by Lenzo, Lisa;
“Back from where?” I ask. What child? I think.
“A home,” Delia says. “A place in Ohio. Where they put him when he was four.”
“A foster home?” I ask.
“Sort of,” Delia says. “A mental foster home. Kind of like a hospital.”
It feels like a stone is pressing my heart down. I was taken to a psychiatric hospital after my boyfriend broke up with me. Had to miss a semester of college. I cover the scar—there’s just one, I chickened out after the first cut—with a wide watchband or long sleeves. Even when I’m alone, I keep it covered.
“They say he’s autistic,” Delia says. “He doesn’t like to talk or for people to get too close. But he knows how to talk—he does, sometimes. He’s got dark hair, these big, brown eyes. Likes to play basketball, by himself.” Delia’s blue hair slants into her face as she paws through her purse. We’re still standing in the kitchen next to the sink. She pulls a school photo from her wallet and hands it to me. Her boy has beautiful, dark eyes and a subdued but not wholly vacant expression. She takes the photo back and slips it into her wallet, then fingers a pack of cigarettes but doesn’t take one out. “He’s eight now,” Delia says. “Someone adopted him last year, but a couple months ago, they gave him back.”
“They gave him back?”
“Had the adoption annulled,” Delia says, tapping the pack of cigarettes against her skirted thigh.
“They can do that?” I ask.
Delia laughs instead of answering. Then she says, “Jesus, maybe I will have some of that juice. Pretend there’s vodka in it.”
I get out a water glass and pour it full. As Delia opens her mouth to drink, I notice a dark spot, an untreated cavity, on the left side of her mouth. She takes the glass from her lips and repeats what she said when she first walked in: “I need you for a character witness. To testify in court.”
“For what?” I ask, thinking of drunk driving or maybe drugs, not making the connection yet.
“To get my kid back,” Delia explains. She frowns at the glass of juice in her hand.
I think of keeping quiet as usual, but then I don’t. Maybe I’m remembering that when we were girls, Delia was the one person besides my mom I could really talk to. “I think you should leave your first kid where he is,” I say, “at least until you’re more . . . stabilized. I think you should focus on this other kid for now.”
Delia looks at me as if we are strangers. Of course, we didn’t talk about stuff like this when we were girls. “Stabilized,” she repeats. “What do you mean by that?” She’s staring at me but her eyes are nearly squinted closed. I realize that I don’t really know her anymore.
“Dee,” I say, “remember those little birds we always used to try to save?”
Nothing registers in her brittle face.
“Little pink, baby birds with their wrinkled, wobbly necks? With those bulging, purple eyes that weren’t open yet?”
“Yeah, so?” Delia says.
“How many ever lived?”
“What is this, a science quiz? We’re not talking about birds, we’re talking about my boy. Besides, if anything’s a baby bird, it’s this one here,” she says, pressing the puckered black crepe beneath the waistband of her skirt. “If anything, we should forget about this one, not Henry.”
Henry. He has a name.
I look down at my kitchen floor, which I usually walk across without a care. There’s no one to trip me up—Alice doesn’t like to crawl on vinyl, and Flannery steers clear of me unless I’m opening a can. They’ve both disappeared now and won’t come out—they’re unused to strangers and loud talking.
But now Delia is standing in front of me, waiting, blocking my path. “So,” she says, “will you come to court with me and be my witness?”
I glance up at her and glance away. Today is Sunday, my one day off. All I want to do is read my new novel, look at the paper, lie around with my cat. Not answer questions. Not make promises or plans.
Delia’s still staring at me with her eyes narrowed tight. I look at the old blue glass bottles lined up on my kitchen window, wishing she had never come over. Not to this comfortable little fortress. Not to the decrepit two-story I lived in when we were girls.
“Well, I need a smoke,” Delia says. Her eyes relax and droop—they look tired and also wet. She picks up her purse from the counter, slings it over her shoulder, and straightens the neck of her leotard, tucking a red bra strap out of sight.
I’ll be your witness.
I say it in my head; I don’t let the words out. I want to make things right between us. But I also don’t want Delia to stay in my house.
She walks a beeline through my living room, goes out my front door, and hurries down my four concrete steps without a word. Halfway across my front yard, she stops and strikes a match and holds it to her cigarette, inhaling until it’s lit. Then she resumes her brisk pace without looking back. Watching the dead match fall from her fingers, I remember the last day we were friends.
We were twelve. We were with two boys in the alley behind my house. Dee said, “C’mon, let’s go in this garage.” I said I didn’t want to. She said, “Why not?”
“It’s too dark in there,” I said. “There isn’t any light.”
Dee pulled a book of matches from her pocket and held it up and said, “Here’s some light.”
“Those won’t last long,” I warned her. Behind her, a mulberry tree twisted upward from the dirt, dropping purple berries that splotched and stained the ground.
The boys were watching us, shy yet eager, waiting for whatever we’d toss their way.
“You’re just scared,” Dee said. “She’s just scared,” she said to the boys. “She wants to grow up to be an old maid.”
“I do not,” I said. I was planning on marrying and having three children, but I kept that to myself.
“See you later, Old Maid,” Delia said, and she went into the garage with the boys following her. I walked out of the alley, listening to her laugh, wishing I could have what she had.
And as she drives away in her battered Jeep, I still want it. Her laugh. Those boys. Her nerve. The dark. I even want her baby bird, though I know that’s a crazy thought. I even want her quiet son, even though I know I wouldn’t be able to save us both.
Lorelei
In the mornings, I write stories; in the afternoons, I drive for the public bus that provides door-to-door service in and around Saugatuck, Michigan. We carry young and old, rich and poor, able-bodied and disabled: anyone who needs or wants a ride. How we drivers feel about our riders depends on the particular passenger and the driver, but almost all of us, including me, grumbled about picking up Lorelei. Her wheelchair was dirty, sticky to the touch on the handles and everywhere else. Bits of dried gunk were stuck to the frame, and strands of Lorelei’s long, white hair had wound themselves around the joints above the casters. We couldn’t help but brush up against some of this when we used the tie-downs to secure her wheelchair to the floor, and if Lorelei got up and moved to a bus seat, which she usually did—with such ease that we wondered why she bothered using a wheelchair—her butt sometimes made a wet imprint on the bus’s upholstery.
Whenever I boarded Lorelei, I’d try to persuade her to stay in her wheelchair without telling her why. I’d say it made more sense for her to stay put since I had to strap down her chair whether she was in it or not. But as soon as I backed her and her wheelchair from the lift onto the bus, she’d get up and slip onto a seat, her face furtive and then stubborn as she avoided my eyes. Watching her, my own face would turn irritable and sour. After Lorelei disembarked, I’d check to see if the seat she’d sat on was wet; if it was, I’d tear paper towels from the roll and lay them on the damp spot so no one else would sit there.
Lorelei would ride every day for a month, then not at all for a few weeks. During a phase when she was riding daily, she kept remarking on a car parked on the Blue Star Highway just north of Saugatuck that had a for-sale sign taped to the window. Eve
ry time we passed it, she’d say in her Arkansas drawl, “I wish I knew how much that car cost. I’ve been looking to buy me a car.”
One evening as I was driving in my own Honda Civic past the Buick Lorelei had her eye on, I turned in to the gravel lot, pulled up close to the Buick, and copied the phone number and asking price on a three-by-five card. My brother Arthur was with me. “I’m writing down these numbers for one of my passengers,” I explained. “She’s been talking about buying this car.”
“Wow, Annie, that’s so nice of you to do that for your passenger,” Arthur said.
I gave him the same sour look that came over my face in Lorelei’s presence. “I’m not doing it for my passenger.”
“You’re not?”
“No. I’m not doing it to be nice.”
“Oh!” Arthur said. He laughed. “You’re doing it to get her off your bus!”
⊙
At least part of my aversion toward Lorelei was rooted in my upbringing. Although my parents were politically progressive, I’d been raised with some prejudice. Not toward the usual targets—African Americans and Mexican Americans and other people of color—but against southern whites. My family lived in Detroit, but my dad had marched in Alabama and seen them up close, their faces contorted by rage. These were the people, he said, who attacked and killed an untold number of black southerners, as well as civil rights workers of both colors from the North and South, including the best and the brightest, Dr. Martin Luther King. My dad loathed Bull Connor, James Earl Ray, and the rest of those southern racists. He also thought northern rural whites were suspect. Once when I wanted to go camping by myself near Ortonville, a small town north of Detroit, my dad wouldn’t let me for fear of the local “rednecks.”
Of course, even urban whites from northern cities could be racist; my dad’s own mother was a case in point—an Italian immigrant from Queens who disparaged her Puerto Rican neighbors. Once, when I was fifteen, I said to her, “Grandma, I can’t always tell the difference between Puerto Ricans and Italians.” This was the plain truth. What I said next, while also true, was sly; my intent was to needle her. “Like what about your friend Margie Tonelli?” I asked. “Are you sure she’s Italian? She looks Puerto Rican to me.”
Through clenched teeth, my grandma answered, “You can always tell Puerto Ricans from Italians because Italians are clean!”
But back to my father’s prejudice, which became also my own: while we’ve never used the uglier slur “white trash,” which seems a terrible phrase to use for a person, at times both of us have referred to rural white people as rednecks.
⊙
When I gave the card with the phone number and the Buick’s price to Lorelei, she told me some involved story about having the money for the car but not being able to arrange for insurance right now. A few weeks passed. Someone else bought the car, and Lorelei continued riding the bus.
On the day before Thanksgiving, I picked up Lorelei from Christian Neighbors, a charity that distributes donated clothing and food. She was grumbling about something not being fair and the Mexicans and being cheated as I pushed her wheelchair onto the lift. A volunteer carried her bags of groceries up onto the bus and left without a word. After I’d strapped down Lorelei’s chair and returned to my seat, she was still grumbling.
“What’s not fair?” I asked her.
“They gave all the turkeys to the damn Mexicans, and all I got was a lousy chicken.”
My back was to her, so she couldn’t see my smile. “Well,” I said, “they probably did that because there’s only one of you, and the Mexicans have families.”
Lorelei didn’t respond.
“That makes sense, doesn’t it?” I said. “To give bigger birds to families and smaller birds to single people?”
“I don’t care,” Lorelei said. “I wanted a turkey.”
I drove up the Blue Star Highway and then made several turns, the last into the Ridgewood Oaks complex, where Lorelei lived. Remembering a previous conversation, I asked, “Aren’t you going to your granddaughter’s for Thanksgiving? Won’t you get to eat some turkey there?”
“No, I won’t,” Lorelei said. “She’s making a damn ham.”
⊙
Shortly after Thanksgiving, each bus was equipped with a bottle of hand sanitizer, so after I’d touched Lorelei’s sticky chair and she was off the bus, I’d squirt some onto my hands and wipe them clean with a paper towel. The weather was exceptionally mild for late November, and one day when Lorelei rode she made a remark about the crazy warm weather. I told her I was still picking lettuce and greens from my garden, and Lorelei said that her mother used to grow greens, and also watermelons and corn, back in Arkansas. She went on to tell me that her grandpa was a preacher, and they had to get dressed up every Sunday to hear him preach. “It was just a little bitty church,” Lorelei said. “And so hot in the summer. You should have heard me complain. My daddy said hell fire would feel hotter, and that’s where I was going.”
“Do you go to church now?” I asked.
“No,” Lorelei said. “I got in all my church time when I was little.”
As fall became winter, my fellow drivers continued to complain about Lorelei’s stained, soiled clothes and her grimy, sticky chair, which they still didn’t like to touch, even though we now had sanitizer to clean up with after she rode. But at least Lorelei no longer smelled like urine, and the bus seats she sat on stayed dry. I mentioned this to Di, another driver, and Di said Lorelei had told her she was getting Depends from somewhere—her son or her daughter or maybe Christian Neighbors. “She can’t afford them herself,” Di said. “Those things are super expensive.”
One day Lorelei told me she was going to buy some lottery tickets, and she hoped she’d win enough to pay off the three thousand dollars she owed in medical bills.
“Can’t you get some help from Medicare for your bills?” I asked.
“They won’t pay it because I have a certificate in the bank. They want me to give that up first, but I won’t do it.”
I tried to talk Lorelei out of her plan. “They say you’re more likely to get struck by lightning than win the lottery,” I said.
“Yeah, I heard that, too,” she said. “But I’m going to buy me some anyway. I’ve won before. Though nothing to brag on.”
Since the only thing Lorelei was buying at the store was the tickets and we weren’t busy, I waited for her. When I’d got her back onto the bus and had punched her card, she said she’d spent her last forty dollars on scratch-offs. I kept quiet, wishing I’d said something more convincing than my lightning remark.
“If I win,” Lorelei said, “I’ll call you back in a bit for a ride to the store. I need to buy me some groceries.”
She didn’t call back that day.
⊙
A week later, as I was driving Lorelei home from the grocery store, she told me she’d been feeling sick all afternoon.
I said something commiserative but I was thinking, why don’t people stay home when they’re sick? Why do they have to ride the bus and expose everyone else to whatever they’ve got? Recently a passenger had taken her feverish first-grader all over town. As I was remembering this, I heard retching. I looked in the rearview. Lorelei was holding her grocery bag up to her mouth. I was relieved to see that she was vomiting into the bag rather than on the seat or the floor. She had removed from the bag the couple of items she’d bought—a box of chocolate-covered donuts and a pack of cigarettes—and set them beside her.
“Are you okay?” I asked.
“Yeah,” she said, sounding dejected. “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t worry about it.”
“I didn’t think I’d be puking on the bus.”
“It’s no big deal,” I said. “It’s happened before.”
“I knew I shouldn’t have eaten that lunch meat,” Lorelei said. She vomited into the bag again. “I’m so sorry,” she repeated. It was the first time I’d heard Lorelei sound downhearted and ashamed.
&n
bsp; “Don’t worry about it,” I said again. “And thanks for using the bag. That saves me some trouble.”
When we arrived at Ridgewood Oaks, I called in to the dispatcher that Lorelei was sick, and it was going to take me a little extra time to help her off the bus. Meanwhile, two regular passengers from the building next to Lorelei’s were standing outside, ready to board: Bart, an alcoholic who was nearing the end of drinking himself to death, and Liv, who had some sort of mental disability but one that didn’t seem too severe. I called to them, “Can one of you get me a plastic bag from your apartment? I need to double bag this”—I held up the bag of vomit—“before I put it in the dumpster.” They shook their heads vigorously, eyes exaggeratedly wide—you’d think the bag was contaminated with Ebola and I’d asked them to dispose of it themselves. I sighed, walked down off the bus, knotted the bag, took it over to the empty dumpster, and dropped it in, wondering if it was too late to switch careers. I had an MFA in creative writing—maybe I’d published enough now to land a teaching job. The bag hit the metal bottom of the dumpster and jiggled but didn’t break. But my hands were a little wet—some of the vomit had ended up on the outside of the bag. This bus was missing its bottle of sanitizer and was also out of paper towels, so I asked Lorelei if I could wash up in her apartment, and she said yes. I rolled her onto the lift, powered her down to the pavement, and pushed her chair through the double entrance doors of her building and then all the way into her apartment.
Lorelei apologized for the mess, but my overall impression as I glanced around, being careful not to stare, was that her apartment was not as bad as I’d thought it would be. “I’m getting ready to move, is why everything is kind of tore apart,” Lorelei said.
“It doesn’t look bad at all,” I said. And it really didn’t. The furniture seemed to be set in the right places, I didn’t notice dirty dishes lying around, and the floor wasn’t too cluttered.