them

  Because she’s going to die soon, Maureen thought.

  “Because she was Howard’s mother, you know,” Loretta said lamely.

  “Yeah, I know. Like I told you, my own ma had the same problem. For thirty years.”

  “Your mother must have been a saint.”

  “Yeah, she was sort of a saint, now I think about it. All us kids think she was real good. I wish I hadn’t given her so much trouble—”

  “Trouble! Jesus Christ, there’s nobody that doesn’t have trouble.”

  Loretta fixed her eyes on Maureen. She was beginning to look at Maureen in a certain way now, seriously and thoughtfully. This had begun a few months back, when Maureen had turned fourteen. “Fourteen years old! My God!” Loretta had said, and Maureen had been uneasy at her words.

  “Yeah, that’s a fact. That’s a sure thing,” Ethel said.

  “In the front room I got trouble, when Howard was alive I had trouble, back living with my father I had trouble—one thing after another, all my life. But I don’t let it get me down.”

  “You sure don’t. You look real good, Loretta.”

  “Oh, the hell with that,” Loretta said, pleased, brushing this compliment away with a wave of her hand. “I’m just not going to let them get me down. The guy came about the water meter and said somebody broke it, some kids. I said, well that ain’t my fault. He said it hadn’t better be broke again. I said, go next door, it’s their water meter too, ain’t it? I tell you, Ethel, every half-assed bastard comes down the street winds up here trying to give me a hard time. He said, are you Mrs. Howard Wendall and ain’t this Labrosse Street? I told him have a look at the street sign if he could read. I told him none of my kids broke that meter and he could go to hell if he thought I’d pay for it.”

  “Yeah, they always try to push you around. They got a badge or something and come in a truck, think they can push you around.”

  “I’m telling you nobody is going to push me around. Just because I’m a widow. Now, this one cop, this Italian what’s-his-name, he gives Jules a hard time and for no reason whatsoever. What’s his name, Reeny?”

  “Joe Mattuizzo.”

  “Yeah, him. His kid brother used to be a friend of Jules. He picked Jules up in the squad car last week, or two weeks ago, and Jules was doing nothing, not one thing. Him and the other cop searched him. They said they were cleaning up the street and looking for kids with knives or dope. Jules don’t have even a knife, what the hell would he want a knife for? Anyway they had to let him go. When I saw that bastard the next day, hanging around by Vernor, I told him, go feel up some nigger and leave my kid alone! He tried to act real polite but I told him he’d be sorry if he bothered my kids, to remember that.”

  “He wasn’t the one, about Betty?”

  “No, that was some old cop, that wasn’t a bad old guy,” Loretta said. Her face took on a slightly irritated look, and Maureen knew that Ethel had done wrong to bring up this subject. “No, he was nice. He understood. He just brought her home and talked to me. I gave him some coffee. He was a real gentleman and not like that bastard Mattuizzo or whatever the hell his name is.”

  Betty had been brought home by the police one day, caught with a gang of kids who were breaking into cars parked near Tiger Stadium. It had been the afternoon of a baseball game and all the parking lots and even the front and side yards of private homes had been filled with cars. No charges had been made against her. Loretta had wept about it for an evening and had finally slapped Betty around, and that was the end of it. It hadn’t been mentioned again.

  “But I’m telling you they ain’t going to get me down,” Loretta said angrily. “There’s not enough bastards in this city to get me down for long.”

  The one job Maureen’s grandmother was supposed to do was the ironing; that had been her own idea. While Loretta was gone during the day she was supposed to iron, sitting out in the kitchen with the ironing board stretched between two chairs so that she could reach it. On the kitchen counter was a radio that played continuously, little fifteen-minute stories. But she usually felt sick, and so Maureen did it for her, giving in, feeling the surface of her skin rise in tiny prickles at being so weak. When Loretta came home from work she would say, “Oh, I see you got the ironing done, Ma, thank you,” but her grandmother never spoke up to say that Maureen had done the work.

  “I hate her! I wish she’d go away,” Maureen whispered to Betty.

  “They should come and take her away and throw away the key,” Betty said.

  Part of Loretta’s new life was a certain fast rollicking blindness; she did not seem to see what was going on. She was in a hurry. She came in the house and changed her clothes, she went down to the drugstore, she went shopping just before the grocery store closed, she went out to the movies with Ethel or other “girls” who worked at the beauty parlor, she went bowling with them, she was always in a hurry and seemed to have a big-sister’s mocking strength. Toward Grandma Wendall she was ludicrously formal. She said, “Reeny is going to do the kitchen and the bathroom this morning, Ma, and we would both appreciate it very much if you didn’t walk on the floor. So if you want to go to the bathroom maybe you could go now. I’ll help you in.”

  She appeared in the kitchen in her slip, the odor of sweat and perfume about her, the straps of her slip fixed with safety pins and its skirt tight about her thighs so that you could see where her stockings were fastened. She often hummed to herself. When she complained about her low pay at the La Marvel it was not real serious complaining but a kind of song, another kind of humming. When Maureen tried to explain things to her, why she needed a new skirt or fifteen cents for the Red Cross Drive at school, Loretta often didn’t hear her. Or she said, “Blah-blah-blah.” She developed a habit of standing with her hands at her hips, her mouth fixed in a patient, disbelieving smile. Perhaps she listened to the wild stories of the other beauty-parlor operators with that same smile. Perhaps she listened to the wild stories of her customers with that smile. Sometimes when she came home late, having been out at a movie or bowling or maybe at a bar, she’d wake Maureen and Betty and give them a bag of pretzels! Other times she woke them up to complain about something. Why was the house so dirty? Why couldn’t that big dope Maureen keep things cleaner? She was going to turn Betty over to the reformatory, the girls’ jail, yes, she was—and Betty, with her wise, crinkled eyes and her tough skin, would watch her mother with that exact disbelieving smile, her mother’s smile. Sometimes Loretta sailed into the house with her hair newly done and her face all fixed up, an almost-pretty woman with a slightly sullen, perplexed forehead, and announced that she was going out for dinner and would Maureen please take over and try not to leave the place a mess.

  The more Loretta was away, the more powerful Grandma Wendall became. Maureen had to run down to the drugstore for her. She had to telephone the clinic to report her grandmother’s new symptoms. She had to go next door to tell Flora Stonewall that her grandmother would like to borrow some cocoa to make hot chocolate. If she went outside to get away, just hanging around the front veranda with a girl friend, her grandmother lay in the living-room and called, “Maureen! Maureen!” in a voice of pain. In the summer she played parcheesi with a girl in the neighborhood and the games were always interrupted. Under her breath she murmured, “Oh, hell,” as she ran back into the house, thinking, What next? What’s she want now? And it was always something surprising, something she would not have imagined.

  One morning after Loretta left for work Grandma Wendall began talking about her. “You know she’s running around with every man she can get,” the old woman said. Betty snickered and shoved her chair back from the table. “Oh, yes she is! You think your grandmother is lying? Making things up? I sit in this house and I don’t go out but I know everything that’s going on. I know everything. I can look right out the window, through the side of the window, through the side of the shade, and nobody knows I can see what’s going on but I can
. I know all about that little girl friend of yours, Maureen—that girl with the bad skin and the oily hair, her. I know all about her. And I can hear you talking. I can hear everything you say.”

  Maureen looked away.

  “She’s just making it up,” Betty said.

  “I can hear everything. I can see everything. And when your ma comes home it ain’t alone. I see them out front on the street, in the car—I know, I’m watching. She thinks I fall asleep in here with the television on but I’m not asleep. I know just when she comes in and I know everything about her. She doesn’t fool me—”

  “You’re crazy,” Betty said.

  “Don’t you talk like that to me, you little jailbird!”

  “I’m not no jailbird,” Betty said in a whine. “I never got arrested once! Don’t you call me that!”

  “I can hear everything they say. Oh, your ma says all kinds of things, she’s got no shame. She tells them men anything they want to hear. I wouldn’t tell you girls what it is. She talks about meeting them the next night, she makes promises—them men are probably married and just running around with her for the hell of it, to see what they can get out of her, and she’s so dumb she thinks they’d marry her. Well, nobody’s going to marry her, with her hair all bleached like a bone. She looks just like one of them roosters with the blond feathers on top.”

  “I think Ma looks nice,” Maureen said.

  “I do too,” said Betty.

  Their grandmother pushed herself up from the table. She was stooped over but still fairly tall; what had been muscles hung in folds from her arms, visible through the overlarge armholes of her cotton dress. There was an odor of unwashed flesh about her. Really, she was a very dirty woman; she did not like to wash. She was so hawkish—with her sharp eyes and mouth that Loretta did not dare to mention it.

  “You just like to talk back, you two. One with a long face and the other a jailbird—”

  “Betty was never in jail,” Maureen said.

  “I never even got arrested,” Betty said again.

  “You will,” the old woman said.

  “I don’t care if I do! I can take care of myself. I ain’t no crazy old bag,” Betty said. She wore blue jeans and a boy’s shirt and she was barefoot. She and her grandmother stared at each other, nearly the same height. Betty snickered like a boy.

  “One of you two help me now—I got to go in the bathroom.”

  Maureen went obediently to her grandmother and helped her walk. The old lady leaned upon her. She said, “You wouldn’t stand around telling your grandmother to go to hell if your father was still alive. You’d see what was what then. Or if your mother didn’t run around with every man she could find, anything in pants—”

  “Shut up,” Betty said.

  “—if she didn’t stay out all hours of the night running around in cars and getting drunk!”

  Maureen went to open the bathroom door, but Betty got there before her. She slammed the door to and held onto the knob. “Don’t let the old bag in! You’re always letting her boss you around!”

  “Betty!”

  “Let her go in her pants! She’s all dirty anyway, the old bag, the old bitch! Or let her go out in the yard like the dogs, shove her out here, here!” Betty opened the back door wide. She was shouting. “Come on! Shove her out the back door! She ain’t no better than a dog! Come on, Maureen! Let go of her!”

  “Betty, are you crazy?”

  “I had enough, I ain’t taking any more! She ain’t going to push me around, let me tell you! This door is standing wide open and she can climb right down the steps here and do her business in the back yard, she thinks she’s so smart. Come on! Come on!”

  While their grandmother cried out, Maureen and Betty struggled over her. Betty seized the old woman’s wrist and began yanking her toward the door. Maureen pulled her back. She was amazed and yet there was something funny about it, Betty’s anger and her white-rimmed eyes and her grandmother’s sudden weakness. The old woman was really weak. She had no strength. Betty yanked her forward and Maureen had to let go. “Now go outside! Go on! You do what I tell you ’cause I am now your boss!” Betty screamed. When the old lady grabbed hold of the door frame, Betty raised her foot and brought her knee back, like a man, and gave her a hard solid kick right in the small of the back.

  The old woman fell forward onto the top of the back steps, then over the steps and down a few yards to the ground.

  They looked down at her. She lay writhing in silence.

  “Come on, get up! You ain’t hurt!” Betty screamed.

  The old woman’s silence terrified them. Maureen could not move.

  “She’s just pretending, she fell on purpose! You saw her fall on purpose!” Betty said. “I ain’t taking nothing more from her or from nobody! Nobody is going to push me around! Let her lay there and die! Let her! You saw yourself she fell on purpose to get me put in jail! You saw it!”

  13

  That September, Maureen was elected secretary for her homeroom. During homeroom meetings she had to sit at the table at the front of the big room, beside the president. She had to take careful notes. In her slanted tiny handwriting she took everything down, anxious not to miss anything; she sat hunched over, writing, while the boy who was president, in a frightened, faltering voice, tried to conduct meetings, and Sister Mary Paul, their homeroom teacher, looked sternly around the room to see that nothing was going on.

  Sometimes things did go on, not during meetings but outside or in the corridors—Maureen tried not to know about them. In the yard at noon hour boys said certain things to girls—it was better not to hear.

  After school, on the long walk home, she and another girl, Carol—a kind of friend—were careful which way they walked. Passing by an old warehouse one afternoon Maureen had seen an old man waving to her, and she’d known enough to stay away, to hurry away. Some of the girls told wild stories. Carol’s mother told wild stories. Maureen tried not to listen, her face burning, everything in her confused.

  Carol’s mother trapped her and Carol sometimes and made them listen. Everything about her was strange: greasy, mussed hair, already gray, a slovenly, smelly body, a shiny, hard-looking face. She told Maureen and Carol about certain things, talking rapidly and angrily, without looking at them; Carol would stand in an agony of embarrassment, a heavy-set, worried, plain girl in a soiled school uniform of blue jumper and white blouse; Maureen, a little more polite, would nod yes, yes, to Carol’s mother’s warnings about how girls should never go into cellars or dark places, never sit on toilet seats in public places, or look at men on the street, or hang around anywhere, or wash their hair during that time of the month—or else they would get very sick and everyone would know why—and did they know how easy it was to get pregnant and have a baby?

  Maureen was afraid of Carol’s mother, yet she did not try to back away; she remained polite and listening while Carol shifted her weight from foot to foot, ready to cry. Around school they said that Carol’s mother was crazy. Carol herself never talked about it. Maureen felt a dizzy, dangerous sensation, unable to move away as the woman came closer to her, always talking, muttering warnings, warnings; it was clear that this woman knew everything about life that was ugly and this knowledge obsessed her. It weighed her down. It seemed to be bulging out of her, making her talk so fast. Knowing such things had made her sick. Once she put her hand on the back of Maureen’s neck and said angrily, “That brother of yours, that smart-aleck kid? Where’d he get that car? How old is he? He thinks he’s pretty good, eh? I saw him with a woman the other day right out on Michigan, walking along. A woman. Who is that woman? Does your mother know what’s going on? Or can’t she handle him?”

  Maureen stammered, “I don’t know…anything about it.”

  Every Friday, Sister Mary Paul’s homeroom had a “meeting.” At this time Maureen became the “secretary,” and rose shyly from her desk to come to the front of the room
. She was very proud of her job. The rest of the week was confusing, and on her way home anything might happen and at home anything might happen, but being a secretary, having a special job, was safe. And she had the idea that this would give her experience so that she could become a secretary after high school. Her mother had liked that idea. She would get a job and make money and live by herself.

  At the start of the meeting the president would ask her to read the minutes of the previous meeting. She would read them slowly and carefully. The secretary’s official notebook was a plain one with a blue cover and lined pages with wide margins. On the front was a sticker that said Room 202.SECRETARY’S MINUTES. Sister Mary Paul, a massive woman in her fifties, taught Maureen exactly how to take down the notes. It was an important responsibility, being homeroom secretary. Sister, sitting at her desk with her eyes closed, told Maureen what to do, very serious, nodding as she spoke. First of all, no ballpoint pen. A fountain pen only. Dark-blue ink only, not light blue ink or black ink. That was important. Every line had to be blotted carefully. The blotter should be clean. The minutes had to be written out on an ordinary piece of paper, handed in on Monday morning to Sister Mary Paul for checking, then copied with great care into the blue book. Each word had to be written slowly and carefully. No word could be crossed out: if a mistake was made it would have to be erased. And it was difficult to erase dark-blue ink.