A Place Of Light

by Mary Bucci Bush

  I put my hand on the jar and held her to the table.

  “Well, by golly, you’re right,” she said. “We can look at it anytime. Always take care of the business at hand.”

  I spread newspapers over the junk on her table, so she wouldn’t have broken glass in ever ything. Maybe her cut would heal, but mine refused. It had been eating at me all these years: what I had done to my kids on account of her. Because once I found out what I had gotten myself into by marr ying the three of them – Len, Carl, and Ruby – it was more than I could take. I left them all to fight it out on their own, with a sink full of dirty dishes, and the washing machine hose broken and spilling water onto the floor, the baby cr ying because he’d dropped his plastic soldier man down the heat register, the cats and dogs and Ruby and Carl tracking in dirt, ever ybody underfoot and squabbling for attention, a house full of mess and noise and commotion. My body stayed behind, though, so it looked like I was there, but I wasn’t.

  They learned that much from me – how to keep your own flesh and blood from knowing you.

  I spotted a stack of rolled nickels, over near the edge of her table, half-buried under papers. One roll was open. She must have been getting them ready to take to the bank for deposit when her money jar decided to play a trick on her.

  Right then it played a trick on me, too. I looked at it and saw my daughter sitting on the bus again, all closed up, her hand raised like a sign, calling me to her, keeping me away.

  I lifted Ruby’s wrist, to put it on the newspapers, and the picture disappeared. “You’ve got to stay still, now,” I told her.

  Her skin looked like it would crack if you so much as breathed on it. But it was soft as a baby’s.

  And there I stood, working over my own again, to get the burdock or bubble gum out of their hair, or a thumb into the thumbhole of a mitten, while they jiggled their legs and touched things and gabbed on with whatever popped into their heads, and me saying, “Mm-hmm. Stay still, now.”

  Ruby started off on some story about a boy she’d had in school who’d invented windshield wipers, but nobody knew about it, nobody gave him credit.

  I picked up the hammer and touched it to the jar. Her hand lay still under the glass, like something else – one more thing I didn’t know anything about.

  “You’ve got to hit harder than that,” Ruby said.” You’re just tapping it.”

  Her voice brought me back around.

  I raised the hammer to Ruby Mondo while she sat with her eyes glued to that jar, like somebody in a fever, waiting for me to set her free. I tapped the jar again, and the sound rattled right through me.

  “You’ve got to hit harder,” Ruby said. “Hit it.”

  Carl thumped the wall with the rocking chair. “Ruby’s got her hand stuck in a jar,” he sang.

  “Harder,” I heard her say. And then I shut my eyes, and everything broke loose at last.

  Carl shrieked, laughed. I could hear the pieces showering to the floor.

  I thought I had smashed her hand with the hammer. I thought the glass had gone all over, that I’d driven it deep into her flesh and caused damage.

  And right then it came to me: I was the one person in this whole damn town who Ruby Mondo considered her friend.

  “See?” Ruby said. “That was nothing. That’s all it took.”

  I opened my eyes and she sat beneath me, whole.

  I took a seat across from her, the pile of broken glass between us.

  “Now I’ll just clean this up and get back to business as usual,” she said, wiping her hands on the dish towel. She started folding in the edges of the newspaper.

  “Wait,” I said, reaching my hand out. I needed things to be still for a minute.

  “Oh, look,” she said.

  And there it was, the red trickling down my own fingers, though I hadn’t felt it.

  I drew my hand back and sucked on the finger, and as soon as I did it started stinging. I took the Kleenex from my sleeve and wrapped the finger while Ruby jumped up to search through her cupboards for Band-Aids. “It’s okay,” I told her. “I don’t need anything.” But she kept rummaging.

  I sat back and pressed the Kleenex tighter while I watched her bustle out of the room, then back in, then open a drawer, a cupboard, pull things out, root around. There was no stopping her.

  And there I was, come full circle, right back to the kind of foolishness that drove me away, that I could not get free from: Ruby blind to the commotion she churned up, me broken and bleeding from it.

  I caught sight of a nickel on the floor, just underneath the edge of the stove. The last nickel she’d been trying to retrieve, to fill the roll.

  It seemed par for the course, God giving me my due like that, calling me there for the very one I blamed for losing the others, calling me back into her house for a lousy five-cent piece and a stinking mayonnaise jar.

  And I saw right then and there what I should have seen years ago: that I would either have to yield, or do battle the rest of my life.

  But I did not want her. I did not want that sixty-two year-old child, and yet I had her.

  She reached for my hand, to see how bad the cut was, and her reaching threw me off. I tried to pull away, but she held on.

  She turned my hand over, like a gypsy palm reader looking for meaning in the scars of my life.

  “Just a scratch,” she said. “It’s nothing.”

  Nothing, I thought. It’s nothing, and the feelings rose up in me. But before I could say anything she pointed to some dirt on the floor, from when she’d knocked over the geranium, and she went for the broom.

  She took big, choppy sweeps, dipping from the waist with each swing, so she looked more like she was hoeing weeds than sweeping a floor. Within seconds the handle of the broom tangled with her telephone cord and sent the receiver flying.

  “Alexander Graham Bell!” she said. “Who would’ve thought a voice could travel thousands of miles over a tiny piece of wire? See what you can come up with if you put your mind to it?” She left the receiver dangling while she swept.

  Maybe I was in shock from losing blood, though I hadn’t lost any to speak of, not that showed anyway. But I worried about that phone, what would happen if someone tried to call right then. I wanted to get up and set it right, but my body felt like a sack filled with rocks.

  “They give him all the credit,” she went on, “but you know it was really an Italian who got the ball rolling. And who knows who else before that? Who knows how far back it goes?”

  I watched her and I thought, Don’t ask me how far back it goes. I can’t even figure how I got here today.

  “Look,” she said. “Now where do you suppose this came from?” She swept out the nickel and dusted it on her sleeve. “This must be my lucky day.” She dropped the nickel in her dress pocket and went on sweeping. It looked like she planned to do the whole floor now that she’d started. “Remember nickelodeons?” she said.

  So Ruby Mondo had herself a friend – who didn’t even know she was a friend and didn’t want to be one anyway. But why her? I was asking myself. Why not somebody who could do for me, who could give me something in return? Besides the gray hair and varicose veins, that is.

  “You never hear about nickelodeons anymore,” she said.

  I watched her push at the pile of dirt, making it go here and there, but not really paying any mind to where she moved it. What if my life had nothing to do with me or Len or the kids? I thought. What if it was something else altogether, something I didn’t know anything about?

  I felt my knees buckle right there in the chair, and I went stumbling down a steep embankment. When I hit bottom something swept over me. It pushed me under and carried me along to some cool, deep place. But as quick as it took me it flung me out again, and I came up breathing air.

  I looked at her and I thought, I’ve got four kids, strangers or not. Maybe those invisible threads Ruby saw that connected all things and brought them back home would work for my kids, too. Maybe they we
re working already.

  “Just like the old Victrolas,” she was saying. “You never hear about them, either. But we wouldn’t be where we are today without them, would we?”

  She stopped sweeping and bent over to pick up a piece of glass. She held it up to show me, and winked. Then she dropped it and went back to pushing the broom, her face bright with whatever was tumbling through her mind.

  I shook my head. “I guess we wouldn’t,” I said.

  I had four kids of my own, that was, and two more by default.

  And I had a head that was swimming with all the mysteries and inventions of the everyday world. Things that were right there for me to see. Things that belonged to me.

  UNDERGROUND RAILROAD

  This is the only thing I know how to do: work on the dirt bike Cardamon sold me for ten bucks, which I only paid him five and he keeps waiting for the other five. “A boy like you,” he says, trying to put his hand on me. “It don’t have to be money.” But I never let him. I got a can of kerosene, trying to wash out the rust parts to see if maybe then I can get the engine to crank for even one blasted second, with Maude sitting on the tree stump watching me the whole time not saying a word because I told her soon as it runs I’m giving you a ride and maybe we’re not never coming back. So she waits for it to start, sitting there with the sun burning a hole in her head, and the door locked on us by the one that calls herself our mother, as if we wanted to be inside there with her anyway. Not even for Cardamon’s five dollars.

  When I hear the car coming up the road about half a mile away without a muffler I get the wire brush and go at the crank chain with it. I don’t look at Maude, but I know she’s waiting to see if I’ll say something when Cardamon lets Pa out. The car sounds bad, like maybe he let some midget loose under the hood with a sledgehammer and when he stops to let the old man out I keep working. But then Cardamon blows his horn so I have to raise my head and nod, though I don’t have to see him, even if my head is pointing that way. He pulls out, like the Fourth of July.

  I can see by the way Pa walks that he is wore out worse than ever, which he says is because of us not his job. He takes slow steps to the house and I keep my head down and watch his black lunch pail bob each step he takes.

  “Maude,” he says, too tired to sound mad. “What I tell you about these damn crates?”

  She swings her legs on the tree stump and can’t say nothing. She made it herself, a playhouse from crates from the barn, and now she’s got to bust it down but she won’t. She took one wall and left the rest.

  “It’s a goddamn junkyard here,” he says. We watch him reach for the door and just when I stand up to see what he will do I hear the hook get undone, so when he pulls the door it opens. Nobody is there.

  We are behind him now, me and Maude, not because we want to go in there but to see if what our mother done is really done and to see what will happen now.

  She is not even in the kitchen when we go in there. Sometimes it is like a dream when something happens. You go away and come back and there somebody is boiling a pot of coffee or there somebody is hammering a loose board on the step or else the room is peaceful with the sunlight and the jar of wilted daisies on the table and maybe nothing really happened, you think, maybe it was all just a dream.

  He turns and says, “What the hell you two following me like puppy dogs for, don’t you got nothing better to do?” But he stops a minute and his face goes funny when he sees us staring at him, like already he knows, but he doesn’t know what.

  And then a strange thing happens, he tries to turn his head to look at the parlor door where she’s inside sitting yet he can’t let go looking at us. So his head can’t move and he can’t move and for a minute all three of us are stuck like that. And then at last he breaks free and walks right through that black hole of a doorway and I wonder did he notice everything that’s not there: supper not cooking, the TV not blasting, Martha not fussing to be fed or have her diaper changed? Because everything is dead still like nobody ever lived in this house.

  I follow him to the parlor door and I stop there and look in and feel Maude behind me, her hair brushing my arm. The TV is going, just the picture with no sound, and she is sitting there watching it like that and the shades are pulled. Halfway into the room he stops and looks at her but she don’t look back or move a muscle or act like she notices anybody is there.

  He stands like that a long time. A comedy show is on the TV, soldiers riding horses and one man falls off and can’t pick up his hat, the horse keeps stepping on it. Then finally Pa says, “What’s going on?”

  She watches the TV, with her big round face and her gray hair coming out of the ponytail, just sitting there a big heavy lump. Then she says, “I had to take some aspirins,” like she’s talking to the lady on the television commercial now who is frosting a cake and cutting a big slice and handing it to whoever is watching.

  “Aspirins,” he says, like it’s a word he never heard before. He looks around at us, then back at her and he waits while something tries to sink in.

  “Why you got that thing on like that?” he says. And then he waits a minute more and then his voice gets louder, but not much. “You tell me what happened,” he says.

  “I had to have a break,” she says.

  He goes over and shuts off the TV and puts a shade up so there’s some light and now I can see her face, her eyes pushed in there like you pushed your thumbs into a pile of dough, looking at the TV screen with nothing on it. She stares so hard at the TV while he’s looking at her that her head wobbles. I feel Maude breathing against my arm.

  He stands there looking at her like he’s asking her everything in the world without saying a word. He puts his hand up through his hair and turns half away, like he might start to do a dance but then decides not to. He turns back and looks at her and then at us watching from the doorway.

  “Go outside,” he says, and we don’t move. “Git,” he tells us. I take a step back and bump into Maude. We stay there.

  “You tell me,” he says to her, like he will bust into tears over her.

  “I had to have a break,” she tells him, looking at that empty television set.

  He watches her a minute. “I could of give you one hell of a break a long time ago,” he says.

  “I wish’t I had something,” she says.

  “You tell me,” he says to her.

  “It don’t never let up,” she says. “It’s all I ever hear is fussing and crying. It don’t never let up.”

  She’s sitting there talking like one of those dead people on the late movie that’s got all the blood drained out of them, and I’m thinking, Why don’t he ask her why it’s let up now? Why don’t he say something about right now when it’s never before been stone quiet in this house at suppertime?

  “I thought you was done with this,” he says, that choking sound in his voice, though maybe he don’t even know yet what he’s talking about. “I thought things was changed.”

  I look at her and think, You ain’t my mother. I got none. And if he’s my real pa, maybe that’s a mistake too. All I got that’s real is a sister, Maude. I had four sisters in my life but Maude is the only one alive. And then I touch her like by accident just to feel her there behind me and I can hear her breathing. I will take that bike and go. And if it won’t start I will walk if I have to and I will take her because she is my sister.

  Then he goes around putting up the other shades like if there’s more light it’ll just be a dream to him too and he can wake up.

  “What the hell these shades down for?” he says. “And that TV? You crazy after all?”

  He goes at the last shade like he is in a fight and the whole thing comes ripping down and clatters to the floor. He turns to her like he will break something.

  “You better talk,” he says, but his voice is even. “You better tell me something.”

  In the light she looks like a fat teenage girl but she is almost forty. And he looks like a sick old man – tall and skinny and
hopeless, and too broke down for words.

  “I can’t move,” she moans. “I’m like paralyzed.”

  “Goddamn,” he says. “I can’t ask you no more.”

  “It don’t stop,” she says. “I been telling you. I’m always telling you. They driving me this way.”

  “What?” he says. “What?”

  “That baby won’t let up.”

  But she’s let up now, I want to say. Why don’t you ask her why she’s let up now?

  “It’s her earache,” he says. “She’s sick.”

  And then she turns her head and looks direct at him for the first time and I see those two places where the thumbs pushed down into the dough, but there’s nothing there. “She’s sick,” she says, the words coming out of her like bubbles come out of somebody that’s under water.

  “Why didn’t you say so?” he says. “Why the Christ hell didn’t you say so?” and he sounds like he could dance all night from the relief of it. “I’ll take her to the doctor.”

  “You got to take her somewhere,” she tells him.

  He turns to me and tells me, “You go over to Cardamon’s, tell him we need a ride.”

  It’s like a knife in me, to think of going there, with him always trying to touch me, after me to do things. But then it passes, and I lean back into Maude’s arm and stay put.

  “Them doctors don’t do nothing,” she says.

  Go tell Cardamon,” he says to me.

  “She’s bad,” she tells him. “You got to take her somewhere. Them doctors don’t do nothing.”

  “Git,” he tells me.

  “Don’t,” she says then to him. “It’s nobody’s business.”

  He’s still trying to act like he don’t know what he knows. But then she says that and he has to stop.

  I look around at Maude and she is staring right at her, but her face is all easy like she could be looking out the window watching it rain.

  “It hurts me inside my heart,” she moans, and I look at her. She puts her hand there where her heart is supposed to be. “Don’t let nobody know,” she says. “I been telling you,” she says to him.