One Heart

Raelene wanted to know that. Wanted to know a lot more than that. A long time ago, this was. Over fifteen years since she came to camp. That’s a long time ago, I suppose. It doesn’t feel that way. But I was a different woman then. God knows.

I learned to appreciate Raelene. When she was seventeen she came up with her big eyes and pink Chinese slippers and her accent from Philadelphia. She wanted to save me. You know the sort. The child who couldn’t save her own parents. She’s just ripe to save a stranger she thinks needs fixing. Just ripe to wrap herself around a shipwreck like me. Oh yes, Raelene rescued me, at least for a while.

She took me away on a Greyhound bus. She was an odd piece of work. She said, come on, Gladys, let’s just go! And something in me knew I’d scram then, or never scram again. I was forty-eight. Not exactly your traveling gypsy age.

When Raelene first came up to camp I was what you might call dying on the vine. I was living with my sister, Ivy. Ivy’s a good woman. Sometimes too good. But she got on my nerves back then. She was always watching me, and she knew too much about me. She’d been there when it all came tumbling down. Looking at her face was somehow looking in the mirror of my past. It was all right there.

I didn’t even know this then. I didn’t think much about the past, but it was always there just the same. Like bad background music. I couldn’t get away from the glorious past even for a second. Not as long as Ivy was there. My whole life story was caught in her eyes because she’d watched it unfold, and the problem was, neither Ivy or me said a word about it. Words get stuck in your eyes if you don’t let them out of your mouth.

Ivy always meant well. I know that. Didn’t I always? And I’m not blaming her. Even if I wanted to, I’m too old to blame anyone now.

Ivy was there when I was a girl, drunk on hope, falling hard for my husband, James. She was at our wedding, of course. She knew James well, knew my son Wendell well, knew A., my daughter well. And her heart broke each time there was big trouble for me. When Ivy’s heart broke her eyes broke right along with it. Painful eyes, at least when she looked my way. Sometimes I couldn’t face her. I’d look elsewhere. She pitied me. She thought I was the big shattered, pitiful mystery woman. Maybe I was. A mystery to myself too.

When Raelene first showed up at our house, I said to myself, no thank you. I was unprepared, and I’m not fond of surprises. I was rude, I know that. Partly because she’d stopped writing to me and never told me why. After years she just stopped. I didn’t particularly need another child disappearing like that. And she sure didn’t look much like the little girl I met once before in Washington, D.C. (That’s a long story.) Her long brown hair was curly wild. And I thought she needed a good bath, and she had the blue tattooed angel on her arm. I had a problem with that. Don’t ask me why. Tattoos always disgusted me. After a while, I told Raelene that.

“I don’t like ’em much either,” she said. “This guy I was goin’ with convinced me to get it. But I figure a tattoo on your body’s not too important compared to the things that end up tattooed on your soul.”

This was Raelene. A real life philosopher from Philadelphia. I got a charge out of it. I liked that girl’s way of talking. And there she was, working in the late spring at the camp where I cooked. Campers weren’t there yet as I recall. She was being trained, fixing up the lean-tos. She’d come up from Philly, where she’d been her whole life.

I’d been cooking at the camp over ten years by that time. Ivy had been up there cooking forever. She followed some man up there when she was too young to know better. Can’t even remember the man’s name right now. Arnie? He was a handsome plumber from Lake Placid. Had money because the rich summer people hired him for every little leak. He invited Ivy for a vacation. She was only twenty-some years old. Well, she vacationed all right. The highlight of that vacation was Mr. Lake Placid disappearing on her. She had no money, and she was in a strange, cold place. And too proud to call our father. So she ended up getting a job as a cook down at Camp Timber. Didn’t expect it would be her whole life. Who would? Didn’t expect I’d come join her, either. But she called me a few years after being up there. “Why don’t you and James come settle?” she said. “Then Wendell would be near his Aunt Ivy.” That was late 1960. In early ’61, she called and said, “I’m lonely, please come.” So we all went up to see her. I didn’t think we’d end up calling it home.

Now little Raelene Francis didn’t fit in, believe me. She and her tattoo and her wild hair. She wore eyeliner like a cat woman, not exactly your camp girl look. She chewed big wads of gum too often. She had that accent from Philadelphia. If she wanted to tell you “have yourself a very Merry Christmas,” she’d say “Have ya self a vurry murry Christmas.” It was an awful way to have to talk, but you can’t help where you’re born. Her big dark serious eyes just sat back in their sockets staring at you like they had serious answers if only you could ask the right questions. And her eyebrows were always raised up like she was ready for trouble. Ivy thought she always looked like she was about to cry. But that was Ivy. Raelene never cried. Not Raelene. Not back then. She was beyond tears. So was I. Beyond Tears is like a place, a meeting ground, and it’s where we met. Right out there by the old campfire, a nice place that could’ve had a sign: WELCOME TO BEYOND TEARS. POPULATION: 2.

See, Raelene was on late-late shift one night. All the counselors had to take a turn at it, every other week. This was maybe three weeks after she’d shown up, and some of the early session campers had started trickling in. I suppose I had a case of guilt. I wasn’t sleeping. Here was this child who had written to me for years. I’d written to her too. The least I could do was be her friend.

Now, that was going to be hard. I hadn’t been anyone’s friend in a long time. Not my own friend, either. I read books and mostly kept to myself. I worked. I slept. I said hello to folks. Sometimes I even enjoyed them. Part of me did, anyhow. But I’d been frozen, I see now, all my insides just frozen up. It’s easy to freeze. I understand why I froze. Now I understand.

So Raelene was out there by the fire that night, the late-late counselor, sitting on a rock, poking embers with a stick. Chewing gum. I can’t imagine what she thought when she looked up. I had turned off my Sonny Boy Williamson and stepped outside. I had walked in the dark, down the hill from our house, through the valley past the school, and up the other hill to the camp. This was not a hop skip and a jump.

I’d never been over late at night before. Now there I was on the other side of the flames. Big old Gladys in blue pants and jacket. Just standing there in the night, firelit. I tried smiling. I imagine she saw the fire reflected in the lenses of my glasses.

I went and hoisted myself onto a rock across from her. The flames were hot and dancing on my skin. Above us were the usual stars.

“Even though it’s two in the morning,” I added, “And I’m crazy not to be in bed.”

“It’s crazy just living, as the old song goes,” Raelene said. Her voice was sweet and high. She was smiling.

Raelene shrugged. “I don’t know. I can’t believe I’m even here. You must think I’m really pathetic, and I can’t say I blame you.”

A small wind bent the flames. I peered over at Raelene’s firelit face, which looked young, dangerously young. Needy. I rowed back inside myself all the way for a clear moment. I could row myself back inside like I was a cave. A cave with ice on the walls, nice and dark. I could see the world and anyone in it standing at the cave’s mouth, framed and manageable. I had to do this right away with Raelene. Because I see now she scared me. The little girl believed she knew me. Thought she knew old Gladys.

Oh, she knew some things. But she didn’t know me. Not then. You can’t really know a person just from letters. I had told her some things I hadn’t told any others. True enough. She was my secret pen pal. I had told her how broken I was inside a while after Wendell was killed, for instance. Broken up. A smashed heart. Hatred in my veins for the whole country was the only thing whole inside me, and I expressed that page after page. To a child I expressed it! This I’d call desperate. I wrote that letter at night out on a picnic table off the interstate. I sat in the dark and wrote my hatred out. I almost ripped the letter up. I remember it seemed to demand too much tenderness from me to fold a letter and put it in the envelope. I remember I had to force myself to go through those motions that seemed beyond me. Because I was pure hatred and rage. Shaking with it.

Now Raelene hated the whole country too. She was no dummy. But she had a child’s hatred for the men in power. A baby’s notion that if only the right men got in power, there wouldn’t be war. She didn’t understand a damn thing, but she did have her anger. She couldn’t stand any of it. She was just a baby watching the whole thing on television.

Ivy never knew it, but once I went to meet Raelene in Washington, D.C., for a protest the hippies were throwing. It was 1970. I went, Raelene went. It was her idea to go there on a bus with a church group, and meet me at the monument. She was just a lost child with crooked teeth and red bell-bottoms. Pretty little thing with those big eyes. Flashing the peace sign at strangers when I first saw her there at the foot of the monument. “Is that you?” I said, but I knew. Her face had Raelene written all over it. We were both lost souls in that mob. All those festive hippies, Raelene and me eating hot dogs. The sky blue. It got dark slowly that day. I remember a nun in her blue habit came up to me, tapped me on the shoulder and said, “You have a fine relationship with your girl. It’s obvious.” I remember her white nun face in the dark like I remember some of my dreams. It was late and Raelene and I sat on cool grass behind the White House. I knew I’d remember her sleepy face on that night, and I do. She was so young I felt I should carry her back to the bus. But I didn’t. I was relieved when the day ended.

Raelene loved Wendell in a way, though she never knew him either. His name was on her little bracelet. And she had his picture. She was lonely, a lonely kid from Philly with no mother. A boy named Hambone West lived across the street from her, and he was a kind of friend. She also had some school friends, but they didn’t cure the loneliness. They didn’t cure the mother who ran off with a man to the West, leaving Raelene with a pile of presents. They didn’t cure the father who liked his needles. So she latched onto Wendell, the idea of him. I believe she talked to his picture. And certainly loved him and prayed for him and that cured her loneliness for a while. She had a Catholic imagination back then. It was one thing the drug addict father and the runaway mother handed down. They’d been the sort to have a party on the saints’ feast days. Raelene went to some grammar school called Immaculate Conception, if you can believe that.

So I had told her an important bit of the past, but just a bit. So out there at the fire she looked at me like she knew me. Only it was someone else she knew. Have to admit I enjoyed that. I think now I enjoyed being someone else in her eyes. It was like a vacation, a vacation from my self, from who I knew I was, from who Ivy knew I was. To Raelene I was a big strong woman who’d seen hard times but who was somehow just great. Lonely but wonderful! A real interesting woman. I just needed some encouragement. I just needed a friend.

People can free you up. They see you a certain way and you suddenly buy that vision. You eat it up directly. You get to be someone else for a while. Moments come along where you can stand yourself a little.

So out there at the fire Raelene is looking at me with a load of admiration that first night.

Now, I’m complicated. So to be truthful I’ll have to say this. That admiration in her eyes was not real welcome by one part of me. While one part liked it, another part wanted to slap her face.

Why? Why the meanness? Well, you tell me. When someone admires you and you don’t admire yourself, don’t you feel like slapping them? Like you have the responsibility to wake them up?

I couldn’t stand it when someone turned their naive eyes on me. Of course I liked it too. Like I said, I’m complicated. Bear with me. I’ve beared with me for all these years. Jesus Christ I’d like a medal.

I told Raelene I didn’t think it was pathetic that she’d come up to camp. (This was a lie, I thought it was one of the most pathetic things I’d ever heard of.) I told her, “I’m glad to meet you again, I really am. But I warn you, I’m nothing special. Not like you thought I was when you were small. I’m better in letters. I really am.”

“Your letters were like the best thing in my life for years, Gladys,” Raelene said.

“Gladys, whenever you wrote me, you had this way of saying everything. I’d read those letters like fifty times. I kept them under my pillow and I read them by flashlight when I couldn’t sleep. It was like I could feel you out there, same as I used to feel my guardian angel when I was six. I bet I could recite lines from those letters all these years later.”

As she talked, she looked straight into the fire without squinting. When she stopped talking, she looked at me.

“Your letters meant a lot to me too,” I told her. And saying that, I was surprised to realize how true it was. I hadn’t thought about it in a long time. “And those horses you always drew. It was real nice. I always did love horses.”

She said sometime it would be fun to see them, and I said yes, it would, and then I hoisted myself up off the rock and said good night. I started walking away. I could feel her puzzled eyes on me. I was headed with my flashlight into the dark field. I was headed right toward the hill so I could get back to the house. I really was. But I stopped. Or something stopped me. I turned and walked right back to the fire. “Changed my mind,” I told her. “I’ll stay a bit longer.” Don’t ask why. It wasn’t like me to head back to a place I’d decided to leave.

I stayed for a while, and then walked with her to wake up all the bed wetters at 3:30 A.M. I remember this like it was last week. She would go into the cabin and nudge the kid awake saying, “You have to go to the outhouse now, honey.” Most of the little bed wetters woke up quick. A few cried. We’d walk them down to the purple outhouse. I was interested, seeing the kids this way. They were mostly asleep. They were baby sleepwalkers in pajamas. All moonlit. Like orphans. Angels. Not the loudmouths they were in the daytime. I had pity on them, seeing them half asleep and walking barefoot on cold grass in the dark. They were so young. And it hurt me having pity like that. It warmed me up. Was this the beginning of my unfreezing? Maybe. I do remember it hurt terribly! Like hot liquid pushing through a hole in my frozen heart. I grit my teeth. Crossed my arms. We just kept waking up the little kids. Or Raelene did, and I watched. Tried not to watch, but watched all the same. It was more like a dream. The goddamn camp was packed with kids who peed their beds. A bunch of nervous bladders. Some were only seven years old, like Becky Kalmus, I’ll never forget her. Slept in a cowboy suit. Guns in her holster. Seven years old, a bed wetter, a cowboy in her dreams. She slept this way every night according to Raelene. Made her feel safe. She was a little bird. Most kids just walked barefoot on the grass to get to the outhouse. Old Becky had to put her cowboy boots on. White boots with fringe and too small for her. She wasn’t a sleepwalker. She was wide awake, or at least looked that way. And she sang to herself quietly the whole way to the outhouse: “Hello operator, give me number nine, the boys are in the bathroom, pulling down their flies are in the kitchen, eating bread and jam, my mom doesn’t give a darn and I don’t give a damn . . . ” Raelene said that’s what the kid sang every night as she walked to the outhouse under the stars. Anyhow, I watched her closely. Couldn’t help it. And something about her face was getting to me.

“I think I’ll go now,” I told Raelene, after we walked Cowboy Kalmus back to her cabin.

I felt angry. I remember I walked back to our house full of anger. Why in hell had I just walked around with the late-late counselor waking up the bed wetters? Goddamnit, I had to work in the morning.

But before I fell asleep, I kept seeing that little girl, that little seven-year-old Becky. Her face under her cowboy hat. The eyes looking up at me. Brown eyes, not big or small, just brown regular eyes. It came to me that night that she’d reminded me of A. My daughter.

I’d stay away from her for good, I thought. I fell asleep mad. Raelene dragged me out of my cave. Mad at her for even showing up. I wished she’d go back to where she came from.

Of course, once you’re out of the cave, you’re out. You’re rearranged. Bigger. So if you try going back in the cave, the fit’s no longer quite right. The next day I woke up and knew it. Because I’d had a nice night. I really had. Old Raelene knew how to show a person a good time. Just walk them around in the dark and wake up some bed wetters.

So I believe I had this sense of expectation. Nothing familiar about it. The anger from the night before was mostly gone. Ivy said to me at breakfast, “What’s up?” I said, “Nothing.” She said, “You’re different.” I said, “For Christ sakes, Ivy, stop watching me!” Poor Ivy. I hurt her a lot. Why didn’t I just say, “Well, Ivy, I stayed up late with Raelene. She’s a nice girl. She likes me. She depends on me. She might just turn out to be a real friend of mine.”

I didn’t say that because poor Ivy was just too hungry to hear it. Now that’s another mean streak in me. If someone was too hungry to hear something about me, they got nothing. Jesus said feed the hungry, so I’ll go to hell, but I couldn’t control it. Not with Ivy. Ivy thought I needed her kind of love, but I needed privacy. Don’t we all? And I see now I needed Ivy to get her own concerns. She didn’t have a life outside me back then. Or maybe she did and I couldn’t see it. I’m smart enough now to know I don’t finally know too much.

So that morning I’m in the kitchen. I’ve got a new sense about things. It was unclear what it was, but I could feel it. I stood washing my hands at the big sink. I noticed the sky. Purple. The sun coming up orange. The mountains in the distance. A lot of young green leaves on the edge of the woods windblown upward. Everything hushed.

I stood with the water rushing over my hands noticing sky. How long had it been since I’d seen the sky? Ten years? When I was young I’d noticed it every day. Now, here it was again. The sky. Mountains. Pressing in on me. It was like seeing it all for the first time.

And then Raelene, who was the music counselor, was out on the porch. The wandering minstrel with fifty kids following her. She was not in her element. Not naturally playful. That you could tell by looking at her. She liked kids, but she was a worrier. She cared too much. It was a little bit pathetic. She tried too hard to listen to every single kid. Then she just gave up. She stood there with her hands over her ears, smiling. They all asked questions at once. Finally they’d get quiet. I watched at the window. She unplugged her ears, and sat down to do her job. Her job was to get the kids singing before breakfast. Five-thirty in the morning, and Raelene hadn’t slept on account of late-late shift. She looked like a bewildered raccoon. She was a pretty little thing sometimes, but that morning she looked terrible. But then she started singing.

Let us go to the banks of the ocean.

That’s all I remember of the chorus. The song was “The Dutchman,” about an old couple. The old man’s falling apart. Thinks he’s still in Rotterdam. The old woman walks him around. She sings old songs while she makes the bed in their little house by the canal. They sit in a dark kitchen. You can see them. They sit there with a candle burning, eighty years old. They don’t speak. They’ve said it all.

Well, it was a nice enough song. I would’ve especially loved it when I was a girl. But it was the voice that impressed me. It was Raelene’s voice. A real beautiful voice. You couldn’t think otherwise.

Now I was born a music lover. You either are or you’re not. You know it early in life if you’re a music lover. Because songs will make you cry. They teach you something deeper than words when you’re small. They teach you about time. Even the early lullabies do this. All aboard for blanket bay, won’t be back till the break of day. And they teach you that someday you’re going to die, you’re not always going to be a small girl spinning in a nightgown on a dirt patch in the backyard looking at the cows with your mother singing quiet in the window above you. The song’s going to end.

So there I was at the sink listening to Raelene. All the kids were singing along, but I listened to Raelene. I felt a tightness in my throat and thought her voice was terribly lovely. Those were the exact words I used inside my head. They alarmed me. It was not like me to think like that, ever. That’s how good she sounded when she sang. I stopped listening after the second verse. To save myself from feeling it.

It wasn’t easy getting to know Raelene because they keep the counselors busy. And I was busy too. But Raelene would come by for coffee on the days when she wasn’t a minstrel. Before anyone else had to be out of their tents and cabins, Raelene would wake up and head down to the kitchen. Ivy and I would be in there, sometimes a radio on so we could hear the international bad news. We’d have to start cooking soon, but not yet.

“Hi,” Raelene would say in the doorway, her long curls flattened down with water. She always woke and took the GI’s bath. And what a fashion plate! I don’t know where she found those clothes. I guess it was the style in Philadelphia. She wore tight shorts like they all wore, but Raelene went in for the halter tops. They’d have to be a godforsaken color, like electric blue. Bright green with silver glitters. And then she had a dress. White with apples and oranges all over it. It zipped all the way down in the back. Like the dressmaker didn’t know a zipper stops halfway. And then she would go ahead and wear those damn pink Chinese slippers under the dress. They were the only damn shoes she brought with her.

We’d sit together at the table by the door and have coffee. We talked a little, but not much. The kitchen was big, clean, and quiet. The convection oven, the regular oven, the three-bin sink, the six-burner gas stove, the flat grill, the walk-in, the tile floor, all of it was clean because we left it that way the day before. Ivy and I took pride in our work. The kitchen almost had the feel of a peaceful garden on those mornings. Sparkled. Raelene was soothed there.

Sometimes Ivy would come over to the table and join us. I never appreciated that. I would turn to stone when Ivy joined us. Raelene told me about Hambone on one of these mornings. “He lives out west in Oregon now and told me to come on out if I want. I wish you could meet him. He’s been my friend since I was six. He’s like the one guy I can trust.”

“I’d like that. I’d like to meet old Hambone West.” Somehow I pictured an old black man with a blues guitar singing Ivory Joe Hunter’s “I Almost Lost My Mind.” Of course Hambone didn’t eventually live up to that.

Then, another morning, Raelene came to visit with tears in her eyes. Her voice shaking with sadness.

She sat at the table. I poured her coffee. I said, “Easy now, easy.” I was not prepared. I didn’t know her that well yet.

Not well enough for the tears I could feel were coming. I didn’t want anyone’s tears falling around me. Maybe because I kept my own dammed up inside and expected others to have the common courtesy to do the same.

Ivy did, and brought it over. “Is she okay?” Ivy asked me. Raelene was looking down at the table, biting her lip. She was wearing another godforsaken halter top that day. She looked about as much like a camp counselor as I did.

I let her get her bearings. I went and got the pot of coffee and put it between us on the table. Then I gave her the newspaper’s crossword puzzle.

And then I went over and started cooking breakfast. That’s just how I was. My shoulder just wasn’t ready for anyone’s tears. But as I was cooking breakfast, I had Raelene in the corner of my eye. It was like I was holding her there. I half wanted to tell her to get out of the kitchen. The other half of me was confusion and feeling for her. Empathy. Not pity. Lord she knew how to make inroads.

Maybe I was glad because finally, after all those years, here was a counselor who liked me, and not Ivy. That sounds childish, I know. But you don’t know how it was. You don’t know how the other counselors regarded me all those years. Fat, mean, and dumb. They size you up in a flash. You can read the faces too easy. You’re the cook, you’re a bit overweight, so you must be dumb. And their asses are headed to Harvard in the fall, so what the hell do they care?

(But not as different as she thought.) She was happy-go-lucky. Blue eyed with golden hair. That won her some points. The jolly fat woman. Santa’s wife. They all said, “Hi, Ivy!” with big smiles on their faces. And there were a few groups of girls through the years who invited her canoeing or to a little cookout. She was “a good sport.” She played along with who they thought she was.

I never got invited anywhere. (This didn’t astound me.) And I never thought it bothered me, but maybe it did. One child, ten years ago, a boy named Neal, he liked me. Made me lacy valentines in July, and gave me a goldfish in a Baggie. But when I walked up to his table to thank him one night he put his hands over his face and shouted, “I’m ascending into heaven!” He wouldn’t take his hands away from his face, and he wouldn’t stop saying “I’m ascending into heaven.” In other words, he was out of his mind.

I let her sit there and stare at the crossword puzzle. The sun rose in the window. She was all lit up now in sunlight. It seemed to bother her. She put her hand over her eyes. Then she got up and left, not saying a word.

“She’s upset, Gladys. You don’t just give someone a crossword puzzle,” Ivy said.

But I knew damn well she was right. And I thought about Raelene that day. And that night I left my house and walked down the hill and up the other hill. Got to her cabin at ten o’clock. She was one of the few counselors who had their own cabin. She’d started out with a college girl in a golf shirt from Boston, but Golf Shirt wanted to live with someone else. Surprise surprise.

I walked down the path in the woods. There was hardly any moonlight. I saw her cabin didn’t have any lights on. She was probably sound asleep. I wouldn’t wake her.

There she was, standing in the doorway of the cabin with a long white T-shirt on and those long bare legs.

I headed down the path, and then she called out my name, and told me to come back.

I suppose that’s the night we became real friends. Raelene’s cabin was a nice place. She had little impatiens on the sills and a stuffed bear sitting next to them, real cute. Screens on the windows with flittery moths all over them. She had two cots, with white sheets and scratchy blankets. And I sat down on the one that was made, and she sat down on hers. She lit a lantern and set it on the floor. On the wall she had taped up some snapshots. Her mother. A lady on a couch with tall, dark hair. She didn’t look like the sort to run away, don’t ask me what I mean by that. Her father in a baseball cap holding a small white dog on the front stoop of a brick row house. Just how I pictured Philadelphia. Another snapshot was Raelene with some long-haired boy with an open shirt. Hambone.

Soon we had both stretched out. We were there stretched out talking with our eyes on the ceiling.

Raelene said she felt like she didn’t belong at the camp, that the other counselors didn’t like her, and that she wasn’t good enough with the kids.

“You could get yourself some preppy clothes from a catalog and do something cute with your hairdo,” I told her. “And new shoes. But why would you want to? What the hell do you care?”

“Feeling alone gets old,” she said. “I never felt like I was the weird duck back in Philly.” She laughed. “Up here’s like a different country. I never thought I’d get homesick for Philly, man.” Laughed again. Then she told me a bit about her father. “When I left he was high as a kite. I tested him by saying I was going off to Texas to get married. He was so high, and so was Peggy, that’s his girlfriend, they just got teary eyed and said, ‘Aw, you’re gettin’ married! You found true love! Aw, Raelene, that’s so sweet.’”

I didn’t know what to say to that. It was quiet, then Raelene said, “You know, Gladys, I been up here worrying he’s dead.”

I remember she laughed too hard and too long at things like that, then she’d catch her nervous breath.

“Yes he is, and he’ll be fine in the future too. He’ll find his way. So don’t fret it.”

Was it true that I could feel this? I thought I could. Or did I just assume that everyone would be fine, in one painful way or another? I thought I could see her father sitting in a dark kitchen at night with a radio ball game. A man in a dark cap wondering why he ruined his life. The radio ball game reminding him he was once half normal. He was once a boy who collected baseball cards. It’s true I could feel things like that. I could sometimes look at a person and see their mother and father or maybe their true love, even before they showed their snapshots. Just some trick my mind played?

I could feel certain things about James too, my lost husband. I knew he was alive, and living far away. I even had a sense he was in a warmer climate.

Slowly but surely, I worked James right into our talk without even knowing I was doing it. Once I started, I felt a kind of pressure inside. Like the words had been waiting to come out. Waiting for years. I’d started, and there was no shutting my big trap now. The words were coming out.

Of course Raelene was curious. She was interested in me. In every little chirp that came out of me. Interest is bait. I mean someone interested in you like this can make you talk, if you feel the interest is pure, and not just some kind of idle curiosity. Most people you meet in life, let’s face it. They’re not interested, they just got a case of idle curiosity.

But then someone comes along with their interest. Their pure interest, and it gets you interested again.

It was that way with Raelene there in the cabin. I told her all about James, how after he got back from a year in Korea he and Wendell and I once lived in a house not much bigger than the cabin, a place Ivy found for us about a half hour away from the camp, a view of the Adirondacks out the back window. How we just let Wendell paint and crayon all over the walls, and how that looked just fine. I told her of the claw foot bathtub in the backyard with the makeshift wall around it that I decorated with pictures cut from Look and Life magazines and how Wendell loved it. Never wanted to get out of the nice warm water we’d heat on the woodstove. And how he would sing to himself “Silent Night, Holy Night,” no matter what the season. His voice was sturdy and made my eyes water on certain nights back then. I was a sentimental girl at least when it came to that child. I also told Raelene how James worked in a lumberyard and came home smelling like fresh wood and fresh air. And always had a story to tell me, though he was not a real talker. Could I believe I was saying all this to Raelene, a camp counselor in a cabin? No. She kept asking questions anytime I’d pause. Questions mainly about Wendell, which was natural.

James and I, we’d eat supper with Wendell, then put him in to play with his trains and cars and stuffed whatnots. We had a whole room for his pleasure. We never made him pick up his toys in that room. He could do what the hell he wanted in there. His father and I believed in letting him be natural. It was our own idea. We’d tell him, “Go use your imagination.” And sometimes we’d play with him. And other times, maybe two or three times a week, we’d get out the Jack Daniel’s and listen to music, and talk. Sometimes Ivy would come over and join us.

We never thought much about it, James and I. His father and my father, and sometimes my mother, they drank like sailors. And their friends did too. So we never thought even for a minute, Maybe there’s a problem here. Maybe it’s not good for Wendell to see us drinking. We just thought, The wars are over for a while, so here’s to what we call life.

We drank. We played our music. Everything from Bill Monroe to B.B. King. Some nights we were perfectly sober. We were never really out of control. We loved Wendell to death. And sometimes the three of us would sleep right out under the stars, Wendell in the middle in a blue hooded jacket.

Meanwhile all my old friends from Delaware were moving to houses with natural gas furnaces and H-bomb shelters. I’d get a letter from someone and they’d have to tell me about watching The Aldrich Family or Milton Berle on the television, and what did I think of Betty Furness, the Westinghouse lady. I visited once or twice and saw how they thought they had the good life under their belts because their houses were brand-new and clean. You could eat a meal in their toilet bowls. Sparkling clean and new! Out with the old. New everything. And they’d send me Reader’s Digest articles that said the Communists were taking over our children’s minds in the schools. They believed the articles were true. They were smack in the middle of things.

We were out of it. Our house looked like Hogan’s alley. We read the paper, sometimes we went to David Walton’s bar to watch Ed Sullivan. And we had a radio. But other than that, we entertained ourselves. The more McCarthy stirred up the fear of reds, the crazier people got. We had neighbors two miles away who were crazy like that. They avoided us entirely.

But things were booming out there. It was boom time. The country was rich. Clean! Happy! A new car born every second, and two or three lucky babies. America the beautiful. But we could feel the lie of that. James and me could feel the evil in the air. After Fat Boy and the other bomb, what the hell did they call it, I forget, but we could feel how the air was different, the world was different. No matter how new the houses were, no matter how many sprung up, no matter how clean.

Then one day when Wendell was twelve I thought I might be pregnant, and I went to the doctor, Doctor Elwin Fry. He looked exactly like a walrus, I’ll never forget that. Doctor Elwin Fry said to me, “You don’t want to gain weight now, Gladys. You want to keep your figure.” I did have a nice Betty Grable–type figure, if you can believe that. I had every eye on my legs when I walked down a street in those days.

So the walrus says, “When you get the urge to snack, have a cigarette and a highball.” Raelene didn’t believe this. I had to explain. Things were just different back then. The doctors didn’t want the ladies losing their figures. This was the biggest concern. The ladies cannot lose their figures! No figure loss by the ladies allowed! You could hear the doctors saying this throughout the land of plenty.

I was used to that. My father, to save me from turning to fat, made me run and swim until I wanted to die. But that’s a whole other tale.

So I was pregnant and happy. It weren’t planned. We’d wanted to wait for a while. But we were so happy. About three months into that pregnancy, James’s father died. We all went to Kentucky for the funeral, and James and I cried together with his mother. This was the mid-fifties. Later that year we moved from New York back to the state of Delaware for a few years. Only we lived in the north, in Wilmington, an hour from where I’d grown up. My father ended up landing James a job down on the docks as a loader. We were happy and Wendell was happy too. He was thirteen now, and he was looking forward to a brother or sister. I missed our old house up in New York State, our old way of living. Ivy missed us and kept saying, “When you coming back?” But James was making decent money at his job. And whenever we got the chance we got out of the city and camped.

We missed the land. Both James and me loved land. There weren’t so many real land lovers back then like there are now. Or if there were they didn’t talk about it as much and hang so many posters. I’d grown up on a farm, and land was in my blood. I weren’t so big on loving animals, but I loved the land. James had grown up in a town, where he said he felt “shackled.” Part of why he fell for me I think is because I had the land in my blood. The old farm in my heart.

One night by a river he and I made a pact to avoid boredom. We drank to that promise. We were so young we believed boredom would be the worst possible thing to face in this life.

Well, not yet. Not yet. It’s not that time yet. I’ll just tell you she was nice. She was a good baby that didn’t keep us up all night too much. I can’t hardly stand thinking of her so I won’t. I’ll talk but I won’t think. Not about this. Yet.

Now one day A. was three years old, Wendell was a teenager, and James and myself took them on a little trip to a pond. This lake was back in New York State. (We were there for good this time, in another decent little house in the woods.) We had never been to the pond before. Bennet Thane, a man James worked with, recommended it. He had a cabin nearby. He said we could use the cabin and swim in the pond, have us a getaway.

So there we were, a family by a pond. Sunshine, a little bench of old stones by the edge of the water. Woods all around.

Wendell was a quick-eyed, handsome boy, with his short black hair and his hawk nose. He looked older than sixteen. He had the usual recklessness of that age. Well, that day at the pond he met a girl. Her name was Jan. She was fifteen in a green and yellow flowered two-piece. They ended up running around together in the woods. I don’t know what happened in those woods. We didn’t worry much then. I remember we watched Jan and Wendell swimming off together in the green water, laughing.

“Everything happens too fast,” James said. He was pouring us some white wine into small glasses. I ended up throwing those glasses out. Along with everything else we had with us on that trip.

The glasses had Scotty dogs on the side, white and black. I think they were from James’s father. I can see the golden liquid shot with sun and pouring into the glass. A. was sound asleep on the blue blanket she loved. I had her face covered up with a sheet. She was pale skinned and burned easy. On her feet were blue socks. They made her legs look whiter. She still had some baby fat then. This is a picture frozen too clearly in my mind. I thought of covering her legs and then thought, no, I should let her get a little color. I can’t for the rest of her life protect her from all the sun in the world.

I began to feel the strange sensation that I was a girl again when I talked with Raelene in the cabin that night. Because I spent my whole young life talking in the dark to Ivy. Twin beds, windows, summer night, quiet voices . . . it was familiar at the very core, even though it was Raelene over there and not Ivy. Even though the things I was saying, that girl I was had never dreamed possible. I weren’t comfortable. But I kept talking. Not able to control it, really.

I told her how James and me kept drinking that day. We weren’t completely out of control. It was never like that with us. We could hold it. And it was only wine. We had tolerance like nobody’s business. The sun was brilliant. Way high up there in a great blue summer sky. We were on the pink blanket lying down now and turned toward each other. That’s how we were, we just liked to lay there and stare at each other, and laugh and try to feel young. Sounds stupid but it was a good feeling. To feel comfortable like that. There’s no denying I felt at home with that man for a while.

But we got too comfortable. And we fell asleep. It was Wendell who woke us. He was dripping wet, so was the girl standing beside him, Jan. I remember looking up at them and thinking, Why are they so wet and cold?

My hand reached over to the blue blanket, but it was an empty space. I sprung up. And as I sprung up, the whole world got dark for a second. And in the dark there was something evil, a force, or a face. It was there for a split second. I began to shake.

James squeezed the back of my shoulder. He was trying to calm me. I pulled myself away from him. I screamed her name. I screamed it and ran along the edge of the water. But I knew even as I was screaming. I knew that she was on the pond’s floor. So I was screaming her name with no hope whatsoever. I could feel that she was gone like I could feel the water was wet when I dived in. James and Wendell and the girl dove in too. It was a fairly big pond, but not all that deep. We were diving for her, all of us.

We dove and dove and finally James said, “She’s not in here. Jesus Christ, Gladys, why the hell did we assume the worst? She wandered off into the woods is all.” He called her name. “Where’d you get to, love?”

James’s voice was packed with hope. I tried to believe it. But I knew. And I was mad at James for not knowing, hated him for being able to enjoy that bit of hope. I watched James head into the woods. He turned for a split second and looked at me. From that moment on nothing was ever the same between James and me.

“Calm?” I remember Raelene saying. “But weren’t you screaming on the inside?”

“No, I had the kind of calm that’s on the other side of screaming.” It’s not possible to say what that’s like. But I was where I’d never been before. And never been again. Though part of where I was I suspect is still inside me.

I knew if I kept diving I would find my child. And when I found her, I knew I would find a hole in the world that I would fall through. It would be the deepest, blackest, hungriest hole in the world, and I would fall through, and nobody would follow me down, and I wouldn’t want them to. But first I had to find her.

Her body was not on the edge of the pond, but out near the middle. At the time this made sense. Only later did I try to figure out how a child who couldn’t swim made it out to the middle of the pond.

And to Raelene I didn’t say a thing about how it was to swim with her body toward the land, and I won’t ever say a thing about that to anyone, though I did tell James.

I didn’t tell him until many years later after this happened, though. Because I hated him so much, hated him immediately, hated him more than I loved him, and hated myself even more than that, which was powerful hatred.

I hated myself too much to weep. Weeping in grief is a kind of pleasure. The only pleasure when it comes to grief. I felt I didn’t deserve it. No release. Not for a minute. No pleasure, ever again. No consolation. So back at home, with Wendell locked in his room throwing a ball against the wall for hours, and James in our room weeping for two days straight, I was sleepless and out on the back stoop chain-smoking. And hating James more and more the more I heard his crying. The grand indulgence of his crying.

So you can see by nature I’m partly cold hearted. And even then I knew that. I thought to myself, A good woman would go comfort her man, a good wife would hold her husband as he weeps. A good woman wouldn’t sit here frozen up with rage, a good woman would run to Wendell and tell him time will heal.

Does time heal, or is that just something we like to say to people? I don’t believe it heals. Not really. Time goes by, and the buried pain gets duller, true enough. But is that healing? Was I healing as I froze? No. Healing is something else entirely. It happens within time, but it’s not just time doing the trick.

Half a year after we lost A., I got the news that my father dropped dead of a heart attack. It happened in public, on a street in New York City, where nobody knew him. I went to his funeral, but I didn’t digest a thing. Not possible. And years later, when my mother died, which was four years after Wendell was killed, I went to that funeral too. All I know is I sat in the front pew with my eyes closed. I tried to hold a picture of my mother in my mind, but couldn’t. I’d see her, then she’d start to shatter into pieces. It didn’t hurt a bit. And the faces of my children would blend into her shattered face. Then the face would explode like confetti and fall. I watched the explosion, didn’t feel a thing but dizzy. I looked at the coffin and thought, She’s in there, and didn’t feel a thing. But the person I suddenly missed was my father. Missed him like I was a child, like he could come and gather me up. I remember my heart like a car starting to plow into a field of quicksand. I remember I slammed on the brakes and coughed too loud until I felt safe again. Everyone has a time in life where they think, Cry now and you’ll never stop. Maybe it’s these times where you have to say, “Okay, ladies and gentlemen, I’ll cry for the rest of my life.” But of course nobody in their right mind makes such a choice. Not usually. You slam on the brakes, thinking you’ll save yourself. You won’t make a show. You’ll be strong. Ivy sat beside me, her head down. I felt her look at me several times with her side vision. Her hands trembled. What she digested, I never knew.

After that night in her cabin, Raelene would sneak out of her cabin sometimes and sit with me, out on the back stoop of the house. The end of May. A number of the summer campers hadn’t even come up yet, just the ones from certain private schools that let out early.

Raelene didn’t make too many inroads with the other counselors. They’d asked her, “Where do you go?” Meaning what college. She just looked at them, not understanding the question. They said, “What college?” and she said, “Not sure, maybe next year I’ll go somewhere.” Well, that would’ve marked her an Ada the Fringer in their book. If they hadn’t already decided that.

She was glad for my company out there on that stoop. My reading stoop, as I called it. Ivy would poke her head out the window and say, “Do you think this is right?” or sometimes, “Keep it down, ladies.” Because we would be laughing and talking and drinking beer. “Come join us, Ivy,” we’d say sometimes, but Ivy felt left out anyway and always said, “I got too much to do, maybe some other time.”

One night out on the stoop on the first of June after it had rained all day and the kids were all wild banshees doing indoor arts and crafts and Raelene was feeling restless, Raelene said, “You ever want to leave here and go someplace else? I mean someplace that’s not a camp?”

I really hadn’t given much thought to that. But I said to her, “Hell yes.”

“Maybe you and me can get some bus tickets. Remember Hambone? The friend I mentioned? He’s like a guy I can trust. We could visit him.”

“He’s like a guy you can trust,” I said. I liked to tease her about the way she talked. She never minded.

You might not want to put yourself on a Greyhound when you’re almost forty-eight. Unless the trip’s short. The destination particular. Don’t just get on the bus with a young girl like Raelene. Buy a train ticket if you need to get away. Don’t let a girl tell you, “We can just waitress our way across the United States!”

“You waitress, I’ll sit on my hind quarters and watch, honey,” I told Raelene. She gave me one of her smiles.

And I was already on the bus. I have to say at first it thrilled me, just looking out the window. I didn’t expect it to feel so good. I put my head against the windowpane and felt the vibration of the bus. I watched the land open up, the sky get bigger. I got off and on the bus with Raelene, the tour guide. Greasy spoons were palaces to Raelene. “Look, Gladys! Real genuine midwest coffee cups!” Whatever that meant. We got off and spent one night in a motel called The Wayfarer in Indiana. That was also a palace for Raelene. “Look at these great little soaps! They’re so cute!”

Of course on the bus I was putting up with the usual Greyhounders. Half had just escaped from the nut-house. A man named Albert across the aisle never shut his mouth. I had to hear his couthless stories. He would look across the aisle and say, “Your arsehole gettin’ sore?” He didn’t understand when I ignored him. “I said your arsehole gettin’ sore yet?” he’d say. And when I still didn’t answer he’d say, “Blessed are the bus riders, for they shall inherit sore arseholes!”

“If he’s still here tomorrow we’ll need to kill him,” I told Raelene, who threw her head back and laughed her way through the whole ride. Laughed and laughed. That’s what you do when you’re young on a Greyhound. It’s all a big adventure. It’s all a laugh riot. You think every lunatic in your path makes the world a little more special.

Finally Albert got off the bus. A girl took his place. She was Amy, she was a talker too. We had to hear all about her rock and roll band, the Helen Kellers. But she was a relief after Albert. She had some couth. We got off the bus with her in Lincoln, Nebraska. She promised us showers.

I’m forty-eight years old traipsing down the street in Lincoln, Nebraska, to visit the house of one of the Helen Kellers. It’s getting dark and I’m thinking, Okay, Gladys, you can wake up now, the dream is over. The little dream is over.

Our tickets let us get off and on whenever we wanted. I wanted off, but not in Lincoln. At that particular point, I wanted off the earth, not the bus. But I walked down the street to Amy’s house. Raelene and I sat and drank water on her lumpy couch. “So here’s to Nebraska,” Raelene said. Amy changed into a purple robe and what looked like white go-go boots, then took us out to her backyard. I thought I’d leave then, I thought I’d go find the bus and just go home. Rather than stay and feel ridiculous.

Instead I sat down in the room Amy had set up in the back of her house. It was a ridiculous room in the middle of a wheat field. A blue couch covered with plastic. A rickety blue table, a hat stand. I thought, Now I’m dreaming someone else’s dream. Amy smoked marijuana from a small pipe. “Do you mind?” she said. “I’m not your mother,” I said. “If I was, you wouldn’t be wearin’ those go-go boots.” She smiled. “That’s cool. That’s cool.” Then she inhaled too much, had herself a minor coughing fit. She passed the pipe to Raelene, who said, “I hate drugs, I hate all dope, I don’t get near it, I’m straight.” She folded her arms. She’d seen enough of drugs in her life.

Amy told a long story about her friend who was going to be famous soon, if his record “Come to the Salmon” caught on. I could try hard and never forget the name of that song. She sang it for us. She stood looking down at the ground.

Come to the salmon

with me and me

Come, come to the salmon.

“Can I use your phone?” I said when she was done. I went inside and called Ivy.

I wanted Ivy to say, “Why? Why on earth are you in Nebraska? You should be here, helping me. The kitchen’s falling apart.”

I wanted to say, “Ivy, I miss you.” I did miss her. How could I sit in an outside room and watch a young girl smoke marijuana and sing a song called “Come to the Salmon” and not miss my sister?

I didn’t sleep that night. I sat in Amy’s outside living room on the blue couch. All night long. A big moon lit the room. I might have dozed, but mainly I just sat there. I sat there wondering what I was doing. I couldn’t begin to tell myself.

Amy drove us to the bus station the next day. She drove shaking her head and saying, “Pretty pe-culiar, pretty-pe-culiar.”

“You two. Not even mother and daughter. Traveling together. Peculiar, that’s all, peculiar.”

Back on the bus, I slept. Raelene met a boy. This boy would change her life. Funny thing to say, I know, but it can happen like that. Unexpected. He was a scrawny kid with a goatee in a white undershirt. A hyper kid with what they call a boom box for his rock and roll music. Next time we stopped, it was Fargo, North Dakota. The Frank Powers Hotel. The boy and Raelene holding hands, Raelene with her eyes on me, afraid I’d feel left out. “Relax,” I told her. I was happy to get off the bus. Happy to see that hotel. I wanted a shower. That’s all. I wanted to get the grime of the bus out of my hair. Off my skin.

Now poor Frank Powers was ninety or a hundred years old, and he took us up on a manual elevator, and charged us each a dollar for a shower. Terrible showers. A trickle. No pressure whatsoever.

“Might as well hire a dog to piss on your head,” I told Raelene and her boyfriend. His name was Anthony. The two of them practically threw themselves down on the floor laughing. Like I was the funniest woman alive. I stood and watched them. I closed my eyes. I was homesick. But not for any home I’d ever had. Not for any home I could even dream up.

And that night back on the bus, Raelene and Anthony kissed in the seat behind me. His hands all over her. I could see them in the reflection of my own window. I rode and watched them. Finally I turned around. I said, “If you need to do that, go sit somewhere else.” And Raelene pushed the boy away. Looked up at me with big eyes.

Gladys

Out of the Cave