Lark and Termite

by Jayne Anne Phillips

  Stamble leans down next to him, between him and the wind like a shield. “Would you like to try sitting in the chair?”

  Termite sits real still. Clearly a no. I could answer the question for him, but I don’t. Stamble seems comfortable enough with the silence, and he stays still too, his face near Termite’s, like he’s waiting, listening for another kind of answer. Stamble’s white blond hair is only a shade or two lighter than Termite’s, and his light eyes would seem as startling if they weren’t so pale and weak and narrow set. It’s almost as though Stamble and Termite are related versions of something, but Stamble walks around in the world and Termite doesn’t. Stamble’s invisible to people except as an oddity, like Termite, but he’s not so set apart that people don’t expect things of him. He has a job and a suit, but he stands and moves in his own peculiar, leaning-away stance. He keeps a distance. Like he’s careful, not used to himself. He’s got nothing to help him out but that suit, and the hat that covers his pale hair and shades his face. No holler-back protector like Nonie, no radio knob to fiddle with, no blue plastic ribbon to blow and blow. Everything is gone from Stamble, you can tell by looking. He’s passing through, he’s visiting.

  “Where’s your family?” I ask him. “Where you from?” “Not from around here,” he says. He stays crouched down next to Termite and touches Termite’s head with his pale hand. “That wind is going to get stronger,” he tells Termite. “It’s going to blow all this heavy air to smithereens.” He says it like he’s thinking the way Termite thinks, that any storm is a good thing because he loves hearing them.

  I’ve got a radar about anyone who might hurt Termite, make fun of him, take advantage. I’m realizing my first feeling about Stamble had to do with Social Services, and the surprise of him appearing so suddenly with that briefcase. They all have briefcases. But he’s not like them. He really is strange. I wonder if people know how strange.

  “Looks like that storm they’ve been talking about is here,” I say.

  “I’ve got to be going,” Stamble says. “You two had better get inside.” He stands up now, away from Termite, and grasps the briefcase he’s left sitting by the door.

  “Don’t I need to sign anything, about the wheelchair?”

  “Not at all. See if he likes it first. See if he’ll use it.”

  Now the rain has turned hard and solid and steady, like a watery curtain falling straight from the edge of the porch roof. “You want me to lend you an umbrella?” I ask him.

  “No need,” Stamble says. He steps off into the rain as I’m opening the front door, pushing the folded wheelchair in front of me, pulling Termite and the wagon behind. I look for him, walking away, but the rain is so dense I can’t even see the street. It’s as though Stamble has disappeared.

  “You’ve got your storm,” I tell Termite.

  He doesn’t say anything. He’s listening to rain on the roof, pouring off the gutters, running in little rivers, while I dry him off with a towel. We didn’t really get wet, but everything feels damp, cool, and the smell of the rain has filled the house. I put Termite in his soft upholstered chair and shut the windows except for a couple of inches, so the sound of the rain comes through, then I open a newspaper in a corner of the living room and steer the wagon onto it. The wheels are wet and dirty and I’ve got to clean up the tracks across the wooden floor. The wheelchair sits in the middle of the room, folded up, and I move the coffee table to one side so there’s more space. I like the rain, the sound and the way the pouring water turns the air a pale gray evening color. Thunder cracks and rolls and repeats. It’s raining hard and we’re closed into the sound.

  I open up the wheelchair, flip the latch underneath to lock the seat steady, then I sit. It has cushioned straps that fit over the shoulders, and a waist strap, and a seat back thick as a pillow. It might work for Termite. It moves so easily, and turns and reverses. The wheels make a light ticking sound on the smooth floor. Termite wouldn’t use his hands on the wheels, though. He’d have to be pushed, at first, anyway. He’d still need help.

  He’s turned his head. He hears the chair now, like it’s a sound timing the rain. I’m thinking I could ride him on my lap and he could rest his wrists on mine, feel how to steer and turn something lighter, quicker. Today I just want him to listen. I push his big chair into the middle of the room on its clunky refrigerator wheels and sit back down in the wheelchair. Then I close my eyes and try to feel the circle around him, the space cleared of furniture. I move up and back and around, reverse, turn backward and forward. I bump into the table and the piano, but only at first. The tick of the wheels gets faster and smoother, and when I’m just near Termite I can hear him, distinct from the pour of the rain, making his own sound in the back of his throat. I know he’s turning his head, listening, keeping track of me and the sound of the chair. He’s like the second hand of a windup clock ticking so smooth it blurs into another sound.

  That’s how Nonie finds us when she comes home, drenched just running from Elise’s car to the back door. She turns on a lamp in the softly dark room and sees us, Termite in his chair, me in mine.

  “Well, I never,” she says.

  I don’t say anything for a minute. I have to get used to her, standing there stolid and wet, when the room felt so closed and pure before. “Stamble brought this wheelchair by,” I tell her. “It’s smaller, easier to use.”

  “I didn’t ask Social Services for any wheelchair.”

  “We’re just trying it out.”

  “Who’s trying it out?” She shakes her head at me. “I suppose you can use it if he won’t, if it entertains you so. But I can’t imagine Social Services will allow us two wheelchairs. They’ll have to come back here and get the other one. Right now I’d like you to heat up the chili I brought from the restaurant. Tomorrow, with the Flood-Relief people coming in, we’ll sell a lot of chili—it offsets the damp.” She steps out of her wet shoes and nudges them with her foot, onto the newspaper I unfolded in the corner. Her white waitress shoes sit empty near the wagon like they belong there. She gives me a wry smile. “They say half the town will flood, but they’ve been wrong before.”

  I stay still. I want to get out of the wheelchair, fold it up and tuck it away, but not in front of her. It’s like Stamble convinced me the chair is secret. It has the feeling of him all over it, and his whispery sound I’m just starting to hear. But Nonie doesn’t look at me. She’s standing, quiet, looking at Termite. “What do you think, Termite? Are they wrong?”

  Termite doesn’t answer, doesn’t say. He turns his head away, tilts his head up, listening, like the answer is in the air, and anyone should be able to hear it.

  Nonie

  I come into the kitchen soaking wet, the sky thundering and rain sheeting in drifts, pounding like it has its own weight. The blue glass barometer Lark hung on the wall is cracked to pieces at the top—too cheap to register the pressure. The blue water has leaked out and stained the cardboard frame, and the light inside the house is stained too, lit up and olive green. The storm has squeezed daylight to a thin shine, and there’s Termite in his chair in the living room, with Lark turning circles in a wheelchair I’ve never seen before. It’s like she’s performing just for him and he’s listening, with that look he gets. It slays me. So much was taken from that child before he was even born, yet he always seems to want exactly what he has. He’s himself, so intent and fixed, when Lola was never still.

  Lola always got what she wanted, until she lost all she had.

  She wept, about me, she said, not Charlie. She was calm, as though I was the one who didn’t understand. I wanted to be with you both and he was the only way I could. Then she stood back and accused me, like she had a right. You left me for so many years! And you wanted him, you needed him to stay. Yes, I answered, and he was a chore you undertook for my sake. Did you think I’d never find out? She said he would have left us. Then you should have let him, I told her. You would have sent me with him. I didn’t disagree. You have a job, I told her.
You’re making a living as well as I am, and you can’t live here anymore.

  I didn’t see her for days. She stayed at the club, and Billy and I packed her things. Like a father, Billy threw away her battered suitcase and bought her new ones, to hold her new clothes and shoes and the satin sheets she’d bought for the bed. Then he asked me to marry him. He said it was time I had a man worthy of me. He paid some boys to move Lola’s things into his rooms above the club, and he moved in with me. We got married at City Hall the next week, and Lola stood up with us. Charlie was gone, but there were three of us again. She went right on, smiling, somber; it was as though she had a more appropriate set of parents and she assumed her place, rehearsing in the afternoons, singing at night, sleeping all morning, while I quit my job and managed the books at the club. I kept Billy’s hours, though I didn’t indulge in his habits. He concealed most of them at first, the drinking, the cocaine, his occasional heroin use, but he couldn’t conceal his cooked books and the way he actually made his money.

  As for Lola, I think now that she wanted Charlie with us as much as I did, for different reasons, but she was certain he’d leave after a few weeks if he wasn’t so mesmerized and aroused and at fault that he couldn’t go home. Maybe she was right. He’d told Gladdy his address was a rooming house, that he worked as a chef at a restaurant. He wasn’t inside a church the whole time he was in Atlanta. Later he told me he confessed to an Atlanta priest before driving nonstop to Winfield. Gladdy allowed he was ill when he got home and put him to bed like an invalid. He went back to work and stopped thinking anything at all, he said, until he got the phone call from me three months later. Lola was pregnant with his child. We were family again, or still, despite everything. Lola wanted the baby. She said she’d intended the pregnancy, though she didn’t want to marry Charlie or anyone else. This is Charlie’s baby, and yours, the only way the two of you will ever have a child. Someday you’ll understand, you’ll forgive me. I told her I wasn’t interested in babies. I wanted to leave, get away from her; now I couldn’t. I had to stay until she’d given birth and I knew they were safe.

  Things were falling apart for Billy Onslow in Atlanta. He had a smaller place in Louisville, where his family practically owned the county. He was going back to run the club in Kentucky, and if he liquidated fast enough he’d stay ahead of any charges in Georgia. He was going to dry out, he said, run a low-profile operation. We all moved to Louisville, and Billy and I were at the hospital when Lark was born. Billy handed out cigars. He really did see Lola as a daughter by then; his business would support her and she would sing in his club, but he vetted any suitors and made it clear she wasn’t for sale, like certain of his other employees. Their choice, he said, his protection and business guidance for a clear percentage.

  It was a world Lola could live in. Billy was kind to her and his operation was classy enough, she saw herself as a legitimate performer in a stable situation. But she didn’t kid herself, as Billy might say. The baby couldn’t grow up here, she said, or in any life she could provide. She sensed I was going back to Winfield before I even told Billy. No one needs to know. Say she’s your child, with Billy; you’re married, after all. Or she’s your divorced sister’s child. Just let me keep her with me while she’s so small she won’t remember me. Maybe she couldn’t raise a child, she said, but she could take care of a baby. The other girls loved Lark, she’d have plenty of help. Then I’ll send her to you. Billy will bring her, and I’ll help you, every month. I won’t ask to see her, ever. Don’t tell her anything. I don’t want her knowing any of it. She’s yours. I didn’t believe her. That baby is your responsibility, I told her, I had all I could do to take care of myself. If she didn’t think she could raise a child, I said, she shouldn’t have had one, especially with Charlie.

  I resolved things with Billy. Despite his various enterprises, he was more honest than the politicians and cops who profited from his hard work. He dealt with a lot of people, and I never knew a soul who said he’d abused them. I couldn’t settle in his life, though; I couldn’t stay. We went to Reno for a weekend divorce. I didn’t ask for a settlement, but he declared he was going to win me one and show me a good time. He didn’t clear as much as he’d hoped, but in those days the five thousand dollars he won at blackjack was plenty for a down payment on a little house in Winfield. Charlie wanted me to buy in a better part of town and help me with the payments, but I wasn’t owning a house with Charlie. This is my place, I told him, not yours. In fact, he couldn’t afford to help me. They were about to lose the restaurant; even Gladdy admitted as much. I arranged to borrow enough from Billy Onslow to help us turn the business around. Lola wrote to me, sent photographs of the baby. I never answered. Lark was almost three when Billy Onslow showed up with her. I had to take her, Billy said, Lola wasn’t doing well. Everyone in the place was only getting more attached to the baby. Lola had to finish this and pull herself back together. Yes, I said, well.

  Lark had a grave little face, and Charlie’s Black Irish looks, his dark hair and liquid brown eyes. Lola’s sculpted features weren’t much in evidence yet, and that was lucky. To me, Lark looked like Charlie. He and I were together again, after an initial few months of his sad, hopeful courting as we worked to save the restaurant. He said Lola got into bed with him one morning after I left for work and he wakened making love to her. It was confused and crazy, part of a dynamic between Lola and me we both knew Lola had wanted all along. When he left, though, it was clear he’d lost me, not Lola. I wouldn’t marry him, ever, I told him. I wouldn’t live with Gladdy or even be related to her, but we were together. Now here was this child. Maybe life hadn’t cheated us out of so much after all. At the time, I didn’t really care what Lola suffered, giving Lark up. I told myself Lola had created her own suffering. I put away all I knew: the child on the bed with our father at her feet, the skinny girl waiting alone in a dark kitchen, the teenager left in an empty house with a mother who didn’t speak.

  I told Billy he could bring in Lark’s things, clothes and toys and a half-size bed he set up in my spare room. Then he hugged me, said he missed me, and left. Lark had never called anyone Mama, but she certainly knew Lola’s name. She said it like a constant happy question at first, but I’d busy her with something, and little by little, she forgot. My name was not so different from Lola’s, to a toddler.

  I took two weeks off work to spend every minute with Lark, and then Elise came over while I did the supper shift at the restaurant. She’d put Lark to bed and read romance novels till I got home. It was manageable, and the Tucci kids were right across the alley. Nick’s wife was still with him. She was a drifty, sweet girl, and those little boys hung all over her like satisfied puppies. Lark joined them. By the time she was four, I took her to work with me; she napped in the office and played in one of the booths, and Charlie adored her. Gladdy was so angry she “retired,” but town gossip settled any scandal on Lola. I said Lola’s marriage hadn’t worked out and the father wasn’t involved; I really didn’t know anything about him and it didn’t matter. Lark was my niece and I was her legal guardian, she’d take my name, the adoption was in process. Gladdy was getting older; she stopped by the restaurant every day but mostly left it to us.

  Those years when the war was ending and Lark was a child were good years, and light and bright compared with the struggle when Termite came. That was hard, all of it. He seemed the damaged mystery of everything I’d never finished with Lola, and the sadness of all that had gone wrong for her. In ’49 she wrote to tell me she’d married that young soldier, and signed the letter with her married name. She was pregnant; they were going to buy a little house when he got back from overseas, maybe in Florida, by the ocean. She promised never to try to take Lark from me, said she only wanted to see her, to be her auntie, and she hoped we’d come and visit after they were set up in a cottage with a yard and a palm tree. A palm tree! It turned out there was one, a scrawny spiny thing with spiky fronds, and the picket fence she wanted, not that she probably car
ed anymore. She had a long difficult labor and a damaged baby, and then got news her young husband was dead in Korea. I asked Charlie to help her buy that little house in Coral Gables, and he mortgaged the restaurant to buy it free and clear. Gladdy was livid. She only agreed to sign if the cottage was in Charlie’s name and the restaurant in hers.

  Billy and some of the Louisville girls helped Lola move. Billy helped her with expenses, and one or another of the girls stayed with her the first weeks. She wouldn’t let Charlie or me near her. She said she could manage. I decided to respect her wishes, give her time to get on her feet, and then I tried not to think about her. I didn’t hear from her again until Billy Onslow called to tell me what had happened, what she’d done, and then Termite was here. A soldier who’d known his father brought him in Billy Onslow’s car—all according to Lola’s instructions. They were a whole crew—the soldier, a big man with a terrible limp, his young Korean war bride, and a nurse Billy had hired to care for the baby in the backseat of his big black Packard. The nurse turned around and left with them, of course. The Florida cottage became Gladdy’s “retirement bungalow”—another reason I can’t stand to think of the place.

  Once Termite was my responsibility, I went day by day. It was only Lark’s pleasure in him that began to change how I felt. They have such privacy between them. I’m here to protect them until Lark can manage it herself. And she will, as well as I ever have.

  You think anyone at that school would tell me what happened, why Termite got afraid to go there? I went with him one day, but I couldn’t see what scared him, and he couldn’t tell anyone. He can’t do puzzles or draw or learn letters. He won’t hold a pencil, only those thick round crayons Lark puts in his hands. He can listen to music and repeat sounds at home. Social Services likes to threaten, exercise authority. They said he was past school age and he would have to go; they’d initiate an Aid to Dependent Children investigation if I didn’t send him. The county could intervene, petition for a special-needs placement. It’s in the boy’s best interests to be stimulated, they said, as though he suffers for attention, for people to care and do for him. Lark’s had him all over town nearly every day in that wagon since he was a baby. She took him everywhere. Summers they’d go off with the Tucci kids and I wouldn’t see him until lunchtime at Charlie’s, and I never worried a minute. Lark fed him, she kept cold drinks in a thermos, she found bathrooms, she kept him propped right, pillows all around him, she talked and jabbered at him. It might seem a twelve-year-old couldn’t take care of a kid like him, but she watched me and she knew how and she never seemed to get tired of it. Winters after school she’d sit right down with him like she’d missed him all day. Elise helped us the first couple of years, but by the time Lark was twelve, it was her. I worked evenings at the restaurant and Charlie helped me financially. I’d have Termite bathed and their dinner ready and then I’d go to work. How else could I pay the bills?