Follow Me

by Joanna Scott

  The truth is, though my mother doesn’t realize this, my grandmother blamed herself for missing the warning signs. She would go on blaming herself for the rest of her life. With what she saw as the distinctive color of his hair, the green of his eyes, and the dimple in his cheek, he should have struck her as familiar. But when she saw him for the first time, she didn’t bother to look carefully enough to recognize him. It took her months, she told me, to put two and two together, and by then it was too late: the damage had been done, and I was on my way into the world.

  Sally Bliss

  Blur of deep night beyond the drops streaking the glass. Weight of the cat on her lap. No stoppin’ once we start. Penelope wanted to stay awake and listen to her mother sing. Her bad mother, bumped and bruised, who made her get into the car and go away to nowhere. If only she could trade her for another mother, one who wasn’t bumped and bruised and who would sit and watch television all night at home where she belonged. But what if she couldn’t find a mother who knew all the words to all the songs ever written? Keep singing, Mama. She didn’t have to say it. Singing came from her mother like light filled a room when the chain was pulled. Not always, though. Not after bedtime, and not that once when the bulb popped with a spark and went out. That was a funny surprise, and after being afraid for a little while in the darkness, she was laughing. She was laughing because her mother said, “Where are you, peanut?” and all the while she was right there behind her, all pajama’d and washed and ready for bed.

  She missed her bed so much all of a sudden, she wanted to cry. But she was too tired to cry. She was too tired not to be tired, so she gave up trying to resist and fell asleep.

  Sleep passed faster than she could count, and she was awake again. Awake was good but not so easy right away with the taste in her mouth like the time she ate paste in Mrs. Murray’s nursery school class. Naughty girl! She was slapped on the face for eating paste, the only time she’d ever been slapped, and it made her so mad she decided right then and there to hate Mrs. Murray forever. She hated her now just thinking of that time with paste in her mouth, and she wanted her mama. Her mama was there. Her mama was bumped and bruised, but she was still there. And she was hearing Penelope cry. It felt bad to cry. But it also felt good because it was something that mattered, and her mother had to pay attention.

  Her mother was driving and not listening to what her daughter wanted her to hear. Stop driving, Mama! Maybe if Penelope bawled a little louder, her mother would pay attention. There, she was saying, “Shhh, sweetie pie.” But shhh was a stupid thing to say to a bawling girl, so she bawled some more, clutching at the cat on her lap.

  Finally her mother pulled off the road into a parking lot. It was daytime again, and Miss Penelope Mole wanted breakfast with milk — now! Okay, okay, she could have whatever she wanted if she was a good girl and waited in the car while her mama went into the 7-Eleven. Being good was easier than being bad. But don’t tell anybody or you won’t get your way. She stroked the cat hard between his ears so he would understand.

  She almost always got her way, and when she didn’t, she bawled. There went her mother into the 7-Eleven to keep her from bawling. It gave her a nice sense of being certain about things. She was certain that it was breakfast time. She was certain that she was thirsty. She was certain that eating paste was not a reason to be slapped.

  She wouldn’t be back at nursery school on Monday. It made her happy to picture the empty coat hook below her name and Mrs. Murray wondering why she was late. Never to be slapped again, ha! But never wasn’t a big enough word to be what it meant. Neverever was better.

  From somewhere far away behind the store came a new sound, a chicken squawking or a car honking. Then a big car the color of a water faucet pulled in a few spaces away, and a woman in a puffy brown coat hurried from the car into the store, taking quick steps, trot-trot, like a little pony.

  A snowflake came out of the sky and landed on the windshield, turning right away into a drop of water. Soon there was another snowflake, but that was all.

  Waiting for her mother to come out of the 7-Eleven, Penelope wondered what the letters on the sign in the store window spelled. S-A-L-T. S made the hiss sound, she knew. Apple began with A, and L was just L. But what was that next letter? Think, think, think, she told herself, poking at her temple to make the thoughts come. To her disappointment, she couldn’t remember the certain thought about the letter. Either she’d forgotten what it was or she didn’t know it. There was an important difference between the two, between forgetting and not knowing.

  She’d decided to give up on trying to figure it out when she saw her mama come out of the store smiling but not really smiling, only pretending to, squeezing her lips to force them into the smiling shape and cover her broken teeth.

  That mama. She wasn’t very good at pretending.

  But she was good at getting breakfast. Look, she mouthed with her pretending lips. She was on the other side of the closed car window, holding the half-pint carton of milk she’d pulled from the paper bag. Yes, look! It wasn’t just regular milk, it was chocolate milk, and a package of powdered doughnuts, too!

  Penelope turned the handle around and around. It was hard for her, but that was what she had to do to open the car window, and she had to open the car window to take the carton of chocolate milk from her mother.

  Yum.

  But oops, she dropped the milk carton when the cat jumped. Bad cat! And there he went, being very bad and very fat, dragging himself over the edge of the car window and out like a bouncing ball across the parking lot. He could go fast when he bounced, bounce, bounce, bounce, his big belly flopping from side to side.

  Penelope had enough time to cry out, “Stop!” before he disappeared behind the other car. Then she called his name: “Leo!” He reappeared beside the front bumper, blinked like the lazy cat he was, and licked his chops, as if he had just finished eating the first course of a meal and was ready to move on to the next. Penelope glared at him, telling him with her eyes that he had to come back, there was nothing else to do that would be right. But then because he was a selfish, stupid cat, he did the wrong thing, darting around the corner of the 7-Eleven and disappearing into the woods.

  Penelope would mark the beginning of her new life not with the car ride but with Leo the cat running away, a terrible loss that would have broken her heart if she hadn’t been so furious at him. It was horrible enough that he’d chosen the woods over their nice warm car. But even worse was the way he’d looked at her, denying that he had any reason to be grateful for all she’d done on his behalf. That was why she wouldn’t let herself be heartbroken because of him, and neither would she forgive her mother for all the trouble she’d caused.

  For Sally, though, her new start had begun earlier, with the fist that slammed into her mouth. That she could have had the broken teeth capped by any capable dentist didn’t occur to her. The damaged face staring back from the mirror in her bathroom and from the rearview in the car and from the glare in the store window was hers to keep, and if she now resembled the Raggedy Ann she’d had as a child, well, wasn’t that appropriate? She had treasured that doll for years.

  Between Tuskee and the 7-Eleven along the country route, she’d covered only a little more than sixty miles, driving at a snail’s pace because the curving dark road was slick with ice. And when exhaustion had gotten the better of her, she’d pulled over into the lot behind an abandoned gas station, shut off the engine, and tried to doze. She thought she wouldn’t actually fall asleep, but the next thing she knew there was a pale light above the treetops indicating that several hours had passed.

  She had no idea where she was heading, only that she would follow the river until there were no passable roads, and then she would find another road and keep driving, and eventually she would reach the place where she wanted to be. She would have driven straight through to noon if her daughter hadn’t woken up and demanded her breakfast. To pay for that breakfast she’d taken a dollar from the purse co
ntaining Mason Jackson’s money. She’d saved that money for years. She’d been planning to keep on saving it, and here she’d gone and used it to buy milk and those goddamn powdered doughnuts.

  But it was Leo’s escape that threatened to undo her. Frozen by panic as she’d watched the cat disappear, she felt she couldn’t take any more — not another blow or harsh word, not any new expression of discontent from her daughter, not a prurient glance from a store clerk at her swollen face, and especially not such an unspeakable betrayal as this, by the same cat that had saved her life.

  When awareness of the consequences caught up with her, she came to her senses and rushed after the cat. But the faster she ran, the faster the cat bolted ahead, and he reached the edge of the woods while Sally was still far behind. She crashed after him through the thicket, tore through brambles into a swampier area carpeted with moss and dormant stubs of cabbage. She shouted his name and then called him in a desperate whisper that she tried to make alluring. But the only answer she received was the hum of the wind.

  She went back and found Penelope standing shivering, coatless, on the edge of the lot. She picked her up and tried to warm her in her arms while she continued to call for the cat. When she realized that the glistening dots gathering in the girl’s hair were flakes of melting snow, she carried her back to the car.

  They stayed parked at the store for another two hours. Sally tried to lure the cat out of the woods with bologna, and when that failed she bought a tin of sardines. By late morning the cat still hadn’t appeared, and Penelope was hungry again, so Sally bought a turkey sandwich for them to split, and while they ate, she wrote out a detailed description of the cat on a flattened paper bag. She even drew a picture of him on the bag, and she wrote down the number of Potter’s Hardware. With the clerk’s permission, she pinned the notice to the community bulletin board by the door.

  When she declared that they’d have to leave without the cat, she was surprised at Penelope’s apparent indifference. Sally thought she would have been hysterical. Glancing at her as they drove north, she worried that her daughter was growing hard and unforgiving. But such a change was impossible. She decided instead that her little princess was so used to affection that it wouldn’t occur to her to love anyone or anything that didn’t love her back.

  Until she either found a job or wired the bank in Tuskee to send the money from her account, Sally would have to pay for everything in cash, with Mason Jackson’s money. It had been difficult to part with the first dollar, but she expected that with every new transaction, spending it would become easier, more naturally inevitable.

  Still, she felt compelled to search out the best deals possible. They stayed that night in a motel advertising rooms for $19.99, located near the entrance to the state park, registered under the name she came up with when she had the pen in hand: Sally Bliss. She liked the name immediately, though when she asked her daughter if she wouldn’t mind trying out a new last name for a while, the girl said no way, not for a hundred dollars. But Sally had already made up her mind. Even if she didn’t say this to her daughter aloud, Penelope Bliss would just have to get used to it.

  They had supper at the diner adjacent to the motel. Penelope ordered a cheeseburger, and Sally chose the most inexpensive hot meal on the menu, spaghetti and meatballs, which included a basket full of soft, warm rolls, pats of butter on ice, and packets of saltines. Not only did she eat several rolls slathered with butter, but she also slipped all the saltines into her purse to snack on later.

  A map of the state was printed on the place mat, and a dozen towns and cities were indicated with their first initials followed by dashes to be filled in by children and other bored customers while they waited for their meal. The whole course of the river was marked with a bold, squiggling line, and at the halfway point was a T for the city of Tuskee. Sally wrote out the name with a crayon from a cup on the table. She filled in the letters following the B in the corner of the state and the name after the A to the east. And though she’d learned long ago that there was no such city called Rondo along the Tuskee, that’s the name she gave to the city situated on the lake at the mouth of the river, filling in o-n-d-o after the R.

  The newspaper she bought was from that city, Sally Bliss’s Rondo. She paged through the sections while her daughter watched People Are Funny on the television in the motel room. The TV audience’s laughter seemed to rise in response to the stories that Sally was reading, and it made her wonder if any of it was true.

  It could have been yesterday’s paper or tomorrow’s. But there was some useful information — a reminder that daylight savings would end Sunday at 2:00 a.m. and a forecast of wintry weather for the weekend. And look at that nice photograph of Harold Lloyd, shown seated on a hotel sofa reading a newspaper article about Bing Crosby’s marriage. So Bing was getting married. Oh, that lucky duck of a woman!

  There was a big ad for a men’s sport hat, the Dobbs Gamebird. And under the heading of church services, the sermon that sounded most promising was “What the Bible Teaches about Demons,” to be delivered at 7:30 p.m. on Sunday at the First Assembly of God on Field Street.

  But really, it was the classifieds that mattered, and Sally set them aside as though they were dessert, turning to them only when she was done with the rest of the paper. And here was a whole half page under the heading of “Help Wanted: Female.” One announced an opening at a downtown bank, good pay with benefits, but keypunch experience was desirable. Girls were needed for laundry work at the Star Palace, 61 North Street. Business girls who wanted to add to their present income were encouraged to write to Avon Cosmetics, PO Box 516.

  She circled the notice for Girl, general office work, 5H days/week, must be good typist. Another ad for an Experienced person for one-girl shop office sounded promising: Typing, shorthand, payroll, and clerical duties. Weddell Tools. But she had no experience with shorthand or payroll.

  There were several ads for housekeepers, to live in or out, paying up to forty-five dollars a week. And there were other, less familiar possibilities: 2 ladies to sell costume jewelry. Either home, fashion shows, or where you work. Weekly commission.

  And there was an ad for Dictaphone operations, section ability, shorthand not necessary. This one offered a salary of sixty to sixty-five dollars a week.

  The ad that looked the most appealing of all was for waitresses at Neimurs Dinner Cabaret, Cocktail girls, nice figure, talent a plus. Performance potential. 5-day week. All benefits. Good salary. Apply at box office. She circled this one and put a star by it.

  The city at the mouth of the Tuskee may not have been as far as she would have liked to go from Benny Patterson, but in the past she hadn’t ever gone as far as she’d planned. It appeared to be a big enough city where she could live without being found. And if the classifieds were accurate, there were too many available jobs to pass by. The city of Rondo it was then — her destination again, as it had been before.

  She set the folded paper on the table and watched television with Penelope. By the end of the show she was convinced that people really were funny, and she fell asleep in a hopeful mood.

  The next morning they both slept late, past nine. They took baths — Sally had to plug the tub drain with a washcloth because she couldn’t find the stopper — and they had a big breakfast of pancakes and sausages at the diner. But when Sally tried to start the car, the engine just rattled without revving. Though she kept trying to turn the key farther in the ignition, pressed the accelerator to the floor, and even banged on the dashboard, nothing happened.

  If the car had broken down the previous day, she probably would have given herself up to despair. But she felt stronger after the night’s rest, better prepared for unexpected difficulties, and she had enough wherewithal to ask the motel clerk to call a towing company.

  The tow truck arrived within the half hour. The driver — a polite, grease-stained teenage boy — looked under the hood of the Mercury and diagnosed a carburetor problem. He said his boss was at th
e garage, and they’d try to have the problem fixed by the afternoon. He apologized to Sally several times, as though he were responsible for the inconvenience.

  It was a crisp day with a fresh blue sky, and after the car had been towed away, Sally tied a wool hat on Penelope and lured her into taking a walk by telling her that they were going on a treasure hunt.

  They followed the winding road a short distance into the park until they came to a sign posting park rules. From there they followed a red blaze on a trunk marking the start of a trail. They walked parallel to the road for a hundred yards and then down a gradual slope through a thick pine grove, between towering trees that must have been planted deliberately decades ago, in even rows.

  They passed only one person, a little man who came from the opposite direction carrying fishing gear. He grumbled a greeting in an accent that Sally thought was German, and she had an impulse to stop and strike up a conversation with him. But with his shoulders hunched and his cap low over his eyes, he gave the impression that he didn’t want to be approached.

  They continued along the path, their steps muffled by the cushion of wet needles. For the fun of it, Penelope found a stick and began lashing it against the bushes, and the ruckus startled a doe, sending it loping across the path ahead and into the woods.

  The trail grew rougher as it sloped downhill, winding from beneath the pines through a stand of birch, with yellow leaves still clinging to the branches and glittering in the sun. Beyond the birch was a meadow, and past the meadow was a wooded area cresting the steep ridge of a ravine, where, from the bottom, came a sound like a pot’s lid rattling over boiling water. They climbed carefully down the path, Sally leading the way and turning at each difficult stretch to brace Penelope and keep her from slipping. Though the sun was hidden by the far edge of the ravine, the bright sky cast enough light to make sharply defined shadows that shivered and melted into new shapes with the breeze. Dampness intensified the smell of sap and pine bark, and in the deeper shade, patches of frost were visible. Crows squawked back and forth high in the trees, and one of them burst into a lengthy chatter so varied that the sounds seemed composed of words. And when Sally heard a small animal’s sudden scratching through the needles, she had a flash of hope that Leo the cat had come back to them. But of course Leo had disappeared many miles away.