WHEN MY SON WAS JUST OVER TWO YEARS OLD, BACK IN 1979, this nice lady named Bernadette Myerly from south Philadelphia was watching him every afternoon while I worked at a boardinghouse for pregnant teenage girls. The house was called the Second Mile, and it was run by these Catholic nuns who were devoted to helping girls who, as the one nun liked to say, “got in the family way before they got in the family.” Me working there was odd, since I wasn’t much older and wiser than those teenagers, and I’d done the same thing. But I’d had two years of being a mother, and that changed me. I was raising my boy alone, doing okay I suppose. Moses’ father went back west just after Moses had his first birthday. He wasn’t ready to settle down. He made that real clear by cheating on me twice. So it was like, hey, nice knowin’ ya, Anthony. I wasn’t in love with him anymore anyhow. I was too much in love with my baby. They don’t tell you that’s how it’ll be if you have a baby. A grown man with stale breath and bristles, even a man as pretty as Anthony, looks mighty undesirable next to the magic of your baby, at least for a while. Anyway, Hambone had come back with us, and the truth is, he was more of a father than Anthony’d ever be.
Two of those teenage girls weren’t easy to like, I mean they were loudmouths and pissed off at the world. One of them, Charlene, who’d been beat up for years by her own father, ripped a chunk of my hair right out of my head when I told her she couldn’t smoke in the kitchen. I couldn’t fight back or I’d be fired. What did I do to control myself? I looked at that wild girl with her angry red face and with all my concentration I thought how she was once an infant in somebody’s arms. It was the only way I could feel a shred of compassion for that human being.
My son had broken my heart like all babies do when they first come into this crapped-on world, and for more than three years after his birth, I couldn’t stop myself from looking at people and seeing them as they must have been as innocent, cute little babies. This became such a habit with me that it was like the whole human race started to cooperate; I would look at their faces and they’d give me this secret look of their old innocence. Okay, maybe I was warped. But it got me through some shitty situations.
I held that job for almost a year for a big four dollars an hour, and I think I kept coming back day after day in order to learn some kind of secret from the two of the nuns I worked with. I could’ve made more as a waitress, but I was learning something from those sturdy nuns who loved (I’m not talking tolerated, I’m talking loved) that Charlene girl who could spit in your face as a way of ending conversations.
At that age I wanted to believe that love was something you could have for a person if you just had enough willpower. Nobody was outside the possibility of love is what I wanted to believe. I guess deep down I wasn’t sure whether I was inside or outside the possibility myself. I was back in Philly, I was taking my kid over to my father’s and trying to pretend he was a normal grandfather and not an addict living on a couch. He was trying to pretend too, going to King of Prussia mall one day and buying little cars and stuffed bears and a shirt that said I LOVE GRANDPA, and a year’s supply of animal crackers. He didn’t have a girlfriend anymore, as far as I could tell. He’d been in and out of NA. “NA is not for people who need to quit, it’s for people who want to quit,” he told me. “And I don’t want to.” I had to quick pull out my trick of seeing the baby inside the man, because believe me, the man made me sick.
I was living in a house on Sansom Street with a bunch of kids—students, mostly. Rooms were fifty bucks a month, and the kitchen was never kept real clean, and the bathroom sink had fallen out of the wall and now sat in the hallway. The carpet was burnt orange shag, the sort all the slumlords bought in the early 1980s. Some of my roommates played in a wanna-be Lou Reed band and spent their time drinking and practicing at night. I would try to join them, but it didn’t work. You can’t just forget you’re a mother. I couldn’t relax the same way I used to. I’d have moments when I wished my baby would just go back to wherever he’d come from, and then I’d feel so guilty for thinking that, I’d have to leave the room and go upstairs where he was asleep in a wooden crib next to my bed. I’d crouch down and look through the spokes and whisper him promises. Sometimes I’d pass out on the floor, and when he woke up in the morning, he’d look down at me through the bars and smile.
I left work early one day because Bernadette Myerly’s husband called on the phone and said Moses was a little under the weather, and he really wanted me to come get him. As it turned out, Mr. Myerly was sugarcoating the truth so that I wouldn’t drive like a maniac and get in a wreck.
Moses had slipped through the railing and fallen off the black flat-top roof of the Myerlys’ house. Bernadette had turned her back for three minutes in the TV room because she’d gotten a phone call from her mother. Moses wandered out of the TV room and walked up the narrow stairs that led out to the black tar roof, where chairs were set up for the Myerlys and their friends to enjoy the city lights in the evenings. Bernadette heard footsteps, hung the phone up, and rushed upstairs, but it was a second too late. Moses crawled under the railing, and fell two stories down to the sidewalk, and lay there unconscious.
They had him rushed to the hospital. I got to the Myerlys’ and Mr. Myerly told me the real story, then drove me over to the hospital, where I had to wait for over two hours before I saw him, before he was assigned a room. And when I saw him, he was a ghostly white, still unconscious, dressed in a tiny blue gown, with a plastic bracelet on his wrist just like when he’d been born, and nobody could predict when he would wake, and though they weren’t yet using the word coma, it was stuck in my mind and stomach, believe me, and it grew louder and bigger like an echo until I felt like I lived inside it. I called Hambone from the hospital, and he came as soon as he could. He was not a good support because he was so afraid. I wanted to cry whenever I looked at Hambone, who stood biting his nails and rocking from side to side, because I’d never seen him that way before, and it scared me.
He went and fetched some peanut butter crackers and Cokes for us to share. “What else can I do?” he begged. He wanted to be busy, couldn’t stand sitting there by the bed where they had Moses on an IV.
I looked at him and said, “Call my friend Gladys.”
“You want me to call Gladys?”
“Yes, Gladys. Tell her to come. Just tell her I need her to come because it’s an emergency.”
I wanted her there, that’s all I knew. I guess I imagined she was someone who would understand how terrified I was. Gladys was still in my heart almost the way she was when I was a child writing her letters. I have that sort of heart, once you’re in, you’re in. I didn’t want to call my father; he wouldn’t have known what to say, what to do. Even if he was straight, he would’ve needed my comfort. Gladys, on the other hand, was Gladys. When she came into my mind in that hospital room, my heart pounded. I thought, She’ll understand. Gladdy is the one who will understand me now. I was so relieved it was like I thought her understanding could give me the strength to wake my son.
But I didn’t really think she would come.
She arrived the day after Hambone called her. She’d asked no questions. And she brought James, who I had never met. He was a handsome man in my humble opinion, tall with windburned cheeks and lines around his serious-looking eyes, his hair not entirely gray; his hands were strong with long fingers, and rough from work. He stood blinking in the doorway while she walked into the hospital room. I was sitting in a chair with my head in my hands and didn’t see them at first.
“Raelene?” she said, and stopped walking toward me when I looked up and saw her. She was like the sun itself. I got out of my chair and went over to her and I wanted to throw myself on her, but stopped for a second, sensing she wasn’t real comfortable. But then, she must have sensed me, or the terrified feelings inside of me. She must have sensed it, and recognized it. And she stepped up and pulled me toward her and held me for a moment. It was a hard, stiff hug, and when she let me go I looked in her eyes and saw she had backed off from the intensity of that hug, and she was somehow trying to escape from the room. I wanted to cry. She turned toward the doorway.
“James, this is Raelene,” she said.
James came over and shook my hand. He looked at Moses in the bed, then looked back at me. He said, “Can we get you something to eat or drink?” and I said no, and then I was overcome with a sense that my fear had not been settled at all by their coming to the hospital, but only seemed deeper, now that I’d had that moment with Gladys, that minute of human contact that seemed hard to hold on to. A big gap opened up between us, while they stood and talked awkwardly about the traffic on the way, and talked about the weather, and how Philadelphia was more crowded than they imagined. They’d gone to the house and found a sleepy Hambone, who had told them how to get there.
It was like I began to sink into a hole. And in that hole I thought of Charlene, the girl I worked with in the home for unwed mothers, the kinds of breaks she had never been given, and how my own life, hard as it had been in ways, already had a ton of luckiness too, considering how I had been given a good brain, a decent personality, good friends, a healthy baby, and it struck me hard for the first time that of course I could lose my boy, of course whatever God there was could easily let him slip out of this world, since after all, these things happened every day to people, and that was just the nature of life. I didn’t deserve any special treatment. Why had I ever thought I did?
And when I looked at Gladys, I imagined for the first time that I knew what the inside of her heart felt like. I wanted to look over and say, “Gladys, now I understand you,” but in the same moment I wanted to push that understanding away, with all my strength, so I did.
Because her child had died. Her child was lost to her forever. I felt sick with a terrible confusion; a part of me regretted calling her now, like her life was contagious. It was like now that Gladys was in the room, my little boy would drown inside of himself, never to open his eyes again.
I sat down in my chair and looked at Moses, and suddenly felt just like I was paralyzed. I couldn’t take my eyes off him, or even shift in the chair. I felt the most terrible, unjust kind of emotion toward Gladys now, a resentment that she was in the room, she who had lost her girl who was just a year older than my boy, she who had slept while that little girl drowned. How can you live with yourself now? If my boy dies, I’ll die with him. I’ll just die with him.
Gladys was standing beside my chair now. She put her hand on my head. James had left the room.
“I was surprised when Hambone called. Surprised to hear from him. But I’m glad to be here,” she said. She cleared her throat.
“Thanks for coming,” I said, but I felt that if she left her hand there for one more second, I’d have to reach up and push it away.
She did not move her hand, and I just didn’t have the nerve to push it away, so it sat on my head, contagious, burning, so heavy I felt my head would split open.
Finally she lifted her hand. “Moses will wake up,” she said. “He will?” Every emotion but hope disappeared inside of me, and I sat looking up at her. It was like I was hanging on her words as if she were some kind of prophet.
“Moses will wake up,” she said again.
“What makes you think so? Why do you say that?”
“I have a strong feeling about it,” she said. “Very strong.”
And when I looked up at her, her face seemed unbelievably strong, and the strangest thing was, it was circled with some kind of light. Maybe it was real light, from another plane of existence, or maybe it was just what I needed to see at that time. It doesn’t matter in the long run.
The nurses made me go home and sleep. Four of them together had to work on convincing me to leave. They assured me I would be called the second he woke, and it was this kind of assurance that made me leave because hearing the words “the second he wakes” rather than “if he wakes” shot me full of wild joy. The second he wakes, I kept whispering to myself. The second he wakes I will hold him and hold him and hold him. Gladys and James and I left in James’s car, and went back to my house. Pick him up and kiss him and never let him go. They walked around my long, narrow room looking at the pictures of Moses on the wall, and Gladys kept going back to the one of Moses in the flat field with the huge windy pine tree behind him, a black and white I took myself when he and I went camping for his first birthday when we still lived out west. Moses had just learned to stand. It was spring, and the world behind him looked huge and filled with all this positive energy. And Moses seemed a part of it. Gladys smiled at the picture, and showed James. He took it in his hands and stared at it a long time, so long I almost asked him why he found it so interesting, but something told me not to intrude.
The next morning it rained, and we left for the hospital before dawn, the three of us in the rainy dark of James’s car, me huddled right between the two of them in the front seat, the morning news on the radio. I could feel the exhaustion and stiffness of their bodies; they were in their fifties, and James had slept on a pull-out couch in a tiny room off of the kitchen, Gladys on the sofa in the main room in flannel pajamas. I’d offered to help pay for a hotel, but they said they weren’t picky. I was always so lucky with friends.
Gladys had fixed us each a cup of coffee, and I had to hold James’s mug for him while he drove, along with my own mug, and when he took the curves I looked down at the coffee in the two cups, one yellow and one blue, and I thought, Okay, God, if nothing spills out of these mugs, that means he’s waking up today, and nothing spilled until the very last moment when I was getting out of the car in the parking garage, and I told myself that didn’t count.
At the hospital that rainy day, something interesting happened between Gladys and James. I think about it whenever I think of Gladys, which is often.
James sat on one side of Moses’ bed, and Gladys sat on the other side. I sat in the chair at the foot of the bed, reading a magazine, just waiting and praying. I stole looks at Gladys and James for a while, hardly knowing I was doing so until finally it registered that the two of them were talking quietly to each other, and that those quiet words were crucial, so crucial the room’s atmosphere changed. Yet when I overheard some of the words they confused me because they were so simple. “Potato chips” and “rain all day” and “dogs” were some of the words I could pick up, and I almost laughed because the contrast of what they were saying and how they were saying it was so extreme. Finally I was staring at them, and I trusted what I felt more than what I saw, for what I saw was simple enough.
They looked at each other with naked faces. You know how a face can be naked. Like whoever lives in the face is right there, pressed up against the face’s window. They held each other’s gaze for a long moment. Then James reached his hand out across the bed to Gladys, and her hand met his. She squeezed his hand hard. They held hands like that, and James winced, as if the moment was just too much for him to bear.
Then Gladys stood up from her chair, and walked out of the room, and James followed, his head held high, as if he were still bracing himself against all the emotion. I waited for a second, then got up from my chair, and went to the door, and watched the two of them walk down the hall together, a space between them just big enough for a young child, and for a split second she was there. Their girl. And for another second, Wendell was there too, and he turned to look at me with the same soldier’s face I’d known as a child who had his photograph, a girl who had imagined she loved him. And when both of them disappeared, I could still sense their spirits, hovering around James and Gladys, and then the two of them turned the corner. Maybe it was just me and what I was feeling. But it seemed real.
Two hours and twenty-five minutes later, Moses opened his eyes and said, “Mama.”
In my mind, Gladys had something to do with this. I don’t pretend to understand it. But it felt like Gladys had something to do with my son waking. I believe that feeling. So I’ll always miss Gladys. I’ll always wish she lived down the street.
That night we celebrated in the hospital with Moses, who had lost much of his ability to speak, but they told me this damage was temporary, and his eyes were nearly as happy as they had been before his fall. We filled the room with balloons, and fed him green beans and chocolate cake, and I brought his tape recorder in along with his favorite music (Bob Marley) and his Pooh books, and after an hour or so we were told he had to sleep, he had to be quiet and heal, and that everyone should go home but me, though they advised that I also leave.
I couldn’t leave. I couldn’t yet trust that he’d stay awake, that he wouldn’t slip back into the dark. But Gladys and James said they were going back to New York, and each of them gave me a kiss good-bye, and kissed Moses. They left quickly, it seemed, and when they were gone I felt afraid and the room felt hollow for a moment, but just as quickly it was filled up again just as if the sun was shining, because my boy was awake, and pointing to a Big Bird balloon on the ceiling, trying to say one of the words he had mastered months before. “Look! Look!”
In less than a week, Moses was home with me. The Myerlys, who had sent flowers and offered to pay the hospital bill, had called me, asking if I was planning to sue them. I told them of course not and a week later received a check for two hundred dollars in the mail, which at the time seemed like a huge sum. It came with a note telling me to do something nice for Moses, and that they missed him. See what I mean about luck? I collected unemployment for two months, and then the nuns decided I could come back and work night shift, and bring Moses along with me. He played with his cars and coloring books in the kitchen at the long wooden table, and lightened the mood in that room for the girls who were on dish duty. Later, he would sleep on the gray cushioned bench in the front hall beneath the bad painting of Saint Theresa, who’d been given a goatee by one of the girls. They’d cover him up with this red homemade quilt.
“Check him out!” the girls said. “Sleepin’ like an angel.” They’d pat his head, kiss his cheek, stare down at him with expressions of longing. None of them were keeping their babies, as far as they knew.
I would call Gladys that year, late at night, on the pay phone in the halfway house when everyone else was sleeping. I had thanked her a thousand times for coming to the hospital, but each time she said, “I think it’s me who should thank you.” And when I asked her why, she said, “Doesn’t matter why, just accept my thanks.”
I knew why, anyhow, of course. I knew she and James had gotten to the other side of their grief.
She didn’t tell me much about James, but I know he stayed around New York State for a while. It’s difficult to say what was happening between the two of them. Because Gladys would tell me things like, “Later on I’m sneaking out to meet James in the woods,” and then she’d laugh. “Really?” I’d say. “Just to take a walk,” she’d say. “Just a walk with a friend.”
And one night Ivy came home and told Gladys, “I’m in love.” She had fallen in love with a sixty-eight-year-old man named Brent Quinn, and the two of them planned to live happily ever after in Brent’s cabin. Since I had worked at that camp when I was a girl, I knew who Brent Quinn was, and had even seen his cabin once. I had even looked at him as a girl and thought, If I ever loved an old man, it would be a man like him. He had an odd, comfortable habit of wearing old striped pajamas and worn work boots, and his face had aged real nicely. The one time I saw his cabin, on a late spring night when he had an open house for the counselors, it was filled with bright, beautiful colors—quilts and flowers and paintings. His walls lined with books. He had great food on the table, though I didn’t recognize what any of it was. Stuff from other parts of the world. And he had several jugs of wine. He loved life, I guess you could say. He seemed to know what matters.
I couldn’t go to their wedding, but when I talked to Gladys, and asked her how badly she’d miss Ivy, she didn’t have much to say. Gladys never wanted to say much about her loneliness. Instead, she told me what she thought Ivy would miss: “It’ll be our music, trust me. That foreign music Brent Quinn listens to is gonna drive her crazy. All that singing about how happy someone is, or how sad, and you can’t understand a damn word about why. All you get is the feeling. And I don’t think Ivy’s the type to be satisfied with that. Ivy’s the type to want the story behind the feeling. Ivy likes George Jones. Johnny Cash. She’s got taste.”
The next year on the telephone when I asked Gladys about James, Gladys said he had gone south to New Orleans where he worked on a boat, but that the two of them kept in touch, but not all that often.
“He’s my friend, Raelene,” was what she said. “My old friend.”
* * *
That year, when Gladys was fifty-four, she enrolled herself in the community college. She took all kinds of night courses—English, history, economics, math, physics. “I think I’ll be a professional student,” she told me in a letter. “Or maybe I’ll get a real degree and start teaching the little winter school kids. Imagine that. Gladys at the chalkboard.”
As it turned out, she was a teacher the last time I saw her.
Me, I was a mail carrier. I was making decent money—twelve bucks an hour. And I liked the job. I liked being out in the elements. I took some days off and decided to visit Gladys.
I hadn’t called ahead to tell her I was going to visit. I guess that’s an odd habit of mine. I don’t like to call ahead. I like to pop in. “You’re afraid if you call ahead they’ll say don’t come,” a friend once said, but I don’t think that’s it. I think I’m afraid of visiting, so I don’t call ahead, part of me hoping they won’t be home when I get there. But whatever it is, this isn’t a good habit to have these days. People’s lives are too full of structure and privacy to allow for droppers-by. But with Gladys I didn’t fear she’d mind. I had not seen her since that day in the hospital. Over eleven years ago! It didn’t seem that long. I hadn’t been able to make it up to her graduation from Mercury Teachers College. She sent me a picture of herself in blue cap and gown, unsmiling, one eyebrow cocked up, classic Gladys. Her friend Doreen who she’d written me about, standing beside her grinning.
A neighbor girl stayed with Moses, someone named Nancy who was twenty and always brought her cassette player and turned him on to funky music. So I took myself up to see Gladys like I’d wanted to do for years.
On the bus I sat next to this kid who looked about seventeen or eighteen with a Walkman on his head. He was slumped down, all pissed off in his seat, and his face was set in anger. I recognized the look. I probably never wore it on my own face in high school, I was too busy trying to pretend I was good, but I recognized it all the same.
When I had first sat down, the boy had looked at me with hatred I took personally at first, until I realized I looked old to him. I was a grown woman now. To a seventeen-year-old who hated the world, I was old. I was of the world. Settled. An adult. Part of the group who betrayed him, in whatever way. Why was it shocking that this kid would see me like that? Why did I feel like defending myself? Hey, kid, I’m just a letter carrier, a mail deliverer rain or shine, just a person trying to get by, I’m not an enemy. A few miles into the trip, when that boy shifted in his seat and touched my arm, I felt an electric charge from his body, something I hadn’t felt from anyone’s body in a long time. After this happened I spent an hour or so shifting my own body in order to brush against him. I know that’s warped. He shifted toward me too. It was a kind of conversation I’ll never forget. I hadn’t had a serious romance in three years, and this boy’s touch told me I’d been starved.
We sat that way until it was time for him to get off the bus. Neither of us even said good-bye, though before he stood he grabbed my arm until it hurt, then turned and gave me a small smile before he stepped off the bus, a smile that pretty much shocked me, because I saw what a baby he was. I watched him walk down the street of a small, dead-looking town in upstate New York, the street lined with spindly bare trees, the gas station like something from 1950 with old Coke signs in the window. Someone in a dark coat stood under an awning before a small newsstand, holding a cup of coffee. Watching the boy walk away I felt like I was losing him, like he’d been a part of my life for years, like he was leaving for no good reason. I pressed my forehead into the window as hard as it would go. But the smaller he got, the more he moved into that place, the more the feeling went away, and it was gone when I realized I was old enough to be his mother.
It came to me that we’re not really one age at all. We’re all the ages we’ve ever been.
As I rode the cab to Gladys’s house, I might’ve been the girl I was the first time I surprised her. My racing heart was slamming inside my chest. Like I said, I’m afraid of visits, so the closer I get, the more nervous, the more excited, the more uncertain I am about who it is I’m going to see, and who I am. My palms sweat, my stomach swirls, I talk to myself like an old woman.
I knocked on Gladys’s door, and Gladys’s friend Doreen Manchester answered. Gladys had written to me about her—how she was a good friend, the divorced mother of four grown sons, how she was constantly asking people to call her “Door” and how nobody, for some reason, ever did. She was tall and sort’ve bony with burnt orange hair and tight lips that seemed permanently amused, as if any second now a huge laugh might escape her. The sight of her at Gladys’s door surprised me.
“I’m Door at the door and you’re?” she said, eyebrows raised.
“Raelene Francis from Philadelphia.”
She waited, thinking for a second.
“Raelene, Raelene. Well come on in. Don’t I know all about you. Gladys is out back, she’ll be in soon enough. She’s getting some wood. I’ll fix you cider with a cinnamon stick in the meantime unless you got somethin’ against it.”
We sat at the old Formica kitchen table, the same one that had been there years ago, white with silver boomerangs. The kitchen had been painted bright yellow, and a beautiful painting had been hung of a pretty woman in a rowboat. On another wall was a framed diploma. Doreen began telling me about the antics of her sons, as if she’d always known me. “One of them likes a girl named Hildegaard. You know, like the saint? Can you imagine naming a baby Hildegaard. The last name’s Smith, so I guess they thought they’d give her a real stunner of a first name. Well, this Hildegaard’s no saint. Last Sunday she spends the night at our house— that’s right, I allow them to live in sin. I tell myself there’s worse things than sex, but sometimes I’m not sure, you know what I’m saying? So this girl, who by the way won’t let anyone call her Hildy, no sir, it’s always Hildegaard, anyhow she wakes up in the morning and comes down to my kitchen hanging out of her nightgown like Fritz the Cat’s wife and says, ‘Mrs. Manchester, Brendan wants to know if you have any frosted Pop-Tarts. . . .’”
The kitchen was filled with the warmth of this new friend, and I imagined Gladys and Doreen Manchester had spent a lot of days together, and I knew even before I saw Gladys that she was doing better than I could’ve imagined. I relaxed.
Gladys walked in and said my name, dropped a few logs on the floor, and said, “I’ll be damned.” Her face was thinner, her eyes greener, her hair completely white, a beautiful color on her. She was dressed in a big fisherman’s sweater and red wool pants. Her skin glowed from the cold air. I thought she looked perfect.
“So what brings you up here?” she said.
“You,” I said. “What else?”
She smiled. “Long way to travel to see the likes of me.”
“Oh, Gladys,” Doreen said. “She’d come round the world to see you, isn’t it obvious?”
“Poor thing,” said Gladys. She picked up the logs and went to the living room to stoke the fire. We followed her.
Gladys stoked the fire and said she hoped I planned on staying at least until Monday, so I could see her teach fourth grade. Then she turned around and studied me, smiling.
“You don’t look half bad,” she said. “You got a new boyfriend?”
“No.”
“What’s the problem? I’d think they’d be lining up at the door.”
I had Monday and Tuesday off, so I decided to stay, after calling Moses. Doreen was there for most of that weekend too, and Ivy and Brent came by for Sunday dinner. Brent looked fragile to me that winter day, but also happy. He’d developed Parkinson’s disease and looked like he was constantly shaking his head no. Meanwhile his bright eyes were always saying yes. Ivy, who wore sapphire earrings and her silver hair in a braid now, brought most of the dinner over.
“Here’s to our faraway guest,” Ivy said, toasting me at the table.
We ate her excellent vegetable stew and rolls. Beyond the kitchen window the snow fell whiter than the thin curtains. The sky behind the falling snow was dark, dark gray. The sort of air that makes everyone inside feel huddled together.
“This is real good, Ivy,” Gladys said.
“Good for what ails ya.” Ivy winked.
Gladys and Ivy, I noticed, studied each other whenever either of them spoke. They might have looked alike, but Ivy studied Gladys with an interesting expression. A kind of confusion and awe. Meanwhile Gladys studied Ivy from a sort of amused distance. But it was a softer look than it had been years before. It seemed to me she had a kind of tenderness in her face.
“So today Brent and I were out driving, and we see this big fat man selling flowers in the parking lot of the Duke of Bubbles. The duke was standing there in his lace-up boots talking to the man.”
“Who’s the Duke of Bubbles?” I said.
“Oh, some car wash fanatic, thinks he’s a duke, so anyhow, this fat man’s selling his flowers and we pull over to see what they are, well, they’re all roses. All different colors. So I lean out of the car and say, ‘Hey, Duke, what’s your friend charging for those roses?’ so the duke asks the fat man, who says, ‘You can have a hundred for three dollars!’”
“My God!” Doreen said. “I would’ve died!”
“Well,” Ivy said, “don’t get too excited. These roses had one foot on the banana peel. They’ll only last one more day, but it’s worth it. To have a hundred roses in your house for a day. Right Brent?”
“Oh, yes, it’s lovely,” said Brent, all the while shaking his head no. Later that day he joked about it, saying it was a new dance he was trying to make popular called “The Perpetually Disagreeable.” I had to laugh at that.
I ate my soup and watched Gladys listening to Ivy. It was clear to me that she was thinking about the fact of Ivy’s existence as Ivy talked, and not the story Ivy told. Later, when Gladys talked about one of her students whose mother called and yelled at her, Ivy hung on Gladys’s every word, as if she believed that if she could listen hard enough she might finally understand the mystery of her sister. Watching them, I started to wish I had a sister of my own. It wasn’t a small wish, it was a deep wish, it was a desire that made me lonely at that table. I kept watching. I was thinking that for all the great space between Gladys and Ivy, for all the stuff they were never able to protect each other from, a real closeness existed between them, one that nobody else at that table could touch. I think that with a sister, that kind of closeness could be made up of confusion, misunderstanding, and a kind of distance.
After that meal, we had pie by the fire. Gladys smiling at me across the room.
* * *
“So before ya leave, you should come to my classroom.”
“Of course.”
Gladys had been teaching for five years. This was her first year with fourth graders. I sat in the back seat and imagined being one of her fourth graders. What would she look like to me? I don’t know if I would’ve liked her. I would’ve feared her. I would’ve tried to impress her. She was not a natural for the job because she grew too easily bored with the children’s answers, which tended to be rambly or too short.
I felt her impatience when a pale boy with strange pointed sideburns that looked oiled into place answered her question about a character in a book they had all read called Harvey the Doggone Ratfink. The boy said something about how Harvey really was a nice person inside but he didn’t know how to show it because he was too concerned with the lizard and maybe if he got to the cotton candy stand in time that girl with the bare feet could explain to him could explain to him could explain to him—the boy got stuck on this phrase, and I wanted to go help him out, and wished Gladys would help him out, but she just watched him and patiently waited, and finally he said “could explain to him about the lizard” and Gladys just nodded at him, said “Okay,” and called on someone else.
She wasn’t exactly filling up the room with her warmth. Yet the children responded to her. They all wanted to answer her questions. Maybe she was a great teacher. She had her classroom decorated with the kids’ own art and a fish tank. One bulletin board had red felt letters that said LIFE’S SHORT: DON’T BE AN IDIOT.
After class it was time for lunch.
“So, Raelene, what’s new? You been here for two days, and I don’t even know what’s new with you.”
I told her about Moses, how he’s off with his friends a lot now, how he gets decent grades.
And then I tried to tell Gladys that I’m almost glad that he fell off the roof that day, how after his fall and recovery, I became a different sort of mother, more grateful, more alert. I wasn’t trying to brag. I was trying to bring us back to a time when I needed her, a time that brought us together. Gladys lowered her eyes, nodded her head. It was like she didn’t want to remember those days. Like she had moved too far away from that time of healing in the hospital. Too far away from James, and that old life, that old Gladys. I was sorry I tried to talk this way, and for a minute felt foolish and alone.
What I really wanted was to have her remember me in the past, to talk about it some, but I could feel her resisting that. So I didn’t say anything else.
“You have a good life,” she told me after a while, then squinted at me, as if thinking hard. “But don’t be a loner.”
“I’m not,” I said.
“It’s important not to be a loner,” she said. “You need companionship.”
“I know.”
A silence fell between us. I felt really disappointed, and didn’t know why.
“You have a pretty good life too, you know,” I said, trying to keep the talk going.
“For an old dame who never loved the ways of the world,” she said. “I’m ready to retire, though, Raelene girl.”
I was glad she called me that. It pulled me closer to her for a moment.
“I figure if I’m one of the lucky ones, I got about ten, twenty years left of this life.”
“Or more,” I said.
“Whatever. It’ll fly,” she said.
I said good-bye to Gladys then, who had to go back and teach. “You come back soon,” she said. “You should come see me too,” I said, though I knew she wouldn’t. I knew the happiness she had now depended on this rooted life of hers, this living every minute in the present. She gave me a quick hug and patted my back, then turned and walked away, dressed like an old-fashioned teacher, in a wool navy blue dress and heeled shoes to match. I wondered when the next time I’d see her would be. I didn’t think it would be soon.
I was sad watching her walk away. Something between us was gone now. It was just need that was gone, I told myself. I didn’t need her anymore. Or maybe it was just that Gladys didn’t need me. What was left was memory, I decided, there on the bus, riding back home. And she didn’t particularly want to remember. Maybe I’ll never see her again. Life goes that way sometimes.
But in the next moment I couldn’t imagine that. Couldn’t imagine that I’d never see Gladys again. Of course I would. I would visit when Moses was older. Maybe I’d visit her for a long time. Maybe I’d start to go up there for Thanksgiving sometimes, bring Moses along.
That night when I got home it was snowing. I opened the front door and found Nancy curled up under a blanket on the couch, The Wailers on the stereo.
“Hi! Where’s Moses?”
Nancy, the baby-sitter, sat up and brushed her hair down, and blinked at me, like I’d caught her with a lover.
“He and Ruthie are out walking in the snow. We all watched The Birds tonight, and it freaked us out.”
“So was everything all right?”
“Yep, like I said on the phone, he’s a doll, and he’s got good taste in music. More than I can say for my past two boyfriends. They were into this retro seventies stuff like Kansas.”
“That’s too bad.”
Nancy had the house looking great. I paid her, I went and took a shower and got into a nightgown, and combed out my hair. But I couldn’t shake that sense of loss I’d felt the whole way home.
Why did I feel as if I’d lost something important? I’d had a good visit with Gladys. I hadn’t lost anything, really. I’d been lucky enough to see that she had grown into her own brand of happiness, or acceptance, or whatever it was she had grown into.
And I had my brand too. That was true. I had a great son who had his health and his happiness. I had a good job. I had two or three friends. A full-enough life.
When I came out of my room, Moses and Ruth had just stepped into the front hallway. Both were bundled up in hooded coats. “Hi!” they sang. For a few seconds I just stared at them, taking them in.
I went to hug Moses, and he let me.
“How was it,” he said.
“Excellent, and Nancy said you were great too.”
They both had bright, dark eyes, and the kind of beauty I’ve noticed comes to kids’ faces when expectations of the future are so high they can’t be contained. I thought of myself sitting next to that boy on the bus whose touch had sent a shockwave of desire through my body, and I could hardly believe it had happened. If Moses and Ruth knew about such a thing, they’d laugh or feel disgusted, or probably both, for good reason. I stood in front of them in my bathrobe, feeling middle-aged for the first time in my life. I was envious of them. I should’ve been relieved that I’d already survived all that, but I wasn’t. I was envious and my heart was breaking.
Ruth was weirdly quiet, dreamy almost. “We saw The Birds,” she told me. “It totally freaked us out.” She didn’t look freaked out. She looked in love. Girl, you’re a baby, get that look off your face. “Well, we just came in to see if you were home, now we wanna go for another walk,” Moses said. “If that’s all right with you,” he added, cocking his head. I was glad that he was forcing it a little bit, the way he did when he was being sarcastic; I was always glad for those few times when I didn’t feel too much love for him.
“Be my guest,” I said. “Bring me a snowball.”
Really, I wanted them to stay. Or invite me. I wanted my son back.
They turned and walked out the door. I turned out the light in the living room, and thought I’d go to bed, but stopped at the window when I saw them on the sidewalk passing by. They moved together like they were one person, slowly and surely in the darkness, not holding hands, but together all the same. The snow had already turned the street white. I watched them and their dark footprints that followed in a trail behind them until they turned the corner. I stayed right at the window, watching the night, empty of people.
Did my mother and father ever love me the way I loved my son? I supposed they had, at certain times. I knew they had. I could remember the look of my mother’s face when I came home from third grade one day, hurt by the words of another child. I could remember my father’s eyes, dark with worry when I came in one night too late. I could remember his face when he first held Moses, how he looked at me with tears in his eyes and said he was so proud of me and he’d never find words to explain. I could remember my mother fixing me dinner the time I stayed with her out west, how hard she worked to make something special. I could still see that food arranged on the plate like a painting.
And thinking about Gladys and my mother and Moses altogether like that, I decided I would call her. My mother, I mean. I hadn’t seen her since my visit years ago, which really hadn’t been such a good visit, but I had called her three or four times a year, on various occasions, and she had sent me packages of clothes.
“Raelene?” She sounded glad to hear from me.
“Just thought I’d call and say hello. How are things?”
“Well, things are okay, considering I’m on a no-fat diet,” she said. “I feel okay these days.”
“That’s good.”
“And how are you? You’re not in the area, are you?”
“No, no, still in Philly.” I looked out the window into the night. A woman in a long white scarf was out walking her dog.
“So is everything all right? Nothing wrong?”
“Everything’s fine, I just wanted to say hello.”
“I liked that last picture of Moses,” she said. “He’s awfully handsome.”
She’d stopped asking, Will I ever meet him?
“He’s turning out real well. Right now he’s walking in the snow with his true love.”
She sighed, painfully, then said, “Oh, the poor things. I feel so sorry for the young. All they have to go through.”
I said, “They’re happy.”
She sighed again, and said she knew all about happiness.
A silence came between us now. She rescued us from that silence. “Okay, well thank you for calling, honey.”
“Sure,” I said. “Sure, Mom.”
It was not a good call, but I hadn’t expected one, so it was all right. When I hung up I realized that what I really wanted was to talk about Gladys to someone. Maybe I’d wait for Moses. Maybe when he and Ruth returned I could talk with them about my visit. But I imagined them on the couch together with their cheeks red from the cold, me across from them on a chair, their faces trying to stay interested.
I turned the light off so I could see the snow falling, and the moon shining behind clouds. I could see the bricks of the narrow, empty street being whitened. I thought of Gladys, and even my mother staring out the window of their houses, where maybe it was snowing too. And it was all right. Everything was.
For a moment I saw the snow like it was breathing color, like it was freshly painted and set down before me as a gift to wake me up. It all seemed strange and alive, and so clear, and I wanted contact with it. I didn’t want to just stand at the window and watch.
So I bundled up. I went out into that snow, into the wind, the flakes flying and shining in the streetlight. I walked through the silence for a long time. I had the feeling I was right where I wanted to be, seeing everything I wanted to see.
The wind blew, the snow fell.