All the Ugly and Wonderful Things

  My mother got out of the car and ran across the library parking lot. She looked so ferocious, loping toward me in her nightgown and coat, that I expected a blow. Punishment. Instead, she jerked me into her arms and pressed me to her chest.

  After that, I had to tell everything. About the late night wandering. Not the stars. That was still my secret. Mom screamed and Dad yelled.

  “I know you mean well, Brenda. You want to help her. I get that. But when her behavior starts endangering our children, it’s time to choose. We can’t keep her. She’s out of control.”

  The police came to make a report, to get a picture, to put out a bulletin. The neighbors turned out to look for Wavy, but at dawn she returned on her own.

  I woke to more yelling and screaming. That afternoon, Grandma came to get Wavy.

  “It’s a horrible idea. A stupid idea,” Mom said. I marveled that she could talk to Grandma like that. It didn’t seem possible to get away with saying something like that to your mother. “You can’t keep an eye on her all the time. You can’t stay up all night.”

  “What would be the point? I suppose she will do a little wandering. From what I remember, you and Val did some wandering when you were kids.”

  “That was different. We were teenagers and it was a safer time.”

  “Pfft,” Grandma said.

  “Think of your health, Helen,” Dad said.

  “You haven’t been as strong since the chemo, Mom.”

  Grandma blew out a big puff of air, the same way she used to exhale cigarette smoke, and shook her head. “Tell me your solution. Foster care? Send her to live with strangers?”

  “We’ll keep her,” Mom said.

  “No, we won’t.” Dad stood up and blocked my view, so I’ll never know what look passed between him and Mom, but when he went to the counter to pour himself more coffee, Mom nodded.

  “She might as well come home with me today,” Grandma said.

  I sat on Wavy’s bed while Grandma packed her suitcase. There wasn’t much to pack. A dozen dresses that had survived the Great Unraveling. Some socks and underwear. The hairbrush that she sometimes let me run through her silky, fine hair. The last thing into the suitcase was Dust Bunny, the baby doll.

  Grandma put it in the suitcase. Wavy took it out. Mom put it in. Wavy took it out. It was the only toy Wavy had. “Nothing belongs to you,” she told me once when Leslie and I fought over a favorite Barbie that later disappeared.

  Wavy took Dust Bunny out of the suitcase and handed it to me. A gift? Then it was time for her to go. Grandma hugged us all, while Wavy stood near the door. Mom tried to hug her, too, but she skittered away, slipping past my mother to hug me. Not close enough for our bodies to touch, she rested her hands on my shoulders, and sniffed my hair. When she released me, she ran out the front door.

  “You see how it is,” Mom said.

  “She’s her own girl. You were, too.” Grandma smiled and picked up Wavy’s bag.

  After Thanksgiving, I found the real gift Wavy had left me in the closet under the stairs. When Mom pulled out the boxes of Christmas decorations, I crawled in to sweep up loose tinsel and a broken ornament. Tucked in the very back was the stolen book: Salome.

  2

  GRANDMA

  October 1975

  Irv and I raised one daughter who turned out fine. Brenda married a good man, had nice kids, kept a clean house, and worked hard. Valerie, our youngest, I don’t know what happened.

  I suppose nowadays, she would be diagnosed with something, but at the time, we lived with her behavior. For example, her germ problem. There was a time when she washed her hands a hundred times a day, until the skin cracked and bled. I made her wear gloves to help her feel clean. Two dozen pairs of white gloves that I washed and ironed every day.

  Then her junior year in high school, she got pregnant and ran away with Liam Quinn. We didn’t like him, but we’d never tried to keep her away from him. He was a troublemaker and I didn’t feel he treated Valerie right. The sort of boy who thinks he’s the center of the universe.

  Later I found out he was worse than just a selfish boy. I found out he’d gotten her mixed up with the sorts of things that put her in prison. As for that whole mess, it wearied my heart. I hoped Brenda wouldn’t hate me when she found out how much of Irv’s pension I cashed out to pay for Valerie’s lawyers. I’d hoped to do college money for Amy and Leslie, but there was nothing left for that.

  The first day I took Wavonna home with me, she didn’t speak. To be honest, she didn’t talk for weeks. That’s harder on your nerves than you might think, having another person in the room who won’t speak. It turned me into a real chatterbox. I narrated everything I did, the way I had for Irv when he got bad at the end.

  The first night, Wavonna didn’t eat dinner. The next morning, no breakfast. By lunch the next day, I started to get a taste of why Brenda looked so broken. Three days of worrying, before I had the sense to count things in the fridge and cupboard to tell what she was eating. At bedtime, I had six cheese slices in cellophane, nine apricots in the crisper, thirteen saltines in the open tube. In the morning, only five cheese slices, seven apricots, ten saltines. Not enough to keep a mouse alive, but she managed on it.

  The second day, I set out some new toys I’d bought her on the coffee table in the den. It had out-of-fashion pine paneling and shag carpet, but we’d used it as our family room when Irv was alive, so it was full of mostly happy memories. I spent the day piecing a quilt for a church fundraiser and watching the TV. Wavonna sat on the sofa, staring at the wall or the TV or nothing. The girl had a hundred-yard stare like Irv had when he came back from the war. Once she got up, and I thought, Finally, she’s bored. She’ll do something. Play with her toys.

  She went to the powder room. The toilet flushed and the sink ran. Back she came to the couch. The Barbie, the stuffed elephant, and the Lincoln Logs stayed in their packages and eventually they disappeared.

  After two weeks, I did what I should have done first. I bought some flash cards—letters, colors, shapes, numbers—the kind of thing they use in kindergarten classes. The next morning, I made her a nice bowl of oatmeal and went out of the kitchen for a good fifteen minutes. I spent the time calling the gals in my bridge club to tell them I wasn’t coming that afternoon. When I went back to the kitchen, sure enough, there was less oatmeal. I cleared the table and got out the alphabet cards.

  “A is for Apple.” I knew she wasn’t going to parrot back what I said, but at least she’d be seeing and hearing them.

  I went through the whole deck that way. When I finished, Wavonna walked over to the counter and got the grocery pad. Some claptrap thing Irv built that held a roll of adding machine tape and had a hole drilled in it for a golf pencil. Wavonna rolled out some paper and started writing the alphabet. You could’ve knocked me over with a feather.

  I reached over and put my finger on the A. “Do you know how to say that one?”

  Wavonna considered my finger for a second before she said, “A.”

  “What about this one?”

  “B.”

  “This one.”

  She sighed and said, “Abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz.” Silly Grandma.

  Come Monday, I enrolled her for school.

  The first day, after I dropped her off at school, I took a two-hour nap. The second day, I went for some much-needed beautification. Old women need sprucing up and my hair was starting to look bedraggled. The third day, I don’t remember what I did, but on the fourth day I went to bridge club. I had a martini and a lovely raucous time with the gals. They were expecting me to tell them all about Wavonna, and I pretended to be the proud grandma. Oh, she has the finest, baby-down blond hair. She already knows her ABCs. Nothing really about her.

  I held Leslie in my arms after she was born. Same with Amy. They were my granddaughters, my babies. I flashed their pictures and bragged on every little accomplishment.

  Wavonna, I’d never seen her until Brenda got custody of her. I know you?
??re supposed to love the hard ones more, but most of what I felt was pity. Her wispy hair and scrawny shoulders were so sad, and then those empty looks. Leaving bridge club, though, I felt like it was going to be okay. I would learn to love Wavonna the way I loved Leslie and Amy. She would learn to love me.

  When I got to the school, Wavonna didn’t come out. I waited for a few minutes before I went into the front office, where I was met by the school principal and Mrs. Berry, Wavonna’s teacher. I’d handed Wavonna off to her on the first day in the school office. She was a friendly woman with a big smile, but that day she was a hysterical, sobbing mess.

  Wavonna had run away from school.

  I cried, but mostly I remember thinking, This is how it started with Valerie. Of course, skipping school didn’t start with Valerie until she was in high school, but all the same I had a sinking feeling I had failed.

  At eight o’clock, I went home and waited to hear from the police. I held the phone on my lap as I soaked my feet. I’d walked I didn’t know how many blocks, knocking on doors all around the school. I needed to call Brenda, but I couldn’t bear the thought of saying, You were right. I can’t handle her.

  My doorbell rang and I didn’t know what to feel. Hopeful. Terrified. With my feet wet, I went to the door. Wavonna stood on the porch alone, shivering. Once she was in the house, I locked the door, like that would keep her from escaping.

  “You scared me so much! What if something had happened to you?” I knew yelling wasn’t the best way to communicate with her, but I couldn’t help myself. “Never, never do that again! Do you understand me?”

  She nodded, but I knew that nod from Valerie. It meant, “I understand you, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to do what you say.”

  After I called the police to tell them Wavonna was home, I made her some soup and counted out a pile of crackers. While I cried in the bathroom, she ate a few spoonfuls and two saltines. I couldn’t go on like that, but I couldn’t let her go into foster care. Would anyone else eye the level of soup in her bowl as carefully as I did? Would a stranger count crackers to make sure my granddaughter was eating?

  I cleared the table and brewed some decaf. When I was sure I was calm, I said, “Wavonna, will you please come into the kitchen and talk to Grandma?”

  She didn’t sit down, but she stood waiting for me to talk.

  “If you run away from school, they’re going to take you away from me and make you live with strangers. I don’t want that to happen. I want you to stay here with Grandma.”

  She didn’t react to that, but I didn’t expect her to. I could have had a French poodle dancing the tango with a monkey on my head and she wouldn’t have reacted.

  “Will you tell me what happened at school? Why did you run away? If you’ll tell me, I’ll try to make sure it doesn’t happen again.”

  It was like with the alphabet. She had to prepare herself, but after a moment, she said, “The loud lady touches me.”

  My stomach almost gave up the coffee I’d drunk. That sweet woman? I couldn’t imagine her doing something like that to a child. In my mind that’s what bad touching was.

  “Touches you?”

  She stretched her arms toward me, her hands curled into menacing claws, and then brought them back tightly to her chest.

  “She hugs you?” I said.

  A nod.

  “And you don’t like that?”

  She shook her head seriously. I was sick with relief, and with knowing how awful the world looked to Wavonna. Of course, she never hugged me, and whenever I touched her, she shrugged out from under my hand.

  The next day, we went to school, and I did what I should have done the first day. I walked her directly to class, planning to explain everything to Mrs. Berry.

  All that went out the window when I reached the classroom.

  In the center of the room sat three children in wheelchairs. I don’t mean to be cruel, but they were drooling vegetables. In one corner, a child flopped around on blue rubber floor mats. The school could paint the walls as bright a shade of yellow as they wanted and hang up all the pretty mobiles in the world, but it was a horrible place. I couldn’t imagine Wavonna spending five minutes there, let alone the four days I’d left her there.

  Mrs. Berry hurried over with a big smile and said, “Oh, Mrs. Morrison, what a relief! Wavonna, honey, you had us so worried.”

  That was the day I earned Wavonna’s trust. Mrs. Berry swooped toward us, clearly planning to deliver an enormous, smothering hug. I spread my feet and put out my arm to block her.

  “Mrs. Berry, we need to talk to someone about changing classes.” She made a wounded face as we backed away from her. I had nothing against the woman, but I was too old to beat around the bush.

  When I sat down with the school counselor, I took the same approach. I looked her square in the eye and said, “My granddaughter is not retarded.”

  “Mrs. Morrison, we don’t use words like that anymore. Our concern is that her speech problems are a sign of developmental delays.”

  “I don’t mean it to offend, but she’s not stupid. Look, here. Wavonna.”

  She didn’t look at me, but I knew she was listening.

  “Give me paper and a pencil.”

  The counselor slid a sheet of paper and a ballpoint pen across the desk. I scooted Wavonna’s chair closer and said, “Go ahead and show her. Otherwise you’ll have to stay in the class with the loud lady.”

  As soon as I mentioned the special-education teacher, Wavonna picked up the pen and put it to the paper. First, she wrote out her name, neat as can be. Below that, she wrote her alphabet: Aa Bb Cc, and on like that. Under that she put her numbers. Then she did something I didn’t even know she knew. She turned the paper over and wrote: Cassiopeia. Next to it, she drew five dots and connected them. Then seven more dots that she labeled Cepheus. She filled the paper up that way. The only ones I recognized were the Big and Little Dippers.

  The way the counselor’s jaw dropped down set me to giggling. I laughed right in that poor woman’s face. Laughed until I cried. Before Wavonna, I’d been feeling pretty good. My cancer was in remission, and I had myself a nice retirement planned, before Wavonna moved in. After everything I’d been through in the last month, I needed a good laugh.

  They put her in a regular classroom, but I told them right up front, “Don’t give her a nicey-nice teacher.” I spelled it out for them. Nobody could touch her. They couldn’t expect her to talk, but they shouldn’t assume she wasn’t listening and learning. I didn’t make requests and I didn’t apologize.

  Things weren’t perfect after that, but they got better.

  She lived with me for almost two years, and in all that time, she touched me twice. On what would have been Irv’s and my fortieth anniversary, I had a little wine and got maudlin. Wavonna touched my hand, my wedding ring. To comfort me, I think. The second time was right before Valerie got paroled, and I hired a lawyer to help her get custody of Wavonna and the baby she’d had while she was in prison.

  We drove down to Tulsa for Leslie’s birthday and had a fine old time: singing, wearing silly hats, and cheering as Leslie ripped open packages. After all the big hoopla, the three girls settled into the living room to play, while Brenda and I cleaned up.

  I couldn’t keep putting it off, so I sat down at the kitchen table and said, “I’ve been talking to Valerie’s lawyer about this transitional program she can get into.”

  “I didn’t know she still had a lawyer. Are you paying for that?”

  I didn’t answer. I wanted it not to be her business, but maybe it was.

  “Fine. So, Val’s lawyer thinks she can get into some program?” Brenda cut a second slice of birthday cake. Her weight dogged her for years, because she ate when she was upset.

  “It’s for women with children, to help her get back on her feet so she can take care of Donal and Wavonna.” I knew that would cause a ruckus and it did.

  “Are you serious, Mom? Do you really think Val can take
care of them? You know what Vonnie’s like. That’s Val’s parenting skills right there. A daughter who won’t speak, won’t eat, and sneaks out at night.”

  “She’s doing better.”

  “I know. You’re doing so good with her. I—” Brenda laid her hand on my arm, and I could see she really was sorry she’d lost her temper.

  “I want Wavonna to be with her mother.” I wanted to want that. I wanted things to be simple and they never were.

  “Do you really think that’s the best thing for her?”

  “Val’s been getting treatment. This program will put her in an apartment, where she’ll have a counselor. They’ll make sure she takes her medicine, and help her take care of the kids.”

  “Well, what do you need to do? Is there paperwork?”

  “I need you to go to her parole hearing and the custody hearing. You’re going to have to do it, Brenda.”

  “Why?”

  “Metastasized.” Wavonna had crept up so quietly neither of us noticed her until she spoke.

  “What does she mean?” Brenda said. “Mom?”

  “She must have overheard me talking with the doctor’s office. The cancer is back. It’s in my lungs and my liver. Three months they think, maybe less.”

  Now that we were talking about hard things, Leslie and Amy stopped playing Barbies and came to stand in the doorway next to Wavonna. I tried to will Brenda to be strong, but she started shaking and crying. Amy and Leslie cried, too. They were all crying, except Wavonna. She crossed the kitchen and reached out to me. For a second, she laid her hand on my chest, touched those fake foam boobs I wore in my bra.

  I loved her then, right as I was getting ready to leave her.

  3

  WAVY

  June 1977

  Aunt Brenda didn’t want me to stay with Grandma at the end.

  “Let Bill take her back to Tulsa. My friend Sheila is staying at the house to take care of the girls while I’m here,” Aunt Brenda said.

  “She’s going with you soon enough. Let her stay with me,” Grandma said. She held out her hand and I went to her, even though I wasn’t brave enough to touch her with Aunt Brenda there to see.