Aunt Mary Louise sighs. “Seems like I don’t have energy for anything these days.”
“You should get out more,” Joelle says over her shoulder. “You need exercise and to quit sitting around.”
“I guess I do,” Aunt Mary Louise agrees.
Until a year ago Aunt Mary Louise went to work along with Vernon. She did a day shift at the chicken-packaging plant south of town, which meant no one was home when Joelle got back from school. She’d open a bag of chips, get a can of soda from the fridge, and have the place to herself for a couple of hours. She’d settle down on the couch and do her homework, slowly and neatly, from beginning to end, with no interruptions. Embarrassing to admit, but she liked doing homework. She enjoyed memorizing history dates and making math problems come out right. Tests weren’t that hard for her. Somehow she always knew the answers. She actually felt steadier, more orderly when she took them, though she kept this to herself. It would just be another weird thing about her for people at school to fasten on.
Unfortunately, Aunt Mary Louise lost her chicken plant job. She was laid off because her legs started hurting and she couldn’t stand up all day and gut chickens. She put in for a sit-down position, but never heard if she was even in the running. Now, whenever Joelle gets home from school, she’s there, lying on the couch, smoking the place up and reading a novel. She keeps stacks of them on the floor of her closet, worn-out paperbacks she picks up at yard sales with titles like Dark Side of Desire and Jailbirds Don’t Sing.
“I’m serious. You have to take better care of your health,” Joelle says, sitting down beside her after the dishes are finished.
“I know,” Aunt Mary Louise murmurs. You can see she’s not about to change anything.
“Are there any Indians that you heard about in my background?” Joelle asks her suddenly.
“Indians? You mean like warpath Indians?”
“Yes.”
“Uh-uh. Not that I was ever told,” Aunt Mary Louise says. “You came from Chicago.”
“I know.”
“On a freight train, they said.”
“I know that. I just wondered if—”
“Which always seemed strange to me. I mean, why a freight train? Why didn’t you come on a regular passenger train or by bus like everyone else?”
“How do I know?”
“Did I ever tell you about that first day you came to live with us?”
“You did.”
“About what you said when we brought you into your room here for the first time and showed you your bed?”
“I heard,” Joelle says more loudly, but Aunt Mary Louise doesn’t register. She is bright-eyed and far away.
“Me and Vernon had you by the hand, one on each side, and we brought you into your room, which we’d got all fixed up for your arrival, and you said, ‘Do I get my own pillow?’ ”
Joelle doesn’t say anything. She focuses her eyes on the floor and keeps them there.
“Remember? It was so cute. ‘Do I get my own pillow?’ you asked, in this teeny-weeny voice. Because you’d always had to share it, I guess, like with your crazy mother who threw you out the window. Or maybe you just never had a pillow at all. Can you imagine that? A child who never had a pillow to lay her head on?”
“You told me that before.”
“I guess I have,” Aunt Mary Louise says.
“About a hundred times.”
“You should tell me to shut up.”
Joelle looks at her. She feels helpless, as if she’s caught in a net. Half of her is angry, furious even, that Aunt Mary Louise would tell her this, over and over, without thinking how it might make her feel. There’s no more pathetic thing than a little child asking, “Do I get my own pillow?” as if she’d never been anything to anybody her whole life, as if she were a throw-out. Who needs to be reminded of that?
But the other half of Joelle knows that Aunt Mary Louise is telling her this story because she loves her. It’s one of the precious memories that Aunt Mary Louise hoards, that she brings out to make herself feel better. Because things in Aunt Mary Louise’s life haven’t always been so great. And they especially aren’t great right now.
“So nothing about Indians that you can remember?”
Aunt Mary Louise shakes her head.
“Somebody said I looked like one.”
“An Indian?” Aunt Mary Louise snorts. “You’ve got South America in you, that’s what I think. Vernon said something about the West Indies one time. He did some research on you but never found out much. How you made it up to Chicago to get yourself born, I don’t know.”
“Someday I’m going to that office in Badgerville and check things out for myself,” Joelle says, standing up.
“You won’t find anything there. That office was closed. I know because I wanted medical information about you a few years ago and there was no sign of the place. Then I heard you could contact a state agency in Hartford, but when I called up there, you weren’t in the records.”
“There must be information written down somewhere. Maybe they didn’t want to tell you. They could have been trying to protect people who didn’t want me to find out about them.”
“Maybe.” Aunt Mary Louise heaves a distracted sigh. Her hand finds its way to the cigarette pack on the coffee table. “There was a bunch of Indians living down around Westerly that Vernon used to know when he worked for the railroad,” she muses. “They’d all drive up to the ball games in Pawtucket on weekends.”
“Hmm.” Joelle glances at her watch.
“And then there’s Queenie.”
“That old black lady in the park? She’s Indian?”
“There’s a mix there, I’d guess. People say she’s a descendant of one of the early tribes around here. She can’t live indoors, that’s one thing.”
“When’s Vernon getting back?” Joelle asks.
“No telling. There’s no telling with him lately.”
“Well, I’ve got homework.”
“You go on, sweetie.” Aunt Mary Louise glances up fondly. “Don’t worry about me. I’m just going to lie here and rest my bones. I’ll be tip-top by tomorrow.”
* * *
Carlos, coming face-to-face with Joelle in the hall the next day, says: “Buenos días. Have you been over to look in the library yet?”
“No!” Joelle says.
Carlos drops his eyes and gets ready to go on by, but then Joelle changes her mind and says, “Okay, yeah, I went.”
“You did?”
“The Narragansetts don’t look like me.”
“Not exactly, I know, but—”
“They’re shrimps, for one thing.”
“Oh,” says Carlos. “I just thought there was something about—”
“And they’re not even real!” Joelle adds in disgust. “The artist didn’t care what anyone looked like, he was just painting types. Black hair, beads, peace pipes. They could be anyone. You’re the Indian around here. . . . Do they look like you?”
“No,” Carlos says quietly.
“Do I look like a type?”
“No.”
“I was born in Chicago!” Joelle shouts angrily. “I don’t even come from around here!”
She glances away. She’s never told anyone any of her facts. Here she is sounding off in a public hallway. She steals a look at Carlos, who appears to be suffering under her barrage.
“Sorry,” he mutters.
“It’s okay, don’t worry about it. People always get me wrong. I’m not what anybody thinks.”
Carlos nods without looking. He really isn’t that much shorter than she is, Joelle notices. He must have been standing on low ground before. She likes the way he doesn’t try to defend himself by getting angry back.
“I was thinking about that Indian council place,” she finds herself announcing a second later. “You know, the place in the woods you were talking about?”
“You want to go?” Carlos gazes at her in surprise.
“No. But I migh
t change my mind.”
“We could go tomorrow. This afternoon I’m driving with my mother to pick up my father at the airport in Providence.”
“Where’s your father been?”
“To California, for a medical conference. He’s an orthopedist.”
“A what?”
“He specializes in bones.”
“Big deal.”
Carlos nods thoughtfully, as if he’s really considering this. “How about if I meet you outside school tomorrow?” he goes on.
“In back,” Joelle says. “The posse is out front.”
“Oh, right.” Faint lines of what may actually be a smile appear on Carlos’s long face. “Why are they after you, anyway?”
“Because I’m royal.”
“What?”
“And lost.”
“Huh?”
“They want to rescue me.”
“From who?”
“I’m kidding.”
“Cariño mio!” exclaims Carlos. “When will I learn?”
They walk in opposite directions down the hall.
4
THE MINUTE JOELLE GETS HOME from school that afternoon, she goes to her room and gets out the thick Spanish-English dictionary she uses to do her Spanish homework. She bought it cheap from an older girl who dropped the course over the summer.
Sitting on her bed, Joelle thumbs through for the word cariño and finds the translation: “darling.” She already knows that mio is the word for the possessive “my.” So, unless she’s totally crazy, cariño mio translates as “my darling.”
But would Carlos ever knowingly say such a thing? Never. He’d die of embarrassment if he knew. He was just repeating a phrase Mrs. Correja, their Spanish teacher, blurts out from time to time, usually when someone has made a specially horrible mistake in pronunciation. Cariño mio, your brain is thick as mud! is what she means, though she never completes her sentence. Carlos probably thought she was swearing.
Still, just thinking that he said something like that to her makes Joelle blush. He is such a weirdo. Why a person would want to hike to some dumb Indian council place way off in the woods, alone with him, she doesn’t know. She should call him right now and say she can’t go after all.
“I’ll be a little late getting home tomorrow,” she ends up telling Aunt Mary Louise later, in the kitchen. They’re together at the counter, peeling carrots and chopping them into pieces for dinner. Aunt Mary Louise has offered to make glazed carrots with butter and brown sugar, a special treat that Vernon loves.
“I have to do a project on Indians with some other kids. We’re walking to a ceremonial meeting place in the woods.”
“That’s nice,” Aunt Mary Louise says, bending over to look in the fridge.
“This whole area was full of Narragansett Indians at one time. Their artifacts are still around,” Joelle informs her, exercising Carlos’s word. It sounds so professional.
“Artifacts, hmm,” says Aunt Mary Louise.
“You know what those are, right?” Joelle asks.
Aunt Mary Louise went to school only through the ninth grade. Though she’s a reader, there are spaces in her knowledge of the world that Joelle has recently begun to detect.
“I know,” Aunt Mary Louise says. “Bones, right?”
“They could be other things, too, like arrowheads or ax heads. You can tell when you find an arrowhead because you see striations in the stone.”
“See what?” Aunt Mary Louise gazes at her.
“Striations,” Joelle says. “Marks that show the stone was honed to make a sharp edge, probably with another stone.”
“Oh.” Aunt Mary Louise lowers her head.
“I wasn’t sure what it meant either,” Joelle says quickly, so she won’t feel bad. “A kid I know said it, and I checked it in the dictionary to be sure I had it right.”
“I should do that more,” Aunt Mary Louise answers with a weary sigh. “I never look up anything. That’s why I don’t know much.”
“You know a lot!” Joelle protests, shocked that she’d say that. Even if it is a little true, it’s nothing she can help. She had to drop out of school. Her father fell off a ladder and broke his back when she was fifteen. He couldn’t work afterward, and there were five children to feed. Aunt Mary Louise was the oldest, so she applied for her father’s old job in a typewriter factory in Providence. Amazingly, she was hired! (She lied about her age.) It’s a story she’s told many times.
Aunt Mary Louise shakes her head, then pats Joelle on her arm.
“You do it for me,” she says. “Keep looking things up and being smart. That’s why I went and found you, to carry on where I got stopped. I knew you had it in you when I first saw your face. Did I ever tell you about that?”
Joelle doesn’t say anything. She picks another carrot out of the plastic bag and starts peeling it, though there are more than enough already.
“I recall that day so well,” Aunt Mary Louise goes on eagerly. “I recall it like yesterday.”
* * *
The reason Aunt Mary Louise decided to adopt Joelle was that she got married to Vernon but was too old to have a real baby. They were late bloomers, past forty. One day it hit her that she had to have somebody to come after her. She couldn’t just die and leave nothing behind.
“There needs to be someone who has the print of you in them, or life doesn’t make sense,” she’s told Joelle many times.
Vernon was against the idea at first. He’d been married once before and had a child who died or something. He wasn’t eager to get into that again.
Aunt Mary Louise talked and talked about a child, though. She went on for a year or more, wouldn’t stop talking about it. Maybe she drove Vernon crazy because one day, suddenly, he up and agreed. He made a few phone calls, they got in the car and took a ride to Connecticut, to the center in Badgerville. And who should be waiting there, just arrived the week before from the crate at the depot, but Joelle.
“You were not the most awe-inspiring sight in the world,” Aunt Mary Louise informs her now, laying herself back heavily on the couch, going into a story Joelle has heard before, though not so often as some others. Aunt Mary Louise likes the high drama of the early stories better: crazy mothers, open windows, freight trains.
“You had nothing, just the clothes on your back when you arrived. Even after they’d cleaned you up, you didn’t look too good. I remember how they brought you in and we just knew, Vernon and me, that nobody else was probably going to take you. The surface didn’t look too promising. Most people who adopt want a newborn that hasn’t got much experience of the world. They don’t want to take a risk on the older kids, in case something has happened that’s already messed them up. You can’t always tell by looking at the surface. Only years later, it shows up when they start acting bad.
“Well, with you, your surface already looked bad because of you living out in the depot for who knows how long, but we could tell you were all right inside. You had good eyes that looked right at us, real sharp and curious. You didn’t say anything, but you didn’t cry, either. That was good because the one thing Vernon didn’t want was a crybaby.”
Joelle finds herself nodding. It’s pathetic, but she nods, as if she wants to hear more. And the terrible thing is, she does. But she also hates listening. She hates how it makes her feel.
“And you never did cry,” Aunt Mary Louise adds thoughtfully, as she has on other occasions. “Right up to now. Not when you fell or hurt yourself or were frightened. Not for anything. Why is that?”
She looks at Joelle with real curiosity. Joelle gives her a level gaze back.
“I don’t know.”
“Well, it’s odd.”
“No, it’s not. Why should I cry if I don’t feel like it?”
Aunt Mary Louise sighs. “I guess you shouldn’t.” She goes on: “Anyway, it wasn’t ten minutes after they brought you in to us that I said to Vernon, ‘Okay, this is the one.’ And he said, ‘Good choice.’ ”
&nb
sp; “He did?” Joelle asks. This is new information. “You never told me he said that.”
“He did.”
“I thought he didn’t care one way or the other. You said that before.”
“Of course he cared when he saw you! He had to see you first, then his heart went out.”
Joelle takes a peek at Aunt Mary Louise to be sure she’s not making this up. Vernon doesn’t usually let his heart go out to anything.
“So I asked the woman to tell us your name. Well, she looked at Vernon, and Vernon looked at her, and nobody knew, if you can believe it. You were so new at that place they hadn’t had time to get the details yet, the few details there were. And, of course, you wouldn’t say anything.”
“Wait a minute,” Joelle can’t help breaking in. “I’d been there a week, and they hadn’t given me a name in all that time?”
“I guess not,” Aunt Mary Louise says, “because you didn’t have one.”
“That does not make sense. They would have thought one up by then.”
“Well, they hadn’t,” Aunt Mary Louise says. “Or they hadn’t wanted to call you anything until they knew the right name. Anyway, what happened was, the woman announced how she’d seen this movie on TV the night before. And—I’ll never forget this—she said it was about an orphan girl named Joelle who grew up to be Miss America. I can’t remember exactly what she grew up to be, but it was somebody like that. So she asked us, how would we like that name for the time being? Until they could find out what your real name was. We said that would be all right, and she wrote it down on her paper. Later, when we went to adopt you properly, they told us you’d been called Sissie in Chicago. Short for Sylvia, I think. Anyway, Vernon said you were Joelle to him by then, and he wouldn’t think of changing. Vernon, is that you?”
It is Vernon, coming through the door. Early.
Aunt Mary Louise looks startled for a moment. Then she remembers what he said at dinner the night before: He had to take off from work at three o’clock today to get a tooth pulled. It was giving him trouble.
“Oh yes, I forgot,” she answers, even though Vernon hasn’t said anything. “That didn’t take long. I guess it wasn’t too bad?”
The Crying Rocks Page 3
