Lark and Termite

by Jayne Anne Phillips

  “You’re telling me our new social worker is an albino?” Nonie shakes her head. “Social Services must have assigned us a new caseworker without telling us. Typical. First thing they do is show up without calling, just to see if we’re torturing Termite. Like he’d rather live at that school, farmed out the way some of those poor kids are. And a lot of them not as disabled as Termite.”

  “So-called disabled,” I say. “I’m not going to talk about him that way.”

  “Well now, Lark.” She looks at me dead-on. Arches her brows in that way that shows up the star-flared lines around her eyes, the shadows beneath them. She turns back to the dishes. “How do you want to talk about him then?” she asks me.

  “They’re not as well off,” I say, “not as well off as Termite.”

  “They’re sure not,” Nonie says. She’s pulling the stopper out of the sink, drying her hands on her apron. “Our prince here gets bubbles in his bath, and radio control, and birthdays every time he turns around. Am I right, Termite? And he’ll get school at home too, if that’s what we have to say he gets.” She sighs then and leans near him, cups his face in her hands. “What’ll we teach you first? How about local politics, how federal money pours into that school while they all stand with their mitts out, and those kids sitting there, waiting to get their faces wiped off after lunch.”

  “I can teach him the same things at home,” I tell Nonie. “I have some of the same materials, and I can make more. They can’t make us send him, can they?”

  “We’d have to say I teach him, because you’re not an adult. Homeschooling is not usual around here, but some parents do it. Look at all the religious nuts in this county. We’ve got the Temperance Methodists, the Irish Catholics like Charlie and Gladdy, the Italian Catholics like Nick, and still plenty of Jehovah’s Witnesses, like your grandparents were, but it’s mostly the Pente-costals and Nazarenes that school at home. No one bothers them. It’s just that Termite’s handicapped, like the word or not. He’s past school age now and he has to go, to the special school or at home, but they’ll say we don’t have the training. As though we haven’t taken care of him all this time.”

  I know they want to test him more, see what’s wrong with him. What they can do about him. They all think they have to do something. It’s never all right for him to be what he is. Nonie said the doctors in Cleveland wanted to look in his head when he was a baby, see what parts of his brain didn’t work, what did, like that wouldn’t hurt. And they would have, except they decided it wouldn’t do any good.

  Termite can hold his head up now, except when he’s tired. From the time I was a kid I thought his head was heavy because there was so much in it he couldn’t tell or say. That everything had stayed in him, whether he recognized the pictures or not. That he’d kept all the words I couldn’t call up, our mother’s words and words about her. Words from before we were born, what I heard until I was three and forgot. Words about what house what road or street who was there how she looked and talked and why she sent us away. It’s hard taking care of Termite but she kept him for a year, she tried. Why did she try or stop trying. And I was a normal kid she didn’t keep, except I’m not normal, because I don’t remember her. I’ve got my own big blank but no one can see it in the shape of my head, in how I speak or don’t speak or don’t move. It’s like by the time he was born there was too much to know. It filled his head too full, then wiped it blank. If I said this to Nonie, she’d say I like my own stories. These are birth defects, she’d tell me. No one knows why or what. Nothing your mother did caused them. We’re here and we move on from here, and isn’t that bathwater run yet? You need time to practice typing. Didn’t Charlie bring you the typewriter from the restaurant so you could practice? Well then.

  “Lark, are you in a dream? That tub must be full.” Nonie opens the bathroom door and takes a look. “He’ll like this.” She looks down at the frothy bath. “But you’re going to have to drain some out before you put him in. It’s way too deep.”

  Put him in, Termite says after her, but she’s right; the tub is too full and the bubbles stand up above the porcelain rim. The smell of the bath is in the kitchen now, soap and warmth, and I carry Termite into the little bathroom. I get his clothes off while I let the water drain lower. “Way too high,” I tell him, and he says the sounds back like he agrees. But I know he doesn’t. He likes the bubbles all heaped up, he can smell them, and when I put him in he reaches straight into them, and puts his face just where they start.

  Nonie smiles, shakes her head. “Give a yell when he’s ready and I’ll put him to bed,” she tells me.

  Sometimes I feel so tired all of a sudden. I’ve got all the windows open and the chimes hung from the kitchen ceiling are moving and tinkling in the air. There’s a breeze almost, but the air is hot. Termite is clean and powdered and his hair is tousled up in a pale blur. I steer his chair toward the living room and see Nonie on the couch. She’s put her legs up waiting for us and fallen asleep with her shoes off. Her toes are covered in those black half-circle feet of her support stockings, and her mouth is barely open. If we get closer we’ll hear the tiny whistle of her breath, like she’s an old lady. I don’t want to, so I turn Termite back around, into the kitchen. He nods. He likes this time of night before bed and I face his chair the way he likes, near the window, so he’s close to the turning pieces of the chimes. I glued pieces of red and green and silver foil to one side of each metal strip—the thing still makes noise that is sharp, then muted, but now he loves being near it. That’s why I think he might see colors, or maybe what’s shiny.

  I go into the bathroom to wash, turn the bathroom light out, stand by the sink. The bathroom door is almost shut, but I can see the back of Termite’s chair. He settles into a cat sound, a kind of purr that’s jagged and melodious. I pull my dress off and stand on Termite’s damp towel. Wind my hair up in an elastic, put the stopper in, run the cool water almost to the top of the sink. I wash with my hands, let the water run down my legs in tracks. Close my eyes and wash between my breasts, around them and under them, between my legs. It’s sexual sometimes. It is now but I don’t make a sound, I can be so quiet. I have to do it most nights or I can’t sleep. Usually I want to go to bed with it done so I can close my eyes and not think. It can be over in a minute. Sometimes I think I could stand in a crowded room and do it without even touching myself. I think about where that room might be and who might be in that crowd. Strangers, most of them, except for two or three. There’s no controlling who I might think about— Solly and Joey, or Nick Tucci, even Charlie, or other men I barely know. But they don’t look at me the way men mostly do. In my thoughts, they’re more like women, or they’re men who know what women know. They know it all and they look inside me, straight into where I’m getting to. I get to that place and fall through it. Then I open my eyes and I’m here, and tonight the whole of the alley and all the backyards past the frame of the window look sleepy, turned inside out. Gray and pretty, fuzzy with dusk. Not like Winfield at all, not like anywhere.

  I open the bathroom door wide and see Termite in his chair, turned away from me toward the chimes, sitting very still. His white blond curls and fair skin and pale blue pajamas glow in the dim kitchen. There’s no air, not a breath, but the chimes move in their tiny circle like a dream, like they’re in thrall to a magnet or a thought. The kitchen window holds a space layers deep above the stony shine of the alley. Lights have come on in the houses, people move in the lit-up spaces. The Tuccis’ frame two-story is nearly dark, and I hear Joey’s car before I see it, hear the slice and slide of gravel. Solly’s driving, with no headlights. He slams into their side yard, jerks to a halt. I see him get out and pull his shirt off and lean against the car door, and whatever I just pulled down or shredded in myself begins to come together again. I see Solly go around and help Joey out. They’re drunk, or Joey is, which is pretty normal for Joey but not so usual for Saul, and I see Joey fall over, then Solly gets him up and walks and drags him into the house. They
leave the doors of the convertible open. Joey’s little love car, Nick Tucci calls it, and it looks abandoned, like a puzzle thrown apart, white and topless and opened up. I want to walk over there naked and shut those doors, feel the air on my skin, make them see me when they’re too drunk to do anything about it. Doing it is like a reflex with them, must be. Finding someone to get into. There are girls who can’t resist watching them need it so much.

  So much, I think I hear Termite say, and I look at him to see. But he’s only crooning to himself, satisfied because it’s dark and the air is soft and motionless, and he has the sound of the chimes and the colors are shining. I hang my dress on the hook by the kitchen sink and pull my nightgown on. Day is done. We sang that song at the camp I went to before Termite came. The only time I went away, before or since, I was Termite’s age, the age he is now. I try to remember myself and it’s like struggling in a sack, like those kittens Nick Tucci sent Solly to the river with, the one time I told him to bring some home from the rail yard. We think of Termite as someone who’s two or three, we take care of him like that. I get really scared when I think there might be a part of him that’s as old as he really is, a part of him that knows more and more, like anyone else does. Gone the sun, sang the little girls in rounds. But Nonie was wrong, the moon is out bright as a plate. I see black clouds sail across it fast, like mountains across an orb.

  Nonie

  There’s choice but no choice. Kids deal with what is, and take one shape or another.

  Whatever I had, Lola wanted. First she wanted to be bigger, tougher, stronger, like me. I was four years older, the one she looked up to. Our mother always seemed more a child than we were, quiet, all her edges turned down the way Dad liked them. Lola wanted to read my Bible instead of hers, my bigger, heavier schoolbooks, but she only pretended to read, her eyes skimming the shapes of the words so she could turn the page at the right time. She’d sing the hymns I hated until I hated them more, and our father let me stop singing and just play the piano for Lola. She performed, even then; she could only see herself in the way people looked back at her. I cooked the food and Lola served it. She lit stubs of candles and lay flowers alongside the plates, all in the service of the Lord. I did the work and she carried off the sleight of hand, drew Dad’s gaze away from me, away from our mother. Dad worked maintenance for the city after he left the mines, but Lola would shine his shoes as though he was preaching all day at the Temple instead of emptying trash and waxing floors. Later he did preach, and she’d sit up front with me nights, working her fingertips deeper under my thigh. She’d gaze at him, nodding and mouthing the right phrases, and move her fingers under me, tickling and poking me to prove what a good show she put on.

  Dad was convinced she was a kind of prodigy, that she had the spirit in her. He said he didn’t need to treat her like a child. He’d shut them up in his room and make her read Revelations to him while he prayed. My mother and I were forbidden entrance, but he told us we could stand at the closed door and listen to Lola speak the Holy Word. I saw them once, through the window from outside, when he’d left the curtain open. She sat on the bed stock-still, reading from the small white Bible our mother had carried at her wedding, while he knelt before her and clasped her knees to his chest, his head bowed on her bare legs. She was young enough that her skirt came just to his forehead. Her voice never faltered.

  Years later, when we could talk about it, she swore that she kept him from carrying through. Now I know what it cost her. For a while he even rented her out as a douser to farmers trying to find water. He’d drive her through the county all day on a Saturday, and she’d walk across fields with a forked willow dousing rod, the men trailing her. Once she showed me with a yardstick, in our room, how she went into a trance and held the rod so it seemed to jerk and move of its own accord. She struck it lucky a few times, then began to miss, and got out of it by telling Dad the work gave her powerful headaches, that she couldn’t be clear when the men who paid them money weren’t favored by the Lord. She was ten years old at the time. Amen, she’d say at Temple. Even then, her mouth was like a flower with damp petals. Her white skin and that red hair. Our father made her wear a hat or a scarf to Temple: our mother’s hats, her frayed scarves. Lola tied them on tight and covered her hair completely, like it was her idea. She’d get swept away, locked into this passion or that, even if it was Dad’s borrowed passion, temporary, and ridiculed when we were alone in the bedroom we shared. It was our mother who scared Lola, sitting and looking out windows, sitting in the pew at Temple, so silent she only moved her lips for prayers.

  Giving a person like Lola the looks she had was like giving a baby two fistfuls of dynamite. She realized little by little, and learned early to mirror back what people wanted to see. Our father thought she was his little Witness serving at Kingdom Hall, while she hid her cosmetics and borrowed heels at school. She’d sew clothes in home ec that she never brought home. People hate girls that beautiful, but she had a way about her. She’d steal inside, up close, she couldn’t help herself. Even when I knew she was doing it, when she did it to me, it felt good. She could seduce me like she did anyone else, but the terrible thing was, with me it was real. She wanted my approval desperately, like part of her was always that motherless child, but she maintained her self-respect by competing with me, being unpredictable. I let her win, even encouraged her, when it served my purpose. I was the older sister but I let her protect me: our father was fixed on her. She managed him instinctively, played to his delusions, for years. She performed and adapted. I had rules and plans. I guarded my plans and was careful. Lola learned to offer herself up, to me or anyone: her smiles, her glances, a hymn, walking into a room, like she was sharing a peach. She made it look easy, and it was, but sometimes, with me, she was frantic, and she could go from one to the other fast. I held her then until she stopped shaking, but I was angry at the guilt I felt when she seemed vulnerable. She scared me the way our mother scared her, but for different reasons. Lola was impossible to control, and taking care of her was my job.

  It wasn’t hard at first. When she was a little kid, she said she wanted to marry me and no one else. She’d brush my hair at night, lay out my tenth-grade outfits, fuss over me. Little by little she took over chores I’d been assigned, cleaning and dusting, laundry. At eleven, she was taller than me. I was fifteen, but she filled out my clothes better than I did. Soon enough she noticed my new interests and wanted to smoke cigarettes, wear my sweaters, walk by the river with boys who had no idea how old she was. I paid her not to with lipsticks and cheap perfume she couldn’t wear at home. By then I worked after school, clerking at Murphy’s Five & Ten. Lola envied my grown-up life and drew my picture in that notebook of hers, page after page, my face from one angle and another, recognizable but changed, a reflection of a reflection. The rest was sketches of tables and walls, our bedroom window, the kitchen sink, like she was studying meaningless objects in secret. She kept her notebook hidden. She knew something about those drawings she didn’t want anyone else to understand. When I started seeing Charlie Fitzgibbon on the sly, an older boy already out of school and working in his father’s restaurant, she lied for me. I was working at Murphy’s, she’d say, or staying late at school. Two or three times a week, we’d pretend to go to sleep and she’d help me out of our bedroom window, then wait for me to come home.

  Charlie and I would meet in the meadow by Polish Town when the grass was high enough to hide us, or by the river in the shelter of the railroad tunnel. I’d decided long before that Dad’s religious wrangling and hellfire were lies. Charlie had been raised with his own version of the same. Whatever we did was wrong, equally sinful and private, so there were no boundaries. It was dark and we’d find a place to lie down. Now and then we’d catch glimpses of other teenagers, or see a Polish Town prostitute conducting her quick business, but we took our time. I’d come back home after midnight, warm and wet, smelling of the river if I’d washed, smelling of him if I hadn’t. Lola would be sitting up,
awake as though she’d never slept, waiting for my tap on the window. We kept a washbasin and pitcher of water on our nightstand, not so unusual in the ’30s. Indoor plumbing was still a recent addition in a lot of Winfield neighborhoods. Lola would move the basin to the board floor and help me off with my clothes, like she was nursing me after an accident. I’d wash with that cold water and a piece of laundry soap. Later she’d creep out of her narrow bed into mine. What does he do, she’d ask me, how does it feel. Show me. Pretend. I turned my back to her, but I let her stay, and tangle her legs in mine.

  Dad began going away on weekends, preaching over near Bellington. Finally he got his own congregation there and spent most of his time living over the storefront they rented as a Temple. They didn’t pay him much but I was working enough, even in high school, to cover the expenses he didn’t. It was a relief to have him gone. I was the adult in the house. Our mother grew even more silent, and never stirred after dusk. Late at night, I’d let Charlie into my room if it was raining or bitter cold, into my bed. Lola would go sit in the kitchen in the dark. She’d be gone when we started but sitting there near us when we finished. After, if we fell asleep for a few minutes, she’d be in bed with us, right next to me.

  Maybe it’s why she never stayed any amount of time with a man I didn’t find first. Oh, I’m sure there were others I never knew about. There were years I wasn’t in touch with Lola, for obvious reasons. But as long as she was near me, she borrowed my men. She never intended to keep them. Lola never kept anything. She knew better.

  Back when Lola was a child men watched on the street, she was sure I’d marry Charlie and the three of us would live together. Never my plan, but she thought she was standing right between us. She thinks we’re her parents, Charlie joked. She was fascinated that he went to confession and told the priest what he did with me, then prayed I wouldn’t get pregnant. I didn’t pray I knew Gladdy looked down on me with a vengeance, that in her mind a pregnancy would always be the only scandalous, inarguable reason for Charlie to marry so beneath himself. We’d started when I was sixteen. You can have a baby, Lola would tell me, and I’ll take care of it. She was quite dutiful, Lola was, as a young girl. She featured we’d go away like a little family and live beside the ocean somewhere warm. We could watch waves instead of a river that got brown and swollen and floated all manner of things that fell into it from Polish Town.