out of her government assistance checks. The old house was on the other side of the railroad tracks from my grandparents’ neighborhood, but well within walking distance. We were ecstatic. We knew what it meant: we were in the magically delicious land of California for good!

  The house had a tan exterior and dark brown trim. In the center of the front yard was
a gigantic oak tree, much taller than the house itself, with thick roots that extended across the entire lawn, making it look lumpy and brown. It was more like a tree with a house than a house with a tree. The shade of the branches helped cool our kitchen and living room all summer long.

  The cement porch was the red of the fancy ladies’ toenails I had seen on the TV in my grandpa’s living room. The front door was dark brown with thick, glossy paint that reminded me of chocolate, and it even sounded sticky when we opened it. Inside, we discovered a spacious living room and kitchen surrounded by three bedrooms, and one bathroom—but not a stick of furniture. I thought houses came with that sort of thing. What did come with this house was a musty smell of wet wood. Our empty home looked huge, large enough to hold two families, at least by LeBaron’s standards.

  Mom looked happy with her choice, in part because it gave her a reason to spend each Friday evening of the summer, pen in hand, scanning the local Gazette for garage sales where she might find furniture, electronics, and small appliances for our new house. One of her first bargains was a secondhand TV, which she plopped down on the carpet in the living room against a bare white wall. It was the first time we ever had our own television set. From that day forward, we spent hours and hours in front of it. Mom told us we were only allowed to watch cartoons, but often she’d sit with us in the evenings and we’d all watch family sitcoms together. She’d sit with Meri resting over her shoulder, laughing at Mr. Drummond, Arnold, and Willis on Diff’rent Strokes and Mrs. Garrett on The Facts of Life. We could tell that Mom loved watching TV almost as much as we did, but she’d get angry whenever we tried to watch something violent or grown-up shows she called “inappropriate.”

  Not only was life different in Strathmore because of the TV, but in California we didn’t have to go to church anymore. There wasn’t a church close by that taught the same things we believed. Mom said she missed going to church, but I didn’t. I was having too much fun.

  Mom didn’t have a lot of rules, and the few rules she did have, she didn’t always have the time or energy to enforce. The house could get loud and chaotic. The days of grinding our own wheat, making bread and cheese, and milking cows seemed far behind us. Mom loved chocolate ice cream with nuts in it as much as we did, so there was always plenty of that in the house, along with all sorts of other junk food she’d buy at the grocery store just down the street. We only occasionally had beans and rice and never had to eat mush for breakfast anymore. On Saturday mornings, we’d sit in the living room in front of the TV eating bowl after bowl of cereal that Mom bought in large, clear-plastic bags. So compelling was the Saturday-morning cartoon lineup that none of us even noticed when Mom slipped out to go to her garage sales. Mom would leave seven-month-old Meri with us, and she’d sit on the carpet for hours and stare up at the ceiling while we watched TV.

  Mom worried about Meri. She thought she should be crawling or at least rolling over. Meri couldn’t even hold her head up. Around the time we moved into our new house, Mom’s Medicaid application came through, so we spent a lot of that summer taking Meri to doctors to try to find out what was wrong with her. But it seemed that no one ever had any answers to Mom’s questions.

  One bright Saturday morning in the middle of July, Mom opened the door of my white, bare-walled bedroom and startled me. “Do you want to go yard selling with me, Ruthie?” she asked in a whisper.

  Still half-asleep, I couldn’t decide whether I wanted to miss watching cartoons. The sky outside my window was still pitch-black, and I was warm and comfortable in my very own twin bed. Finally Audrey and I were sleeping in separate beds, and I woke up dry every morning.

  “I’ll give you a dollar to spend,” Mom said, sensing my hesitation. As I came to, I began to get excited about going shopping all morning alone with Mom. She never asked Audrey or the boys to come with her, and she hardly ever gave us our own spending money. I rose quietly and tiptoed out the door, wincing as I passed Audrey’s bed and caught a whiff of her urine. Mom smiled apologetically. Whatever influence she’d once had on Audrey had been lost and Mom knew it. Audrey now refused to use the toilet and wore diapers day and night.

  Mom drove us to the bigger neighboring towns of Lindsay and Porterville, where the streets were wider and the homes larger. The garages were so big it seemed as if we were shopping at huge department stores.

  “The real yard sales have nice stuff,” Mom told me as we drove down one quiet, tree-lined street. “But in some of them, people are just reselling what they bought at other yard sales, trying to get a higher price.” Mom prided herself on being able to detect garage-sale wheat from chaff even from a distance. She’d slow the car as we approached every sale, but often we would speed away without even stopping, Mom having already seen that it was mostly overpriced junk. That was my signal to put an X through the corresponding ad in the newspaper while she unfolded and refolded an area map and found her way to the next stop.

  Absent the usual distracting noise from the television, enjoying a quiet moment as Mom drove from house to house, I was reminded of the mean girl at my old school who’d talked about all the “retarded” people in my family. I started thinking about Audrey and her diapers, the way Luke wouldn’t pronounce words the right way, and how Meri still couldn’t roll over. I had wanted to ask Mom about the girl on the playground for a long time, but I needed a private moment to do it—and private moments in my family were rare.

  “What does retarded mean?” I asked after a deep breath.

  Mom seemed irritated by the question—she cocked her head back and looked at me with an exaggerated wince. “Where’d ya hear that word?” Her nose scrunched up beneath the bridge of her glasses.

  “A girl on the playground in Mexico told me we had lots of retarded people in our family. She said her mom knew you and that you have lots of retarded babies.”

  “Who was it?” Mom demanded, turning into a new neighborhood so fast I had to hold on to the door handle.

  “I don’t know. She asked me if I was retarded too.”

  “What did she look like?” Mom was almost yelling now. She pulled over to a curb while I stumbled through a description of the girl.

  “I don’t know who that is.” Mom realized we were lost and angrily unfolded the map. “Did she say who her mom was?”

  “No.”

  Mom switched off the van’s engine, took a deep breath, and sat back in the seat with her hands folded over her lap, exhaling slowly through her mouth. “Ruthie, your teacher says that you’re real smart. She sees lots of kids, so she knows. That little girl was just bein’ mean. If somebody asks you a question like that again, you don’t pay any attention to them. You tell them it’s none of their business and turn around and walk away.” Mom looked up at me from the map with red, wet eyes. The anger had been washed away from them, and I felt emboldened.

  “Why is Meri going to so many doctors?”

  Mom tossed the map into the backseat, started the van, and pulled away from the curb before answering. “Meri is sick. The doctors think she was born with a birth defect, but they don’t know what it’s called. It’s kind of like what Luke has, and they don’t have a name for his either.” Mom made a U-turn in the middle of the street while she fished a tissue out of her purse to blow her nose. “They have to do lots more testing on Meri to find out what’s wrong and how they can help her.”

  “Is she gonna be sick for a long time?”

  “I really don’t know, Sis. I hope she’s gonna be just fine.” We drove a bit before she said, “All families have problems.” She stared intently at something just over the horizon. “We just have to have faith that everything’s gonna work out and be okay.” She looked at me, shrugged her shoulders, and smiled. “Don’t ya think so, Ruthie?”

  “Yeah,” I replied, not convinced.

  The next yard sale was a good one, with many newer items and almost nothing broken or falling apart, although everything cost more than a dollar, so I kept mine in my pocket. Mom bought
an entire box with BOYS CLOTHES written on its open flaps. She also lingered for a long time in the book section with her head bent over a box filled with beat-up, old volumes going for five cents apiece. She gathered up an entire stack of coloring books, stood up, and flipped through each to find the ones with the fewest already-colored pages. She settled on a tattered pile of treasures.

  “I’ll give ya a dime for all these,” she said to the proprietor. They settled on a quarter, and when we were safely out of earshot, Mom confided that she had gotten a good deal. She was even happier about all the little-boy pants she’d found without holes in the knees. These were rare finds, she said, because boys played rough and usually wore out their clothes before they could be sold.

  Thanks to a string of Saturdays with good sales, Mom had the entire house fully furnished before school started again. Thanks to welfare and SSI checks from the government—compensation for Audrey’s and Luke’s disabilities—we had a ready supply of food too, and American breakfasts soon led to American lunches and dinners. By fall, meals of beans and rice were a thing of the past. Now our favorite foods were macaroni and cheese, peanut butter and jelly, hamburgers, and french fries. I sometimes missed a few things about LeBaron—mainly Brenda and Natalia—but I loved strawberry milk shakes and having my own bed.

  When first grade began again in August, I found myself in an unexpected situation: I was the tallest girl in my class. Sometimes I played with my former classmates at recess or lunch, bragging about the fun I was having in my second year of first grade and making them wish they’d been held back too. Because we were no longer living across the street, my brothers and I began taking the bus to and from school, which I thought was an adventure. I was glad to be back at Strathmore Elementary, and even gladder to be out of the house, where Audrey was acting scarier than ever.