“It’s one of these. Which one is the G?”
“Right there!” she says, poking the G with her index finger. “See ’em?”
“Yea! You’re so smart!”
We both laugh and she works to make the G fit. I read a paragraph, and then see that she’s trying to put a Y next to the G. “No, look, Cheyenne. What comes next?”
I start singing the song and she joins in. And we go through the routine all over again. It’s not the easiest way to read a book, one paragraph between puzzle letters, but I don’t want to be like some of those moms who dump their babies in front of any old TV program just to get them out of their hair. “Sesame Street,” or “Mr. Rogers,” or “Barney,” that’s okay. I know Cheyenne learned the alphabet song on “Sesame Street,” and she knows how to count to ten, too. That’s from “Sesame Street.” But I don’t plop her in front of junk TV.
It is after nine when Cheyenne is settled down, bathed and asleep. I pick up my book again. I’m only on page thirty-six, 210 pages to go and there’s a test on it Friday. I can’t tell yet, but I think I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings may end up being one of my book friends. I think it has more to say to me than Go Ask Alice did.
Reading about how a “spirit-filled” woman knocked the preacher’s false teeth out in the middle of a sermon has me laughing out loud. I’m thinking how Maya Angelou sure knows how to tell a funny story, when the phone rings. It’s probably another one of those mystery calls, but I answer anyway.
“Hello?”
“Melissa?”
“Mom?”
“What have you been doing?”
“Do you want a whole year’s worth, or just today?” I say. I don’t mean for it to come out sarcastic, but it does.
“In general,” she says.
“Well, taking care of Cheyenne, going to school, keeping up with the laundry and housework, mainly that. What about you?”
“I’m settling down.”
“What do you mean?” I ask.
“I’m tired of the circuit. I got on at Convention Center Services in L.A. You know, where Teresa works now. I want to stay in one place for a while.”
“You’re not working the track anymore?”
“Nope.”
I can hardly believe it. That’s all I’ve ever known my mom to do, go from racetrack to racetrack.
“I’d like for you and the baby to come over to my place. Teresa and I got a place together. It’s not much, but we’re close to a park, so it would be fun for the baby . . .You know, that business of moving every meet, four or five times a year—it gets a little old after twenty years or so.”
“It was old to me by the time I got to first grade,” I tell her.
“Yeah, well. Water under the bridge,” she says. “So, do you want to come on Saturday?”
“Sure,” I say.
She gives me her address and I tell her we’ll try to get there around noon. Really, I want to talk to Teresa as much as I want to see Mom. I always wonder about Sean, and I’m sorry we’ve lost track of one another. It’s so easy to lose track. I have no idea where I could reach Daphne anymore. She’s just gone.
I’ll have to call MTA and see what the best way is to get to my mom’s new place. Maybe Cheyenne and I can make an adventure of it—riding the big bus, or maybe even the Metrolink. I’ve never been on that before, and Cheyenne loves seeing the little trains zip along the railway near the freeway.
“Hey! Who were you talking to tonight!”
At first I think I’m dreaming. Then I feel a strong poke at my back.
“I asked you a question!”
I turn to see Rudy standing over me, looking down with the look I don’t like to see on his face. I rub my eyes and glance at the iridescent numbers on the clock. Two-thirty-seven. I get a whiff of stale beer fumes.
“Who were you talking to on the phone tonight, damnit!”
“Shhh, Rudy, you’ll wake Cheyenne up,” I plead.
“Answer me!” he yells.
“I was talking to my mother,” I tell him.
He lets out a snort. “You expect me to believe that?”
Cheyenne stirs. I get out of bed and walk to the living room, Rudy following close behind. If a fight’s coming, Cheyenne doesn’t need to see it. In the living room I turn to face Rudy.
“It’s the truth. My mom called. Listen, her message is still on the machine.”
I press the play button but before he can hear even the first word he punches erase.
“That don’t mean nothin’! You probably had someone from that loser school call and leave a message. Anyone could pretend to be your mom. You think I’m stupid?”
He shoves me and I trip backward, landing on the couch.
“Huh? You think I’m stupid?”
“Yes!” I scream, standing to face him. “Yes! You’re stupid! I was talking to my mom! That’s all!”
“SHUT UP!” he yells over me, but I keep yelling back. I am so angry, I don’t care what he does to me.
“Why would I lie to you, Rudy? I’ve been right here, taking care of our baby, and cleaning your mom’s house, and fixing your lunch for tomorrow and doing my homework! And if you think I’ve been doing anything else, then you’re STUPID!”
He smacks me in the face and I smack him right back. Irma rushes from her bedroom and pushes between us. Rudy shoves her aside.
“Stop, Rudy. I won’t have this in my house anymore!”
Rudy shoves her down on the couch and starts pacing, back and forth across the room, again and again, like a caged tiger. He keeps looking at me, even when he turns and changes direction.
“I know what you’ve been doing, bitch!” he says in that quiet, measured voice that is more frightening than yelling and screaming can ever be.
Irma gets up from the couch and puts her hand on Rudy’s shoulder. He pushes her away, not even pausing in his tracks.
I stand, watching, following his pacing, not blinking away from his hate-filled eyes.
“That Mr. Raley from lowlife high school was in getting stuff copied today. Your name was on the paper—some kind of sheet spread or something.”
“Spreadsheet,” I tell him, my voice as hateful as his. “He wants to use my spreadsheet as an example.”
“Yeah . . . I asked him, ‘Who’s this?’ all innocent, and he says one of my star students!”
“So?”
He stops and faces me, inches away. “So, I told you to stay away from that place! That’s SO!”
His fists are clenched and his face is so stony it looks like it would chip away if you took a sculptor’s hammer and chisel to it. I picture my hands, holding the tools, chip, chip, chipping away at Rudy’s stone face. Chipping away lines of hatred, chipping away his nose, and his chin, and the vision gets me laughing, and I can’t stop laughing and laughing in his stone face.
He stands silent, stunned, and I keep laughing. I don’t mean to. I can’t help it.
“Stop!” he yells, shoving me backward onto the couch.
The laughter keeps coming until I am weak with it.
“STOP!” he demands. He kicks me in the shin, hard. Pain shoots through me. Sharp. I catch my breath and then laugh harder, sharp and fast, like the pain.
“You slut! Boning that Raley guy to be his star whore!” Rudy yells, reaching back for the magazine rack, swinging it overhead and down at me. I jump aside, just in time. It breaks the wooden trim on the side of the couch clean in half, like a well-placed karate chop. Rudy looks at the bent frame of the rack, confused, as if it had bent itself and somehow managed to jump into his hand.
I laugh so hard I wet my pants, and that’s funnier still. I can’t help it. I look up at Rudy. Stony face, chip, chip, chip, I think, and laugh harder still. He stands, puzzled now. He doesn’t know his face is chipped away. He looks down at me.
“Stop,” he pleads, “please.”
Irma comes to the couch with a cold cloth and wipes my face with it.
“St
op it, Melissa,” she says, almost gently.
Rudy sits down on the footstool across from me, his head in his hands. I turn my back to them and stifle my laughter in the cushion of the couch. I don’t know when my laughter turns to weeping, or when they leave the room, or when someone covers me with a light blanket.
Sometime before dawn I limp into the bathroom and check my skinned, bruised shin. I wash it gently and spray it with Bactine. The colors, red, pink, brown, purple, remind me of one of Daphne’s pictures, except her array of colors was all over her body, not just her shin. Just the shin isn’t so bad.
I limp lightly into the bedroom and change nightgowns. Cheyenne is sound asleep, gripping Mary. I stand looking at her for a moment, filled with love. I don’t look in Rudy’s direction.
Next I clean the couch cushion with warm sudsy water. Running my hand over the break in the couch’s wood trim, I know the force of that blow could have killed me.
For a moment I picture it, the wrought iron rack coming down full force against my head, the split skull, the instant darkness. Then the thought of not being around to love and protect Cheyenne hits me hard in the pit of my stomach. What would become of her without me? I sit on the couch, thankful to be alive, and to know that I’m the first one Cheyenne will see in the morning, and the last at night. Then, I toss my still damp nightgown into the washer and start a load of clothes, put a towel over the damp spot on the couch, and lie there until the day’s first light shows at the edge of the living room drapes. My shin throbs.
CHAPTER
13
While Cheyenne and I are waiting in the driveway for the Teen Moms van to pick us up, Irma shuffles out in her bathrobe, her hair sticking up all over and her eyes barely open. It’s about three hours before Irma ever gets up, except on those rare times when she has to cover an early shift for someone at work.
“You better not have any crazy ideas in your head about taking that baby away again,” she says.
“The only idea I have is to finish my credits so I can graduate,” I tell her, shifting the still sleepy Cheyenne in my arms.
“No court’d give you custody, you know—hysterical laughing jags, crying jags, peeing your pants, no means of support.”
Irma pauses, then changes her tone.
“I’ll talk to Rudy,” she says. “I know he’s not perfect. He shouldn’t be acting that way.”
“If that magazine rack had hit me . . .”
“I know. I know. He shouldn’t drink at all ’cause it just gets him going. I’m gonna tell him to stop.”
“Like you have so much influence over him,” I say, thinking
how he shoved her around last night.
“You didn’t have to make things worse with your back talk! I’ve warned you about that mouth of yours.”
For a moment, I see that same hard look on her face that Rudy gets when he’s being the Rudy I don’t like.
“I’m telling you, Melissa, don’t do anything crazy. I won’t be so nice this time. If you’re not here when I get home from work today, I’ll have the cops on your tail in no time. You pull another stunt like before and you’ll lose this baby forever.”
Cheyenne stirs and smiles. “Gramma,” she says.
Irma softens. “Good morning, Sweetheart. Gramma loves you.”
“The van,” I say, standing with Cheyenne, grabbing our backpacks and limping to the open door and up the steps. Cheyenne waves out the window until we’re at the end of the block, and Irma stands waving back.
In English my mind keeps wandering. I run a finger over my pants leg, where my bruised and pounding shin is hidden from sight. Over and over my thoughts get caught in a replay of last night. The magazine rack smashing against the arm of the couch. Rudy’s stony face. I should have gone to the halfway house, stuck it out, like Daphne did. But now . . . could Irma really take Cheyenne away from me? Just thinking about it gets my heart pounding fast. I try taking deep cleansing breaths, like I learned to do in the shelter. It helps a little, but then, when I think again of Irma’s threat—it starts all over, pounding heart, sweating palms.
No one loves Cheyenne the way I do. Irma says she loves her, and I guess she does, but I’m the one who feeds her, and bathes her, and takes care of her when she’s sick. I’m the one she runs to when she’s hurt. God. I can’t stand the thought of not being with her. That couldn’t happen, could it?
In Peer Counseling we’re watching the end of a movie that we started earlier in the week. It’s called “Priest” and it’s about this gay priest who gets caught with his lover, and then makes the headlines of a tabloid. It’s a really good movie, but I can’t follow it today. At the end, a teenage girl comes to take communion from the gay priest and he holds onto her, sobbing and sobbing. I don’t even know why he’s crying, but just seeing it gets me started and I can’t stop. Like I couldn’t stop laughing last night.
I run from the room, embarrassed, and into the restroom. Leticia follows close behind. I splash cold water on my face, take deep breaths, and gain control.
“This is more than being sad over the movie, isn’t it?” she says.
I nod.
“Tell me,” she says.
“It’s just, things are hard for me sometimes,” I say.
She smiles and dangles her keys. “Aunt Myrna’s bean soup. That’ll help.”
I feel too nervous to go to lunch, but I don’t know how to get out of it, with Leticia being so nice.
“Okay,” I say.
At Pandora’s Box Lunch, Leticia orders bean soup for both of us, telling her aunt I need some magic beans.
“That’s exactly what I need,” I say. “Magic.”
Myrna pretends to go faint with surprise over Leticia’s order of something other than her usual bacon, avocado, tomato sandwich.
We take our soup and bread and sodas to a small table in the back. It’s funny, but Leticia is right about the soup. It helps. After about the third bite, I don’t feel quite so stressed. Not that my problems have gone away, but at least my palms aren’t all sweaty and my heart’s not racing.
“Thanks,” I say to Leticia.
“Wanna tell me?” she says.
I take another spoonful of soup, not exactly wanting to talk, and not sure where to start, even if I wanted to.
“Remember back at the beginning of school, that day I was all down about my gramma having to go to a convalescent home?”
I nod.
“And I hadn’t told any of my other friends because it seemed too terrible to say out loud. But then, I told you, because you always listen like you really care.”
Again I nod, remembering Leticia crying about how her grandmother didn’t even know her anymore.
“I felt better after I talked to you. Not that it changed anything, except I didn’t feel so closed up inside. You know what I mean?”
“Yeah, I do,” I say.
“You know you can trust me not to blab?”
“Oh, yeah, it’s not that, I just don’t know . . . well . . .”
There’s what seems to be a long silence, then I ask Leticia, “Finished with your lunch?”
She looks at me, puzzled.
“Yeah, I’m finished. Why?”
I pull up my pant leg and show her my messed-up shin.
She gasps and leans forward for a closer look.
“Rudy?” she asks.
I nod.
“God, it looks horrible. Have you seen a doctor?”
“It’s not broken or anything,” I tell her. “I yelled back at him,” I explain.
“Nothing deserves that,” she says. “Are you going back to the shelter?”
I tell her how Irma threatened to take Cheyenne away from me if I left, and how much I want to graduate on stage, from Hamilton High School, and how confused I am.
“Sometimes I wonder if I’m losing it—like today I couldn’t concentrate at all in any of my classes, and last night I was like a crazy woman, laughing and laughing w
hen things were so terribly sad . . . ”
“Give yourself a break, girlfriend. You’ve got a right to be crazy. I’d be crazy just tryin’ to take care of a baby and go to school, and I’ve got a mom who’d be on my side. And I’ve got aunts and uncles I could go to, too.”
Leticia slides a paper napkin across the table to me and I dab at my teary eyes.
“And here you’re not only having to do everything on your own, you’re takin’ all kinds of hits from Rudy and his mom both! You deserve to be crazy!”
Leticia laughs and I do too, only this time it’s a real laugh, not like last night.
We sit there, Leticia sopping up the rest of her soup with a piece of bread, me sipping what’s left of my Pepsi.
“You’re right,” I tell her. “It does help to talk.”
“Yeah, it does. But you’re still in a mess.”
I get a familiar feeling and excuse myself to go to the restroom. Inside the stall, I check my underwear. Yes! Something’s finally going my way. I get a tampon from the machine and go back in the stall. When I come out, Leticia’s waiting for me.
“You okay?”
“Much better,” I tell her.
“Listen, if there’s ever a way I can help . . .”
“Thanks.”
By the time I get to Mr. Raley’s class at Sojourner High School, I’m dragging. All I want to do is just curl up somewhere and sleep for days.
There are only seven lessons left in my workbook, and two more weeks of classes. So far, I’ve not gotten less than ninety percent on any of my work in here. I’m going to make it. I know I am. I make myself find enough energy to get to work.
I turn on the computer, put in my disk and bring up my file. There’s the spreadsheet that Mr. Raley took to get copied, the one that set Rudy off. Why didn’t he just copy it on the machine in the office? Or at the other Kinko’s? Then none of that stuff would have happened last night.
I go to the next lesson, another spreadsheet task, and for a few precious minutes I’m so involved in what I’m doing that I think of nothing else. Then, as I go to the next step, I realize that what happened last night was going to happen again, no matter what. It could have been anything. Rudy is an abuser, and one way or another he’ll find an excuse to abuse me. Usually I just try to forget, but now I try to remember all the excuses he’s ever used for hitting me. I open the word processing program and start a list.
Baby Help Page 12
