Breaking Out of Bedlam

by Leslie Larson

  THE INTERROGATION

  Sunday morning my kids showed up like the Gestapo.

  I don’t like the church services here, which are what they call nondenominational. That means it’s a mishmash of a lot of religions, with a preacher who wears a collar like a Catholic and works down at the drunk shelter during the week. It’s a free-for-all, with the lunatics from B Wing herded into a row of folding chairs, the droolers parked in the back, and old ladies coming out of the woodwork to warble and pray. There’s so much rigmarole and shifting around and moaning and singing, you think you’ve already died and gone to hell. It doesn’t have much to do with Jesus, I’ll tell you. So on Sundays I just take my folding chair and sit outside my door by the courtyard. I look at the plants and birds and pray a little. That’s my church.

  That’s what I was doing yesterday when I see three people coming down the walkway. I didn’t pay them much mind because a lot of people have visitors on Sunday. I didn’t recognize them until they were right up next to me.

  “My goodness, don’t you know your own kids?” Dean said, before he bent over and kissed me.

  “Well, I wasn’t expecting you.”

  “What’re you doing sitting out here all by yourself?” he asked.

  “I’m just biding my time, taking in the sun.” I looked him up and down. “My God, Dean. How much weight have you put on?”

  I’d say he’d gained about thirty pounds since the last time I saw him. His face was puffy and he had on them khaki pants that aren’t real flattering anyway. The side pockets stood out like elephant ears and his gut hung over the waistband. Kenny, he was just as cute and slim as he’s ever been, though he looked like he’d lost a little more hair. Glenda—well, it hasn’t been long since I’ve seen her. She was wearing one of her circus outfits, something more fit for a clown than a woman.

  They all made a big fuss about how good I looked—how much weight I’d lost and how I looked younger, better’n I’ve looked in years. It didn’t take a genius to figure out they had something up their sleeve. We went inside and the boys milled around while Glenda and I sat in the armchairs. Turns out they’d already been to the office and spoken to what they called the administration, which I took to mean Bigbutt. Glenda told the boys about Vitus first chance she got, and here they all came to put out the fire.

  “We want to meet this man,” Dean said.

  I don’t know where he gets his manner because nobody in my family, or Abel’s either, ever put on airs. But Dean swaggered around like John Wayne with his hands in his pockets and a scowl on his face.

  “It’s a free country,” I said. “Be my guest.”

  Not that they needed my permission, because as it turns out they’d already gotten Vitus’s room number from the office, and off the two boys went, leaving Glenda to guard me.

  “You happy with yourself?” I asked her.

  “Seems like they got the right to meet the man you want to marry,” she said. She switched the TV on to a cooking show. That big fat guy from New Orleans was stuffing a fish with shrimp and oysters.

  “Glad I don’t have to do all those dishes he’s dirtying,” I said, but Glenda was giving me the silent treatment. She chewed a hangnail and kept her eyes on the screen until the boys got back.

  They walked in sober as judges. Dean went so far as to take a little notepad out of his back pocket and ask Kenny, “How do you spell the last name?”

  “K-O-V-I-C,” I butted in.

  Dean sat down on the foot of my bed and Kenny leaned against my dressing table. After a lot of throat clearing and pants adjusting and head scratching, Dean said, “Mom, we really hope you’ll reconsider this whole thing.”

  “Are you the spokesman for the group?” I asked him.

  He was a bully when he was younger, always tormenting the other two. Now he was acting the big man. He needed to trim his eyebrows and the hair in his nose.

  “We’re just trying to protect you, Mom,” he said. “You could lose everything. Your house. All your savings.”

  “Far as I’m concerned, I already have. Somebody’s living in my house, and it sure ain’t me. I expect I have some money, but I’ll be damned if I know where it is. And my things—my dishes and furniture and knickknacks—they’re not getting much use, are they? Looks like I only stand to gain by marrying Vitus. Looks like, if anything, I’ll be getting back control of what’s rightly mine.”

  Hoo-ee, he didn’t like that. The color rose in his face, and he leaned back on the bed like someone slapped him. The truth hurts. Glenda and Kenny looked down at the floor so as not to embarrass him any more than he’d already embarrassed himself. Their fearless leader had just put his foot in his mouth.

  “You don’t know anything about him,” Dean went on. “You don’t know where he’s from or what he’s done in his life. Why he’s here, who his family is. Nothing.”

  “I know enough,” I said. “Me and him has spent plenty of time together. I know all I need to know.”

  “I’m tempted just to go ahead and let you do it,” Dean said. “Let you marry that man and live with the consequences.”

  “Why don’t you do that, honey? Why don’t you just let me go my own way, since you don’t have much of a choice about it in the first place?”

  Nobody had anything more to say, so we just sat there and eye-balled each other. The boys milled around like cattle. Glenda couldn’t keep her teeth off that hangnail. I found myself wishing Abel was there. He had a way of making us feel more like a family, like people who liked being with each other.

  “Don’t let me keep you if you have things you need to do,” I finally said.

  The boys had flown in from out of town just for the day. All three kids lined up at my chair like I was a department store Santa Claus. They took turns bending over and kissing me on the cheek.

  “Good-bye, my darlings,” I said. “I love you, no matter what.”

  I CLOSED THE door and flopped down in my armchair. I was beat. The silence was heaven. I hadn’t been sitting there more than a minute when Vitus showed up at the sliding glass door.

  “How did it go?” he asked as he sat down across from me.

  “Well, what do you think?” I asked, maybe not as nice as I could have. “They declared war. Everybody dug their heels in and nobody gave an inch. We’re on our own, Vitus. I’m surprised you have to ask.”

  He looked taken aback that I’d talk so rough to him, and I was sorry for it, but I’d plain run out of sugar. “I don’t know what you said or did,” I went on, “but they came back here with their minds made up. They’re more against this thing than ever. We can’t count on them for nothing.”

  “Well then, we’ll just proceed,” Vitus said. “I’ll have to call my lawyer.” He came over and laid his hand on my shoulder. “I’ll do it first thing tomorrow. We’ll get him to evict those tenants of yours right away.”

  I hate to pit Vitus against my kids, but that’s the way it’s shaping up. I haven’t talked to him yet today to see what the lawyer said or what we have to do. Things are moving. It feels like I’m getting swept along in a fast current and there’s not much I can do but keep my head above water and hope for the best.

  TWO DAYS AFTER the kids were here, Glenda phoned me up first thing in the morning. “Your fiancé is wreaking havoc!” she yelled. Those are the words she used, wreaking havoc. I got a kick out of hearing her call Vitus my fiancé. It made me feel so young and adventurous, like I was about to take off on a honeymoon.

  “His name is Vitus. You better get used to it.”

  His lawyer got through to the renters living in my house and told them they have to move. Now! So they went into a tizzy and called Glenda, who called me and went apeshit about how she couldn’t calm them down and what is Vitus, the Russian mafia, and what kind of threats did he make to those people? “That man is ruthless!” she said.

  But guess what? They’re packing up! Mov
ing out! Glenda tried to smooth their feathers, but they don’t want no part of whatever’s going on, so they’ll be out of the house in thirty days.

  There was a ringing in my ears when I hung up the phone. The wheels are in motion, I told myself. Here we go.

  THE WORD

  Dead.

  I practiced saying that word every day after Alice was taken from me. I repeated it like a drumbeat in time to my footsteps, my breathing, the smack of the broom against the rug I hung from the clothesline as I beat, dust flying as I swung and hit, again and again. Dead, dead, dead. It was the sound of the spoon clanging the edge of the jar as I knocked out the last bit of jelly, Abel’s rhythm when he pushed into me at night. I wrote it on the scraps of paper that passed through my hands, the pen sliding over the slippery surface of magazine pages, catching on the bumps and pits on dry edges of newspaper. In the fog on the bathroom mirror, in the dirt that spilled out of my shoe onto the kitchen floor. In the dust that piled up on the coffee table and sideboard, dust that comforted me from where I lay in bed, making the shiny surfaces softer, hiding the reflection of my own face.

  Right in the middle of dead are the first two letters of eat, and I didn’t stop, didn’t lose my appetite. Nope, I kept on eating, but for a long time, months and months, all I wanted was white bread, Webers, slice after slice washed down with milk, big cold glasses of it. Soft and bland and white, all white. I ate the slices one by one, plain, or maybe I laid them in a saucer and poured the milk over them, ate them with a spoon like pudding. I might take two or three slices and wad them up into a ball, press them together and roll them into a globe, eat it like an apple, just for a change. Or spread a slice with butter and sprinkle on a little sugar—white, of course—for dessert.

  I could eat half a loaf a day, easy. You’d be surprised. Some days I ate more. It plugged me up, that’s for sure, in more ways than one. I had this hunger deep down, but the minute I thought of eating anything, I got queasy as hell. Anything save for that bread and milk. I still cooked for Abel, pork chops and fried chicken and meat loaf. Lots of potatoes: fried, mashed, or boiled. In the morning, eggs and bacon, or he ate some cold cereal if I couldn’t get out of bed. He was never big on vegetables, maybe just a can of creamed corn now and then. Green beans.

  “Try some,” he prodded, pointing with his fork. “Just a little.” He was grieving, too, real deep. I could see it. When we got married, I prepared myself for him to pay Alice no mind, but from the day she was born he was tickled to death, like she was his very own.

  “Don’t want none,” I said, pressing my lips together to keep from heaving.

  Dead. I repeated the word so much, it lost its meaning. I stared at the letters ‘til they looked scrambled. How did you spell it? Daed? Ded? Dead, I told myself, trying to get it through my thick skull. She’s dead. I couldn’t get used to it. Instead, I was losing my mind.

  My aunt Alpha, the same one who used them crystals for scrying, told me a story about how my sister Emerald died. God gives every baby a choice whether to live out their life here on earth or to go up to heaven as an angel, she said. Some babies choose to be an angel even before they’re born, when they’re just a tadpole in their ma’s belly. Those are the miscarriages. Others make it out into the world, but once they get a look at how things are, they decide they don’t want no part of it. Those are the babies that die. They only get one year to decide. After their first birthday the deal’s off, and they’re stuck with this world and the family they were born to.

  So that’s what happened to your sister, my aunt explained. She saw there was something better for her in heaven, so she decided to go straight there and live with Jesus. She’ll be waiting for you when you die, Alpha said, but for now you two got to be apart. She won’t have no mumps or measles like you. She won’t have to step on no rusty nails or get stung by bees or spanked by your ma for being bad. She’ll never be cold or dirty or hungry. She’s the lucky one, Alpha said. You’re the one with a row to hoe.

  That almost got me to hating my sister Emerald, feeling jealous that she was sitting up in heaven eating candy and floating on clouds while I had to get up early and tote water or sleep squished between Ruby and Crystal because I was low man on the totem pole. How come Emerald decided she was too good for us, that she had better things to do than stay down on earth and pull her share of the weight?

  So I figured maybe that’s what happened with Alice, my little angel. She saw what I’d done, how she was born in sin and how I’d tried to get rid of her, how her daddy took off, and how Abel loved her, even though she didn’t belong to him. She saw the shame in my heart, how I’d made a mess of everything, and she said “No thanks, this is not for me.”

  That was one story, a simple one, the kind a young girl might believe. But I had a better one, even though it was simple, too. That story went like this: This was my punishment, exactly what I deserved considering the things I’d done. That little girl was taken away because I wasn’t worthy of her, not with my lying and cheating and adulterating. God took her to a better place instead of leaving her with a no-account mother who’d tried to murder her before she saw the light of day.

  THAT WAS NOVEMBER. A few months later, not long after Christmas, Abel got a job at the plant in Flint. I was glad to move, to get away from those neighbors in Pontiac who saw what happened, from the women who gave me sorrowful looks wherever I showed my face.

  We rented a little house with a screened-in porch and two bedrooms, with a yard all our own. We didn’t know a soul in the whole place, and each new person I met was one more who didn’t know my story. I aimed to keep it that way. Abel and I didn’t talk about it between the two of us, either. It got so just the thought of having to say her name sent me into a panic, even though she was in my thoughts every minute of every day. It was lonely inside that cocoon of silence, but it was the only way I could carry on.

  It’s so strange to say her name now. To write it down knowing that someone else will read this, will finally know her story. It’s a peculiar comfort to me after keeping that secret so long. Alice would have been one year old on May 20, 1933. Not long after that I found out I was pregnant again. Dean was born the following March. When I was in labor, the doctor asked, “Is this your first, Mother?” I bit my lip and nodded, crossed my fingers that my female parts wouldn’t give me away.

  Glenda was born in Flint, too, and then Kenneth came after we moved out to California in 1941, when Abel got a job in defense, working on the B-1 bomber. Every one of those kids is the spitting image of him, like all I had to do with it was sit on them nine months until they hatched out. I don’t mind, to tell you the truth. It’s the least I could do, all things considered. I love them, of course. And I did everything a mother should do: made sure they were clean and clothed and fed. But I always thought of those three as Abel’s kids, the ones I gave him.

  Mine was gone.

  Yes, she was all mine. She grew up inside me, in my thoughts. I marked all her birthdays, and every time one of my kids did something special—got a tooth, or took their first step, or started school—I imagined Alice doing it, pictured in my mind what she’d look like, what she’d say. Those kids right in front of me, with their squabbling and snotty noses, they couldn’t measure up. Especially Glenda, the only girl, the other girl. I feel terrible about it, but the love I felt for Alice was too powerful.

  It got the best of me.

  THE NECKLACE

  We were just tucking into lunch (beef stew, green beans, and a cube of orange Jell-O) when they sent those boys around with baskets of rolls. They do that sometimes to make us feel like we’re in a restaurant.

  Who should come around to our table but Marcos’s pretty boy, Renato, with his butt-hugging pants and pouty little smile. He leaned over and I took a roll, then old Krol, then Carolyn. Poison Ivy sat there with her tight-lipped smile and helmet hair, waiting her turn. When Renato held out the basket, she stretched her claw toward it,
but just when she was ready to snag a bun she let out a bloodcurdling scream that would raise the dead. My God! Chairs around us scraped, dishes rattled, heads spun in our direction.

  “What in the world?” I hollered.

  Old Krol lowed like a calf. His paw closed on the bun he was holding, squashing it to nothing.

  “Goodness gracious!” Carolyn squawked, rocking back in her wheelchair.

  Ivy put her hands around her neck like she was choking the life out of herself. She juiced the volume on her screaming ‘til I thought the windows would shatter. Those who were able stood up at their tables to get a better view. Renato drew back like he’d been scorched. Even the droolers took note. A few of them stopped sucking their lunch up those straws long enough to flop their heads in our direction.

  “She’s choking! Somebody help her!” Carolyn yelled, which surprised me, seeing as how she felt about Ivy.

  Bigbutt, who’s always hovering around somewhere, came bustling across the dining room, using that hind end of hers to cut a swath through the tables like Moses parting the Red Sea. “What is it, Mrs. Archer?” she yelled. “Do you need help?”

  Ivy still had her hands around her own neck. Her eyes bugged out. Her screams quieted down to a bunch of short grunts like something out of a dirty movie. It embarrassed me to hear it.

  Bigbutt leaned down in her face. “Are you all right? Should I call someone?”

  “Oh!” Ivy moaned. “Oh!” She turned her terrified eyes toward Renato and pointed one of her talons straight at him.

  He took a step back, looking like he’d seen a ghost.