Tell Me One Thing

by Deena Goldstone

  “What if I wasn’t home?” Jamie says to her as he opens the door wider and ushers her in.

  “Where would you be at five thirty in the morning? You have no life.”

  “How would you know that, Ellen? I haven’t spoken to you in a year.”

  “Jaime, you wear your singleness like a sign.” But Ellen is taking stock of his living situation and not looking at her brother at all. “Holy mother,” she says as she scans the living room/dining room space, “this is goddamn depressing. Could you have decorated a little bit at least? Put a picture on the wall. A bowl of fruit on the table. It’s like nobody lives here.”

  “And I’m happy to see you, too.”

  Ellen drops her small bag on the couch. “Can you make us some coffee? I’ve been flying all night.”

  Jamie moves into the tidy kitchen and Ellen takes one of the two barstools at the breakfast bar so she can watch her brother and talk while he gets the coffeemaker going.

  “You know what today is, don’t you?” She speaks to his back as he grinds the beans, measures the coffee carefully into the machine.

  “Liberation day plus one year.”

  “That’s one way to look at it.” And Ellen takes a pack of cigarettes out of her purse, a lighter.

  “Not in here,” Jaime says.

  “When did you get to be such an old lady?” But Ellen puts the pack away.

  Water gurgling now and seeping into the filter, Jamie turns his full attention to his sister. He leans against the counter and studies her. All the girls take after their father, large boned and rangy, with unruly ginger hair and the kind of skin that flushes with temperature changes or emotion. His mother contributed most of her genes to the boys. They all turned out dark like Carrie, with narrow faces, sharp chins, and a slightly haunted look. “I’m Black Irish,” Carrie would always say with a hint of apology.

  “What?” Ellen says now, challenging Jamie’s scrutiny.

  “I thought you were dying the last time I saw you.”

  “Oh, that …” Ellen waves her hand in the air, dismissing his concern with one airy gesture. “Nope. Just a bad patch.”

  Jamie wants to ask her what “a bad patch” means, but doesn’t. “You seem better” is all he says, quietly.

  Ellen shrugs. “Can I at least smoke on your microscopic patio?”

  “If you don’t leave your butts around.”

  “Jesus, Jamie.” But she goes out through the living room’s sliding glass door and makes sure to close it tightly behind her.

  On the front patio she smokes and paces, back and forth, back and forth, as if she’s working off some punishment. Thirty paces without cease. Jamie watches her and waits. He feels something within him stir, something buried under years of living alone. He loves this sister more than the others, more than the brothers who preceded him.

  They were the perfect “Irish twins,” who were treated as a team, a unit. Jamie knows that without Ellen he might not have survived at all. She was his protector, his guide, his interpreter of signs and storm warnings. All he could give her in return was his love, and he did. His adoration of Ellen knew no limits. At least until they hit adolescence, they were inseparable.

  Ellen finishes her cigarette, resists the urge to flip the butt into the sparse shrubbery, and watches her brother find two mugs, pour the coffee into them, open the refrigerator, and rummage for milk. He looks like an old man leaps into her mind. It’s the constrained movements—precise and miserly. The lack of energy. She shakes herself—this isn’t the Jamie she knew. What’s happened in the seven years she’s been away?

  Jamie was always the angriest of them all and the bravest, taking their father on when everyone else would scatter into rooms with locked doors, waiting out the “Hugh storm” as they called it. Too often Jamie’s anger, his outrage over the injustice of Hugh’s cruelty, would propel him into battles he could never win. And the punishments were severe. There were beatings with a belt or a fist well beyond any humane limit. There were times, and she doesn’t like to remember them, when she feared for her brother’s safety—the combination of Hugh’s drunkenness and Jamie’s righteous fury a recipe for disaster.

  It’s like someone has removed all his blood, Ellen thinks as she opens the sliding glass door and steps back into the living room. “Do you believe in vampires?” she asks him.

  And he grins, a wide, wholesome grin, which is what she had hoped for. This grinning Jamie she recognizes.

  “As in ‘I vant to suck your blood’? Or are we speaking metaphorically here? Because metaphorically, yes, I do believe in vampires.”

  “Metaphorically?” she teases him. “No one would know you’re an English teacher.”

  He pours her coffee and puts it on the breakfast bar and she climbs aboard a stool and they each sip their coffee and are silent. He wants to ask her what she’s doing here. She wants to ask him the same question—What are you doing here, Jamie? What’s happened to you since I left the States? But neither does. The admonition from their childhood to avoid intrusive questions—to mind your own business—still censors their speech.

  “Do you want to sleep for a while?” Jamie asks instead.

  “Sleep? I just got here. Take me somewhere, show me something, introduce me to someone. Feed me!” Ellen suddenly remembers she’s ravenous.

  “Okay.” He grins again. Ellen can’t get enough of that grin. “I can do the last. There’s somewhere we can go for breakfast you’ll like.”

  “Perfect!”

  JAMIE AND ELLEN WALK SLOWLY into Hillcrest, a part of San Diego Jamie likes. It feels a little offbeat to him, not dangerously so, but not bland or modern or touristy as some of his adopted city can be. It’s only a few minutes past seven and the staff at Sweet & Savory is just setting out the bright blue metal tables that occupy a thin strip of sidewalk.

  Inside the shop, Ellen is instantly delighted. “Oh, look!” she tells Jamie as she surveys the large, open, high-ceilinged room, mostly taken up by enormous ovens and bread-making tables.

  “I know,” he tells her, amused at her exuberance, “I’m here all the time.”

  Behind tall panels of glass, customers can watch the various breads being mixed and kneaded, baked, and taken out of the ovens before being loaded onto cooling racks where they are displayed for sale.

  “Oh, the smell!” Ellen says.

  “And they have pastries.” Jamie shows her the bulbous bakery case with its shelves upon shelves of flaky and sweet enticements. “There are scones or muffins, croissants, tarts, slices of frittata …”

  “One of each!” she says instantly.

  He grins at her, shaking his head.

  “What?” she asks him. “I have appetites.”

  “Go get us a table outside,” Jamie says, “and I’ll bring the food and cappuccinos.” He’s still smiling. The expression on his face makes Ellen happy.

  AT THE SMALL ROUND TABLE, just big enough for two people, a Shasta daisy resting in the center bud vase, white and fresh against the vivid blue, Ellen heaves a sigh as she sits down. She’s made it here. She loves her brother. Everything will be all right. At this moment, she’s certain of it. Checking to make sure Jamie is still engaged in pointing out their breakfast, she lights a quick cigarette.

  She tells herself to calm down, that she must take things slowly. They will have to find their way back to that old intimacy that made them both feel some measure of safety. Maybe then he’ll be able to hear her. Small steps, she cautions herself, although her blood is rushing with the urgency of disclosure.

  “It’s not one of everything, but it’s a sampling,” Jamie says as he unloads a tray holding several plates of various muffins—blueberry, corn with poppy seeds, banana nut—scones, and two croissants. There’s a small bowl of clotted cream, another of jam, and one of sliced strawberries. He knows it’s too much, but Ellen revels in excess. “The coffees are coming,” he says as he sits down.

  Ellen takes the chocolate croissant and watches a wi
sp of steam rise into the damp morning air as she opens it. “Oh, heaven,” she says, “warm from the oven.” She attends to adding jam, making sure to avoid her brother’s eyes as she volunteers, “We should call Mom today.” She knows what Jamie’s going to say, and he says it—“What for?”

  “Because today must be a hard one for her,” Ellen says, her tone neutral. “It’ll bring back the whole week. Those days in the hospital. The funeral. How she felt.”

  “And what I did.”

  “She’ll have forgiven you by now.”

  “That’s not the point. I haven’t forgiven her.”

  “Oh, Jamie, she did the best she could.”

  “And it wasn’t good enough,” he snaps back at her.

  And then there’s silence. Each looks away. Ellen watches a young gay couple walk their Jack Russell terrier across the street, holding hands as they stroll. One man lays his head, briefly, on the other’s shoulder, then straightens up and, incongruously, begins to sing. Ellen is riveted by his total lack of self-consciousness.

  Jamie replays the scene from a year ago in his mind, the act for which he needs to be forgiven. He wouldn’t take back a second of it. Even now he feels entitled to the exaltation he felt, the declaration of his emancipation from the lies of his family as he met his mother’s gaze and continued on, tossing his father’s clothes to the nearest greedy hands—shirts, sweaters, shoes, and then that maroon dressing gown the old man always wore at night.

  And a deeper memory pushes in that he doesn’t want to have, a much older one. Not this memory, he tells himself, please, but it rushes forward anyway, the floodgates open. There is his father, wearing that gown. Jamie remembers the tiny black fleur-de-lis scattered across the silk, and he sees it flapping open against Hugh’s startlingly white shins as he chases his fourteen-year-old self throughout the house. Hugh is very drunk, sputtering, yelling. Jamie remembers his father’s steaming red face. And he sees the enormous butcher knife Hugh brandishes above his head as he runs Jamie out the kitchen door. His mother, at the sink washing dishes, doesn’t turn around. Into the November snow Hugh chases him, bellowing all the while, “It’s your turn to die, Jamie!” And Jamie, terrified, had believed him, believed that if his father had caught him, he would have plunged in the knife.

  A COLLEGE KID WEARING a large white apron and a patterned bandanna around his forehead brings their coffees. He has that haven’t-shaved-in-a-couple-of-days look that for the life of her Ellen can’t figure out. Do they ever shave? Or do they shave a little? How is it possible to always look like you need a shave?

  “Hey,” he says to Jamie, “nice to see you again,” and Jamie nods at him. Then there’s more silence between the siblings.

  “Look,” Jamie finally says, “I moved three thousand miles away so I can put all the O’Connor shit behind me. There’s no fixing it.”

  “I don’t know, Jamie,” Ellen begins tentatively. She tries to tread very lightly now. “We can’t do anything about the past, but I think we can—”

  “We were brought up in a combat zone,” he cuts her off, “and we’ve all been crippled by it. Every one of us, except maybe Marianne. End of story.”

  “I don’t feel like a cripple,” Ellen says very carefully.

  “No?” Jamie challenges her, the image of his sister barely alive at their father’s wake vivid in his mind.

  Ellen knows precisely what he means. “At least not now.”

  “Good for you.” And he looks away again.

  She studies his profile. His jaw is set, his lips a thin line. This isn’t the face she wants to see. She offers him something. “Do you want to know why I looked that way when I came to Buffalo?”

  “I’m afraid to say yes,” Jamie tells her without taking his eyes off the small shops lined up across the street. Ellen waits. Jamie is deliberate, slow to reveal even a small part of his soul. She knows this about her brother. Finally he turns and meets her eyes, his voice a whisper. “I was so afraid you were dying, El.”

  “More like being reborn.”

  “Oh my God, Ellen, you haven’t been hijacked by some fundamentalist Christian—”

  And she bursts into a cascade of laughter. And he smiles at himself. “Well, you said ‘reborn.’ ”

  “We’re outside, I can smoke, right?”

  “If you have to.”

  “This is a long story,” she says as she lights a cigarette, preparing herself for the saga she’s about to tell. “Okay, here goes.… I went to Spain to get away from Buffalo. Well, really to get away from myself in Buffalo. And Dad, he seemed to be everywhere, you know?”

  Jamie nods. He left for the same reason.

  “It was my fault. I couldn’t leave it alone. I had to tell him about every new job I got, even though I knew—Jamie, I knew—that he’d tell me what was wrong with it and how I was an idiot to work there. And there’d come a time with each new guy I was seeing when I’d say, ‘Come home and meet my mom and dad.’ ”

  “A suicide mission,” Jamie says with quiet assurance. None of this is new to him. “Dad didn’t like any of them, and Mom probably said, ‘He seems nice enough.’ ”

  Ellen nods. “The phone would ring later that night and Dad would be sure to tell me what a loser I’d picked. And I’d defend the guy, even though I was having my own doubts by the time I took him home. And we’d start shouting at each other and I’d tell him if he ever wanted to see me again, he’d have to clean up his act and he’d shout at me that there was nothing wrong with his act and it was my act that was a pitiful mess.…” Ellen shrugs. “And he was right.”

  “Dad was never right,” Jamie says.

  “You know,” Ellen tells him, “you have to acknowledge truth wherever it comes from.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  And instead of getting angry, Ellen laughs again. “Jamie,” she says, “you don’t see the value of the truth?”

  “Mostly, no.”

  “Uh-oh,” Ellen says, “this is going to be harder than I thought.”

  “What is?”

  “Saving your life. I’m here to save your life.”

  “The impossible dream.” But he’s grinning. “You want another coffee?”

  He gets up, goes inside to get it, and she takes a deep breath. The mission is out on the table. He doesn’t seem offended or even reflexively resistant. She can slow down a bit, she thinks. They have time, and suddenly she’s exhausted. She lays her head on her crossed arms and feels the warmth of the metal table beneath them. By the time Jamie comes back with their new coffees, she’s asleep.

  SHE LEANS INTO HIM as they walk home. He has his arm around her and is laughing as she trips over her own feet. Anyone watching would think they were a couple stumbling home after a very drunken all-nighter.

  When they get back to the condo, Jamie opens the pullout couch in his second bedroom, the one he has made into his office, and tucks Ellen in. She’s mumbling “Thank you,” barely awake, and then she’s not. He takes his fifth period’s essays from his desk and closes the door softly behind him.

  The day is glorious, quintessential San Diego weather—assertive blue sky, a comforting breeze from the ocean, temperature just right for sitting in the sun. He’ll take the papers and another cup of coffee and read them on his patio—“microscopic” as it may be—while he waits for Ellen to wake up.

  He assigned his eighth graders The Miracle Worker. This is his honors class, and he’s hoping at least some of them will be able to think beyond the “triumph over adversity” reaction most people have when they read the play or see the movie. That treat, screening the movie, Jamie always saves for last. He wants them to come to the play without the overlay of Anne Bancroft and Patty Duke.

  For Jamie, Annie Sullivan is the more interesting character, more nuanced, and yes, ultimately the more “heroic.” Her own childhood was horrendous—institutionalized in a mental hospital because there was nowhere else to put her. Blind before an operation restored some measure of her s
ight. Literally falling at the feet of “important men” who came to visit the asylum and pleading for an education. And then, without any real training, coming to the Keller household as a young woman barely out of her teens and refusing to give up on the wild animal she found there—Helen. There’s a reason the play is titled The Miracle Worker and not Helen Keller. He hopes at least some of his students will see that. He doesn’t expect any of them, except maybe Colleen McAllister, who is serious beyond her thirteen years, to understand that Annie Sullivan is also heroic because she allows herself to love Helen fiercely. After all that life had thrown at her, she still opens her heart. That’s a kind of heroism Jamie doesn’t expect middle schoolers to begin to understand. That’s the kind of heroism he most admires.

  He picks up the first essay. It’s Chloe’s, outgoing, gregarious Chloe, who always greets him with “How’s it going, Mr. O’Connor?” and never seems to have a bad day. “Helen Keller was an amazing person who overcame all the challenges life threw at her” is her topic sentence. They’ve been working on creating good topic sentences. This one doesn’t bode well for an essay he’d want to read. Jamie puts the paper aside and tries the next one. “When Helen Keller met Annie Sullivan, it changed her life.” This one is from Kim-Ly, granddaughter of Vietnamese immigrants, who wears the shortest skirts in the class. Beside the ambiguous “it” that Jamie circles with a red pen, the sentence doesn’t promise any new thinking, either. He tries the third essay. “Being deaf, dumb, and blind didn’t stop Helen Keller from having a full life.” This one is from Sam, a too-earnest kid who always seems to Jamie as if he’s half Labrador puppy. Jamie circles the word “dumb” and writes, “Helen Keller was anything but ‘dumb.’ ”

  Jamie puts the essays aside and gets up. It’s moments like this, when he suspects that he hasn’t managed to motivate his kids to any creative thinking, that would depress most teachers he knows. But that’s not the effect they have on Jamie. Instead, he asks himself what he could have done differently. How could he have led his students away from conventional thoughts and into creative ones? What should he say when he hands these papers back to them? It’s like a puzzle where he has to find just the right pieces in just the right order to make the picture he wants them to consider appear in their heads.