More Than Allies

by Sandra Scofield

  He looked at it as if he didn’t know what it was.

  “I’ll get a seat,” she said. She thought he looked pleased, once he figured out what he was doing. They went inside and he moved into line behind some other kids.

  Only he backed away, one step, then another and another, until he had backed against the counter where the newspapers were spread out. Maggie hurried over to him. He looked ready to cry.

  “What now!” she said. He pointed, the tiniest gesture.

  She saw then that the boys in front of him were Hilario and Gus. Gus gave him a little wave, then said something in Spanish to Hilario, who snickered. They left.

  “What?” Maggie asked Jay, exasperated.

  Jay thrust the bill into her hand. “I don’t want any.”

  “What did they say? What did they do?”

  “Nothing! They didn’t say nothing to me.”

  She followed him out to the car. She made herself sit in silence. She would outlast him. She would make him say what was wrong. In a moment he said, “I should have gone to school. I missed practice for Spanish night.”

  “You’re not in Spanish night, Jay. Jack said. You know he said. Because of the paint can.” God, she hated Jack!

  He turned his head and hung his chin on the window. “I hate Jack,” he said quietly.

  “Jay.” She touched his arm lightly, but he yanked it away.

  “I talked to your dad this morning. He’s going to come up.”

  He swung around. “He’s coming back?”

  “He’s coming to—to see you.”

  When he didn’t say anything to that, she started the car. She pulled out into the street in the direction away from home. Maybe if they drove around a bit they would both calm down.

  She drove past the high school, a mistake, she soon saw, because buses were loading and students were crossing the street any place they liked. She slowed to a crawl.

  “Let’s go to Dad’s place,” Jay said. He’d pulled himself up in the seat.

  “What, honey?” She didn’t know where he meant.

  He pointed down the street. “You know, down by the freeway.”

  “Oh, the Gabrelli property. Okay.” She was relieved to get past the high school throng. In a couple more blocks they had crossed the back artery street and hit a poorly kept road that would deadend along the bank of the freeway.

  She parked on the shoulder of the road in front of the Gabrelli place. It didn’t look like anyone was there. The Gabrellis were Californians, and didn’t spend much of the year here. They had bought an old farm house to renovate, and Mo had worked for a month last summer clearing the property of brush and trash, checking and steadying the old shed they wanted to keep for its blue tin roof and look of groovy old times. He had taken Jay out with him most afternoons. There was an irrigation ditch along the back of the property, fruit trees, berry bushes, several abandoned cars. It was like country, so close in.

  They walked up the gravel drive past the house. There wasn’t any sign of life. “We’re trespassing, you know,” Maggie said. Jay paid no attention. Who would care? Maybe the neighbors, but probably not. The property was three-and-a-half or four acres, the house shaded on both sides with large poplars. And they weren’t hurting anything.

  Behind the house the property inclined sharply, and then opened onto a rolling meadow. What was left of a shed or small barn lay low to the ground. Someone, at some time, had taken the roof right off the shed and set it on the ground, but because the roof was high-peaked, there was still room to walk beneath it. Jay headed straight there.

  He knelt down by a broken concrete slab and poked at the ground. Maggie asked him what he was looking for.

  “Chipmunks. Sometimes Dad and me would go to lunch and bring back french fries and they’d eat them, one at a time.” He stood up abruptly. “They’re not there,” he said curtly, but as he walked away he looked around and his expression brightened.

  Just before the opening to the shed there was a hillock of ferns. He said, “Watch, Mom!” then turned and flung himself backwards onto the mound. Spread-eagled, he lay nested in the soft foliage and smiled at her. “Come on,” he said. “It’s soft as pillows.”

  She thought about the green stains on his white T-shirt, and she thought about what might be crawling in the grass. She shook her head.

  He sat up. “What’d we come for?” he said, but he headed into the ruins of the shed.

  Maggie followed him under the roof, climbing over old beams and odd hunks of lumber. Near the middle of the length of it was an open place in the roof, and in the ground where the light hit, grass and a few sprigs of violets had sprung up. Someone had been here fairly recently—there were the sooty remains of a small fire, and an empty pork and beans can.

  “Look, Mom!” Jay said, digging at the little mound of ashes with a stick.

  “That’s not very smart,” Maggie said. “Dry as it is around here.”

  “Oh Mom.”

  She sat on a beam. The sun shone on her face and felt fine. She closed her eyes and didn’t pay any attention to her son as he poked around. When she looked up again, she didn’t see him. For a moment she was alarmed, then saw through the other end of the shed that he had gone out on the grass. She followed. The sun was bright in her eyes. He darted towards her, holding a long skinny branch. “Halt and surrender!” he cried.

  “Put that down!” She batted at the piece of wood. “You could put my eye out.”

  He threw the stick on the ground and stomped on it. It cracked loudly. “Fuck,” he said.

  “What did you say?” She grabbed his arm.

  He wrenched away. “When I come here with Dad it’s fun!” he cried. “We play knights and lances. We made rosehip tea once.”

  “Well, your dad isn’t here now,” she said, sorry as soon as she said it. She marched off toward the road again, hoping he was behind her.

  “Girls are babies,” he said when they paused by the car. “Scared of everything. Even a little twig.”

  She bit her lip and got in the car. “I’m not girls,” she said when he was in, too. “I’m your mother.”

  “Too bad,” Jay said. He was just a boy, he was angry, he was grabbing for the first thing to say. Maggie knew all that, but it still made her want to cry.

  “Fasten your belt,” she said sharply.

  Instead, he crawled over the car seat with a thud and settled in the back. At Polly’s house, they headed for separate bedrooms. Stevie, who had been in the living room with Polly, toddled down to Maggie’s door. She tried the handle and couldn’t turn it, then began whimpering.

  Maggie lay on Gretchen’s bed in a haze of resentment. Now she was going to have to tend to Stevie!

  Polly, on the other side of the door, was already doing so. Maggie heard her as she carried Stevie away again. In a moment she heard Stevie giggling. Polly switched on the TV. Maggie put her head under a pillow, and hid from her life.

  “Sometimes they’re just too much.” As soon as Maggie settled onto Rachel’s wonderful stuffed chair, the tears sprang from her eyes and her throat was choked. At least Rachel would understand. She had two kids, too, Mason, who was Jay’s age, and Leah, who was four. Suddenly there were a thousand things Maggie wanted to say. She wanted to tell Rachel how bad the week was going—and it was only Tuesday! She wanted to ask her what she did when Mason was sassy and sour and sad. She wanted to ask if Leah had outgrown that terrible baby neediness yet.

  Rachel put her palm against her own chest. “You have to find the place—in here—where you are the truest you. You have to protect it. Children—oh, they need you, of course they do, and you want to give them what they need, but if you aren’t nurturing your self, what kind of mother can you be, anyway? If you are an artist and you put away your paints? A writer and you close the drawer on your manuscript? Children need parents who are whole and authentic.”

  Maggie didn’t think she and Rachel were talking about the same things at all.

  “
Of course you don’t write,” Rachel said.

  “Or paint.” Maggie smiled, thinking it was better if she made light of her lack of talent.

  Rachel settled onto a chaise lounge across from Maggie. “Once you have a child, everyone sees you as part of a unit. I had to change therapists two times to get away from the family systems bias. Kids or not, I want to be an individual. My work doesn’t have anything to do with the kids. The writing, I mean.” She crossed her legs and settled down deeper in the cushions. “I’m thinking about taking a leave from teaching. We don’t really need the money. I’ve hit a plateau with this manuscript. There’s something deeper evading me, and I don’t think I can dig down to it when I have so many distractions. Actually, it may not be a matter of digging. It may be a matter of soaring, of finding the overarching theme, the ultimate story. You know what I mean?”

  Maggie nodded yes, but she felt dizzy with bafflement. She also felt intimidated. It was Rachel who had asked her to join their splinter group when the larger book group broke up. Right away it was obvious she wasn’t as well-read, as knowledgeable as Nora or Rachel, but neither was Gretchen (whom Maggie had immediately suggested), and they were never unkind. Rachel was in some way the group’s spirit: she chided them to probe inside, to think harder, to relate everything, ultimately, to the deepest part of themselves. Maggie often felt a mistiness in her own thinking, as if Rachel’s concepts were just out of reach, obscured, but attainable, if she made the effort. She had always felt she should try.

  Rachel gazed beyond Maggie, at the wall behind, where there were a dozen or more photographs of herself at various ages. “When I began this novel, I thought it was a journey story. Daphne moves out from the house—at night, I told you this before, didn’t I—in circles, widening the territory, exploring the night of her neighborhood, her town, even as she is exploring her own dark side—and the circles widen, and I thought, well, eventually she’ll go out far enough that she won’t come back. She’ll be free, she’ll be somewhere she hasn’t been before. Then I realized there had to be something more objective than that, something tangible, a desire, and I embodied that in the Other—you don’t know if it’s a man or a woman. But you know what I’ve discovered?” She sat up, her shoulders now raised, her head bent toward Maggie. “That intensity of desire, once abated, creates stasis. It’s anticlimactic.” She fell back on the chair again. “It’s boring.” She lifted her hands, palms up, and smiled ruefully. “Maybe it’s inevitable. Maybe fulfillment means closure, and closure is—for me at least—dishwater.”

  There was a timid knock at the door, the door squeaked open slightly, and Leah peeked around. “Mommy, we’re having rice pudding.”

  “I’m so sorry,” Rachel said, looking at Maggie. To Leah, she spoke sternly. “I’m talking now.”

  “But Daddy said to tell you.”

  “Tell Daddy I’m busy.”

  Leah’s face clouded. She inched the door open a bit wider, put one foot inside the room.

  “You may not come in now,” Rachel said.

  Maggie jumped up. “I need to go anyway. The kids need baths, stories—” She lifted her hands the same way Rachel had done earlier, palms up.

  Leah ran across the room and stood by her mother.

  “You set boundaries,” Rachel said. Maggie nodded mutely.

  “And you separate issues, those that have to do with—them—” she glanced at her daughter—“and those that have to do with you.”

  “I better go.” Maggie’s face burned. Leah looked like a child mannequin, standing by her mother, a pretty child with no expression at all just now.

  Rachel heaved herself off the chair. Leah clung to her long pink dress. Rachel moved across to Maggie and put her arm over her shoulder. “A therapist could help you sort it out, you know,” she said. “The right one.”

  Maggie took a breath and found a voice. “I was really just wondering what you do when Mason—when he—sometimes he must—”

  Rachel smiled. “Sandy looks after the kids in the evenings, so I can work. I really leave the discipline—that’s what you’re asking about, isn’t it?—to him. You could talk to him.” She kissed Maggie’s cheek. Leah had followed her movement across the room. She stood pressed against her hip, her face still blank and patient.

  “Bye, Leah,” Maggie said.

  Rachel glanced down as if she’d only just noticed the child. She patted her shoulder. “Run have your dessert, angel.” To Maggie she said, “Come any time.”

  Maggie took Leah’s hand. By the time they were at the stairs, she heard Rachel’s door close firmly with a click.

  Dulce tells me: Rachel was one of the first people I met when I moved to Lupine. Gus was four-and-a-half. I had to find work, but I didn’t know what I could do so that I could also afford a babysitter. I had a place to live, and I applied for food stamps, but I didn’t want to go to welfare. My husband was in prison. I didn’t want nobody asking me questions. I didn’t want to answer to nobody.

  There was an ad in the paper for a babysitter, “Live in or out.” I went and talked to her. I saw that what she really wanted was a housekeeper, cook, laundress, and babysitter, so I promised her I could do everything, if she would hire me, and if I could keep Gus with me whenever I was in her house. Her son Mason was the same age as Gus, so it made it easier for me, and was good for the boys. Rachel was teaching, and she was soon pregnant with Leah. I didn’t know what her husband Sandy did, exactly, because he was in and out all the time, but that was his business and I never thought about it. I knew it had to do with money. I guess I thought he was a banker, except that he didn’t seem to have a schedule. Now I know he’s just rich. He goes somewhere when he feels like it, and he plays with his own money. And, you suppose, he makes more of it. He’s nice, Sandy. He was always good to Gus. He never really could decide how to act around me, though. Americans don’t know how to act with servants. My papa told me once that in Mexico, everyone has someone who helps out in the house, except the poor campesinos. Everyone understands, you aren’t friends. Sandy always wanted me to know how much he appreciated what I did. He could have given me more money and I could have done my own things with my son, but he didn’t pay me, Rachel did.

  Well, little by little I moved some clothes over to their house and spent most weekday nights there, then went home to our trailer on the weekends. That was what made me finally like the trailer. I had hated it at first, because of the way I got it, and where it was. I liked the way it was mine, we had our privacy, but it was cozy, tucked in so close to the other trailers. I liked not doing nothing for other people, being the lady of my own shitty little house.

  I admired Rachel, but she was frightening in some ways. For one thing, she was very large, a tall, big-boned woman, with a belly that looked ready to burst with triplets, at least. She was intense, and nosy, and full of advice. She insisted on taking Gus to Mason’s pediatrician. She thought he ought to be growing faster; her son was much bigger. I told her, my papa was a short man. I’m only 5’2”. I didn’t say anything about Gus’ father, and Rachel didn’t ask. She gave me Mason’s old clothes for Gus. When I went home on Friday she sent me with a sack of groceries, leftover roast, and fruit, bags of potatoes. I worked long hours; it really was like being the wife and mother of a large family, but I was happy that the boys got along so well. And I didn’t have to worry too much, since we ate ten or twelve meals a week at their place. We ate like family. Most of the time, it was Sandy and me and the kids. Sandy said Rachel ate in the middle of the night. She was getting strange. He told me he appreciated the way I looked after the kids. Often in the afternoon I took them to the park and sat on a folded blanket and watched them play, and felt lucky. I wanted to write Gustavo and say we were okay, but I felt guilty; I thought things ought to be worse for a woman whose husband was in prison. As long as I didn’t look back and I didn’t look too far forward, I felt almost happy. I could watch my son grow. I could figure out something more at another time.

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nbsp; After Leah was born, the load on me was much heavier. Rachel stayed in bed for weeks, all the time she had off from school. She didn’t nurse Leah. She slept a lot in the day. She wanted me to keep the kids quiet. She got up at night and wandered around downstairs, sometimes until morning. I began to feel the tension between her and Sandy, too, but it wasn’t my place to say nothing, and what would I have said? I went to the health food store and bought herbs to calm her. She laughed. When she saw she’d insulted me, she said she’d try them, but that was the last I heard. My papa’s grandmother was a healer. Even my mother knows herbs. She buys them in fancy sealed bottles at the supermarket.

  The boys began going to kindergarten. We enrolled them in the afternoon session in Mason’s neighborhood so that there wouldn’t be any hurry in the morning. I could put Leah down for her nap part of the time they were gone. At first I slept then, too, but after a while I began to think of the time as mine, and I didn’t want to waste it. That was when I began a dream book. I used one of those little school notebooks.

  Some dreams I had over and over again—the children in the orange grove, for example, and the girl on the balcony. Others I had only once, and I was anxious to write them down. I often wrote in Spanish, though I had never really studied or read it. Writing kept the language in my head. Besides, I dreamt in Spanish, most of the time.

  In May of that year, the year the boys were in kindergarten, Rachel told me that she would “take over” the care of Leah in the summer. For certain, I said. To myself, I thought: well, why shouldn’t you, you’re the mother! But she hadn’t ever taken care of Leah. I was sure that when I did not stay in the house, it was Sandy who got up with Leah. Even if Rachel was up, reading, or walking, or, eventually, writing, she would ignore her daughter’s cries. I don’t mean she was cruel. I think she didn’t hear. Me, I dream when I’m asleep. Rachel dreams, walking around.

  So there won’t be so much for you to do, she said. She thought maybe I could come just in the mornings. Well, that would cut my pay in half, wouldn’t it? But I didn’t say anything right away; I needed to go home and think about it, think about what else I could do. Then she said she’d also been thinking she wanted to concentrate on her writing more, and she thought she needed a quieter house, and would I please not bring Gus anymore? Like he was a puppy.