Callie gave my mother a look that day, but it was more an exchange of understanding, and that’s what they came to. Callie was going to need help, and my mother wanted a hand in the raising of her grandchild. I think my mother kind of admired Callie, admired her nerve, admired her determination to keep her kid at a time when a pregnant teenage girl either got married or gave her baby away. But it made her start watching me even more than she normally did. She needn’t have worried. Every time I thought of what Tommy and Callie had done, it gave me a funny feeling, and not a good one. I liked kissing and even then some, although I’d done very little of it, mostly in the hallway at mixers with a boy from my homeroom named John Gellhorn, who said “wow” each time we came up for air. But what came after just seemed strange to me. And Callie and Tommy were such a mismatch, him all fireworks and her so not.
But I got to admire her, too. She’d had to leave school before Clifton was born, and when he was three months old she’d gotten the job at the diner. My aunt Ruth said the baby was named after some movie actor I’d never heard of, but Callie said she’d just seen the name in a book and liked it. Her grandmother took care of him sometimes, and so did her mother. Her father told my father that he was washing his hands of the whole business, and it seemed like he was standing by that. “I’ve lost respect for Pete,” my father said, and that made me proud, that my father felt that way.
I asked Ruth if she’d help with Clifton, but she looked shaky and said, “Oh, good gracious, Mimi, I’m not up to all that.” So I worked eight to four at the diner that summer, and then Callie came in and handed Clifton over to me before she started her shift. She always insisted she pay me a dollar an hour. At first I said I wouldn’t take it, but my mother said, “People need their pride,” so I caved. LaRhonda said that was cheaper than the going rate, but I don’t know how LaRhonda would have had any idea what the going rate was. She never did any babysitting. All the other girls said it was because she didn’t need the money, but I’m not sure anyone would have asked her. She didn’t seem like the kind of person who liked kids much, and she seemed like exactly the kind of person who would go through your underwear drawer and jewelry box and eat all your ice cream while you were out.
“Me! Me!” Clifton always said when Callie handed him over, reaching out his arms and putting them around my neck. “You be good,” Callie said as she tied on her apron. “I’ll pick you up in the morning.” I fed Clifton at our house, gave him a bath, and put him to bed in a secondhand playpen in Tommy’s old room. “Da,” he said, pointing at a picture of Tom in his dress uniform on one corner of the bureau, but only because I’d told him that.
The diner was a couple of miles outside of town. Mr. Venti said that that was where the future was, that downtown was dying. He said that at a Chamber of Commerce lunch and some of the business owners wanted to throw him out but he owned too many businesses for them to do that. Besides, I thought maybe he had a point. My parents talked all the time about how they used to go shopping on Main Street, for my mother’s wedding suit, for my father’s tools. Now there was nothing but a Christian Science reading room with books open in the window and no one inside, an insurance office with travel posters and a sign that said PLAY IT SAFE WITH MUTUAL OF OMAHA, and the sporting goods store that stayed in business because of the high school teams and the Little League and because it sold guns. There was one place that opened as one thing or another, a used book store, a bakery, a gift shop, and then closed so quickly that sometimes it seemed like you’d imagined it.
There was nothing close to the diner except for a big parking lot where I waited with Clifton on my hip for my father to pick me up after work, a big sweaty spot on one side of my uniform where the baby sat. He was starting to walk now and didn’t like being held, but if I put a couple of barrettes in my hair they could keep him quiet, playing with them, trying to yank them out, at least until my father pulled in. My mother usually had Clifton’s dinner waiting. Callie didn’t let him get away with much, so for a baby he was pretty well behaved. We sent Tommy pictures. He was in Vietnam, a place I’d had to find on a map, fighting the Communists. I asked Callie if she wanted to send him a letter, but she didn’t.
“It wasn’t any big thing,” she’d said to me once, but at least she’d let us share the baby.
I sent Donald a picture of Clifton, too, although LaRhonda had said it was a well-known fact that boys didn’t care about babies. “Only how you make them,” she’d said, like she knew. But I was pretty sure Donald was going to like Clifton when he met him. He’d finally sent a real letter, although it was typed, as though it was more business than personal. “I am coming to visit for a week on August 2,” it said. “My grandfather is picking me up at the airport. Maybe you could come with him so he could stay outside with the car and you could come in and find me.” He did make it sound a little bit like business, but I was still happy. “Your Friend,” he signed that one.
“I sure will be glad to see that young man,” his grandfather said when I saw him at the diner. “I can’t call him a boy anymore. He’s a young man now.”
“I hope he still has that nice way about him,” Ruth had said when I told her.
I shifted Clifton from one hip to another. My work uniform usually smelled like hamburgers and donuts, and I think Clifton liked the smell, because sometimes he’d put his nose to my chest and inhale loudly. I always had to check afterward to make sure he hadn’t left a snail trail of snot behind.
“You’re good with that child,” my aunt Ruth said. After dinner but before he was due to be put down for the night I usually walked him up to her little house and let him toddle around a bit. My aunt Ruth had a lot of dolls on shelves in the dining room, and Clifton always pointed up at them like he wanted to look at them. She had a doll dressed like a nun, which was the only way I knew what a nun looked like because there weren’t any in Miller’s Valley, and a doll that was supposed to be a figure skater named Sonja Henie that had belonged to her mother. She had one dressed like Scarlett O’Hara and one dressed like Florence Nightingale, and she had some Cissy dolls, too. Clifton seemed to point at those the most, but Ruth just ignored him. She ignored him when he put his arms in the air to be picked up, too. One day he even took her hand and tried to get her to walk him outside, but that led nowhere.
Ruth’s well was acting up that summer, and my father spent a fair amount of time behind her place, tinkering. He’d put in a new sump pump, too, because the last time there’d been a heavy rain, water had wound up really flooding the basement of her house for the first time.
“Your father can fix anything,” Ruth said. “Gaga,” Clifton shouted, his hands on the sill, his face to the screen so that there was a grimy grid pattern on his nose after. That’s what he called my father, Gaga. “Right out here, little man,” my father shouted back.
“I don’t care so much for children when they’re small,” Ruth said.
“What about me?”
“That was different,” she said, finishing up the crust of a tuna sandwich. It had been maybe a year since my mother had stopped sending meals up to Ruth’s house. “She can look after herself,” my mother said flatly, and a couple of nights later when she caught me with a ham steak and some macaroni and cheese on a plate she took it wordlessly out of my hands and dumped it in the trash.
“That’s a waste of good food,” my father had said.
“I made it, I paid for it, I can do what I want with it,” my mother said. I thought I saw my father wince.
The two of them were at war because the older Clifton got, the more my mother wanted to move him and Callie into the little house where Ruth lived. I didn’t even have to eavesdrop on the heating vent to know about her plans, or my father’s upset with them. They’d fight about it right there in the living room.
“Callie’s doing fine living over there with her mother,” my father would mutter.
“She and the baby are in one room,” my mother countered. “What’s she going to do wh
en he’s out of the crib?”
“We can’t turn Ruth out onto the street.”
“No one is talking about turning anyone out onto the street. There’s always vacancies at those garden apartments down by the hospital. One of the girls in the ER lives there, and her place has a nice big living room, and a little balcony. Not that Ruth would need a balcony. God forbid she should go out on the balcony, the world would end.”
“This is her home.”
“This is our grandson.”
“Ruth’s not a town girl.”
“She’s not a girl, she’s a grown woman and it doesn’t matter where she lives as long as it has walls. It’s not like she’s going to miss the scenery.”
Then my father would play his trump card: “How the heck would we get her out of there?”
And my mother would fold: “I don’t give a rip.” Or a hoot. Or, if her feet really hurt and Callie’s mother had been bragging at the beauty parlor about how much time she spent with the baby, a damn. Even she couldn’t find an answer to the idea of Ruth screaming her lungs out, holding on to the doorjamb as someone tried to drag her into the open.
“I’m her only flesh and blood she’s got in the world and your mother treats me like a boarder,” Ruth said to me, tears running down her cheeks onto her floral blouse.
“I’m pretty sure I’m her flesh and blood, too,” I said.
“You know what I mean. I don’t know why you all make such a fuss about that child.”
“He’s flesh and blood, too.”
“Oh my God, Mary Margaret, you are the most literal girl I’ve ever met. You’re worse than my sister. You think it’s right for her to talk about throwing me out?”
“What if Clifton and Callie moved in here with you? You’ve got two bedrooms you’re not even using. It would be company for you.”
“I like my privacy,” Ruth snapped. “Besides, your father won’t let her do anything. It’s his place. She forgets all about that. Your father’s the boss, pure and simple.”
I didn’t want to take sides, but the older I got the more Ruth seemed childish to me. Sometimes someone who had known her when she was a girl would say that that was because she was a youngest child, but I was a youngest child, too, and I didn’t sit around waiting for someone to make me cinnamon toast and put it on the end table with a cup of tea.
But I still brought her food, only from the diner instead of my mother’s kitchen. We were allowed to take things that wouldn’t look pretty on a plate, lopsided cakes, the end piece of a pork roast. Sometimes I made her something, a cheese omelet (“Not runny inside, Mary Margaret,” she would call from the living room) or a BLT.
“Ruth has always been a soft sort of girl,” said my father one day when we were riding in his truck. “I remember when I first met your mother, Ruth was maybe ten years old and was always saving baby birds. She’d put them in a little shoe box with some cotton, feed them bits of things.”
“Did she save them?” I asked.
“She sure tried hard enough.”
“But did it work? Did the birds live?”
My father thought for a moment. When my father was thinking it was like an aerobic exercise, like he was putting his whole body to the test. “I’m thinking not,” he finally said.
It was a hard time, the fall just before I turned sixteen. August 2 had come and gone, and Donald had never arrived. He sent me a postcard saying he couldn’t get off work, but his grandfather had already told me he wouldn’t be coming. “It’s that mother of his,” he’d said. “Don’t get me started.” He looked so sad. I knew how he felt. Our house was built for five, and now it was down to three. My brothers’ old shirts hung in their closets like the ghosts of people who’d once slept in their beds. I missed Tommy. I missed Donald. I even missed Eddie sometimes, and Donald’s grandmother. Sometimes I thought about her lavender smell and her warm pies. I think maybe more than anything I missed the Mimi I used to be. Getting older wasn’t working out so well for me. My brother’s words had made me think a lot about what I wanted, where I wanted to end up, and the truth was I had no idea in the world. I figured it should be clear, like that big strip of yellow tape they held across the end of the course for the sack race at the volunteer fire department picnic: this, here, this is how you win.
I did well in school. I’d always done well but now I moved to the head of the class because I didn’t have much to do except homework and helping Callie out. There were things we studied that I couldn’t see the point of, like poetry and ancient history, and there were things that made perfect sense to me, like algebra and biology. First term of sophomore year I got highest honors. The list was in the paper: three of us, the other two boys. “Don’t let it go to your head, Mary Margaret,” said Ruth, who got the paper a day late, my father taking it out to her when my mother was done with it. But my mother made me sit down at the kitchen table after it had been cleared and wiped, and she put her finger on my name like she was marking a point on a map.
“This is your road to something better than this,” she said. It was the only time I’d heard her say one single thing that made it seem as though her life wasn’t just what she wanted it to be, except that one night after a Jansson wedding at the firehouse and a couple of whiskey sours when she had talked about how all through high school she had gone out with an older boy named George who had gone away to the state university. “That one had a high opinion of himself,” my father had said. The next day I asked Ruth if she remembered a boy named George that my mother had dated. “Of course,” Ruth said. “That was a time.” And she wouldn’t say more, which for Ruth was saying a lot.
My mother’s finger tapped my name in the paper. She had made my father buy extra copies. “You’re a smart girl,” she added. “Don’t waste it.”
That’s who I was by then: the smart girl. But it was hard. When you look back on your life there are always times that you remember as the hard times, even if they’re the hard times a girl has, not the hard times of a woman, with grief and loss and real hardship. “I might come to visit this summer,” Donald had written on his last postcard (a picture of the Hollywood Bowl) but I wasn’t going to count on it again. I figured it was what Ruth called wishful thinking.
LaRhonda and I had never been a perfect fit as friends, which my mother and Aunt Ruth and even Cissy Langer had told me more than once, but sometimes, I’ve found there are people you get to be friends with accidentally and then stay friends with because you’ve always been friends. But I only saw LaRhonda now when she didn’t have anything better to do. After she’d come back from the ranch she seemed a lot older than I did, and for the hour or two that we’d been at her kitchen table, eating fried chicken from the diner that her mother warmed up in the oven, I figured that it was because she’d learned a lot from the other girls there. Once Mrs. Venti went to work, leaving us with a banana cream pie and a pitcher of iced tea, I’d found out what was really going on.
“I’ve accepted Jesus as my Lord and Savior,” LaRhonda had said solemnly, clutching at the neck of her blouse and finally pulling a gold cross on a chain from underneath.
I’d seen a lot of that growing up, from Mrs. Bascomb, who spoke in tongues at a church that held its services under a tent in a used car lot, to Donald’s grandfather, who had once told him that he’d been traveling a dark dark road before the Lord lifted him up. For LaRhonda finding Jesus took a different form. She became friends with a group of girls in our high school class who had all found Jesus, too, and who all spent a lot of time on the phone each night planning the outfits they would be wearing next day. They also managed to incorporate gossip and meanness into their religious tradition, like this: “I’m praying on Cheryl because I hear she drank six beers after the football game and puked in the bushes outside Cathy Barry’s house.”
There’s a particular kind of way I’ve noticed people, women mostly, act with one another when they’re pretending to be nice but they really don’t like each other. That’s how tho
se girls were with me. They were town girls, and it was like they could smell the farm on me, or maybe they made me smell it on myself. For a while I hung around the edges of all this, but there was a girl who kept saying she was praying on Callie because of Clifton, and I thought Callie needed a second pair of hands and a job that paid more than minimum wage a lot more than prayers, and at one point I said so, and although LaRhonda said she had told the group I was expecting a visit from Aunt Flo—which I wasn’t—they were concerned about the state of my soul.
Even Tommy wasn’t Tommy anymore. When he finally came home on a visit it was like he was someone else again, jacked-up and hard. He’d let his hair grow down the back of his neck and refused to shave, and he and my father had a fight about it. “I’m waiting for a gook bullet through my skull and you’re worried about hair?” he’d said. He had a tough little barking laugh he laughed now, a mean second cousin to a real laugh, a poor substitute for the way he used to throw his head back and let loose. His first dinner home he said, “There was one night when the guys and I were crawling through some mud—” And my father cut him off and said, “Son, I don’t think your mother and sister want to hear that.” Then we all sat silent until my mother put butterscotch pudding, Tommy’s favorite, on the table, but he pushed back his chair and said, “I’m going over to see Jackie.” In the middle of the night he came in and started crashing around his room, banging his knee on the playpen. “Goddamn,” I heard, and then a thump, and silence.
When it was time for him to leave again my mother hugged him hard in the kitchen while Tommy sobbed on her shoulder like some tormented version of his old self. For weeks afterward I could hear that sound, the hoarseness like his guts were coming up, the gasps like his heart was going to explode. I’d been waiting for Tommy to tell me what to do with myself, but as his tears turned the shoulder of my mother’s plaid shirt black I knew that he was more lost than I was. He pulled himself together and tried to pretend like nothing had happened, but it was one of those moments you can’t ever take back, that you remember forever.
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