by Jo Barney
8
“Who the hell was that?” Ray’s voice swirls through a cloud of alcohol. He grunts, gets comfortable on the couch, does not speak again.
Patsy turns off the living room lamp, goes to the bathroom, frees her hair from the headband that has it captive. She leans closer to the mirror. No, she won’t have to make an appointment with Lillian for a few days, the hair is still manageable, especially since the work on the hedge will probably take a toll on it. As she stretches the band and replaces it, she thinks about this evening’s visitor. She had met men like Hank often in her office at the VA hospital, where she worked for three years. Men who had lost part of themselves in the middle of frightening explosions, had shot at vague enemies, killed innocent strangers, carried friends to helicopters on gurneys and in body bags, tied tags to toes to identify what was left. She had tried to help these survivors overcome the losses that were obscured at first by their relief that the war was over. Sometimes it worked, the group therapy, the medications, the counseling. Sometimes it didn’t.
She supposes that she should be glad that Ray’s only noticeable injury from his tour of Vietnam is his alcoholism. No rage, suicide attempts, wordless depression, bad dreams, anxiety, most of the symptoms of what is lately called PTSD. Only the drinking. A big only, though.
Eleanor’s husband apparently has suffered from this kind of stress ever since his time in Korea—a long time to be disturbed, a long time to be disturbing. Tonight, Patsy had tried smiling and giving noncommittal nods as Hank vented his anger at the trimming of the hedge. He hadn’t been asked for permission, and he blamed her. She hadn’t defended herself. “Yes, you’re pissed,” she’d said, and other counselor phrases had come by habit until he left, threatening he’d be back over to talk to her husband if she and Eleanor went on with their project. “Good,” she had responded. “Ray will want to hear your ideas. Come back in a few days when he’s feeling better.”
Ray can stay sick for a while. She and Eleanor will finish the hedge. Perhaps when Hank understands that the new hedge will still protect him from whatever he’s afraid of, he’ll change his tune.
Or maybe not. Maybe he’ll forget today’s confrontation altogether. Sometimes they do.
Tomorrow they’ll get the first side of the hedge done. All Eleanor has to do is keep Hank out of the backyard.
Tonight she and Izzy will play at the exercises that the therapist said would help her learn to walk steadily, to talk in words that others besides her mother will understand.
They will laugh together. Patsy will try not to think of the mother and daughter she saw at the grocery store this morning: a seventy-year-old woman holding the hand of her gray-haired daughter with Down’s syndrome as she asked her to pick out the cereal she wanted this week. A poignant scene. One that brought tears to Patsy’s eyes. “Can I do that?” she wondered out loud. No one answered.
9
Patsy and I decided when we first talked to not try to pull out the hedge. Instead, we will trim it. I knew Hank would not pay for the manpower and the machine we would need to remove the huge bushes, and Ray isn’t interested in any part of the job, including talking about it. No matter; I have found in our garage the clippers, a saw, an electric hedge trimmer and cord that may still work, and two pairs of work gloves that are stiff with age, too big, but still usable.
“We’ll need a taller ladder,” Patsy says as she emerges from the hole in the hedge. “I’ll get our other one when we can’t reach anymore.”
“We might be doing this upside down. Maybe we should start on the top.” Just thinking about it makes my back ache.
“Probably, but by the time we round the block from my garage to your backyard, we’ll be too tired to do anything else. Maybe one of our husbands can help tonight…or maybe Jimmy?”
I like the idea of my son helping with the hedge. He’ll have to be careful with the sharp tools, though. He sometimes gets distracted. “I’ll ask Jimmy tonight.”
The hedge’s thick limbs hide behind the stiff green leaves. Soon we are working side by side, one sawing and one taking the cut branches and piling them up in the middle of the yard. The hedge is about thirty feet long, we guess, and in a couple of hours we have moved about five feet along it, leaving behind bare wood and holes and twigs.
“It will come back,” Patsy says, as I shake my head at the sight. “You can’t kill a laurel hedge, my dad always said.”
“Is your dad still alive?”
“Yeah, but he lives with my stepmother in Seattle. He sometimes comes down to see Izzy, but not so much lately. He says he’s busy with his law practice, but I think he’s disappointed in his granddaughter.”
In Patsy’s voice, I hear a tinge of the same sadness I feel when Hank blows up at our son. I remove my gloves and tuck them in my pocket. “All you can do is try to protect your kid from being hurt by the rejection.”
“Maybe Izzy is lucky that her grandfather lives two hundred miles away. The rejection is long distance, not across the table.”
I am once again surprised by Patsy’s ability to understand things without my saying a word about Hank. Perhaps that’s what social workers do: see the truth that lies under the words. I pull off my dirty sweatshirt and notice that the bruise has purpled and spread from my elbow to my wrist. I suspect my new hedge-attacking friend is not only a good listener but also a good guesser when it comes to bruises. I yank down the long sleeve of my T-shirt and pour a glass of water for Patsy and her buzzing clipper. “Time to cool off a little.”
A head, white-curly-haired and grinning, pops into one of the new holes in the hedge. “Hello, workers. How’s it going over there?”
Patsy reaches out to help her mother through the hedge. “Great, Mom. How’s it going with poopy pants?”
“We got it all under control. On the potty, even. She responds well to Cheerios as bribes, doesn’t she?” A hefty woman squeezes through the hedge and holds out her hand to me. “I’m Sarah, Patsy’s mother. You’re the friend who got my daughter off the sofa and into the hedge.”
“Actually, Patsy got me out of the house and into something I’ve never done before, and we’re having a good time.” Sarah’s smile is as wide as Patsy’s, but her hair resembles a curly white hat perched a little haphazardly on her head, not her daughter’s neat helmet.
“Even though it doesn’t look so good right now.” Patsy waves a glove at the dismembered bushes behind her.
“It’ll grow back. You can’t kill a laurel hedge. Forget who said that.”
“Dad did, that time he tried to and failed.” Patsy adjusts her headband, then pulls it off and tucks it into a pocket. “Whew! The two of us are doing a massive makeover on this overgrown creature. If all else fails, we’ll secretly hire a guy to rip out its ugly remains. Let’s start saving our pennies, just in case.”
We laugh, and I realize this might be the first time I have laughed in days.
* * *
This evening Hank comes in and collapses in front of his newspaper. I do not tell him of the results of our first jab at the hedge. I feel too good to allow myself to have to deal with his usual anger. When I see that Patsy’s kitchen lights are off, meaning the family has settled into their evening, though, I lead Jimmy through the new hole in the hedge and over to the Sullivans’ house.
When Patsy meets Jimmy, she tells him she has seen him head out to work in the mornings. “Do you enjoy your job?” she asks, but Jimmy only nods. She smiles. “I need help getting the tall ladder out of my garage and carrying it back through the hedge.” He nods again in his solemn way, not meeting her eyes. “Sure,” he says and follows her to the garage.
He looks up at the hedge as he pokes the ladder though a space between bushes. “I’m bigger than you, Mom. I could cut the top.”
“We can work together.”
10
His dad was quiet last night. Sometimes Jimmy can’t sleep, waiting for his father’s bad dreams to break into the night, but he slept okay, and
Mom was cheerful at breakfast, smiling at least, and Dad said, “See you at dinner,” to them both as he picked up his lunch pail and left. It will be a good day, even though it was cereal day so he didn’t get to cook eggs. Maybe tomorrow they’ll have pancakes. He can help with those too.
Jimmy carries his extra coat and his lunch in his backpack, and so does Janey, who hooks her bag on the back of her wheelchair. They wait at the corner where the bus stops, and she tells him about the television show she watched last night, All in the Family. “I didn’t like it; it was supposed to be funny, but it wasn’t.”
“Why?”
“People aren’t kind; the father, especially, says bad things to his wife and about a neighbor, like they were stupid or ugly. What I don’t understand is why the audience laughed at what he said. It wasn’t funny to me.”
“I wouldn’t watch a show like that.” Jimmy shook his head, remembering. “Sometimes people say bad things about me. They laugh. I don’t.”
“Yeah, your feelings are hurt.” Janey looks out the window for a few minutes and adds, “I know what that feels like.”
They are silent, as the bus rolls up to the Goodwill building. Janey maneuvers her wheelchair towards the ramp that is lowering for her. Jimmy, as usual, picks up both their backpacks and carries them out to the sidewalk.
Once inside the building, past the racks and tables of clothes and dishes and electronics, they make their way to the door that leads to the back rooms. Three or four workers are going in that direction too, and one of them is William, the manager of the sorting rooms, who smiles and holds the door open for Janey. “Welcome to another day in paradise,” he calls.
Jimmy likes William and his job as a sorter and hanger-upper of the donated clothes. It isn’t paradise, of course, it’s just the usual workroom, but he likes working in a place where no one expects him to talk or even look at them, if he doesn’t want to. And he feels good when the racks of clothes hanging neatly are ready to go out into the shop. William is the only person besides Janey and his mother that he ever wants to look at. He has been working on eye contact with his therapist, though. Maybe he’ll get better at it.
Janey rolls over to a table that is piled as usual with books and records and tapes. Her job is to sort them and repair any containers or books that are torn—hardbacks in one pile, paperbacks in another—and rewind tapes unless they are broken too badly to be fixed. Sometimes she sighs and stops working for a few minutes. Jimmy guesses she doesn’t like her job as well as he likes his. As William walks by, he pats her shoulder. “Good work, Janey.” She grins and gets back to work.
At the end of the day, both of their tables are clear: The books and tapes have been placed on the appropriate shelves in the store; the clothes are priced and ready to sell. Janey and Jimmy get on the bus waiting for them and join the other workers who live on the same route. Some are noisy, the younger ones who celebrate the end of another workday; others, like the old woman sitting in front of Jimmy, doze or stare out the window.
Jimmy wonders what they all are going home to. An empty room? A place with a bed and a meal, like Earl, whose job is to move stuff from the backroom into the store? Earl talked one day about the shelter for people like him without a home, and he wiped at tears when Jimmy told him he went home to his mom. Jimmy wasn’t sure what to do. He had seen his mother cry before, but never a wrinkled old man who sometimes didn’t have his teeth in.
A few minutes later, he hangs Janey’s backpack on her chair, and as they walk, he remembers to ask her about the place she lives in. “A group home?”
“One guy, three women, including me. It works good, most of the time. We have schedules for cooking, for cleanup, for using the washing machine, and for the TV and quiet time. When Jerry forgets his meds, he sometimes goes off track, and we all remind him because that’s kind of hard to watch. He is nice, but his mind works too fast, and he gets mixed up cooking, so I’m usually his partner. I’m the brain, and he can reach the back of the oven. He works in a lumberyard, stacking up wood.”
She laughs. “Then there’s Ellie. She had a bad car accident, but it doesn’t slow her down much. She wears men’s trousers, boots, flowered blouses, big hair ribbons that match, and a lot of lipstick. She buys her clothes at the reduced piles at Goodwill, and her room is full of stuffed animals. She doesn’t work, and Gladys, our social worker, told her she has to at least clean the kitchen and bathroom once a week to earn her keep.”
“Where does she get money?”
“She’s on Social Security, I guess.”
“Who pays the rent?”
“We all pay a little part of it. Gladys says the state supports group homes like ours.”
Janey turns the corner. “I’ll find out if it’s okay with the others if you come see our house next week.” Her invitation sounds both scary and exciting. He’ll ask his mom about it.
The quiet day becomes a quiet evening, mostly because Dad doesn’t come home. “At his union meeting,” his mother explains. “But come out and look at the hedge. One side is almost done, except for the top. Since tomorrow’s Saturday, maybe you’d like to be a superhero on a ladder?”
* * *
“Shush, Dad is still sleeping.” Mom wakes him up, and after a quick breakfast (cereal again, not pancakes after all), they go out into the yard and find Patsy struggling with the tall ladder. “About time.” She hands it to Jimmy. “Go, Captain Marvel!”
With the two women holding the ladder stable, Jimmy and the clippers move along the hedge without mishaps. When he’s done, one half of the hedge looks good. “Naked, but good,” Patsy says. They rake up the leaves and branches and add them to the growing pile behind the garage. “Good thing I have a back of a garage, too,” she adds. “We can wait a few days before we have to decide how to get rid of this stuff. And, Jimmy, if we can manage it, can you help me with the top of my side before we do the bottom? Tomorrow? Early?”
Jimmy glances at his mother, sees her smile, nods. But he has other things on his mind, and he might forget. “Don’t forget to wake me up, Mom.”
His mother had left sandwiches for lunch, and when they come back to the house, most of them are gone. So is Dad, and she says not to worry, tells him to take a shower and they’ll finish the sandwiches and watch a little TV until he comes home. When they finally turn off the TV, they see his father sitting in the dark on the front porch. His mother motions for Jimmy to go to his room. “Early wake-up tomorrow, remember?”
His parents’ voices rise and fall in waves outside his window. He cannot hear what they are saying, but they don’t seem to be mad. He sleeps, lulled by the drift of words.
11
Hank, out on the unlit porch, huddles in the curve of the old wicker chair, not moving except to bring a cigarette to his lips, and I hesitate. Something is wrong. Did he find out that we went ahead with the hedge work? Is he so upset that his anger has gone silent?
I open the screen door. “Hank?”
He doesn’t answer.
“What is it, Hank?”
His head moves. He glares over his shoulder at me. “Nothing you’d care about.” He returns to his huddle. “Go to bed and leave me alone.”
“I care, Hank. Something’s happened. Where were you today? What is it?”
When he doesn’t answer, I slide a chair next to his and try to think what I can say to break through the wall of silence he’s built. This is about something more important than the hedge. He would yell about that. Work? That seems to be going pretty well, despite the emergency union meeting last evening. He’s been working at the aluminum factory for more than fifteen years, a raise every year, his job secure especially as a union member. It has to be something else.
Acid burns at the back of my throat. I suspect I know the reason for Hank’s behavior. Or lack of it, the absence of the yelling, screaming, flailing, stomping, turning over furniture. Silence is not among his responses to anger. This retreating, tightening, frightening stillness is worse.
Lloyd must have called again. Talked to Hank. Told him everything. I wait.
The moon pokes through a cloud. Hank’s lips move. “The union has given up on us. They have agreed to let the company cut back its workforce by seventy percent. By workforce they mean workers like me, trained but not necessary once they send the work to China to people who can do what I’ve been doing for next to nothing.”
“Are you sure? You’ve worked there so long.”
“So has most everybody. Three hundred of us. All out of jobs in two weeks.” His lips curl in a snarl as he adds, “With good recommendations, they assured us, and a severance pay of one week. Some of us had a meeting today to protest. Nothing we can do about it, the union rep said. Happening all over.”
His words become a garbled murmur. I reach for his hand, but he snatches it away and rubs it across his eyes. He finally looks at me.
“We can talk tomorrow,” I whisper. “We can figure out what to do.”
“Won’t matter.” For a moment, only the breeze moves the air. Then he stands up abruptly, and his chair crashes to the porch. “Damn it to hell! Why can’t a guy get a break in this world?” He leaps down to the walk and disappears into the road. His words, “I’ll be back, maybe,” make their way to me on the porch.
* * *
In the morning, Jimmy wakes up and pours his cereal, and when I come into the kitchen, he doesn’t look up from his bowl to notice the dark circles under my eyes. Around a mouthful of cereal, he says, “Superhero here. Is Patsy ready?”
I can see through the kitchen window that she is attempting to move the ladder through the hole in the hedge to her side. “She’s waiting for you, strong guy. I’ll make you both lunch if you want. Let me know when you want a break.” I manage to make my voice calm, but I can only get a cup of coffee down as I wonder where Hank is and whether he’s okay.
