One Heart

GUS GUNADOS WAS A MAN I DRANK WITH AT THE VFW IN Eugene, Oregon. That’s where we got off the bus for good. When I say we, I’m speaking of myself and Raelene and Anthony, boy of her dreams.

Gus was no veteran. And the VFW was not your typical old soldier bar. It was the misfit watering hole. Doors wide open for your down-and-outers. Bums spent the night in the booths. Some mornings, the odor was sickening. But you had to admire an operation like that. Course there were vets in there, but they weren’t the sort to hold it against you if your feet never wore combat boots. They played old music in there. Glenn Miller and Fats Domino, mainly. Sometimes Johnny Cash. I liked to sit and talk to Gus and hear Johnny Cash in the background.

Gus was a flat-foot in thick glasses. He and I hit it off, mainly because we were both afternoon drinkers at the time. It was company for a while. Nothing to compare to James. In fact, just being with Gus got me thinking of James.

We stopped there in Eugene, Oregon, because that’s where Hambone West lived in a big old house with a few other youngsters. One of those young people called himself an artist. He’d paint the Pillsbury dough boy, Mary the Virgin, and an automobile on a tin can, then sell the damn thing for fifty-five bucks at the Saturday market. I just kept my mouth shut about that.

The other young person was a college girl. Hardly saw her. She had an older man professor in her life. Tell you the truth, he was my age. Bumped into him one night in the hallway. He had a towel wrapped around his waist. We just looked at each other, then moved on.

I was all pains and aches after that bus ride. Raelene and Anthony and myself got off the bus and there was Hambone West. He had himself a car the size and color of a toad. “Get on in,” he told us. I looked at the car and thought, How? Raelene squeezed into the back, and I sat beside our chauffeur.

Hambone was a curly red-haired boy who talked too fast and too much. The sort of young man who blasts off like a rocket when he’s sixteen, then crashes down to earth by age twenty-five. He was still blasting when I met him. I looked at him and pictures came right into my mind. An exhausted mother and a General Motors father, hardworking folks with dark circles under their eyes, and all their dreams in Hambone. I liked him. He didn’t seem to care that I was old enough to be his mother. When he talked, he talked to both Raelene and myself. He didn’t pretend I wasn’t there, and he didn’t change himself because I was. Every other word out of Hambone’s mouth was shit. And it brought out the cusser in Raelene and Anthony. “Are you shittin’ me?” they’d all say.

“You people got cute mouths,” I’d say. “But use your imaginations. You got a lot of curse words out there, why stick to one?”

The house was surrounded by roses. Two blocks away was the Willamette River. I would go for walks on a path there. Thundercloud plum trees lined our street, dazzling deep purple if your eyes never saw one. My room had a bed and a rusty mirror on the wall. And two windows. I wasn’t complaining. Something in me was different. Maybe I just made myself enjoy the distractions of novelty. I knew it wouldn’t last long.

But I see now it was good that I headed west on that bus. It was good getting away from my life. They say you can’t run away from your problems, but I found that’s not true. You need to sometimes, and you can. It’s possible. It’s not like you stay the same if you put your carcass on a Greyhound and take it to a house of youths across the country. You don’t tend to haul that same old carcass with you. You change.

Not in a big way, but that’s all right. You need little changes. You need a stranger on a bus to sit across the aisle and tell you the story of the time her uncle painted everything in his house bright red. I said to the baffled niece from Detroit, “Everything? Even the toilet paper?”

And that’s when I knew I left myself behind. Laughing with an ease I hadn’t felt since being a girl. My eyes tearing up with the laugh. I turned toward the window. I thought of the uncle with his paintbrush not being satisfied with a red house. He’d want to paint the sidewalk next. He was trying to make the world simple with his paint. For a while I sat and rode and thought about that man and laughed.

Old Raelene. She stirred it all up. I can see she’s a mystery now. The fact that she came into my life. Mystery. Where would I be without it.

For employment in Eugene, I cleaned houses for three families—it was easy work, and the one family paid a fortune because the father was one of those men who hate exploitation of any kind. For decorations in that house they had posters from this protest, that protest. “Want to join us on an antigrape march?” the mother said one day when I was eating lunch. “I’m not a marcher,” I said. And the mother got very interested, pulled up a chair, like I’m a scholar on not marching. She says, “Really? Why? How did you come to that decision?” No matter what I said, that family thought it was interesting, so I just said, “Bad feet.”

Meanwhile Raelene picked strawberries. Walked around with stained hands. Still wearing Chinese slippers, only black ones now. She’d bring home baskets of the very ripe ones, and we ate.

Anthony worked with some carpenters. He got brown and muscled in the sun, started looking too much like Omar Sharif for his own good. Grew a thin mustache. Raelene told me she was going to marry him. “That’s how much I love Anthony,” she said one night on the front porch. They would have three kids (she had three god-awful names picked out, including Illuminata). They’d stay “out west where the air was vury clean.” And maybe she’d eventually look up her mother, she said. Her mother was out west, had been for years.

“Out west is not an address,” I said. I looked at her face. She was biting down on her lower lip.

I understood then that the girl had wanted to go out west not just to see Hambone. Not just for the adventure. And I figured she wouldn’t be able to wait. Marriage and babies would come later. Tracking the mother, sooner. I could see it in her face.

Wasn’t too long before Raelene says, “Will you go visit my mother with me?”

She needed my company. Omar Sharif had to work, and she couldn’t face it alone. Part of me wanted to go so I could say to the mother, what ails you?

Turns out the mother lived in the city of Portland, Oregon. Raelene borrowed the tin can artist’s car. Away we went with the twin Virgin Marys on every door. Raelene at the wheel.

Here’s what that girl told me on the way to Portland: “Gladys, I’m going to have a baby.” The way she says it, soft with a big smile, her eyes all lit up, I know I was supposed to say, “Congratulations.” But I just stared at her. Then I said, “What?” And she says it again, with the same innocent happiness. She was like a film star playing a farm girl. Odd, because she weren’t much of an actress usually.

“Not yet. I want to take him somewhere nice, like down to the river, make it vury, vury special when I tell him.”

“Raelene,” I said. For a moment I clenched my eyes shut. I was overcome with an emotion. A kind of sorrow for Raelene, maybe. For all she was going to lose. And besides this sorrow, I felt something like jealousy. A grown woman jealous of a girl in trouble. It alarmed me.

“Don’t worry,” she said. She smiled over at me. Then she turned back to the road, still smiling.

“This little trip’s not my life, Raelene,” I said. “This is diversion.”

She smiled. “You never know, Gladdy,” she said. She had started calling me Gladdy. First and only person to ever give me a nickname. Gladdy.

Raelene’s mother’s apartment building looked like a motel. It was on the second floor. This was a gray day in July. I had stopped in a bar for a drink. I was eager to knock on the mother’s door and get this over with.

But Raelene was a wreck. She stood on the balcony with a pocket mirror. Chomping her nails like a war bride on D day. Pushing her hair behind her ears which weren’t flattering. She wore a long olive green dress. “I look terrible,” she said.

I said all sorts of things, but words didn’t help. I thought this whole idea was a bad one. I could feel it.

When we knocked the mother answered. Raelene lowered her eyes. Couldn’t look up. So the woman says to me, “Yes?”

I didn’t like the woman. Never had, ever since I heard of her. She was a pretty woman, I’ll give her that. Even in an ugly brown pants suit with gold buttons. She was an hourglass redhead with blue eyes. Only thing she had like Raelene was crooked teeth.

Raelene still couldn’t look up. So I said, “I’m Gladys, and this is RAELENE.”

“Come in,” she said. Her face went whiter. We stepped in. She led us into a long, narrow kitchen. Three toddlers sat at a little table. One was a little Chinaman. Red bowls full of lima beans on the table. I can still see it. Raelene just stared at the children.

“Can you say hello to our visitors, kids?” the mother said. She said it singsong.

“You kids be golden while I sit and have a grown-up time,” she said. She led us to the other end of the long, spare kitchen. Toward the horizontal window framing Portland sky. She walked real fast like she was racing. Then slowed down all the sudden. Slammed on her brakes, so I nearly fell on top of her. Raelene looked at the floor. Then we were all on a sagging couch set under the window.

“Surprise, surprise,” Raelene mumbled to herself, smiling. She had a nervous laughter brewing in her, I could see that.

“I didn’t think I’d ever see you again,” the mother said. “Is this your stepmother?” she said, big blue eyes looking at me.

“Go ahead, tell me you hate me, get it over with,” she said behind her hands. Raelene stopped laughing.

“Go read Miss Moppet,” Raelene’s mother hollered. The anger she felt at being surprised got stuck inside the word Moppet.

She turned to Raelene with her blue eyes. She said, “I know what you’re thinking. I know you’re thinking it’s damn funny of me to take care of other people’s children when I can’t take care of my own. But I have to. Only job I could get, Rae. My middle name’s not exactly Skills and Education.”

The mother got up and started talking to the kids like a foul-tempered Donald Duck. Very talented. Raelene’s mouth hung open at this. I wanted to reach over and close it.

I looked at Raelene and widened my eyes. She rolled her eyes up in her head. But then those same eyes landed on her mother. And stayed there. Desperate. All the sudden I felt I shouldn’t be there.

The mother came back. “I memorized a whole speech for you a long time ago, Rae, and the damn thing’s gone now.” She slapped the side of her head. “My mind’s a sponge somebody wrung out too many times. I still remember the Gettysburg Address, but not my own speech to my daughter.”

The mother was digging under the couch now. She brought out a shoe box. “I’ll show you some photos,” said the mother. Here, let me sit down.

So I stood up and let the mother sit down. I sat on the chair across from them and looked out at the sky. I said to myself, Of all the places in this world, here I am.

“This one’s your great-aunt Sara in her Jackie O. glasses. She was like a mother to me. She took care of me when I first came out here.”

“Nice? Nice? That’s not the word, sugar. She was the one who understood. She was a survivor. Everybody else was saying, ‘Cheer up, honey, keep your chin up!’ But not Sara. Sara knew how heavy a chin could get.”

Raelene’s mother turned the snapshot so I could see. It shook in her hand. I nodded my head.

“And here’s my friend Dot. She was my roommate in the bin. Dot Miller. Not very attractive, but kind. We did the Thorazine shuffle together for years. Be glad you got your daddy’s genes, Raelene, or you’d be Thorazine shufflin’ yourself. See those fuzzy slippers? We called them our dancing shoes.”

“This is me, believe it or not,” she said, turning the picture toward me. She was on the beach in a plaid two-piece. Next to her a handsome man in sunglasses. A towel gripped in his hand.

“He was a piano player. Vury jazzy. When I got walloped he thought he could cheer me by playing some music. I’d lay on his couch and he’d play for hours. Vury jazzy stuff.”

“But he didn’t love me, he just loved my body. He admitted that in the end. They all do, you know. Nobody loves you when you’re walloped.”

“Way far deep down in the dark-ass walloped.” She laughed, her eyes watered. “Depressed,” she said. She pulled out another handful of pictures, her hands shaking. Then she put them back in the box. One of the kids was singing loud, right by her feet. She yawned a big, sudden yawn. Loud and rude, but she couldn’t control it.

“I don’t know what else I can tell you,” she said. “Maybe come back tomorrow. It’ll be a better day tomorrow. I’m so tired. It’s nap time here.”

The children had turned into dogs, crawling and barking. We stood up. She saw us to the door.

Raelene and I got into the car. I was at the wheel. I figured she could sit back and digest it. I started up the car, I pulled out to the road. Then we hear, “Hey, Raelene, stop, stop, stop, stop!”

The mother is at my window. Leaning in and saying, “Stay with me, Rae, stay and have coffee and sleep one night at my place. I’ll get you back in the morning. I’m, I’m, I’m . . . I have to go back up there now, please . . . ”

Raelene looked at her like she was undecided, but she weren’t, really. “Go on, Raelene, go on,” I said.

She got out of the car, and away I drove. Too fast, probably. I didn’t much care for the whole journey. I wished I’d never come. I found a telephone booth. I thought I’d call Ivy and tell her, “I’m headed home. The whole trip’s been abnormal.” I stood in that glass booth on the side of the road and the phone rang and rang.

The next night was the night Gus Gunados and I danced to some sorrowful old man band called The Starlights. The old fart who sang was a 112 and still using Great Day on the three and a half hairs he had on his head.

Gus was handsome for a sixty-year-old in bifocals. I suspected we were headed toward romance. I’d known him for weeks and I was lonely. I’d been lonely for years but now I was lonely in a strange place. It’s better that way. It’s worse being lonely in a place you know well. So alongside the loneliness was a kind of pleasure. And I liked Gus’s way of telling stories. He had six kids scattered across the country. He talked to three of them every Sunday. And they were all doing crazy things. He’d tell me about them in that dark bar with Johnny Cash singing “I Still Miss Someone” or “San Quentin” and he’d get me laughing. For instance his oldest boy was a shepherd who didn’t speak between the months of December and February. He didn’t say a damn word. He told Gus it was his winter cleansing. He told Gus he needed “a world without words” in the winter. The only word he wanted in his head was baaa from the sheep. This boy changed his name from Johnny to Shepherd. Gus said, “Am I wrong, Gladys, or does this sound like the behavior of a lunatic?” It’s not that funny, but to hear Gus talk about it, it was. Because he was so damned confused about every last kid he ever had. Gus was the sort to try to figure them out. His one daughter, Olympia, she had two husbands named Jack and the second one she married under water.

Your life might not pan out, but you can still tell your story. Gus knew that much. He never put me to sleep with all this. Fact he never bored me much at all.

Which is why I started missing James. Because the feeling of not being bored was what I had with James. Yet James never had to talk as much as Gus to give me that feeling. And I believe James understood the world more and was more generally offended way down deep.

Gus and me danced and drank. I’m talking whiskey or rum. That one night after dancing to the Starlights, Gus and me decide we’re going to the hot springs. We heard about it from some young girl named Stacy. Stacy was one of your Greyhound gals escaped from a group home in West Virginia. She had streetwalker blonde hair and hippie clothes and was always getting loaded. She had a boyfriend named Stephen who was handsome except for an obvious Adam’s apple, but not wrapped too tight.

Stacy and Stephen did their slow dancing next to Gus and me. The elderly Starlights are destroying a good song, “The Great Pretender.” Gus and me are dancing the old-fashioned way; he’s leading and there’s space between our bodies. Our feet know something about where to step. He’s looking to the side or over my head. Meantime Stacy and Stephen are draped over each other like they’re dead. Hardly moving. Eyes closed. I always found that modern style a little pitiful. As I moved around the floor with Gus, I kept my eyes on Stacy’s face. She looked too young to be dead.

After the song Stacy says to me and Gus, “Stephen wants to take us to these, like, hot springs. It’s like a cure. You just go there and sit down or something.”

Tall, long-necked Stephen said, “It’s like up in the mountains. It’s like a dream world up there. And it’s free.”

I said, “Let’s like go.” I said it because as I danced to that bad music with Gus and looked at Stacy’s young face with her eyes closed I started feeling a need to be distracted from the loneliness of it all.

So we traveled, the four of us, up to the mountain. One of the Cascades. I had to hand it to Stephen. He had a sense of direction. He found where we were going quick. So he parked his Dodge on the side of a pitch black road. I could see the mountain was covered with trees. You could smell the leaves. I said, “I don’t see any hot springs.” Gus said, “Gladys and me aren’t big on hiking.” Stacy laughed. Stephen said, “There’s a path, just follow old Stephen.”

So we all follow old Stephen single file. The path is wet dirt soaking through my sneakers. First I complained. “What the hell are you getting us into?” But then I didn’t much care. Because it smelled so good in there, and the stars were so bright and low it was like a dream. And after a while we reached the springs.

Now if the path was a dream, the springs was a nightmare. I mean initially. The air was steamy and moonlit. The two pools in the ground, I mean the two hot springs, were filled up with naked people. In the one hot spring was three men and two women. They were all crammed in there. It didn’t look too kosher if you want an understatement. We stood a ways back. A small fire burned to the left. I guess they’d had a cookout.

In the other spring was just one man. And he was reading a book. He was the one I looked at, not the others. I looked at him and felt almost right away like I wanted to be beside him. Not talking, not touching, but reading a book. I hadn’t read a book in a long time. And the man looked so peaceful.

Well, Stacy and Stephen went to smoke while Gus and I stood side by side mumbling things like, “You going in?” “Don’t know.” “Didn’t expect it to be so well lit.” “Is there like a full moon?” “Why are we here?”

So they come back naked, Stacy and Stephen, and then the four who were crammed in together stand up and walk naked over to their little fire. They stoke the fire. They crouch by it. Cavemen. Stacy and Stephen go into the spring where the four people had been. I’m beginning to get a little disgusted. I’m not the queen of clean, but I never had the urge to sit in another person’s bathwater either.

Gus, he just took off his clothes and glasses real quick, folded them neat. Then he went to sit with Stacy and Stephen. When he was in there he said, “Come on, Gladys, this is heaven.”

She was too young to know that I could be happy being a big woman. She was too young for knowing much of anything. If I wanted to go sit in the bathwater of strangers, I would’ve stripped and they would’ve seen a big, strong, healthy-enough body. That’s how I look naked. Powerful. I know I do. Despite the excess.

But I kept looking back to the lone man with the book. He was young, maybe thirty. His hair was dark and thin. He wore glasses and his shoulders were strong looking, the kind of strength some men seem to get from a lifetime of tension.

Well, the man puts his book down all the sudden. Then he looks at me. “You should take a soak. It’s good for the spirit,” he said.

“What’s the temperature?” I said. My heart was racing. Because I knew I was going to do an extreme thing.

“It’s just warm, just warm enough. It’s just like putting on a silk robe that’s sat in the sun all day.”

And then I got out of my clothes and walked over to that spring and climbed in. I wasn’t Mrs. Graceful. I sank down and put my head back on the earth and looked up at the stars. I could hear my heart. The stars looked like they were beating, like they had hearts too.

My three cohorts in the other spring joked, “Guess we’re not good enough for her!”

I lifted my head off the earth and looked at him. We looked at each other for five seconds or so. Finally I said, “Why would I want to die?”

“Oh, most certainly. Johnny got his gun. Uh-huh. Johnny had his fun. But Johnny can’t talk to anyone. If you get my drift.”

Carry me over,

Carry me there

To leave the hills of Caledonia

Is more than the heart can bear. . . .

Then our feet were touching. It felt good. I felt my foot move against his. He moved his foot against mine.

“I believe it’s usually best to dwell in silence,” he said. “To dwell in silence,” he said, “is to dwell in possibility.”

Fanciest thing anyone ever came out and said to me personally. I’ll never forget it. He moved his leg, stretched it forward. Now his leg was lined against my leg.

“So you got a way with words,” I said, too quiet. I don’t think he heard. Maybe he heard my heart, maybe he heard my heart beating like a jazz drum.

Soon it’s our legs are entwined. My cohorts are still singing the same song, doing harmony now. I wanted them to sing on and on. I wanted this man. I admit that.

And all the sudden I knew he’d been to Vietnam. I knew he’d been hurt. I knew he was one of the wounded souls who couldn’t sleep.

He picked up his book and read, “The new house, white, like a dove, was inaugurated by a dance.”

And he’d pulled his legs back. We weren’t touching anymore. And all I could do is say, “Read it again.” And he read it again, four times.

Not so much the man, but what he called up in me. The kind of hunger. The kind of loneliness.

He said it was time to go after a few minutes. And the feeling was mostly gone. Just scraps of it were left, and a kind of deep pit inside me where the scraps floated. Now I was just sorry I’d come here. I watched this man. He stood up, he climbed out. I looked up at him. He had a strong young man’s body, but it looked so alone I was filled with the heaviest kind of sadness. And when I closed my eyes, I saw Wendell. I saw Vietnam jungle rice paddies. Dark green twisted confusion. Flames. Someone screaming. Wendell a boy on a bike. I opened them quick. The man dressed and said good-bye, and “I’m sure I’ll see you here again sometime.”

But in the Valiant on the way back to town I knew I’d never see that place again. Gus and the others sang all the way home, the same damn song. “Damn! We’re good!” they said. And I stared out the window. Everyone was strangers to me. I missed Wendell. I couldn’t talk. My throat was filled up with missing him.

On the bus back home I leaned my face on the window like a dreamy girl. Mostly because I was tired. And because I didn’t want to talk to the blonde woman next to me. Or her children in the seat behind me. They all had colds. The one boy kept kicking my seat. I sunk into myself. I pretended I was deaf. I made my eyes look blank too. The blondie maybe thought I was retarded. I could hear her thinking, Just my damn luck to end up sittin’ with a deaf retard.

On that ride home I remembered all kinds of things from long ago. My mother’s vegetable garden. My mother. I remembered how she’d take me and Ivy to the ocean. She’d wear a bathing cap and earplugs. She swam all stiff, like she was made of tin. It always bothered me. I’d want to rip the cap off and dunk her head under, hold it for a while. So she would come up alive and kicking. I don’t know why I was born with this kind of mean spirit but I was.

The woman, the blondie mother, she just sat beside me and pretended she didn’t know these kids. The kids got louder. I finally had to say, “Aren’t those your kids?” Surprise, the deaf woman can talk. She stared at me. And then she whipped herself around and talked to those kids through gritted teeth. They shut up for a good five minutes. The bus rolled on.

And I remembered James. I remembered how James and me knew how to spend a winter day. Light a fire, open the curtains to the gray sky, get under the blankets. I kept remembering that one thing over and over again. I didn’t go trailing into other things. I controlled my mind. And when the woman settled down those kids for the fifth time, I drifted off into half sleep; I dreamed about the same thing. The fire, the gray sky, the blankets. And James.

So it didn’t surprise me when I got back and James was there. Thoughts are like spirits. You think a thought about someone and the thought will travel right into that someone’s heart. Whether they know it or not.

It did surprise me to find out he was with Ivy. I have to admit that surprised me quite a bit. I didn’t know what to make of it, it seemed so odd. I wasn’t hurt, initially.

It had been eight years since I’d seen James. We thought we had a lot to talk about. So we tried to talk, right there in the house. Ivy just let us be. For a few days, we’d sit at the table and try to talk. I wanted to talk, but it wasn’t working.

James looked about the same, a little older I guess. He was tired looking, but he was always tired looking. One of those men whose face tired out before his body.

He didn’t tell me I looked good. And I knew I didn’t. Four days on a Trailways at my age will leave its mark. Still, we felt our connection to each other. A few times at the table, talking, we felt it. One of those times it was what you call a fierce connection. It stung. I couldn’t breathe.

I would’ve done anything James asked me to do. I had nothing to lose with him. I had wrecked mine and James’s life together long ago. After we lost our girl. Plenty a woman lost a child and recovered right alongside the child’s father. For me, it weren’t possible. I remembered James saying, Please, please, please, don’t leave me. Like he was a child too. But I’d already left him. I left everyone. I was in a land of my own. Soon as I knew she was gone, I went to that strange land. Had to. At the time I didn’t see another way.

So what James wanted after all was to go to the pond. The pond where we lost her. Where we slept while she drowned.

Meanwhile Ivy was out walking, walking, walking. She worked in the garden or out in the field raking up leaves with the kids, she came home to eat, but otherwise she was walking. She wouldn’t talk much to me. She had her chin lifted high. She was holding on to dignity. That’s Ivy. That’s what she did her whole life.

All I had to do was close my eyes and I could see the pond in my mind anytime I wanted. But I went along to help James through it. It helped me to be in my own skin to feel like I was helping out James.

“It’s so strange, being with you,” he said in the car. It was autumn, but the air was strangely warmed up with Indian summer. The leaves were all fiery yellows and reds. And it was evening. I just smiled over at him. Wasn’t like him to say something so obvious. Made me sad, somehow. He was not the old James.

But our words weren’t sinking into the other’s heart. You could feel that. You could feel the words just stuck in the air of the car. Homesick words. I thought to myself, Where do the homesick words end up? Where do they go if they don’t sink in?

“I’ve arrived at the age where I think anyone who manages to be president doesn’t deserve to be.”

“Remember that old dog called Wilma?” he said. He looked over at me with his dark blue eyes, then turned back to the road.

I was thinking, Why Wilma? Why bring up that stray dog we got in Wilmington, Delaware? Of all memories, why Wilma? I couldn’t figure.

“Mr. Horse,” I said. “I always liked that old cat. Course even that cat liked you better than me.”

And then James began to laugh at the wheel. It wasn’t his old laugh. Fact, it scared me because it didn’t sound a thing like him. And his hands were holding too tight to the wheel. His knuckles were all white. And then just as quick he stopped laughing. And I could see he’d laughed himself into his tears.

They just sat in his eyes. I was glad. I wouldn’t have known what to say if James had tears running down his face.

“The last time I saw Wendell, that time he visited me before getting shipped off, he talked about all the pets we ever had,” James said. “I think about that day a lot. He kept saying he was grateful that we’d had all those pets, really grateful.”

It wasn’t seeing the pond itself. It wasn’t even the swim we took. It was the dreams that came afterward that changed me most. Because in the dreams there was a door. A door on the bottom of that pond. Under the water I’d bang on the door, bang on the door, using all my strength. In the dream was hope. A hope that somehow the door could be opened. Somehow I’d step through the door at the bottom of the pond and there she would be. There she would be. In the white sundress Ivy made her. Patiently waiting.

But the swim, it’s not forgettable. James and me stood at the edge of the pond. I didn’t want him to talk. But he felt like he had to. He said, “I never said good-bye to her. I never knew how.”

“That’s why we’re here,” I said. I wanted to say, Just be quiet. But I wasn’t about to.

The pond looked smaller to me. The whole area did. I had my arms crossed. I wanted to go. I believed I’d said my good-bye. Or that I was always saying it, somehow. Wasn’t that the real truth? I believed I was in the wrong place at the wrong time. It was like the place was too small. The place in my head, in my heart, it was gigantic. It was oversized. Bigger than life. This place, this real place, it was so small.

“I’m real sorry,” I told him, suddenly, looking out at the trees. “For all I did wrong. For all I never said. I’m just sorry.”

He looked at me. I think he thought I could read his expression. But I couldn’t read a thing. I couldn’t trust a thing. He could’ve been looking at me with the eyes of a murderer, or a saint. I wouldn’t have been able to tell. Finally James looked back at the water.

He looked older to me, his skin looser. Different from how he looked stored in my mind. Now he was taking off his pants. He had on the oddest boxer shorts, flannel, a wildlife scene on them, a bear and a fish or something.

I felt sad just looking at him. But I felt something else too, some old urge. I felt both things at the same time, along with other things. Confusion.

It began to feel like I was dreaming. Just like when I dreamed about this it felt like it was real. It seemed to me there was a siren blaring in the distance, but there weren’t. It was just silence. Silence that sounded like a siren getting louder and closer.

I took off my shoes, not my dress. I waded into the water. In my dress. Now the siren was gone. It was just the sound of water disturbed now. Then James came in. And then we were swimming out into the middle of the pond. The dusk above us. And out there in the middle I said, “James, this was a bad idea.” And I began to shake, like I was freezing cold. But the water wasn’t that cold, he said. I treaded water. James dove under. He stayed under for a while and I looked at the purple sky and shook. James came back up.

Then he was swimming toward the bank, and I was too. And he dressed and rushed to the car. I thought he was going to leave me behind.

Instead he ran back with two blankets. A red one that smelled like gasoline, and a white flannel one with yellow roses on it. He said, “Wrap yourself up.” I used the white flannel one.

I took the red one and put it on the ground. We sat on it. It wasn’t a bit comfortable. Nothing was. I wanted to weep. Because I could remember the ease that used to be between us. I could feel how James was stunned that none of it was left. Where was it? Where did the ease go? And how was it we could stand being in that pond? We sat there for about ten minutes. James had a small stick he was biting.

He said, “What did Ann think when she was drowning? What did she think of us for not coming to save her? I still think about this every night.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. But I wasn’t as sorry as I was angry. Not so much that he said what he said. But that I let myself go into that pond. I don’t even know why I was angry about that. But I wished I’d never gone in.

I went back and sat beside him. He put his arm around me. I’ll tell you what. His body did not feel familiar. The way he had his arm around me did not feel at all familiar. Still, there was something in him, something about him, it felt like my home.

I fought that feeling. I closed my eyes and said to myself, Take me away from here. But meanwhile my body just leaned right into his. And meanwhile we kissed each other. And he said, “We’re not strangers, we’re not strangers, we can’t be strangers.” Like saying it over and over would make it true.

We’d had a long, quiet drive back. We were walking toward the house now. The porch light was on. Ivy was in the kitchen. I could see her in the window. She was sitting at the table with a beer.

“Help? I don’t know. I guess not. No, it wasn’t what I had in mind,” James said. He stopped me and held on to me for a second, his eyes on Ivy in the window. “Thank you for coming along,” he said.

Later I gave him sixteen pictures. Eight of Wendell, six of A., and the others of the two of them together. Wendell holding A. I said, “It’s high time you forgave yourself, James.” I said this out on the back stoop one night when the moon was bright. The night Ivy was cooking a stew and listening to Billie Holiday. That stew was the last meal the three of us ate together. A few days later, the two of them were gone. I’d told James and Ivy, “Don’t worry about me. I need time alone.”

And what I thought I felt watching them drive away together was a small amount of sorrow or pity for Ivy, because James loved me. I knew that. And Ivy loved James. I knew that too. I imagine she always had. Couldn’t blame her.

I stepped in and took over Ivy’s job canning vegetables with the kids. The kids didn’t much care for me. I wasn’t Ivy, asking questions like Have any hobbies, honey? But nothing about it was terrible. We canned, we put up the squash, then got the ground ready for the next summer. They mostly laughed and talked and weeded. And ignored me. Unless I stepped in to tell Connie Kaiser, the ringleader, to cut the mean crap when they teased the child with the wayward eye. That child ended up working quiet beside me, grateful I think.

I worked with my hands in the dirt, and it was saving me. The dirt was. How my hands felt digging. Gripping on the roots. The smells out there. The dark mornings. It made me feel stronger than I was. Because I had my hands on the earth. And the earth needed my hands, or so it seemed. And for those hours I didn’t think much, or if I did the thoughts didn’t feel as real. I’d think of Raelene. I’d think of Gus. Of James. Of Ivy. Of James. I’d think of worse things, like giving birth.

And then the thoughts would float away easy as a balloon, and I was back to the real dirt. Taking a deep breath, starting all over.

But there was an undersong. I mean something under all the sounds of the day. A voice, almost. Poking me in my stomach. You’ve had your loves. You’ve had your chances. You’ve lived your life. Now who are you? Who are you? Who do you love?

And the undersong would play again, softer, and I’d be both relieved and regretful that it didn’t play louder.

Some nights I’d sit out on the stoop with a beer. And a blanket. My book beside me because I’d be tired of reading. I’d start wondering when I’d hear from Ivy or James. And a moment would come when I’d feel like I’d never hear a thing. Does it matter, I’d wonder. Does it matter at all if I ever see their faces again?

I supposed not. That’s what I told myself. I suppose not. But that’s when I knew deep inside I’d be hearing something soon. Most likely James would circle back this way.

I began in the middle of that month to have the strictest routines. I felt for the first time that house maintenance was important. I painted the whole house except for the basement, I cleaned with a vengeance. I also began to feel that getting exercise was important. I was like Ivy now, walking, walking. And I spent more hours in the garden than I needed.

I’d go down there in the evening sometimes. The child with the wayward eye, her name was Marie. Marie and her sidekick, Kate, they began to take a liking to me. Kate was twelve but acted more like ten. Didn’t seem on the verge of anything like most of your twelves. And she had terrible horsey teeth. Marie with her eye, Kate with those teeth and when’s-the-flood-ma’am pants, and me with my whole life inside me like a car wreck.

But in the evenings it got cool and the sky was pretty. Pretty in that violent purple way the sky gets in the evening when late autumn’s coming at you like a train. And Kate and Marie would stop playing and sit down on the cool ground and talk to me. All about their teachers or parents who were mostly “boring,” “crappy,” or “so stupid you wouldn’t believe it.” Camp was over, school was started. These children were in sixth grade. They’d gone home to their rich parents for three weeks between camp and school.

Kate, she had herself a fake English accent. She weren’t from England but she had an accent and she came out with things like, “You bloody well bet-tah!” and “Have you gone round the bend?” which meant “Have you lost your mind?” which she was always asking Marie. Along with the wayward eye, Marie was one of your children who lived in the land of outer space. I couldn’t get too involved with her. Or not in a human way. I think I got involved with her the way you get involved with a dog. Because she started hanging around the back stoop at different times in the day. She’d just hang around, not saying a word. Just sort’ve sniffing around like a dog. Finally I’d spot her and open the door and say, “Marie, hello, want a treat?” And she’d smile her martian smile and walk into the house and sit down at the table, her bony hands crossed. And I’d give her a cookie or a cracker, some small treat. And I’d want to say, Don’t you ever scrub your fingernails? But I kept my mouth shut.

Then she started bringing Kate. They’d eat and look around the house and look at me, just glad they weren’t in the school building, glad they were here in this strange woman’s house getting away with something. One day Kate might come in and say, “Marie loves Tony Romoni.” And I’d say, “Why? What’s the story with Tony Romoni?” And Marie would get beet red, and Kate would say, “He’s conceited! He thinks he’s God’s gift to women! And he got thrown out of class because he raised his hand to say his balls hurt!” Marie wouldn’t say a word, just stared at her hands, her face crimson. I was glad to have them around. A good distraction. Because I was beginning to be afraid that James and Ivy really wouldn’t be calling. I’d be thinking sonofabitch, Ivy and James. Of all people. And then I’d freeze my mind so it wouldn’t think about it.

I went back to the kitchen in early November. I was glad to return. Glad because I knew that kitchen so well. And the woman they’d hired that September weren’t bad at all. She was a pretty thing built like a pencil and just wanted to be left alone. She liked her talk radio, her Wrigley’s spearmint, and spotting birds out the window. “A convention of warblers,” she might say, nodding her head. But that was about it. Mostly we worked listening to a bunch of talk radio strangers. It would’ve been pleasant if I was the type who got comfort from hearing how many people were crazier than me. But it was better than talking. I was in the mood for moving through the days, just moving right through, and waiting. Waiting.

You can only be hiding in a life of routine for so long. The heart of autumn will come. It’ll come when you’re all alone in your bed, in your cleanest, whitest sheets. It will come when you smell like Jergens soap and your hair’s still wet.

I had showered, I was there in that old dark room with the mirror on the closet, and I brought my hands up to my face and smelled the Jergens soap I’d always used. All I can tell you is the smell was too old, too familiar. I felt I’d been alive forever and in the next minute like I’d only lived a second, like I was a small child.

And why’d I let him go off with Ivy? And why’d Ivy go off with him? Why would she do that to me? And why hadn’t I found a goddamn thing to say to him to find his heart again? And if I’d found a thing to say to him to find his heart again, what then?

And then I thought, You didn’t let him go off with Ivy. You are not the boss. You are not in charge. You did not have a say. Did your goddamn sister even ask you?

And then I thought, He might very well love Ivy. And you, you who had this idea in the back of your tired head that someday you and he would circle back. Well you are the fool. Fool. Fool. You are.

You are the fool smelling your own hands in the night, not a soul you could call on the telephone, not any old relative, not some lost friend, not Raelene.

I hoisted myself out of that bed, shaking. I had the Oregon number. I let the phone ring twenty times, then hung up. Then I got something to eat, a thin sandwich, and ate it in the dark. And I knew as I sat there listening to myself chew that I had to hear a human voice. Any voice.

So out I went. Out went the big wet-haired lady into the cold night. And she walked like hell, walked into town on the black narrow road, ridiculous and afraid, because don’t I know it’s only the crazy people out at four in the morning, crazy and lonely.

One place was open, that was the spoon called Vinny’s. I made it a point never to go in there. The rumor in the early 1970s was that Stan the counterman, Vinny’s jailbird brother, made rat burgers. But that night I walked right into Vinny’s and sat down in the first booth and a man behind the counter with a Walkman on his head said, “Hello,” and his voice broke like it was still changing. He wore a T-shirt that said I’D RATHER BE SNORKELING on it.

And the only other person in there was an old man eating a plate of baked beans at the counter. His black cap sat on the counter. His feet were in sandals.

The man with the Walkman came over to my booth, his small gray eyes open now. “Rice pudding?” he said.

“Yes,” I said, though it was only him saying it that made me want it. “How did you know?”

“I been in the business long enough to know a rice pudding night owl from a burger-and-fries night owl,” he said. He was too young to talk that way. He was acting. Who could blame him? And he saved me from myself that night. He brought back a small dish of rice pudding and a tin of cinnamon, set it down and said, “So what brings you out tonight? Can’t sleep?”

“I myself haven’t been a night sleeper since I was eleven,” he said, “which is why I got this job. It’s perfect. You meet all these interesting folks. And they all got a philosophy of life. I truly hope you don’t have one. Or if you do I hope you keep it to yourself.” He looked right at me but he smiled like he thought a hidden camera was on him. One of these people who watched so much television they think they’re on television.

“I think I’m in love,” he said, and put his hand on his heart. I smiled at him like I thought he was cute.

“Will you marry me?” he said, and went down on his knee, down to the dirty floor. “I’ve been looking for someone with no philosophy for fifteen years now. Marry me.”

I laughed a little laugh. The baked bean man turned on his stool to look back at us, then went directly back to his food.

“Sure, let’s go get married,” I said. “Let’s go get married and adopt seventeen unwanted crippled children and live happily ever after, Buster.”

He was taken aback. He didn’t want someone joining in like this, he wanted to be the entertainer, the only joker.

“Stop in again, we’ll talk about the wedding,” he tried, just the sort of fellow not to know when the mood was all gone.

I walked outside. I started up the road. It was still pitch dark. But I felt somewhat better. Comforted somehow. I inhaled the leaf smell. In the air I could catch a hint of real winter. Of snow coming soon. I crunched some leaves under my feet. And then after a minute of walking I hear someone saying, “Miss! Miss!” and I turn and it’s the old man.

When I got home, I slept. I hung on for a month before I got a phone call. It wasn’t James.

“Gladys, it’s Ivy. I’m on a pay phone. We’re in Canada. I miss you. I just wanted to say I miss you.”

And I waited and worked and drank too much through a sunless winter before I got the next call that mattered.

I wanted to say, Hambone, come on out here, bring Raelene and the baby boy, come on out here and stay with me a while, I’d like that, so just come on out whenever you can, stay with me and save a little money.

“We’re headed to Philly,” he was saying. “Anthony too. We’re all going back to the East. I’m the godfather,” Hambone said, in Marlon Brando’s voice.

“Well, Raelene’ll call you sometime from Philly. Raelene would’ve called you now but she’s passed out. But you were number two on her list of people to call.”

“Raelene’s father. I had to call him first. He didn’t have too much to say.”

Somehow I knew I’d never hear from Raelene ever again. Why should I? She had her new life.

So, I said to myself. Time to stop waiting. Time to start over. Time to move on.

Rage had me stuck. Rage at my whole life. Rage at Ivy, James, but mostly myself. And then the rage turned into something else, a kind of despair, where nothing in the world was interesting to me. Of course the girls, Kate and Marie, they stopped coming by. Because when they tried to talk to me, I just looked at them. I didn’t have any words. I couldn’t have small talk. They got scared of me. The woman I worked with, Nadine Fisher, with her Wrigley’s gum and love for birds, she was the only person I talked to for months on end. Because all I needed to say is “We need more batter for the hotcakes,” or “Does the walk-in feel a little warm to you?” and things like that. In the spring Nadine wore binoculars like a necklace. Tried to share the views. “Oh,” I’d say, “that is one nice bird.”

I wish I could’ve fallen for those birds. James could’ve. Maybe even Ivy could’ve. Not Gladys, I told myself. I was not a woman who could fall for birds. In my mind a voice would say that over and over again, like it was some kind of explanation.

I kept on going through those days because I just never believed in the alternative. Not that I don’t respect others who do. Just isn’t for me, never was.

One foot in front of the other. Go through the days, I’d tell myself. Go through the days.

Gladys

Do You Love?