THE SYSTEM WAS FINE FOR THE FIRST TWO YEARS. Then last year Holden Caulfield began eating worry into me about whether I wanted to go through with crossing the road to the regular rural high school, which would be for all intents and purposes my old school but with ashtrays outside the main hall. I knew I couldn’t keep up with Holden and his crowd on matters such as clothing and leather luggage, but competing for grades didn’t seem that difficult. I had the advantage of a history of working like a dog while they seemed to give themselves a great deal of time off for sports and touring dates around New York City.
I made sure to thank Laura for everything she’d done before I went into her bedroom one evening and sprung on her how I needed more. She had house and family magazines spread around, and when she shoved them over for me to sit down and tell her what I needed, I had to say that all I knew was I was feeling more and more squirmy about spending three years at a school with everybody whose ambitions were lowered down to just the rural style of life. Since the only choice of private education was the Apocalypse school, I didn’t know what to do about this sensation that my future was being threatened into impossible.
She more than understood and said she’d call the Social Service lady the next morning, but for now, if I wanted a view into a world where too much of a good thing spelled more trouble than having nothing, I should crawl up with her and read an article on the swanky home life of Patty Hearst. You can’t watch Citizen Kane accumulate his trove and not picture yourself ringing the doorbell at Xanadu and having him quiz you on your various interests and needs before he laughs heartily and says he’s been waiting for someone like you and he’d be honored if you’d allow him to set you up in a fabulous dormer room and keep you in clothes his magazines advertise and then send you to college well-versed in conversation.
The government fell short of a situation Citizen Kane and the modern Hearst crowd could set you up in, but at least the lady came quickly this time. When Laura phoned her up, she’d alerted her to bring the next height of ideas, and so she splayed out what she’d investigated into across the kitchen table, pointing to brochures on different talent camps and weekend college seminars, lining out what they could cover on fees and transportation and what we had to pay, using the tone you associate with the man listing the prices of soybean and pork belly futures on the news. The figures could be shaking up Idaho, but not to hear him tell it. The difference was the lady was talking about sums that can alter your life, and I didn’t know whether her mind had come unconnected from her mouth and words like, well over a thousand, meant nothing to her, or, if she looked around at our stuff and style and assumed we had that kind of money casually lying around in the black box with stars lacquered on to it, which actually did look perfect for holding strong-smelling stacks of new cash. Laura was also behaving like a pod person, taking in the news with no expression, nodding some, taking notes, I was scratching, chewing, sucking, blowing, sweating, and pulsing, barely able to sputter out, I had no idea I was turning out to be this expensive. Do they have some variety of greenbacks stamp deal or a coupon book like the chamber of commerce has for holiday hotels and rent-a-cars? I’m sorry, but something has told me these IQ camps ran more in the thirty, forty dollar range.
Why, the lady asked, would you think that?
I said, money and the mind usually seem to live so far apart, and I’m sorry, but you expect Harvard to be priced this high, but not weekends with the chess crowd. I really thought you’d go off on what this one brochure’s making sound like a brain isolation retreat and rough it more on the cheap, but it quotes you between six and eight hundred dollars to sleep in the sand dunes and fight fleas and get up at the crack of dawn to operate on fish.
This one, Laura said, in Baltimore, this humanities program sounds custom-made for you. It’s next October at Johns Hopkins.
A wave of sick faintness I hadn’t felt in a while washed through me. I’d wanted to be through with the kind of hot, crackling black coming down over my eyes like a shade shot through with pierces of light. I needed to droop to the floor before another wave came down or to get to the bathroom somehow to press my face against the tile and wait for the acids to stop churning up and melting the tender tissues inside my throat. Laura reached for my hands. There was security in knowing she recognized a mood coming on and wouldn’t allow me to pass out and die from a sharp blow to the head on the way down, but I didn’t want her to comment on how cold and clammy I was and have Social Service panic over my well-being.
I clamped my hands between my knees and spoke quietly to keep my stomach less disturbed, only partway hearing myself over questions screaming inside me, asking if I was ever going to heal from the plague of frustrations. Other people don’t have to chew up good time recovering nor see their hearts throbbing through their undershirts because the person who committed to caring for them promised to do what it takes to give them something they need.
Laura, I said, it’s okay, and thank you, but a weekend in Baltimore runs about what I thought college costs. It’s too much. Actually, it’s way too much.
Laura said, Well, this is a new world I’m in now, but you seem to get what you pay for there, so don’t worry.
When the lady said educational money was easily had from civic groups that doted on ambitious youth, another wave of the blues washed through me. I could see Laura sitting on the sofa, shivering with blankets around her shoulders while her bathwater’s boiling in a pot she’s had to hang by the fireplace, going without to repay the debt I’d caused by spending like the wind at a high-IQ camp. I said, Mam, I think those are all ideas, but it isn’t like we’re part of the have-nots, and when you get down to the reality of it, taking a train or a plane for a weekend at a famous college isn’t the kind of thing I have any business doing.
Laura said, Ellen, didn’t you see these brochures?
I said, I did, and everything looks interesting, but I’ll be fine with the way things are at school. This other’s too different, it’s too all-out. It’s for people who do things like spending a thousand dollars on clothes, but I appreciate the thought. If we found a pearl in some oysters or won the Kentucky Derby, then I’d be more able to do it.
The lady had been sopping her cookies in her coffee and eating them all over her lips to where you regretted offering them to her, but she’d been doing that a while. Then, after I was through talking, she stopped and dotted her mouth with a napkin saying, Well, this is certainly a changed you I’m hearing. Three years ago, the little girl I tried to talk to was so hostile and defensive she wouldn’t have given me air in a jug.
Laura said, I don’t think it’s necessary to make it sound like she was ruthless back then, though if it seemed that way, you can bet it was the best she could do. I didn’t get her here, the government certainly didn’t. Her attitude is why we’re sitting here now. You know I know from ruthless children, you’ve certainly sent more than my quota to me.
The lady put her saucer at the edge of the table and shoved her crumbs over into it, keeping her head down, so she wouldn’t move on toward the subject Laura had just come very close to, of how I’d had to strong-arm the other two girls back into the foster care system when they finally caused more chaos than Laura and I could stand earlier in the year. She left without mentioning it, saying on the way out the door only to remember her old advice about much being expected from those who were given as much as I’d been blessed with. Although she worded it differently, she ended by saying she trusted that two people as clever as Laura and me could figure out how to get me off this road if we believed I was so different I required special and high-tone surroundings to fulfill my destiny in.
While I was putting the program brochures away in the rolltop desk Laura kept household paperwork in, I opened my savings passbook and told her what I had thus far wouldn’t cover cake decorating classes at the night college over by the lumber mill. Then I closed the top and lay on the sofa and gazed at cartoons, waiting for my stomach to cool down. She pulled a blanket over my legs and began going through the house and rambling for things that needed to be washed or hit with the iron a second time. She finished sooner than usual, and there she stood by my feet, screeching the ironing board open and plugging in the iron and holding her hands around it while it warmed, favoring Ava Gardner again when she’s holding on to the handlebar of the rolling cocktail-hour cart and converting it into a steadying symbolic rock.
Laura always called for me to come spit on the iron because she knew I liked hearing it sizzle, but when she offered, my stomach didn’t feel right enough to be up. When I told her I needed to lie there and feel like dirt a few more minutes, she said, I know you do.
I said, I don’t want to be smart-mouthed, but you know I didn’t come here with a dowry. I brought one hundred and sixty-six dollars in a paper sack, and that’s earned about a dollar in interest since then. If I were you I’d be relieved if somebody said they were willing to stay home for free.
I believe you’ll get a scholarship, she said, but if you didn’t or if it isn’t enough, we’ll figure something out. Any number of things can be done, so at the very least, I want you to plan on going to this program.
I said, And when you fall into deep debt to pay for my college and I fall in front of a bus and can’t work to repay you so you can repay the bank, ask me if I hadn’t seen it coming every time the collector drove off with my father’s late-payment merchandise. We have some interesting stories already going on here, and I don’t see any plots that involve you living in more or less a drainage tube in Calcutta because of me. You know I have to go by the theme of working to get the money you need for something. It’s a simple if-then, Laura. If you did that, you can do this. I don’t see how it varies from you always getting up and doing the nastiest job of the day first.
Moving my legs aside to sit down, she said, Getting the best education possible isn’t like bleaching grout. And listen when I tell you, a girl your age has no business thinking about death and taxes. Repaying me for this course or the others or college or anything, Ellen, shouldn’t occur to you. I’d expect some gratitude, being human I suppose, but that’s the extent of it, so if it doesn’t concern me, there’s no reason for it to grind you this way.
The only problem is you don’t realize how dangerous it could be to take what you offer. They said I wasn’t damaged, but this is damage, this is a mess I’ve brought to your house, only you don’t consider it the selfish way I would if I were you. I can fix this. You’ll stay glad I’m here, but not if I take what’s yours. I know how to get what I need done. It’s real and true and simpler like this.
She rubbed a circle on my leg and patted the place down before she hopped up and unplugged the iron. Looking at the television, she said, I didn’t know they were running Dark Shadows again. I’ve seen you watch that, so just rest with it and I’ll come iron later.
Laura asked for nothing but the honor of having a girl like me, to look after and hold her daily conversations and customs with. When I considered the harm I could do Laura, it was embarrassing, revolting, and much more horrible than the idea of her paying for my education. There was the force to feel the wind off of, the sting of a slap from a person too turned in on herself to rehearse how the wounds would feel and too familiar with them to stop and measure their speed and imagine the surprise someone like Laura must feel each time she closed herself in her room to adjust herself to it, sparing me from watching her recover.
Life closed twice when my mother and father died, worlds apart but gone, and now I wasn’t certain I could outlast a third event, of Laura leaving, even in the house with me but not present, always turned in, protecting herself from me.
Even if I could trick myself into counting on a miraculous machine of the gods swooping in at the last minute, I realized how risky it’d be to count on something like a wealthy benefactor to hear about my plight and sympathize when I didn’t have a sports skill to get my name around or hail from an inner city successful people like to donate to in memory of their roots. You can also be musical and get supported, but the farthest I’d gotten toward developing my talent was thinking about taking piano lessons from the preacher’s wife, so I wasn’t involved in anything that’d make somebody like Stevie Wonder or Sammy Davis Jr. take notice.
Then I’d think, How would they even hear about you on your road? Talent scouts don’t tend to blow through here. There wasn’t an uncle in the television industry who could get Walter Cronkite to inspire all his viewers to donate a dime to help pave the rest of the road to the future.
A couple of weeks later, on the morning this present school year started, I was standing on the edge of the road, looking back at the square hedge bushes and the clean brick steps Laura and I had sat on after supper so often that summer, still seeing the vision I’d created of the dump truck sent with best regards by the gang at CBS World News, to pour a silver stream of dimes into a massive mound in the yard.
The bus arrived and the doors opened and I got on and said hey to people I felt like I hadn’t seen in a year although I just saw them yesterday at the store or downtown Saturday buying new clothes. As we lost sight of my house, I knew Laura was about to take her bath and listen to the morning shows through the open bathroom door. She could relax well with nothing to resent. I couldn’t put her out by leaving her. Whatever I did about leaving, I’d have to accomplish through realism, and beyond Laura and the people on the bus I loved, I didn’t trust much. More than anything, I trusted myself to work and knew what I felt about the kind of individuals who mash the snooze button on the clock and stay there, continuing to roll and wallow.
Once I began taking on jobs and studying like a fiend, I got a sideline benefit. Working constantly up to the utmost possible edge of sleeping kept the space my mother had left more filled. If leisure wasn’t well-planned, worry over where she was now would move into the time like a bumptious stranger and addle me out of a place in line. That sliver between wakefulness and sleeping was particularly hazardous if I left what happened inside it to chance. All hell could break loose, and I loathed feeling forced to search for my mother in the flames and listen for her in the screaming of everyone her funeral preacher had said was confined to torment by an outraged God who didn’t need or want help carrying out His will. Sometimes, I used the time to think of ways she could’ve been spared. Random as science was, there was more justice in the laws of nature, more mercy, well-deserved, than in rules that said her decision to die was unforgivable. Whoever could claim that she had enough gall to throw God’s gift back in His face didn’t know her very well, but unless she’d been allowed to get in on the tickets they give to people like pygmies and life-long coma victims who have never been exposed to religion. If I believed the rules, I had to believe they applied to her, so I took a personal doubt holiday that will last until undeserved cruelty, then, now, and thereafter, seems acceptable.
The only road to silent peace was through the words I wrote down to keep, more for the sounds than the meanings, that were always able to carry me to where I was able to rest, holding back the old sounds and scenes that have had time to organize themselves inside me and grow as strong as men, so you learn by heart and you’re grateful to say,
Philanthropist, opulent, honorific, keening,
Tumult, tumultuous, compatible, breast-feeding,
Cinema, efficient, evermore, cellar door,
For I have eaten ashes like bread and mingled my drink with weeping,
That I may learn in my own life and away from home and friends
What the heart is and what it feels.
Beadsman, celibate, cenobite, friar,
Mendicant, palmer, pilgrim, prior.
Mother of God, Amen, Mother of God, so be it.