REMEMBER SATURN
JAYNE USED TO DREAM ABOUT BEING A PRINCESS, like Cinderella or Sleeping Beauty. She’d wear these cute little princess dresses and spin so hard in ‘em that the bottom of the dress rose up into a perfect circle. I always told her she looked like Saturn when she did that, what with that ring spinnin’ around her middle. She used to smile so big that her face got all scrunched together, and, when I watched her little bare feet go up on tiptoes and take little steps in little circles, my face would get all scrunched up too. Grace was too young to care about princesses and all that. She used to wear the same kind of dresses only because Jayne wore ‘em. She woulda worn blue if that’s what Jayne was wearing. She never cared too much about what Kathy wore; I guess there was an attraction for the one closer to her age. Jayne liked that about Grace. Made her feel special. She always used to call her “my baby” like Grace was all hers, and Grace, in turn, always called Jayne “my Jayney.” Point is, ever since Grace died, Jayne might’ve still worn her princess stuff, but she never spun around so pretty any more.
Of course that wasn’t the only thing that had changed since Grace died. Things were unsteady at Alice’s trailer. It’s like when you throw a big rock into the lake and the water ripples for a while before everything’s calm again. The bigger the rock, the longer it takes the water to calm down. Well, little Grace dying was about the biggest rock you could imagine. A boulder. One of the things that happened on account of Grace dying like she did was that Alice stopped letting her girls go out much at all, and never without her. Hell, she never even let them out with me, and before that I used to go out and play with them all the time. So the girls were stuck inside, and they seemed all overcrowded with sadness, whether they realized it or not. It was like claustrophobia or whatever, only it wasn’t walls crushing the girls, it was memories. Watching TV, those girls were sitting right where Grace used to sit, where she used to bug ‘em and crawl all over ‘em. In the bedroom, playing with their toys, the girls were always in the shadow of where Grace used to play or sitting beside Grace’s bed.
After Grace died I made a point of coming to Alice’s place more often than I used to, and that’s pretty often, because I used to come to Alice’s place more than I was at my own place. I liked being over there, so it wasn’t much of a chore, you know. But it was also a conscious effort for me, because, as much as Alice loved her girls, she just couldn’t bring herself to do much with them. If the girls were watching Dora in front of the television, Alice would find her way to her room, or Grace’s bed, and curl up and read or cry, depending on her mood, and, if the girls were playing in their room, Alice’d be in front of the television watching the news or something. I don’t know why that was. Me, I’d’ve kept those girls shut tight in my arms forever, if I were her. Maybe she didn’t want to get too close to them in case she lost another one. Hell, Kathy’d run off the previous week and Alice just about had a heart attack. So I don’t think anybody could blame her for that.
Well, anyway, on the day I’m talking about I got over to Alice’s house about mid-morning. I parked on the highway, just like I always did since Grace died. Truth is, I didn’t have much of a choice anyway, because Alice, she’d made a barricade so nobody could drive up to her house ever again. One by one, she’d taken big rocks from the beach and brought them to the mouth of her driveway, and one by one the barricade got bigger and bigger, until it was big enough to block the whole entrance. I walked around the rocks and made my way to the front door, but stopped before gettin’ there because outside the girls’ bedroom window there was a big pile of clumsily made paper airplanes. I didn’t think nothin’ of it right then, other than it was something I never saw either of the girls do before. I just chuckled at the pile and shook my head a bit, even picked one of them up and tried to make it fly, but it sort of just shot right down to the ground nose first. I had half a mind to pick them up and toss them in the trash, because eventually the wind was going to take them all over the rez, flying like they shoulda been in the first place, but I thought better of it.
When I got inside, I saw the girls must’ve been playing in their room because Alice was sitting all quiet on the couch, watching a talk show; one of those Jerry Springer bullshit shows where there’s more shouting than talking. I always thought they shoulda called shows like that shout shows as opposed to talk shows. Anything coulda been on though, because Alice, I don’t think she was really watching the TV. I think it was more, like, distracting her. She was real quiet all the time. You know, she must’ve had lots of thoughts up in her head, unpleasant ones and all that, ones she’d rather not be thinking. The only problem I saw with watching a stupid show like the one she was watching was it didn’t require much thinking so it couldn’t have been much of a distraction. She woulda been better off watching one of those crime shows I liked. At least those made you use your brain from time to time.
I went over to sit beside her for a little bit, even though I knew there wasn’t much going to come of it. We’d developed a routine, Alice and me. I’d say a bunch of things to her, she wouldn’t really answer, and then I’d leave her be and go off and hang out with Kathy and Jayne. Those two said lots of things. I didn’t hold nothin’ against Alice, of course, because Grace’s death was still pretty recent and she was dealing with stuff the way she had to deal with stuff. The girls, they were dealing with stuff too, but while Alice was pushing everyone and everything away, the girls were keeping things real close to them, and they sure did love their Uncle Gideon those days. And as terrible as the reasons were for that, I kind of liked being needed like that. Maybe I needed to keep things close, too, because I sure did love little Grace, and the closer I kept Kathy and Jayne to me the less guilty I felt about flaking out on Alice the night Grace died. Yeah, Grace was a boulder for me too, that was for sure.
First thing I noticed when I sat down was a cigarette on the coffee table in front of the couch, resting on a piece of aluminum foil shaped like an ashtray. She’d already sucked half of it back, and I watched the smoke rise from it for a few seconds, appreciating how smoke from a cigarette was maybe the only thing pretty about smoking, how it kinda danced and curled in the air. I didn’t know what to think about Alice smoking, because it wasn’t something I’d ever seen her do. That’s probably why I never said anything for a little bit—I was processing and all that. Eventually, though, I tore my eyes away from the cigarette and gave Alice a careful little touch on the arm. I was always careful when I touched her lately, like if I touched her too hard she would just break into pieces.
“How’re you doing today, Al?”
She glanced over at me quick, nodded, and she reached down and took a big drag of that cigarette like she wanted me to notice what she was doing. Maybe it was a cry for help, I don’t know. I took it like that anyway.
“When’d you start doing that anyway?” I said, pointing at the cigarette as if she didn’t know what I was talking about.
She shrugged and then smothered it into the aluminum foil. I waved my hand in the air to push the smoke away. I never liked smoking, me. Got disgusted by the smell of it. For a moment, I wished I’d found Alice out on her tire swing in the back yard because some fresh air woulda been good right about then. I could see why she wasn’t out there all that often any more, though. Being out there, watching on her girls, probably made her think too much of Grace, and how Grace wasn’t playing in the field with her sisters. Alice reached over to her right side and pulled out a pack of cigarettes, which was half full, and took another one out. Menthol, they were. Funny. I had a friend who smoked those things when she had colds because she said it cleared her sinuses. Alice stuck it in her mouth and offered me one, but I shook my head. She shrugged again and lit her cigarette, taking another long tug at it before placing it back on her ashtray.
“You know, that ain’t good for your girls,” I said, and what I said surprised me, because I never butted into anything Alice did in the way of parenting. But I couldn’t help it. Tha
t smoke, it got into everything. It danced up to the ceiling and then spread every which way, for sure into the girls’ room, and that meant they were sucking it in too.
“They’re fine,” Alice said.
“Why don’t you let me take ‘em out back for a bit? Play around and all that.”
“No, thanks.”
“We won’t go anywhere, Al, we’ll just stick around the field.”
“No!” she said, and that was the first time she ever snapped at me.
Right about then I dropped any talk about her smoking. I thought about the paper airplanes I saw on the ground outside the girls’ room, and remembered how their bedroom window was open, so that made me feel a bit better about it anyway. The smoke’d just find its way out into the air and maybe wouldn’t bother the girls too much. That was about all I could take of sitting there with Alice, though, and it sounded like she had about enough of me, too. It was a different kind of talk than we usually had, but it wasn’t better either. It was weird for me because I always loved being around her, even if we was sitting there together all quiet, but what I really wanted to do was see the girls. So I let out a big sigh and pulled myself up from the couch.
“I’m gonna go check on the girls,” I said, and started to walk out of the living room when she stopped me for a second.
“Hey, Gideon,” she said.
“What’s that?” I said.
“You ever think about getting out of this place?”
“Like outta the rez?”
“Yeah, like out of the rez, out of here …”
“Well, I don’t know, I guess so, sometimes,” I said, and the truth was I did think of it from time to time, but not seriously. I wasn’t about to leave Alice and the girls, or my grandpa neither, especially since he hadn’t been feeling too good lately. I didn’t think I could stand living away from any of them.
“I’ve been thinking about that,” she said, and she wasn’t dragging on her cigarette then. She wasn’t staring at the TV set neither. She was looking out the window, out into the sky hovering over the big field her girls used to always play in. “I’ve been thinking about maybe heading out to the city.”
“Alice, what would you ever do in the city? Your home’s here and all your family … and me, too, you know.”
“That’s just it, everything I know is here, and I don’t want to know all that anymore,” she said, and that’s when it started to make sense to me, because if the memories in the house were crushing the girls, they were crushing Alice too.
“You know,” I said, “my grandpa always says you can’t run away from memories and emotions and shit. They’re faster than you could ever be.”
“Fuck what your grandpa says,” she said.
That was like a punch in the stomach to me. I just stood there like I was frozen or something, until she finally took another drag of her cigarette.
“Anyway, that’s what I’ve been thinking,” she said, like she hadn’t just swore at me.
“Okay, Al,” I said.
I turned away and went off to the girls’ bedroom, not really knowing what else I could say to her, or if I wanted to say anything at all.
When I walked into Kathy and Jayne’s room, I found the two of them going about their own business, almost oblivious to each other. That wasn’t a natural thing, to me, because they usually did almost everything together. It wasn’t like playing in the field, of course, but it was still together, you know. Jayne had a box of crayons spread out on the floor in front of her, along with a stack of paper, same kind of paper I saw outside the bedroom window on the ground. She was in the middle of scribbling letters on one of those pieces of paper in red crayon, and she was real into it. I could see her little pink tongue sticking out of her mouth she was concentrating so hard, like Michael Jordan when he was driving to the hoop. I smiled at that. That was real cute to me.
Kathy, she was sitting by the bookshelf with her legs curled right up into her chest, her eyes stuck into a novel that looked kinda big for a little girl to be reading. She was holding it up to catch some light coming in from the bedroom window. The girls didn’t notice me when I came in. They didn’t look up or nothing, which was odd, because, like I said, they really loved me lately.
“Hey, Kathy,” I said as I stepped deeper into the room.
At that, she looked up and smiled quick, but only quick, because right away she was looking back at her book. The closer I got, the more I could notice about the book she was reading. It looked like one of Alice’s.
“What’re you reading? Anything good?”
She looked up again, this time to shoot me more of an annoyed look rather than a smile. Then, like she didn’t know what she was reading, she turned the book over to look at the cover, and flipped it back around.
“The Lovely Bones,” she said.
“That sounds kinda awful,” I said, and that’s really all I could say about it, because I didn’t read much, and I never heard of that book before. Hell, you could probably list off 20 book titles to me and I’d be lucky to know one of ‘em. Kathy, she’d probably read more books than me and she was just 10 years old.
“It’s about a girl who gets killed, Uncle Gideon, and then she becomes a ghost and helps solve her own murder.”
“Well at least she gets to be a ghost and all,” I said. “That’s kinda nice.”
“I guess so, but she’s kinda stuck in purgatory. So, I don’t think it’s all that good.”
I walked over and sat down beside her, cross-legged, and, without asking, I took the book away from her and began to look it over more carefully. I could read and all, in case you’re wondering, I just didn’t think it was too exciting as an activity. Rather be doing other things I suppose.
“Maybe I’ll read it,” I said. “Maybe you should be reading, you know, the books you got in here.”
She snatched the book from me real fast, before I could even think of grabbing onto it tighter. Jayne didn’t even notice any of what Kathy and I were doing; by that time she’d finished writing whatever she was writing, and now she was folding that same paper up with just as much concentration, her tongue sticking out and all. It looked like a little stick of gum, like at any moment she would blow out a breath and it’d turn into a bubble. Kathy looked at the bookshelf and rolled her eyes.
“Uncle Gideon, these are kids books, they’re little baby books.”
“Well, that’s what you are, aren’t you? You’re a kid, Kathy.”
“Plus, I’ve read them all, and I don’t like reading the same thing twice. It’s boring.”
“I just don’t think you should be reading something sad like that, that’s all. Don’t seem right to me.”
“Well, you aren’t my dad.”
“Damn right I’m not your dad,” I blurted out without thinking.
Right away I could see that what I said hurt Kathy, probably just as much as what she said had hurt me. Those girls still loved their old man, despite what he did to Alice. Kids just love their dads I guess, and there ain’t nothing you can do to stop that love, even if the person who’s getting the love don’t deserve it—and that bastard sure didn’t deserve getting loved by Kathy and Jayne. Still, it wasn’t for me to say who the girls loved, and, as soon as I said what I said, I felt bad about it. When they got older, they could decide for themselves about him. For now, I figured I needed to keep my damn mouth shut.
“God, I’m sorry about that, Kathy,” I said, and I reached over and gave her shoulder a squeeze.
Kathy put her book down and put her head on my shoulder for a moment, then took it away and buried her eyes back in her book. I gave her a little tap on the shoulder, and when she looked up again I motioned over to Jayne.
“What’s your sister up to?” I whispered so as not to disturb Jayne; I didn’t want to break her concentration. By that time, I could see the paper she’d been writing on and folding up had turned into a crude airplane. So, that mystery got solved, even though I wasn’t sure what she woulda
been writing on those airplanes. If you didn’t know any better, you’d think Jayne was just any other normal five-year-old girl. I mean to say, you’d never guess by looking at her what she’d been through in her life. She didn’t look altogether sad, unless you looked real deep into her eyes, and she was done up just like I liked to see her, like a girl her age liked to dress. She was wearing one of her dress-up princess gowns, Cinderella I think, and she was wearing it as nice as a real princess. Better, even.
“Oh, she’s making arrow-planes.”
“Aira-planes!” Jayne snapped, suddenly joining the conversation.
“Oh, right,” Kathy said with a snicker.
“What’re you building those for?” I said to Jayne.
Jayne got up with the paper airplane in her hand and looked it over with a whole bunch of pride. Then, with a smile kind of filled with wonder, she pinched the bottom of the plane between her thumb and pointer finger and started flying it around the room, even making airplane sounds here and there, the typical kid sounds for machines and such. You know, it coulda been the sound of a tractor for all I knew, but it was nice to see her make-believe. And I liked that she was flying the plane around the room, too, because it felt a bit like she was dancing and twirling like she used to. Even her feet were up on their chubby little toes. Those toes were so cute, you just wanted to play this little piggy with ‘em.
“I jus’ felt like makin’ aira-planes,” she said as she flew her clumsy contraption.
I thought about the big pile of them outside the window and wondered why she was throwing them away, because she seemed to like them a lot just to get rid of ‘em. I don’t know, maybe she was trying to make the perfect one and she hadn’t quite made it yet. They were all, like, prototypes or whatever. I figured if she eventually made the perfect one I could pick up the others when I left so they didn’t litter the whole rez. Lord knows, there was enough junk layin’ around here and there, mostly in the ditches between the highway and our houses. Like old broken tricycles or blown-up car tires or Tim Horton’s coffee cups or other shit like that.
The Evolution of Alice Page 6
