Jane.

by Riya Anne Polcastro

  22

  (Rose) I know what’s coming. I can tell by the way they huddle, by the way they walk towards me, by the piercing looks in their eyes. I have two choices in this situation: run or go limp. Everything in my nature says run.

  23

  I am still asleep, recovering from my booze and boob-filled birthday, when the call comes. Officer Charlt would like me to meet him at the county jail. He does not say why, and I do not ask; the answer is obvious.

  When I arrive, they show me to a small interview room. After fifteen minutes or so, I am about to go out to check if they have forgotten about me when an officer finally enters. "Good morning there, Jane; thanks for coming down. I’m Officer Charlt." He reaches out to shake my hand. I have to stand in order to reach, and when I do, I notice that he tops out at five feet.

  He motions for me to take a seat, and then sits across the table, a manila file folder in front of him. The interview room he has chosen is actually an interrogation room, complete with a two-way mirror and the stereotypical bare bulb hanging from the ceiling. It is all so TV-PD Drama; an uncontrollable smirk tugs at the corners of my lips.

  "So, I understand you retain custody of your aunt, Rose?"

  "Huh? Custody?"

  He leans forward in his chair so that much of his little torso is on the wooden table. "You are in charge of her? She is in your care?"

  What is he insinuating? "My aunt is a grown woman," I respond. "She is in charge of herself."

  He opens his little folder and changes the subject. "Your aunt appears to be very well known by the Portland Police. "

  I laugh a little. "That she is."

  Officer Charlt crinkles his brow with indignation. "I don’t see how this is a laughing matter. It is actually quite serious," he insists.

  I beg to differ but keep quiet instead. My aunt has lived, that is for sure. She has lived according to her own whims and defied convention. Oftentimes this has led her near, and just as often clear over, the line of the law. She has done some strange things as well as some downright stupid things. She constantly finds herself in the wrong place at the wrong time and is the victim of circumstance on regular occasion. She is on the wrong side of misunderstandings all too often thanks to the confused and convoluted interchanges that control her mode of thought. She would say she is misunderstood. Officer Charlt claims she is a nuisance. Most people would probably say that she is insane. And that is what gets her a trip to the hospital and the charges dropped nearly each and every time.

  The file that Officer Charlt holds is thin. Too thin to have come from Portland. Still, he probably heard plenty of anecdotes from whoever he talked to up there. Rose was on a first name basis with much of the Portland Police Department. You could say she was something of a disturbing-the-peace celebrity. They got calls on her for everything from dine and dash to public urination. One of her favorite past times was to sit on the ledges of the city’s bridges and dangle her legs over. Of course this is illegal, but there was no making sense of it for Aunt Rose. To her it was a grave injustice. All she wanted to do was sit there and hang her legs over the edge, no biggie. It was peaceful. Never mind that any big gust of wind would send her crashing to waters below—she felt alive! So once a year, she would pick a different bridge, climb its cement and cable barriers, and test her fate above the Willamette. She always chose a day near July Fourtg and took a little American flag along to wave from the bridge. The police came to expect her annual demonstration. Annoyed as they were by it, deterrence was not worth adding extra patrols that time of the year. There are a lot of bridges in Portland, after all.

  Besides, Rose had a special event planned for nearly every holiday. Before Christmas, she dressed up like a homeless Santa Claus and harangued shoppers to remember the true meaning of the season. On February fourteenth, she dressed in nothing but a cloth diaper, pasties, and paper wings and gave restaurant streaking her best try. When she could make it past the maître d’, she shot the surprised couples in her wake with a Nerf bow and arrow. Quite a few times, she scoped out a place with a good enough layout that she was able to go from the front door to out the service entrance without being nabbed. She made the paper once for her appearance at a Red Lobster. Someone snapped quite a candid photo of her and sent it off to The Willamette Weekly. On Easter, she would pretend to poop rotten eggs all over town. She painted them months earlier, still raw, and then left them to "ripen" on her kitchen counter. Innocent people found these eggs, mostly children, and inevitably the fragile shell would crack and the most god-awful smell would take over movie theaters, libraries, toy stores.

  However the police dealt with her, I heard little of it. It was my mother who took their calls, and she bore her shame in relative silence. Even as an adult, my mother continues to believe that Rose’s behavior, Rose’s mental illness, is somehow directed at her—a ploy concocted all to embarrass her, to get back at her. Yet her behavior has not changed any now that I am "in charge." But now I am the one called down, lectured, expected to keep her under control.

  "Fortunately for your aunt," Officer Charlt continues, "the car lot should never have hired her—"

  I cut him off, "What do you mean hired? What car lot? Are you saying my aunt got a job?"

  "Yes," he says slowly. "This was her third day on the job."

  I am shocked; how did I miss that? Yeah, Rose has been gone a lot lately, but a job? "At a car lot?"

  "Yeeessss. So this is all news to you?"

  "Well, yeah. My aunt can’t work. She’s on social security because she can’t work! She’s . . ." I twirl my right pointer finger in a circle around my temple in the universal sign for crazy.

  "Yeah, I gathered that from talking to the chief in Portland. Schizophrenic, Bi-polar, PTSD . . ."

  "She has been given every label the doctors can come up with," I reply coldly.

  "It doesn’t excuse her behavior," he declares as he slams the flimsy file folder shut.

  I laugh and roll my eyes. His theatrics are more annoying than entertaining. "Really? I’m not the one in trouble here. I didn’t do anything. You can’t scold me." He does not say anything, and we just stare at each other until I get tired of the silence. "So what did she do, anyway?"

  "We’re not entirely sure where it all started. She took a customer out on a test-drive—"

  "My aunt can’t drive anymore," I interrupt again.

  "So we’ve learned," he responds. "Anyway, the car came back all banged up and without the test-driver."

  "That is hardly grounds to haul my aunt off to jail. They should have never given her keys to begin with. What kind of dumbass would hire her, anyway?"

  "Touché, but that isn’t all. When she arrived back at the car lot, she tried to run over her manager." He pauses again, probably for dramatic effect. He seems to be quite the actor. "Do you realize that she could be charged with assault with a deadly weapon?" He is mad as he says it. Mad that she is not being charged? Mad that I am not groveling at his feet and thanking him that my aunt will not have to endure the consequences of her actions like any sane person would? Whatever the reason, it is quite infantile all the same, and I do not appreciate this admonishment from a cop with an obvious Napoleon complex.

  There is a knock at the door and another officer leads Rose in. A public defender follows. I take one look at Rose, and a white-hot rage boils up from my belly. Her face is peppered with bruises, and her hair appears to have been pulled out in clumps. She is wearing my clothes, but I do not recognize them at first because they are dusty and torn. She is quiet and defeated, her eyes on the ground. I do not even have to ask what happened. I can tell by my aunt’s demeanor that she did not resist.

  I turn back to Officer Charlt. "You’re right. Labels do not excuse my aunt’s behavior. But neither do they give you the right to treat her like a second-class citizen!" I have him there, and he knows it. "Go ahead and charge her with whatever you want. You’ll be out of a job anyway when the lawsuit hits the media." It's a hollow th
reat, and we both know it. Cops don't pay for their actions any more than crazies do around here.

  They transfer Aunt Rose back to the psych ward at Salem Hospital, where she will spend anywhere from a couple of days to a couple of weeks. It is a small building set off just slightly from the hospital’s towers. The flow of energy there defines the city, what with the family birth center right next door, so that the northeast corner of the campus is dedicated to babies and crazies. But this is Salem, home to the State Hospital—the bulk of crazies—fenced in by a string of penitentiaries, and we give our newest residents an early induction to our mental illness free-for-all by setting the baby farm downstream from the cuckoo’s nest. Oh, and I do mean literally. Mill Creek runs past the psych ward first, then the birthing center.

  24

  (Velma) My Rose held down a job for a while once. It was not much. Just a few shifts at the fast food joint around the corner from where she stayed with Darla and Jane. A monkey could have done that job, but she was mighty proud nonetheless. I tell you it did wonders for her too, just being out there and working, having real money she earned instead of leeching off the government. It was like she was a whole new person. We really thought God had delivered her.

  25

  (Rose) Sunday customers were a breed all their own. Like hairless Chihuahuas. People could be rude any day of the week, but Sunday? Sunday brought out the Devil in them. They cursed and cussed and called us dirty names. They took their own shitty lives out on us as if having to wait in the drive-thru made it all OK. There was nothing out of the ordinary about getting called a whore by an old lady in her Sunday best, Bible resting in her lap, or getting flipped off by a bucktoothed kid in the backseat after his parents had already ripped you a new one with the same mouths they used to take Holy Communion. There’s something about being reminded that they're going to Hell that brings out the worst in people.

  The seminal day in my Taco Burger career started out just like any other Sunday. The prep person and the maintenance man both called in sick with the Sunday usual. He probably had a hangover, and she was ill with a strict Catholic call to mass. The day of rest was notoriously short on help, and the less help, the slower people got their food. The slower they got their food, the more insane they became. Our destiny was bleak from the start.

  I was covering for the maintenance man, toilet brush in one hand, when the first wave of cars began to trickle in. Sausage croissants, hash browns, breakfast burritos, imitation French toast. We ran out of coffee halfway through.

  The wench in the drive-thru was eyeing me from the second she pulled up. Her lips were snarled, her teeth bared, her cheeks flushed; she looked like she was ready to eat me if her food didn’t come up fast enough. She never said anything, just watched me fumble with the coffeemaker in silence. When I handed her a bulging paper sack moist with soaked-through grease and an extra-large Diet Coke, a lone bead of sweat trickled down her temple then her cheek before dropping off her chin and splashing on her car door. I know now that she was a bad omen. I’ve seen her since then too. Quite a few times actually. And every time, her silent, sweaty hunger precedes some terrible event that shakes the little bit of sanity I’ve got left to its very core.

  Every single customer after her was a blithering idiot at best. But I’m pretty sure most of them were sociopaths. Where were the buffers? The college kids with hangovers and a thankful daze? The still-drunk-from-the-night-before singletons with their mumbles and fumbles? The graveyard workers on their way home for a good day’s sleep? Constant abuse drains your soul, but I was determined to uphold the Taco Burger credo of customer service even if the current incarnation of the term meant accepting insults with a smile and a dollop of ass kissing. I did good for a while, but there’s only so much a person can take.

  The straw that broke the camel’s back was a scraggly towhead that rolled up in an Astro van. She screeched to a stop in front of the order board and wailed, "Hello? Hello?! Hey, are you going to take my fucking order?"

  Oh, no she didn’t! "Ma’am, you can’t cuss over the speaker. There are children in the dining room that can hear you."

  "You can’t tell me what the fuck to do! I’ll say whatever I fucking want."

  "So be it," I agreed and switched off her speaker. There weren’t a lot of reasons a Taco Burger employee could refuse to serve someone and not get fired. Profanity over the loud speaker was my golden ticket.

  It felt good to deny her food.

  Of course, that wasn't the end of it. She didn’t just accept her banishment and drive away. Nope. Soon as she realized she’d been cut off, she raced around to the window, jumped out of her van, and flew at the glass. She banged and screamed at it and threw one hell of a conniption fit. That flurry of yellow hair, the rabid look in her eyes, the foam on her lips—I shiver at the memory.

  But when it was happening, I wasn’t scared. I was mad! How dare she treat me like this? How dare she act like such an animal? I’ve been told over and over how I should have locked all the doors and called the police. I shouldn't have done what I did next.

  I threw the headset down on the counter and stomped out to meet her. She turned to face me just as I stepped into the drive-thru lane. I stormed towards her, rage versus maniac. I threw my fate in the toilet. My job would be gone, and it would be back to SSI and food stamps. Jane would see what a failure I was. My mother and sister would judge me a spiritual failure. But everyone has limits. Everyone has a point of no return. This foul-mouthed beast had pushed me way past mine.

  She charged.

  Funny how easy she made it. I moved to the side and stuck my arm straight out. Right in front of her throat. It all went down in slow motion. She had plenty of time to swerve or duck. But she didn’t. She went straight down, gasping for air like a fish out of water.

  They sent me home with my final pay counted straight from the till.

  It wasn’t right. It wasn’t fair! There’s no justice in the world!

  Really, what had I done that was so wrong? OK, so my judgment was off a little. I screwed up by going outside. But clotheslining the crazy bitch? That was self-defense! Shit, she charged at me!

  But no one wanted to hear my side of the story. They were talking attorneys and lawsuits and all sorts of bullshit. And they wanted me gone.

  So I went. But the sting of injustice screamed too loud, and before I knew what had happened, I was stationed across the street with a homemade sign: Boycott Taco Burger—Unfair Labor Practices.

  26

  (Velma) Rose was lucky enough she did not get her behind hauled off to jail. Assaulting a customer like that! I could hardly believe it at the time. And then she actually expected to keep her job? That child of mine always had some nerve, some nerve I tell you! James 4:6 teaches that God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble. Rose was so full of the sin of pride that she took to waving a picket sign in front of the restaurant. Lord knows what she thought she was protesting. She stood out there for thirty days. Thirty days! From sun up to sun down, making a spectacle of herself.

  On the thirty-first day, a squad car rolled up and gave her two choices: leave, permanently, or go to jail. Rose did not like either of her options, so she made up a third and bolted into the restaurant with her sign.

  Like a thief in the night, the lunatic strikes with the element of surprise. That is how my Rose was able to do the unfathomable. Half the time, someone could have stopped her from following through on whatever half-brained idea she had come up with. The officer could have tackled her; that would have been the end of that whole ordeal. But Rose had surprise on her side. Her actions were just crazy enough to catch him off guard. He was only stunned for one short second. But that second was more than enough time for her to sprint into the Taco Burger and vault over the counter.

  27

  I love to hear the story about my aunt shutting down the Taco Burger. It is just so Rose! I cannot think of another story that captures my aunt so thoroughly—epitomizes her even.
>
  I begged and pleaded to go down and see her while it was all going on, but my mother would not allow it. She was afraid Rose would fall off of the ledge or be shot down by the police or something equally terrible, and I, as an impressionable child, would be traumatized for life. She would not even let me watch it on TV, so I had to hear everything second hand from my schoolmates the next day. As the saying goes, kids can be cruel.

  I heard numerous versions of the story over the years, each with its own kernel of truth. It was a harrowing ordeal; a frenzy of police descended upon the back half of the Taco Burger in search of a madwoman who had taken the franchise by siege. That was my mom’s version. Aunt Rose told a valiant tale of civil disobedience.

  Either way, the police spent the better part of the afternoon emptying shelves and opening any boxes big enough to hide a small woman. They even shoveled all of the ice out of the industrial ice machine. All the while, Rose circled the roof with her sign, and a crowd gathered outside to watch her. It was Lizzy, a stout little near-elderly woman with Down’s syndrome and short curly hair who had been hired to wipe tables and wash windows, who noticed the open hatch in the break-room ceiling. She climbed the greasy rungs with a frown, babbling about the cold, and came face-to-face with my aunt. Rose had gotten curious as to what was taking the police so long and had poked her head down the hatch for a peek at the same time that Lizzy was coming up. Rose said the old woman was so surprised that she had to reach out and grab her so that she did not fall off of the ladder. Of course, Lizzie screamed and clambered back down in a frenzy. Moments later, the sirens snaked their way to the Taco Burger: an ambulance, fire truck, and then, of course, enough squad cars to tackle a riot. Why they thought they needed so much manpower is a mystery. It was just my skinny little aunt marching on the ledge of the roof, carrying her homemade sign, and chanting on-the-fly slogans that probably did not even rhyme. Besides, Rose had always been a peace lover—when she was not disturbing the peace, anyway.