In her mind, she wanders the rooms of the little house, seeing all the wonders there. How many people would think she was absolutely crazy for not relocating immediately? But she is not those people; she is her odd self. The kiln has been fired; she is a person persnickety about keeping her house clean but not above spitting on her desk to rub out a coffee stain; she will never be an athlete or a mathematician or a skinny person or someone whose heart isn't snagged by the sight of fireflies on a summer night and the lilting cadence of a few good lines of poetry.
Once, when Helen was ten years old, she was sitting on the front porch with her grandmother; she had been staying at her grandparents' farm in Wisconsin while her parents went for a weekend out of town. She had been telling her grandmother all the things she intended to do, once she was finally grown. Her grandmother encouraged her imagination; she saved all the stories and poems Helen wrote. She died before Helen's first book was published, and Helen dedicated it to her memory. But on that summer night, the sky dramatic with the smoky pastels of sunset, she told her grandmother she would live in Paris. Fly an airplane, lead a safari. Act in a movie. Sleep in a bed like an eagle's nest, amid the branches of a great tree. Rescue orphans and zoo animals.
Her grandmother had rocked and listened. Then she'd said, “I was thinking you could help Grandpa milk the cows tomorrow, and then we could pick blueberries and make a pie.” Helen stood and stretched. All the fantasies she'd been considering seemed to fall from her lap, and at first she felt sorry about that. But then she was relieved that she could stay with the familiar, internal boundaries she had never really chafed against. Even then, she was a girl who would take the chair closest to the door, and then sit there every time.
sixteen
THE ROOM THAT HAS GREAT MEANING TO ME IS MY KITCHEN, DONETTA Johnson reads. It has great meaning because it brings me memories. Like of my mother and my grandmother and my husband James who liked to make coleslaw. Just about every night he would eat coleslaw if you let him and everyone said it was so good but his recipe died with him. The only thing is I know it did have barbecue sauce in it. This room also has great meaning to me because it's where my children used to like to sit after school and have some snacks and do their homework. And now they are grown and flown away. But when I am in the kitchen, seems like they are too. I can be washing dishes and it is almost like I can feel them behind me. Hear them, even. Sometimes when I eat dinner, I set an extra place for one of them. And so you see all these people I love are still with me when I am in my kitchen and that is why it has great meaning to me.
Donetta turns her paper over. “I don't know if that's what you meant, 'bout writing 'bout a room,” she says. “I don't know if I did it quite right.”
“You did it very well,” Helen says. “I really liked it when you talked about all those other people being with you even when you were alone.” She looks around the room. “What about the rest of you? What did you like?”
Jeff Daley says, “I liked the clear style, that you just told it like it is, but you really made us see more than was on the page. And feel it, too.”
The other students, emboldened as usual by hearing the first comments, begin to offer their opinions. Ella Parsons says she wants to taste that coleslaw; Henry Borman wonders if it wouldn't be a good idea to describe the room: the table and chairs, what's on the walls; Hector Rivera says she might say what her husband did for a living.
Helen listens, but not well enough: she's distracted by thoughts of the trip she and Tessa took to San Francisco. She can't stop thinking about the house. Last night, she dreamed she was there, standing out in the front yard, the sunlight bright around her. She was waving at two people in a red car who were pulling into the driveway. She was shouting “Welcome home!” but one of the people in the car was her.
“You should make this a short story,” Billy Armstrong tells Donetta. He is sitting with his chair tipped back on two legs, his arms crossed in a way that can only be read as defiant. His delivery is as scary as his countenance; what he says sounds less like suggestion than like diktat. But just as Helen is about to defend Donetta against his brashness, Donetta smiles and says, “Oh, I like that idea! I'm going to do that! Can I do that?”
“Of course,” Helen says, and begrudgingly smiles at Billy. “Okay, only two of you left. Who wants to go next?” When no one answers, Helen says, “How about you, Hector?”
Hector's face brightens and he straightens in his chair. She finds it dear that her students won't volunteer to read, but then are so pleased when they're asked to. There are ways in which people never grow up, and Helen feels grateful for that.
Hector reads loudly, overmodulating a bit, like a Latino Ted Baxter reading the news. His piece is uninspiring, a rather monotonous page about how his study is his favorite room, and it mostly focuses on a shelf holding his awards.
“Aw, man, what's the dark side of you?” Billy asks, and Helen rushes to say, “What did you like about the piece, Billy?”
“Nothing.”
“Well, have you any specific suggestions?”
“All's it is, is a love poem to himself. I don't see the place. We're supposed to see the place.”
“So what you would like, perhaps, is a description of the furniture, the desk, maybe the pictures on the desk?”
Billy shrugs. “Something. Christ.”
“I liked the way your piece told us a lot about you,” Jeff says. “I feel like you're a confident and happy man.”
“I am!” Hector says, and laughs.
“I guess I would like to know more about how you got that way,” Jeff says.
Hector's forehead wrinkles. “From telling about my favorite room?”
A silence falls, and Helen asks, “Well, what do we think? How might he do that?”
“He could wheel in his chair!” Ella says.
“Wheel in his chair,” Helen says. She has no idea what Ella means.
“Yes, wheel around and around like Mr. McManus, he wheels around and around because he is always happy and excited and he tells everyone hi all the time even if he just saw them. But he drools.”
“Okay,” Helen says. “Anyone else have any ideas?”
Claudia Evans says, “You might say something about how you felt when you got the award; it might have suggested some memory from your past.”
“It did!” Hector says, and starts taking notes. “I used to pretend a pop bottle was an Academy Award. I sprayed it gold, and I kept it in my room under my bed and every night I would take it out and sleep with it.”
“Make it a short story,” Billy says, and pushes his chair back from the table. “I gotta go early today.”
Helen looks at her watch; only ten minutes left. “Before you go, Billy, let me give the assignment for next week. I'd like you to write a page about a big surprise you once got that made you happy, but something else, too: sad, shocked, maybe even angry.” They all stare at her blankly. “What I mean is, tell me about a time that you got a surprise that was … complicated.” Again, they only stare. Why doesn't she just say, “What if you got news that your dead husband had built you a house in California?” Or “I can't afford to go to a therapist, so why don't you all help me out?”
“Another option,” she says, “is for you to tell me about your first kiss.” Now their faces light up, and Helen has a pretty good idea what they'll write about.
Oh, it's terrible the way she's asking the group to help her rather than the other way around. She recalls, guiltily, a time when Tessa was three and was badly misbehaving. Helen lost patience and yelled at her, then grabbed her by the arm and spanked her, saying, You! Don't! Do! That! Tessa wailed at the top of her lungs, her pride hurt as much as her bottom. Helen stood there wide-eyed, her heart pounding, wanting to weep herself, wanting to fall to her knees and beg her daughter's forgiveness. Instead, she fled to her bedroom, closed the door, and sat at the edge of her bed, terrified at the way such strong emotion had suddenly overcome her. Where had it com
e from? It was too hard having children, she remembers thinking. It was too hard and too important and she would never do it right. Tessa deserved more than Helen could ever be.
And then she did start crying; she sat rocking at the edge of the bed, using the time-honored rhythm in a vain effort to comfort herself. She heard a little knock at the door. When she told Tessa to come in, her daughter walked over to her, put one hand on her knee, looked up into her face, and said, “Why are you crying?” Helen said she was crying because she felt bad about hitting Tessa. “I'm a bad mommy,” she said. Her daughter gravely assessed her, then said, “No, you're not. You're a good mommy.” And Helen, full to the bursting point, embraced her, and silently vowed never to behave in such a way again. Though surely she had, at one time or another. Had and, oh, does.
“My turn!” Ella says, after Billy has taken his leave. She smoothes wrinkles out of the page before her, a lined page from a yellow legal tablet, covered with loopy script, and in a loud voice begins to read:
My meaning is in the shower room at the home where sometimes I help wash the ladies in D ward. They can't do it because they are too far gone so we have to do it. They have purple spots and brown spots and their bosoms are all long and saggy like those balloons they make dogs out of. Their stomachs have big folds. They have it is like little piles of blue spaghetti on their legs. That is their veins. Sometimes they laugh in the shower but this one, Mrs. Lundgren, every time she has a shower she yells and tries to scratch and pinch you. She doesn't understand and so we have to tell her it is a shower it is a shower we are cleaning you up. But she yells and even sometimes she screams which you think you're going to get in trouble even though you are not doing anything wrong. Their hair gets flat like a drowned rat and then you have to comb it for them which they also can't do that and if you put a ribbon in oh boy they love it. We don't have enough ribbons for all of them but some of them do. It is only yarn anyway. Why the shower room is meaning to me is because it is always interesting to see someone naked and I like it more than the activities room which I have been there too long. And also I like the shower room because I like when they do things I do too. The supervisor always tells us, they are not so different from you and me, you know. If you learn that, you can learn compaction, and that will make you a better health care worker. Which I am.
Ella looks up expectantly and Helen wonders how to temper what she wants to say, which is that she actually loves this piece, for its bright energy.
Henry Borman is the first to comment: “Now there's some honest writing!”
“You know, talk about see,” Donetta says. “I can see those ladies as clear as can be. And when they be pinching you—whooee! You are one patient person!”
“Yeah!” Ella says.
Helen looks at her watch. “I'm awfully sorry, but we're out of time. Perhaps we can talk more about this next time.”
“Wait!” Ella says. “I have to tell you one single thing: I learned to speak French!” She rattles off a bunch of gibberish that might be some language somewhere, but is most certainly not French. The room is silent, and then Donetta says, “You said that very well! You know, I always wanted to learn French.” She and Ella walk out together, chatting like longtime girlfriends, and Helen sits still at the table, thinking. A friend of hers—Anne Jensen, as it happens—once described such acts of kindness as hold knots on life's climbing rope, and Helen thinks it's true.
Not long ago, she was waiting in line at the post office, irritated at how long it was taking. Finally, there was just one old man ahead of her, a gentleman with a walker. He made his laborious way to the clerk and held up a window envelope, a bill being paid. He said, “I've got a little problem here. As you can see, the paper inside the envelope has moved up and now you can't read the address where it's going.” The clerk took the envelope from the man and examined it carefully, front and back. Then he said, “Hmm. You know what might help?”
The old man stood watching intently.
The clerk tapped the envelope sharply on the desk and the paper fell into place.
“Oh,” the old man said. “I see. Well, thank you.”
“Good to see you, Charlie,” the clerk said. And then, after he'd given the old man plenty of time to get out of the way of the next customer, he called, “Next?” Helen came forward, mailed her package, and then headed home. A simple thing. But the world she stepped out into was so different from what it had been before.
seventeen
“WOW,” MIDGE SAYS. “THAT HOUSE SOUNDS LITERALLY INCREDIBLE. I know it was important for you to go alone, but now I'm kind of sorry I didn't go with you.”
“Tessa took pictures. I'll ask her to email them to you.”
“You have a lot to think about, huh?” Midge asks. There is the sound of the phone dropping and then she hears Midge saying, “Ow! Ow! Damnit!” She comes back to the phone, saying, “I dropped the iron. On my foot. I'll call you back.”
Helen gets back to surveying her pantry. She thinks she has enough ingredients to make a cake from scratch. Tessa's coming over for dinner, and, unbeknownst to her, Helen has invited Jeff Daley to come, too. Jeff doesn't know Tessa is coming, either. No need to push things. She looks at her watch. Three more hours. Maybe she'll get her hair done. She calls to make an appointment with her stylist, who is Tessa's age. And married. With a child.
Helen has heard plenty of stories from people who fell in love at first sight. This would not be the case for her daughter and Jeff Daley. They sit stiff-backed, forcing inane chatter over a mostly uneaten dessert (triple chocolate cake!), while Tessa's eyeballs seem to grow ever closer to leaping out of her head. It is all Helen can do not to push herself away from the table and say, “Fine! It didn't work! Let's all just stop, now!” But of course one does not do such a thing under circumstances such as these. One finishes one's meal and, after what can be seen as a polite interval, takes one's leave. That, at least, is what Jeff does. He compliments Helen on the dinner, and tells Tessa it was nice to meet her. Tessa grunts. Then he wraps his scarf around his neck, puts on his jacket, and goes out into the night. Helen stands at the door, watching him walk away, thinking, But look at all they have in common! He doesn't zip his coat either!
Tessa's response to what Helen thought was a clever plan is to stomp into the living room, fling herself onto the sofa, cross her arms tightly over her chest, and say, “Mom. Mom. Mom. What were you thinking?”
Helen comes to sit beside her daughter. When Tessa gets like this, she looks like she did as a toddler. Helen starts to share this; then, in an uncharacteristic fit of discretion, does not. She speaks carefully, slowly. “I was thinking I would invite a lonely person to dinner, who happens to be your age. I thought I'd invite you, too. End of story.”
“Bullshit.”
“Pardon me?”
“Bullshit, Mom!”
“Well, Tessa, since you seem to be so acutely aware of what's really in my head, why don't you share my real motivation with me?”
Tessa sighs. “You are trying to find me a boyfriend here so I won't go to California.”
Damnit. Helen makes her face go neutral. “No.” She says the word in a long, drawn out way that makes it sound almost like a question: Noooooooo?
“I'm going home,” Tessa says, and heads to the closet for her coat.
“Where are you going?” Helen asks anyway, and her daughter only looks over her shoulder at her, sparing her the eye roll she deserves.
“Do you want to watch a movie?” Helen had walked over to the library to check out Midnight Cowboy, one of the classic movies that Tessa has not yet seen, but wants to. Helen figured after dinner, they'd talk about how wonderful Jeff was (though Helen was going to be very careful not to be too enthusiastic) and then watch the movie.
“Yeah, I really feel like watching a movie now.”
Well, two for two. Helen gets up off the sofa and goes over to the coat closet. “What,” she says. “What did I do that was so awful?”
&n
bsp; “You set me up for such humiliation!”
“What's humiliating about meeting a nice person? Suppose one of your friends had introduced him to you!”
“Then it would have been one of my friends who introduced him to me.”
“Meaning what?”
“We need to not talk about this anymore,” Tessa says. “I'm not going to talk about this. You won't listen, anyway.” She goes out the door, closing it quietly behind her. Helen is left with the dirty dishes, the foiled plans, the unwatched movie, the knowledge that she really must stop this. She knows it. She really must stop.
She sits at the kitchen table, feeling a thin stream of cold air coming in from under the back door. It's freezing outside. She goes out onto the front porch and calls to Tessa, who is halfway down the block.
Tessa turns around. What, her body is saying, though she says nothing.
“Do you want a ride to the el?”
“No, thanks,” Tessa says. “I want to walk.”
“Leftovers?” Helen asks, though thank God this is too quiet for Tessa to hear. She waves; Tessa waves back, and there, that will have to do.