“Kind of musical,” Nick is saying. “A bird making its own sense.”
“Or not,” Nonie says.
“Termite can imitate almost anything,” I say. “Things just sound more like music in his version. Sounds instead of words.”
Nonie leans forward to help Termite with his spoon. He can hold things bigger than spoons—his pitcher, fat crayons, toast, or candy bars. He holds his strips of blue because we wrap them around his wrist. Sometimes he uses a wooden serving spoon with a thick handle. Regular spoons and forks are too thin and hard. We know exactly how to feed him. Touch, touch, each side of his mouth, neat and fast. Nonie’s looking at him. “You never make things up, though, do you, Termite,” she says.
“No,” I say, “he doesn’t.”
It’s a fact. Termite can only tell the truth. I know she means she wishes, she wishes, he could say something more than the sound of what he’s just heard. I pretend he thinks more, backward and forward for miles.
“Good cake,” Nick says. “And this cold tea is mighty nice, evening like this. The air is goddamn still, heavy as lead. That storm coming in. Tomorrow, they say. Rain all week. Maybe it’ll clean up the river a little. I don’t like such a brown muck of a river.”
“Lord, Nick.” Nonie laughs. “That river was always brown.”
“Not so, Noreen. The river was cleaner years ago. You could see into it. In the dark it was olive green. I remember.”
“In the days it was—” She goes on at him, making fun now.
“Sapphire,” I chime in. “It was sapphire. Bright, stone blue.”
Nick Tucci gives me a look, then he nods. “Knocked your eyes out,” he says. “Standing there under the railroad bridge, watching the water. Oh, that blue river.”
We’re laughing, and Termite hunches his shoulders, throws his head back to look up into the plum-colored sky, like the river is up there somewhere. That blue river. He says it in high and low sounds, and the sky over us could be a river, bruised and deep as it looks. I reach over and tilt his chin down. His head is heavy, and his neck muscles are not so strong. He throws his head back again, right away.
“He’s got his opinions, has Junior,” says Nick Tucci. “You tell them, Junior.”
“Leave him be, Lark.” Nonie’s eyes get wet when she laughs hard. “He’s taking a sounding. My God, that sky does look like it could fall. Should be a full moon tonight, but we won’t see anything behind clouds like those.”
I can see Termite’s nostrils move, a vibration so slight, like the gills of a fish moving when it breathes, and I hear him smell the air like he’s drinking it. I wonder does he see the clouds at all, does he feel the color instead, or does he think the word “river” is like a sky, so he looks up. Why would he think that. Because it’s true. He could think the sky is like a river that doesn’t stop. Nonie would say he just reacts to us, our laughing, our shouting, whatever. She’d say I give him things to know. Then I remember the candles. “Not much of a birthday, is it, Termite. I forgot about candles.”
“You don’t need candles every time, Lark, as many birthdays as you make him.” Nonie feels the pockets of the apron she took off. They’re all blue aprons she wears at work.
“I kind of promised him,” I say. “Too late now.” But Termite tilts his head back down, gives me his sideways look.
“Not too late. We have most of a cake here, and a few leftover candles. Somebody celebrated at the restaurant today, with a piece of Charlie’s lemon pie.” Nonie has a partly crushed box of those little skinny candles they give away free at bakeries.
“Pie is all wrong with candles,” Nick Tucci says. There are only three candles, but he’s leaning forward, putting them on the cake. “Should be nine, right? Each one of these counts for three years, Junior, so the flames gotta be extra high.” He lights them with his cigarette lighter, then he stands and picks up the plate and holds it just in front of Termite. Nonie and I get up and stand with Nick, so close our faces touch. We let the candles burn, then we blow, really slow, with Termite. The little flames flutter perfectly and go out just right, all at once.
“Excellent,” Nick Tucci says. “A slow-motion blowout.”
“Now, Nick,” Nonie says, “I’ll bet those boys of yours wouldn’t mind some of this cake. Between the motorcycles and secret soldier stuff, they could use Lark’s divinity icing. Like a prayer in spun sugar. You’re such a cook, Lark. If only someone would buy you a restaurant.” She shrugs for Nick’s benefit. “Lark’s cakes are what Charlie would be coming up with if he really did know anything about baking, or pastry—”
“Charlie is just a short-order cook,” Nick says in a serious tone. “He should forget the pies and cakes.” Nick doesn’t much like Charlie. I think he harbors a brotherly resentment.
Nonie cuts him off. “Charlie has no choice. Lark is not working for Charlie, and I’m not baking for the restaurant in addition to everything else.” She checks her watch, the wristwatch Charlie gave her a year ago, on their “anniversary.” It has a platinum band and a square little face with diamonds on either side. Once it was Charlie’s grandmother’s. He spent a lot to have the works inside replaced and to buy a flexible platinum band. Platinum is more dear than gold, Nonie says. The watch is waterproof, and she almost never takes it off. Those little diamonds catch the light like the ring he never gave her. Gladdy was angry that Charlie was so extravagant. She stayed away from the restaurant nearly a week. An unexpected benefit, Nonie said. “Time to stack the café,” she says now. She puts her hand at the back of Termite’s neck, smooths his curls. “I need to cut his hair soon. These curls get so tangled.”
We’re cleaning up. Nonie starts with the dishes. Nick Tucci is putting away the chairs. Termite holds the moon pitcher right up to his mouth, making sounds into its open lip. Someone might think he’s talking, but he’s saying his version of the plates stacked against one another, the plastic chairs scraping, our footsteps, the wheels of his own chair turning as I push it inside.
I lean down close to him and whisper, in the powdery smell of his hair, “Your birthday, Termite, every day.”
Every day, he says back to me, every day, every day.
Nick Tucci has gone home with the cake. Nonie is doing the dishes, and Termite sits beside her in his chair, holding the radio. She makes him keep the volume lower than it’s been all day and she puts the tall plastic glasses on the sideboard to drain. He looks sideways into the ridges just at eye level, like they’re little fun-house mirrors he can see into. I’m making his bath. When I was nine and ten I used to wear my bathing suit and get in the tub to hold him, and Nonie would soap him and take him out. We were bathing him and she told me his head was heavy for him to hold up because there was water around his brain. He’d get stronger. The exercises would help. Like when we made a pretty sound with a bell or music box and he turned toward it, I let him turn his head against my palm, turning to hear until I played the sound again. The water in his head never got in the way of his listening. Where did the water come from, I wanted to know. She couldn’t tell me.
Nonie keeps a framed picture of herself and my mother on our kitchen wall, near the clock. The circular fan on the windowsill turns its grilled face back and forth, back and forth, and the frame stirs a little on its wire hanger, settles, stirs. The chrome of the fan shows a curved reflection of the stacked plastic glasses on the shelf above, and the arms and hands of the girls in the picture. The girls are playing dress-up and my mother always got to be the bride. Because she was youngest, Nonie says, she took unfair advantage. My mother’s name is Lola. We seldom talk about her and we almost never say her name. To think her name feels like breaking the rules, but they were Lola and Noreen, those sisters. They’re both swathed in filmy white that was probably window curtains, and my mother wears a crocheted jacket they must have thought looked lacy. She’s maybe eight or nine in her crown of braided flowers and weeds, long stalks of delphinium that are already falling apart, but she looks eerily grown up in
the lipstick. It’s way too dark for a bride. She stands there like she knows it, guarded or defiant, the shapes of her coltish legs dark in the sheer fabric, but she clasps her hands uncertainly and looks up into the camera. She’s of two minds. The picture is the only reason I forgive her at all. If she were pulling a face or acting cocky, I think I might hate her. Nonie has an arm around her. Nonie’s much taller, being four years older, so she’s the boy, with a penciled mustache and her long hair plaited back.
Their father was a Jehovah’s Witness preacher and they weren’t allowed to cut their hair or drink cola or celebrate holidays. I don’t know who allowed them to dress up or what cola has to do with a religion. My mother’s hair was wavy and red and such an eyeful they made her keep it in braids. The day after my grandfather’s funeral she cut it to a Rita Hayworth swoop. Their mother was too sick to stop Lola making up for lost time, Nonie says. Nonie was in what she calls her respectable phase then, having left Charlie when he wouldn’t marry her. She’d gone off to Atlanta and met her first husband. He was quite a bit older, a widower with an insurance business. Insurance, like there’s any such thing, Nonie will say when she refers to him, but she spent a few years a safe, kept woman down there where it was nearly always warm. She says she was shameless then. She’d never had anything, then she got it all. One day she walked off. But she left things, not kids. Lola finished high school in Winfield after their mother died, then went to live with Nonie. That didn’t last long. The second husband was in the restaurant business, ran a supper club. Troubled men are trouble: that’s all she’ll say about him. Couple of years. Then she came back here to Charlie. I asked her once if Charlie was troubled. Heavens no, she said, Charlie’s not addicted to anything but hard work and Catholic guilt.
Nonie says she wants me to be able to take care of myself. No cleaning up other people’s dishes, doing anyone else’s work. She says we have Termite, and we have to take care of him too. When a woman wants things she can’t get for herself, Nonie says, a man can smell it. She says never let a man inside you unless you want him around forever, because you can’t get rid of him after that, no matter how many times he leaves you or you leave him. Nonie was telling me that before I even knew what it meant: inside you. When I was younger I would see a heart scrawled on a sidewalk, on a bathroom stall, on the wall near the pay phone at the Coffee-Stop where Elise works, and I would think: inside you. Like it was feelings, romance, Elise’s cheap mystery novels with women on the covers. No, Nonie said, it’s when a man puts his body into your body. Then he’s inside you, and your body remembers, each time, every man, even if you try to forget. You came back to Charlie, I said. Is that why? He’s inside you? Now you get it, Nonie said. But why him, I said, and not someone else, another one? Because I was so young then, Nonie said, when we started, and there were so many times. You’ve got to be careful when you’re young.
She got me thinking about Solly, all those times when we were little kids, then not so little. He’d be all over me but I wouldn’t let him inside. I was already too full of Nonie’s words.
How many times, I wonder, Nonie and Charlie. I lean over the tub to turn off the water. Heat rises up at me like some thought of them, young and warm when she was in high school and he was a little older, on the riverbank where kids went, or in the field by Polish Town. Or in Gladdy’s house downtown where Gladdy and Charlie lived even then, where Charlie lives alone now part of every winter while Gladdy bakes in the Florida sun. Nonie’s own childhood house, where she lived with my mother, burned down. There was always a wide slash across the ground until the Texaco expanded and built over top the scar. Nonie and Charlie are together here now, I suppose, when no one is home. That’s not often since Termite has stopped going to school. They could go to Gladdy’s, I guess, the months Gladdy is gone. Nonie says Gladdy went south a long time ago, before she ever got on a plane. That little beach house in Coral Gables is the only thing Charlie Fitzgibbon will ever own, Nonie tells me, until his mother lets go of it all. Gladdy only put it in his name to save on taxes. There sits Charlie waiting, and Nonie says his mother may even outlive him. Charlie and his heart pills. That leaky heart is his, at least, something Charlie owns.
I don’t think my mother ever owned anything. I think she got pulled apart. Too many people owned a piece of her. Winfield did, still does. The whole town knows more about her than I will ever remember. I knew her once. I must have, though Nonie doesn’t say so. I didn’t come here till I was three. And Termite did, for a year, maybe in Florida where the boxes came from, when she must have been finding out more and more how much he needed. Men had hold of her. My father, whoever he was, and then Termite’s, the one Nonie calls a baby, the one who died in Korea. I asked Nonie a while ago, what if he hadn’t died. Would he be taking care of Termite if Lola couldn’t? Don’t know, Nonie said, but you’re here, taking care of Termite for him.
And Nonie is here too.
Termite and I don’t look anything alike. Even if Termite were normal, I don’t think we would. He’s so blond, so fair, with those blue eyes. My hair and my eyes are dark, even if my skin isn’t. Didn’t matter. Kids at school called me Guinea and Dago, like they did the Tucci boys. Joey taught us all how to beat kids up. Maybe that’s why no one called Termite names. Plenty would have, but he was always with us if we weren’t in school. The sand-lot kids that hung out at the rail yard were afraid of Joey, then Solly. The Tuccis were ready to fight. And they were always strong, even before they grew up. Summers we kids took care of ourselves. Down by the river, under the railroad bridge. Joey would swing us around in circles by our armpits, real fast, held still himself by centrifugal force, and he’d swing Termite too. Termite loved it. I was never afraid Joey would hurt him. He’d hear Joey’s voice and throw his head back, look all the way up, eyes cast to the right, like that’s where Joey always was. Joey would say, “Jesus! That boy is ready for a ride.”
Termite was so pale you could see the blue veins through his skin, and his light hair grew in soft curls you could comb with your fingers. From the beginning, I confused him with an angel, a good part of me that didn’t speak and wouldn’t talk in plain language. A part of me I carried around, tried to take care of, couldn’t understand in normal ways. It’s funny. The only thing Termite and I have alike is our birthmarks—brown marks near our navels the shape of tiny shoes. Similar, Nonie would say, not alike, and it’s a shoe if you see it that way. Once I outlined them in ballpoint pen to show her, the boot shape, and the heel. It’s true mine is larger. Why not, Nonie said, you do the walking. He’s lucky you’re a girl with strong legs.
I get that from Nonie. I might be skinny like my mother, but I’m strong like Nonie. I’m like an adopted child, related to Nonie twice, through adoption and blood. I don’t have any trouble lifting Termite. He’s so slight and he doesn’t seem to get heavier. He gets longer, too long to be carried in my arms, up against my shoulder anymore, like a baby. This year I carry him on my back, with his arms crossed around my neck. Down the stairs to the basement, up to the attic when it’s not too hot or cold, out the back door to the wagon in the yard. The wagon’s deep enough to hold the back and seat of a padded office chair, bolted in for Termite, with straps attached to help him stay upright, room for his legs to splay out or fold under him the way he likes. The chair back stands up above the wagon sides enough that he can see just fine and rest his head. We go to the river, down to see the trains, sometimes to Charlie’s for lunch. Late afternoons we might meet Nonie to walk home with her after her shift. But now if I take him anywhere else—to a store, to the doctor’s, to a movie—he has to ride in the wheelchair. He complains so, it’s not worth it. Nonie says he didn’t hate that chair until after he started at the school. Finally she put it in the closet, so he doesn’t have to see it. Home should feel safe, she says. Let Social Services threaten us all they want. Getting used to the chair again will have to wait. But I miss the movies. In the summer, when he was small, we used to pay our quarters and go every ot
her day. We’d leave the wagon outside under the marquee and Termite sat on my lap. Sometimes all the Tucci boys came, but mostly Solly. He liked the westerns. Solly would say whole scenes to us later, acting out parts, and he could do John Wayne’s rolling walk. The dialogue went into his head and stayed there. Seems a million years ago.
“You finished running the bath, Lark?” Nonie is rinsing the supper plates. “If you could just bathe him,” she says. “I’ll put him to bed. I know you want to practice.”
She’s talking about typing practice. I don’t much want to tell her about Stamble. Stumble, shamble. I have to, though. “Nonie, someone came by from Social Services today.”
“Who came by?”
I hear the edginess in her voice. “Not the same woman as before. A man. He was real polite, you can tell he’s new. He asked for you and he said he lives near here.”
“What do I care where he lives? The Social Services people are all the same.”
“He said we needed a smaller wheelchair for Termite, child-sized. He’s strange-looking. White hair and lashes and no eyebrows to speak of. And he was wearing a suit and a hat, all covered up in the heat, like he was afraid of the sun. His skin is pale, like the inside of a rabbit’s ear, and his eyes are so light.”
“Sounds like Mrs. Gaston, down at the Mercantile. Older lady, or looks older. You know her. Wears the thick glasses? She’s an albino. There’s one or two around town. Albinos always have bad eyes, and usually bad hearts. They don’t normally live to be old.”
Mercantile. I remember. The short little woman who sells ribbon in the sewing section. Thin white hair pulled back in a bun, and her skin pale as a root, like she’s been dug up from underground. Yes. Like Stamble.
Lark and Termite Page 10
