Anywhere But Here

  That day in the hospital was a court of law. Gram was already in for a stroke and then we’d had to tell her about Benny. And even under the drugs, she was fighting us. She wanted to go and see her Ben.

  Her arms pushed up, beating out of the blankets, and Adele was standing on one side, keeping her down. When I watched that I remembered years ago, opening the bathroom door and you were standing in the big clawfoot tub. It was the same thing—you were hitting, fighting to come out, and your mother stood pushing you down.

  In the hospital, Gram was yelling. “You let me alone. Get away you.” But from the drugs, her voice sounded different, real small and far away. “Get,” she said, as if she were spitting out the pit of something.

  “Mom, you’ve got to stay here,” Adele said.

  “I want to see him once more and I’m going to,” Gram was saying, but she really wasn’t all right. She bit her own lip so hard it bled. I was on the other side of the barred bed from Adele. I saw that bright blood trickling down her chin and I wiped it off with the hem of my dress.

  I think maybe what really hurt Adele was Gram didn’t seem the least bit interested to see the two of you. It had been years already since you’d been gone. That, I’m sure of it, was the drugs. She could only think of one thing at a time and that was, going to see him.

  You sat away from us all, in a chair in the corner. Your mom stood on the one side of the bed with a young doctor in those mint green clothes they wear. He kept fingering his stethoscope.

  I had the priest over by me. He was fingering his beads. But neither of them said anything, they let us fight over her.

  I wanted Gram to go. It was selfish, because I didn’t really know how sick she was either, but I wanted her to go, no matter what. I wanted Adele out of there, back in California. This was our life here. She’d left it.

  “She’s got to stay, Carol. She could have a stroke and DIE,” Adele said. Right there, over Gramma.

  Gramma started crying, fingering her sheet. “I am not going to die,” she said.

  Adele turned to the doctor. It was like an instinct in her, turning to men more than women, looking up, and to MDs more than ordinary men.

  The doctor dropped his hands from the stethoscope. He seemed reluctant to say. “We can give her another sedative, but it is a risk.”

  “Do you really want to go, Mom?” I said. Here I was leaning over and shouting loud as if she were a child. Her hearing was just fine. “You know, if you aren’t so good, you don’t have to go. Benny would understand.”

  “OF COURSE he would,” Adele interrupted, yelling. “In fact, he’d RATHER. He’d rather you not go.”

  “I want to go and I’m going,” she said. She sat up on the bed. “I told you. I want to see him.”

  I looked at my priest. He bent his head down so I could see the freckles on his balding head. He prayed.

  “Carol, I just don’t think she should go. It’s not going to help Benny anymore and it could, you know—”

  I just didn’t know. “I don’t know,” I said. “I just don’t know.”

  Your mother turned all of a sudden and looked at you. “What do you think, Ann?”

  We all looked at you then, in the corner. You were wearing scuffed-up cowboy boots, like they wore around here, and your legs crossed. That was the first time I’d noticed you’d grown up. Your legs were long and you moved your arms like someone definite.

  “Let her go,” you said. You recrossed your legs, put the other one on top. Your boot was worn down in the heel. “She should go.”

  “You really think so, Annie?” your mom asked.

  And you nodded.

  So she had a sedative and we held her, me on one side, Adele on the other. Just that walk from the station wagon to the back door of Umberhum’s, it seemed like a long ways. I parked as close as I could to the door. The sun was so bright she couldn’t look. We walked real careful but her face was confused, as if she thought her ankles were going in different directions, out of control.

  I’d driven by Umberhum’s Funeral Parlor a million times, but that day I felt like I owned it. Adele and I almost carried Gram in, she was so light, like nothing on our elbows, as if we were fooling, playing the Emperor’s New Clothes, and everyone stepped back, hushing, for no one who was there.

  Then her weight seemed to fall back into her in a heap from the sky when she knelt on the pew by the coffin. For the first time she seemed to me an old woman, the way she settled on that pew. She reached over and touched Benny’s hand. I was thinking how weak and helpless she looked, that we still had to get her up and back, and maybe Adele was right and this was a mistake. I couldn’t tell from her face if she knew anything that was going on. She stayed a long time before we realized she’d fallen asleep.

  But it wasn’t a mistake. She didn’t die, either.

  I didn’t like anything, anymore, for a long time and that’s why I had to go away. I saw the bad in everyone around me. As soon as she was well, my mother bored me. Her life seemed like a windup toy. She traced the same steps, through the same little rooms, bedroom, kitchen, bathroom, every day. She ate her meal off the same dish and then she washed it. And that’s all she talked about, what food she put on that same plate in that same kitchen and how much she paid for it.

  Hal was worse. Merry left, Tina was gone, they lived in a truck up out of town by the bay, with Merry’s new boyfriend. And Hal had a girl, that Patty, who I’d always liked, but he treated her like dirt, like nothing. I saw him hit her, plenty, he used to hold her jaw and slap her. And she didn’t even fight back. She just stood there and her bangs shook.

  There was nothing I did. I went into the store one day to balance the books. I had a cup of coffee from the Big Boy, I was just going to concentrate down in the darkness and do the numbers of the books. I wasn’t going to pay any attention.

  Then Hal walked in. “How’s Patty?” I said, trying to be nice.

  He shrugged. “I only like her because she goes down on me.”

  I shut the drawer in my desk that was open and got my keys out of my purse. I went out to the car and drove home. For a long time, the books didn’t get done.

  Adele always called, always asking for money. Once she said she had cancer. She sent Gram a Polaroid of herself opened up, in operation on the surgery table. I’m not sure why, but I knew right away she was lying. That made me so mad, she gets you down. It was the first thing Jimmy and I did together for a long time. We needed to find out for sure. She’d told us the hospital she’d been in and from them we found the doctor. He confirmed it to us: there was no cancer. My sister was a fine, healthy woman. Her operation had been purely cosmetic. He turned out to be a plastic surgeon. Apparently, sometime in college, your mother had silicone implants. One had shrunk and now she was having her breasts evened out.

  Well, we told Gram and, that once, Adele didn’t get her money.

  See, it was around that time I found the stone in me, that hardness I’d swallowed. I felt it, a cold dark, it pressed back against my fingertips. I didn’t tell anyone, I hoarded, kept it to myself. It stayed under my left breast, always. The hook was there. As soon as I found it, it stopped hurting. I touched it many times, to test. I couldn’t sit still, I always wanted to be alone. I excused myself four, five times in an hour to go to the ladies’ room to touch it. I went into a trance like that, I didn’t think. Touching the stone in me.

  I went away to their retreats. In the woods in Michigan, Minnesota, I even drove up to Ontario. Never once to a doctor. For a long time it was my secret. I read the Bible. I memorized: the fear of God is clean, enduring forever.

  We are strangers before thee.

  I came to know my own wickedness, how I hoarded. Around campfires in pine woods, clearings like our own in the Vale of Valhalla, painted rocks in a circle, I knit and felt alone. The others, nuns and churchwomen, fell in together and did good. They darned the priests’ socks. They made potato salad, they gossiped and laughed, washing pots and pans. I would
n’t join. I prayed. I pleaded for cleansing, there in the north. I wanted the cold to come and burn the dust, everything impure out of me. A crystal agate, something forced by fire. I touched the stone while I prayed, the stone I wanted to save. It was the deepest part of me. My fire. My good.

  But the others complained. Priests took my hands and asked me to forget. One of them read my palms; the right hand and the left, what you are and what you were born to be. There is a time to mourn and a time to forget. I yanked back. Father James sat me down and gave me suggestions, how to make my way with the other women, as if I were an unpopular girl.

  That was when I finally went back home. The women stood in front of a silver trailer, opening bottles of relish and ketchup for a barbecue. All of a sudden, they looked mismatched and shabby to me, the nuns in their hiking clothes. Socks under sandals, the red acne scars on their skin, they were women who had never been pretty, women who would never have sons.

  I didn’t want to scrub with them on the ground, in a campsite. I’d wanted silence and cold, I’d wanted to climb. Gossip, cooking—those nuns played bridge on picnic tables—all that I could have with my own.

  I drove home. And when I got there, I knew I’d given in. I was tired, I unloaded all my gear and dumped it in the basement. I made a call for an appointment with the doctor.

  And what did I see that first day back from Canada, when I opened the newspaper, but a picture of Ben’s little Susie engaged to marry to Jay Brozek. All five of those Brozek boys came back from Vietnam. No one else ever died. The Brozek girls were pretty, three or four of them went to college, all on scholarship. Sheila got married and now she lives across the street. Every year, Christmas Eve, they sent their youngest with a basket of cookies to Gram. Phil and Jimmy talked when they met on the yard, Phil told Jimmy to sue. It got me down.

  I cut out the picture and put it under glass on the desk top where I paid my bills. I went into the bath and soaked for a long time. I looked at my breast, felt for the stone. I seemed so different now that I was back and given up, I almost thought it wouldn’t hurt, I wouldn’t find it. But there it was, rubbery, mobile, the same as when I’d first touched it and I knew then that it was something bad they would take away from me. I’d have to go in the hospital for them to cut it out.

  I don’t know what I thought, that that Susie wouldn’t ever get married. She was only sixteen when it happened. She had to go on and have a life, too. I kept looking at that picture every month when I paid my bills, it’s still there, under the glass. And now, you know, it doesn’t bother me. Because around the eyes and the mouth, Jay turned out to look like Benny. She must have seen that, too.

  I was glad about you but you weren’t here. The season you were on TV, we bought a machine to tape your show. During the daytime, I’d put you on and just look at you. I thought of you every once in a while and thought that you’d turned out to be a nice girl. I was glad to have you for a niece. But I never wrote. I could have, I had time. I could have at least sent a card. I should have, I was still too much by myself, I wasn’t near as good as I should have been.

  You came the one Christmas from college on the Greyhound bus, you saw Hal and Jimmy fight. Gram didn’t feel too well, she wouldn’t have even stayed up if you hadn’t been here, but Hal came late and then he played rough with Tina. Poor Jimmy said, maybe next year we could all get to Florida and Adele could come and meet us there.

  And Hal said by next year, he’d be a millionaire and he’d have a helicopter. He said maybe he’d visit us for a day in Florida and then go to Haiti.

  That Patty put up with all of it, his drinking, everything, and all the while, she worked too. She typed for a pediatrician. Now, she won’t even speak to him, he says, she won’t say hello when they run into each other in the mall.

  That night, your mom called and I think she felt bad because you were here and she was alone then out in California. Well, she started in on Gram. Did you get the sweater, Did you get this, Did you get that. Oh, we were so used to it by then, it didn’t get us down anymore. Gram and I just said no, no, not yet, real quietly, but we blamed it on the Christmas mail, said we were sure it would come tomorrow or the day after. And that seemed to calm her down.

  She wanted to talk to Hal and I shouldn’t have let her, he’d already been so rude to the rest of us, he was drunk. Well, he got on the phone and all of a sudden, he was yelling, I couldn’t hardly even listen, he could be so mean. “You’re a liar,” he shouted. “You didn’t send anything and you know it. That’s bullshit. And every year since you’ve been out there you call and say the same damn thing and you know damn well you didn’t do it! I don’t care if you don’t send anything, just don’t give me this bullshit.”

  Jimmy finally tore the phone away from him. Then I guess you went and talked to her on the extension in the bedroom.

  Hal and Patty left that night not so long after, Hal still drunk. He’d been drinking since I don’t know when, he’d had a beer in his hand steady since he walked in our door.

  And we wanted to keep Tina with us, put her to bed in Ben’s room. I said I’d take her home in the morning.

  But Hal said no, she was his and she was going with him. He grabbed her like he did by the hair so she was almost crying.

  I took that Patty aside and asked her if she couldn’t just drive or talk him into staying over and she said, no, she felt the same way, but she didn’t dare fight. That really got him started, she said, the best thing she could do was go along with it.

  Jimmy couldn’t take it anymore, he went into the bedroom and said good night. That was it for him. And you and Gram and I stood like a little chorus huddled together in our boots there under the porch light. Patty sat on the passenger side, her face all flat and sour, and Hal took a long time unlocking his door. He drove a Ford pickup then. I bent down to Tina and said, “Where do you want to sleep tonight? Do you want to drive with your dad like this or should we fix you a nice bed and I can take you over to your dad’s house in the morning?”

  She wouldn’t look at me. She squirmed, from one leg to the other.

  “I don’t know,” she said.

  All of a sudden, she went to the bathroom then, standing up, I guess she was scared. She couldn’t hold it and Hal glared at me saying, “See, now look what you did. Trying to take my kid away from me.”

  She looked at the little puddle in the snow by her foot and then she started to cry, late, the way kids do sometimes. “I want to go with my dad,” she said. And he hoisted her in and we stood and listened to the motor gunning and then watched the headlights make dizzy paths down the road, much too fast. All night, I jerked at noises, waiting for the phone. But nothing happened. They didn’t die. Nobody else ever died.

  Do you eat carrots? The doctor told me young girls who have cancer in their families should eat a carrot every day. There’s something in it that prevents, the same thing that makes the carrot orange. I eat a carrot every day now and it hasn’t come back yet. I go in for X-rays every six months and so far nothing has shown. He says I’m like a normal person again now. But they took so much out because I didn’t go in right away. If you ever feel anything, you go right in because they say they can do it now and still save the breast. I wear a falsie and then in Florida, I have a bathing suit with it built right in. But it’s in our family, both; the stones and the heart.

  Hal went through a lot before he straightened out. For a long time, even when he was young, he always had to have a scheme. He tried to sell things around here to the neighborhood kids, he tried to get them to buy his creepy crawlers, he wanted them to pay to ride that horse. Well, in town, maybe so, but no kids out here were going to pay to get up on a pony.

  Then, after Benny, he started taking his vacations out in Colorado. He likes it there. He’s always said he might like to move someday. I hope he does, I hope he makes it. Well, he was in at the beginning of Breckenridge, before you heard about it as a place. Then the names you heard all the time were Aspen and Vail, Sug
arloaf. Well, he put lots of money in, all his savings, and he borrowed from Gram and from us too, for this development. And it really seemed it ought to go. He went in with five or six others. It was a good idea, but somehow, when it all came through, it turned out the others owned the land and Hal owned the snowplows. And the snowplows broke down and that cost money to repair and pretty soon they rusted. In a couple years, he ended up paying someone else to take them off his hands.

  He was behind from that for a long time. But he kept working at the store, ten, twelve hours a day until he got ahead a little. The next thing was those houses. He bought two little houses and he was going to renovate and fix them up and sell for a profit. And he worked on those too, Patty helped, he had Tina over there after school painting. But they were right by the railroad tracks, so nobody wanted to buy. He took a loss on those too.

  He started the Chinese restaurant and the Frozen Yogurt and then one time he tried to get the Wisconsin franchise for some new Sony gadget. None of it panned out. He just doesn’t have the knack for making money.

  It’s a good thing Jimmy got him started in the Rug Doctor, so at least he’s got that and the pressure cleaners. His plans all came to nothing. He still talked, for years he was going to be a millionaire. Nothing he did ever worked.

  Jimmy and I were back to normal, then, we had things in common. The health. We both take the Herbalife vitamins in the morning and we eat our cereal with wheat germ and brewers’ yeast. You came quite a few times on your vacations, Gram was always glad about that. Each time, you went home with junk from the basement, nothing valuable, our old coats and Villager sweaters. You like that old stuff, I don’t know what you do with all that junk. I kept hoping my old coat would turn up on TV. The once you wore those crazy earrings.

  I remember, I overheard Jimmy talking to you in the breezeway. I was coming up from the basement with a load of wash. “She doesn’t want to,” he said. “Not once since Ben.”