Three

LOOK AROUND MY HOUSE AND SEE WHY THE BEAUTY here knocks me off my feet every few minutes of the day. There’s a kind of love behind the thoughtfulness you see when you open the door to a room that draws you inside to sit down and gaze, enjoying how welcomed you feel and trusted as well not to spoil things. How many times have you been in a place where the lady of the house is so wadded up by fear of spilling on the sofa she’s kept it enclosed in plastic, and how many people have you visited who lacked the edge of sophistication to realize that they were supposed to unwrap the lampshades once they got them back to their living rooms from the display living rooms at Sears? You see Laura’s confident tastes and her refusal to let life revolve around terror of stains impressing visitors when they come in, and even though other women on our road may not be able to go through with finally stripping their plastic when they leave here, they behave like it’s the amazement it is that she can interior decorate like out of a magazine and mix tones of paint in brave and unique ways without anything about herself or her house making them feel like lesser housekeepers or victims of families that wouldn’t appreciate anything new they might try.

Martha’s mother visits when the store is closed of a Sunday afternoon and takes a nap in the guest room, generally without letting her family know where she is. If you saw the wreckage from Martha’s five brothers in the house, you’d know why she parks where you can’t see her car driving by and refuges in what she calls the peace of mind room down here. Before I saw it clearly, Laura explained her resting as she was making her a pot of tea to wake up with, saying, Women hide women, Ellen. Sometimes you have to make one wash her hair and go downtown, and sometimes you have to help one have a little rest and rustication from her life. And don’t tell Martha her mother’s here when she’s missing. It’s only two or three hours, but the child will decide she’s poisoned and want to nag her mother for the antidote.

I said, But if Martha or her brothers have an accident or something, and they can’t find their mother, what about an emergency like that?

You see it, she said, through your eyes, but the reality is there’s another able adult in the house, asleep in front of a football game, and that’s the only time he’s in the house all week, so he can learn to be on his feet and alert if his children need him.

I didn’t need to ask Laura whether she needed to be hidden from me. I followed her down the hall with the tin of mail order shortbread she allowances out for visitors.

You open the door to the guest bedroom that used to be the scrambled, moxed mess the other two foster girls lived in and see the fabric coordinated, not matching but still good, on the padded window seat, the bed, and the straight, long-hanging curtains. Stay here a while and learn that a suit of clothes drapes on your body, drape is a verb, not a noun, and you wash your hands in the sink, not the zinc, which is not to say my way of speaking was oafish before I got here. My mother’s history had her say, like Laura, stockings instead of hose, undergarments for bloomers, drawers, panty leggings, and step-ins, and if we’d had more than a few belongings in our house, they would’ve been arranged in this appropriate way, like a cottage motel royalty would say they found agreeable to stay in. I had to move a silver rose bowl, for example, to put the tea tray down, and when I set it on the dresser, I had to move aside a dozen or so kooky windup tin toys we keep there for Starletta to stay occupied with when she comes over.

Taking a look around the living room, there’s a wooden bowl of many woods on the mantel and two pewter candlesticks at each end, and hanging over it is an old window we made into a picture frame, and where the windowlights should be are scenes of us on various holidays and one of Starletta and me dressed out as macaroni and cheese on the first Halloween I was here. On the round cherry table nearby is a tall lamp and a slender, floral painted shade and a golden frame with a picture of me fishing Starletta out of the bobbing for apples barrel that same year. Laura’s theory is you keep the public surfaces free of everything except for a lamp, a book, and a thing, so the end tables by the sofa have a lamp, a box we keep arrowheads in, and books you think are important for people to pick up and leisurely read in: We Are Your Sons, about Julius and Ethel Rosenberg and how their sons fiercely believe they weren’t criminals, a biography of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, and a book of T. S. Eliot poems called Four Quartets, which helped when some Jehovah’s Witnesses dropped by and didn’t want to understand that a poet could work religion into his themes.

One thing to note is watch out when you sit on the large leather ottoman over near the kitchen. If the hidden wheels aren’t braced, it’ll slide out from under you, or if you hold on and push against the sofa, you can jump the threshold and ride past the appliances and the sink, usually ending up in the area in front of the back door, where you clean dirt off your feet. It’s not a room specifically though it goes by the name mudroom. I haven’t ridden the stool since I moved in, but since we changed out the kitchen linoleum for hard tile, there isn’t a problem with pushing Starletta. Laura dreads Stuart wanting to take off on it, banging dents, but it has to do with his size and how he doesn’t realize the force of his own weight, so as long as you’re not that heavy and know to do it once and then stop, she’d say go ahead. All she asks is you not behave like you were raised in a floored pen, which isn’t a problem for people who quickly pick up on the news that things are a rung or two above the typical, tear-it-up wrestling den. There’s no wooden fork and spoon on the wall, no easy recliner, the pale yellow quilted satin she sewed lays across the arm of the sofa, not across the back, like in an invalid house, nothing sateen or shag, no burnt orange or vanilla incense, no sign saying to Bless This Mess and no mess.

Laura despises filth and chaos and believes there’s self-respect in getting up and doing what calls for bleaching first, and since the other two girls left, she hasn’t had to endure anybody struggling against the order here, which is not to name me perfection, but glancing slights like faking sleep when I don’t want to delve into the day or shifting when she reaches to touch me because of something like a bad monthly mood that takes things beyond your ability to be caressing are nothing in comparison to how the other girls treated her. If you don’t want to sleep for a few days, go into her room after she’s slowly closed herself up in there to sit on the edge of her bed a few minutes and recover from some ugly choice you made to be stubborn. Apologize and hear it’s fine or she needs time because of a remark you made about how you’d put out a leg and thumb to Baltimore before you’d accept a charity dime for the train fare, and then go back and ball yourself up in the nice chair she bought you and regard the words that come out of your mouth and cringe at what a big shot you sounded like. Make a mistake with your mouth in this beautiful place with the woman who rescued you from the fate of strangers and uncaring aunts, and see how much power you have and how dangerous and easy it is to slip into being the kind of girl who damages women. Then total how far a distance there is between you right then and women who love enough to keep a friend hidden of a Sunday afternoon and waken them with English tea in a china pot and a tin of biscuit treats they can’t have at home because everything gets consumed out from under them.

You hope it’s only human nature that makes you uncivilized around the edges sometimes, and you tell yourself you aren’t like the others who took too much. Compare and contrast the freedom you feel to breathe freely and go in and out of the rooms without worrying about opening a door to their rough company on the other side. In the girls’ bedroom I would hear males being big shots, talking about their deals like somebody sixteen has business enterprises, ripping into the Little Debbie cakes I took for lunch and leaving the box gaped empty in the pantry, flagrant about behaving like they owned the place when Laura wasn’t here and crawling in the windows when she was. She eventually found them out by following a trail of sorriness, and one evening when she came in from the movies early and cleaned her way to them, stooped over with their floor trash in her hands and opened the door on their party, the clash and conflict I’d expected didn’t happen.

She said, If you don’t live here, get out, and you two, sit here until I can speak. I’m going to think. Then I’ll speak.

I heard her on the phone to Starletta’s mother, saying the girls were growing up downhill and she was afraid, she said, on account of the quality and quantity of attention they were after. I thought she’d say I was a relief or my problems were at least not proning me toward sexuality diseases, but she didn’t, and although the girls tried to move the topic off them and onto things like how unhealthy it was for me to read all night and how I existed to turn them in for minor trivialities, she wouldn’t be varied off them. She taped rules on the refrigerator, which I thought gave out too much world to operate in, especially for the busty one with the new driving license, but they only felt more fenced in. They tore beyond the outline and pressed in all directions while I watched what I’d come here for become completely disdone.

The minute Laura cranked the car to be gone more than an hour, they were phoning up characters to come over, common, hostile old friends and relations in the main from their old lives, untrustworthy people. They sniffed around Laura’s bedroom belongings and stole her sample bottle of Chanel Number 5, leaving her to think it’d fallen off her dressing table into the trash I’d then carried out and disposed of. I had to stand between two strumpets and a woman disappointed over her only perfume, wondering if family loyalty to girls with evil gene pools and hordes of imprisoned people in their genealogy meant keeping the truth in until my lips exploded. You wondered if she’d say I shouldn’t have told her because family members have permission to be treacherous and protect one another, but I wasn’t aware of that because instructions on everyday life in the family unit weren’t installed in me young.

I hit the limit of the rock and the hard place on a school vacation day when Laura drove Starletta’s mother and her to the teaching hospital to meet a new doctor. When she said she’d be gone from dawn to dusk, you could see the wheels turning with the girls’ plans on the good time that was due to be had by all. They kept enticing me to visit people, but I said I’d rather stay in my room, which they took as a sign I’d be lurking and phoned people up saying Old Ellen might find herself on the far side of a locked door and so on. Laura hated to trust them, but they said they recognized she had the one nerve left, and if they danced on it, that would be that. Earlier than they usually managed to wake up for school, they were sneaking their favorite gang of foulmouth grabbers in, including a boy who bragged he was AWOL and several who looked like they’d be diseased down there. Then I heard the clothes dryer buzzer go off over the record player and racket, and when I opened the laundry room, I knocked into the army criminal and a girl with face skin that looked like potato chips participating in something so far toward sex you could call it sex.

They created scenes of chaos they couldn’t put back in order fast enough. When Laura came home early and walked into this one, she went to her bed and cried, mainly, she said, because she hadn’t left them in the middle of the night, this had been a weekday morning, which made her feel like something not quite violent but definitely unfriendly had jumped out at her, stubborn deaf and blind to the day she’d spent doing a good thing. The hours bundled into stacks of days she’d spent on them that were now looking like futile time she could’ve used elsewhere. When they all finally left, including the girls, I said, If I was you, I’d call the veteran and have him change the locks and stand in here and turn some tough love on them when they set up banging to get in.

She said, I know, and it’s sad, this route they’ve taken, but the families they come from are sadder, and it’s only a couple of months until things at home are straight enough for them to be back there. So maybe let’s try to be patient. Maybe you could stay overnight at a friend’s if things aren’t comfortable here.

I said, I don’t mean to say it’s turned upside down, but I don’t know if the one behaving ought to be the one put out. This wasn’t part of the program when I said I wanted to be here permanently.

Not put out, she said, just a couple of nights, if they do something like this again.

I said, But why can’t they just be decent instead of me having to pack another suitcase? Part of what I was given was a fair amount of patience, but those girls expect to keep draining the well continuously. My family may not be in jail, but they’re still either dead or crazy, and I’m the one here losing sleep over taking a sliver of pie.

You can’t make people behave, she said, by force of will, and you should try harder not to panic when things feel a little out of place.

I said, It’s the middle of the day and somebody’s crying in the house. What if one of them gets a baby in here? Suppose they drag people in that hurt us, not our perfume, but us bodily? And they’re not upset right now. They’re at Wright’s Chick Shack, laughing about us in the parking lot. It seems to be very relaxing not to have anything expected of you, but I’m worn out watching it. I thought it’d be peace for more than a few minutes.

Yes, she said, I know you did, and when I can think about what to do about them, I’ll do it, but you may just have to be patient. There aren’t many people who’ll take older girls, even briefly.

Because we cause so much commotion, I told her. That’s what people think.

She said, You know you don’t.

I said, No, it’s okay. Then I left the house and rode my bicycle down to Martha’s store and used the pay phone to call the foster office and say I was sorry to report it, but I knew of some girls the foster office needed to come on back out here and load up because through no fault of their new mother’s and the hoopla they’d created on their own, they were bordering on being out of hand, and if anyone needed evidence, they could be found drinking alcohol out of sacks outside a take-your-clothes-off place in town, where one or the both of them was nursing an ambition to work. When the lady asked where Laura was all this time, I said, Same place as she always is, at home and hearth, doing the very best she can.

Laura was supposed to be told only so much of what I’d said, but riding back home, as my forearms began to numb and hot stomach acids began to attack, I realized you can’t trust the government after Watergate. Riding to my house felt so much like riding to my doom that I sat on the steps when I got there, hoping she’d be worried enough around dark to speak to me in relief rather than with a sting in her voice. If I hadn’t been worried about being seen by somebody riding by, one plan was to turn the bicycle over in the ditch and have it lay there on top of my body a while, anything not to hear her say I’d destroyed two girls to save myself, and I’d never be the kind of woman who shelters a friend if I was this conniving about putting them back in their pasts before people there were wholly healed and ready for them.

The crunch of the granite rocks in the driveway is generally loud, particularly if the bicycle tires need air in them, but when I rode up, it sounded like I was grinding them between my ears. I knew she heard me because the front curtains parted, and when the door opened, I exploded into a wild kind of weeping just as she said, Well, just sit here and get pulled together because you want to be in fairly good shape when they show up for this emergency investigation, or they may take you, too, take you, take me, take them, close the house down, Ellen, and take us all. You see, you said the girls were out of control, so it naturally follows that I’m allowing them to run wild and leave the windows cracked for the boys and get by with all these other offenses you must’ve done an excellent job listing.

Mother of God, I said, they’re after you? Are they taking me?

Ten or fifteen years from now, she said, I’m sure it’ll be hilarious, but right now it’s not. You described this as a mess of an ordinary day.

I said, I was trying to fix it.

Patience, you needed to manage for another few weeks. I told you.

But, I told her, it sounds like a long time. It’s been so little of life, you know what I mean to say, right, and now they’ll end it again?

She pushed the ottoman over and sat down with her knees jabbed up to mine and told me, Your life, your life isn’t the only one here.

But I was making something of it, I told her. They were just treating their life like a motel, you know, not attached, and I’ve been making things.

Yes, she said, you have, and they’ve been alive and doing fairly what they’ve known how to do at the time.

Martha’s oldest brother had told me about seeing them in unsightly places in town, and I had a sudden picture of them going through a siren arrest and having my name on their lips while their mug shots were taken. I said, Maybe they weren’t that bad. I guess I can take it. Let me call the foster office and say I lost my head and passed some false rumors or something and you were upset over something else I didn’t know about yet.

So instead of us sounding like two extremely mean-spirited and disturbed people, we’ll sound like Lucy and Ethel, she told me. If I were you, I’d dry my face and get back to whatever I was doing, and don’t phone up anybody else, either here or behind the meat counter down at Martha’s place. Let me get dinner together and let me manage this, and Ellen, think before you do this the next time, think a thing completely through.

I did, I said.

When? On your way down there?

I said, I’ve thought about what to do once I started living all my life, and I thought this was how you did it. I don’t need supper though. Martha made ham sandwiches while I was on the telephone.

When I got to my room, I couldn’t rest, so I wrote some on how things had corroded so darkly from where the girls had been the first day I saw them with Laura with a kind of bright light of bliss around them and thought they were set to live out the orphan American dream. I stayed out of my skin, thinking about how to be a part of this group that seemed to take for obvious granted that you change your underwear daily and hand-wash your brassiere in Ivory Snow once a week, and when the moment came for me to find a place to live again, even though there’s only the one road everything in my life has always operated off of, all the roads led to here.

The roads would come together here and conclude. I’d move elsewhere for college eventually and do the epidemic disease research and come home for holidays bringing Laura unique presents from across the international date line. If she wanted to, she could come with me a few times, the way Starletta’s probably going to do. This was the story I’d started writing here, and when it was snatched by people who interrupted with jangling, ill-fitting contributions, I couldn’t throw up my hands and let the work and words scatter like October leaves on me. If you want a rhythm in your life as dependable as the seasons, you can allow only so much outlandish weather in before things become too confused to repair.

I was finishing the picture of me staggering up out of the ditch, miraculously clean when Laura came in, saying summarized, Don’t trust that anything you mox in again like this is going to work out according to your specifications, and believe me, your life is going to be enough to keep up with from now on.

What happened was I landed on my feet because the girls were more or less off theirs by the time the lady got someone downtown to find them. Laura helped place them with married gym teachers she knew who had a knack for converting the wild, and by the time their families were ready for them, I heard they were routine girls who merely lived in town and reported to school and their part-time jobs on time.

I told Laura, It sounds like the girls probably slowed down out of a lack of somebody to get a charge out of and simple boredom.

Good, she said. There’s a great deal to be said for boredom, not all of it bad. It leads to naps, although I know it’ll be a while before I find you asleep during the day without sitting down to feel you for fever. It’s you here now and the company we have wishes you well, so there’s nothing stopping you from saying there’s nothing to do so you’re going to take your shoes off and get on top of the covers with your clothes on. You’ve learned to love and work well enough without a guidebook, and since I’m supposed to have one for you, I can tell you the next chapter’s on rest though if you need a higher authority, I understand that citizens of Spain and France and I don’t know where else are expected to rest, more than a little siesta. The idea of rest equals the idea of work, and I think they smear love throughout automatically, and I see another automatic thing, odd but nice, I think. Other people notice it to me, but I’m just hearing it. I sound like you, I hear old Ellen in me. Do you hear it? Listen to us, amazing.