Stan sometimes gets home early when Estelle is out shopping or at bridge club or at the beauty salon. He walks in and says Hey kiddo and I think for a minute, like I always do when these people come in from being out, that he is really not that old. Stan doesn’t ask me to do anything like play cards or read books to him or look at old photos or talk about what I am feeling like Estelle does. Stan just looks at me and raises his eyebrows a lot and I think maybe this is because something Estelle told me once which is that Stan has a daughter who he never really got to know because she lives in Tucson. Estelle was worried it might be hard on him having me here, reminding him of it all, but I don’t think he minds because a lot of the time I think he thinks I’m older, or more of a boy because sometimes he asks me about sports, or who I would vote for for senate, and I never know what to say so we just sit there until I think he forgets he asked the question. And these days when he comes home early Stan just says Hey kiddo, and then he goes to the little bar in the corner of the den, by the kitchen, and even though Estelle says no drinking before five o’clock he says, Get me some ice will you? And then I know to bring the ice tray in and to bend it back so the cubes pop out of their seams and then to use the nail on my pointer finger to pick a few cubes out for him and drop them in his glass and then he pours over them while I lick my finger and put the tray back and then go to see about some way to get out of his way and never mention it to Estelle because when I was told they had found a home for me and I had to go, my Mama held my arm like she did her dough, with two hands, and told me this:
Walk on eggshells, Mercy Ann, walk on eggshells.
This is how I did and this is how it was anyway for the first eleven months and then yesterday Stan asked me if I didn’t want a drink myself. This is how it was: He asked, Hell have you ever even tried this stuff? You can try a little if you want. Lord knows at your age, I . . . and he trailed off and I didn’t know what to say because drink was always a tool of the Devil, but the world that it had been that tool in had since been burnt to the ground like someone had turned off the TV:
I hadn’t gotten even one letter from my Mama, or my sister Bess, or even Emma.
So I thought about it as Why not? And then the thing that really got me in truth was the way that I had been watching him these months pour the gold water over the ice I had just put there. My nails hadn’t changed the ice at all in touching them, but that drink softened the edges of those cubes quick and I found it sort of holy to watch because it reminded me of the way a thing like an aster would wilt when one of my sisters picked it and put it behind her ear. At first it seemed fresh and sharp and then the next time I looked up from work there it would be, curled and soft.
So I heard myself clear when I said Yeah, okay Stan. And he told me to go get the ice tray again and he got a little giddy as he got out a glass and he called to me in the kitchen, You know Estelle used to have a drink every night with me but now she says it makes her too sleepy. I was standing in the kitchen almost smiling when I heard Stan sounding happy, I think it was the first time I did something he liked and all I had to do was just break one of Estelle’s rules with him and I wasn’t sure if we were two friends that were old or two friends that were young but either way I brought the tray in and did like I did for him except for this time it was for me so I counted the ice cubes aloud in my head. One Two Three. He nodded and I watched him pour my first drink ever before I went to put the ice tray back. I stood in front of the freezer and felt the cold, and in that air I thought that if Bess could see me now she would finally believe what I whispered to her in the dark of our bedroom. How I thought I was not afraid of the Book we had been raised on like it was milk. Then I closed the freezer door and heard it slurp shut with the kind of general certainty of the way things were and had been for the past eleven months.
I came back to the bar and Stan handed me my glass, which was wet on the outside, and he said Let’s go out back. Out back was a small walled-in area that penned in their out back from the out back of other condos. It had a dirty glass table and some plastic chairs so Stan and I sat down and both began to look at the brown brick wall in front of us, and the blue sky up ahead.
We sat like that for a while and I took a sip. It tasted hot, and I knew my Mama would say it was the heat of hell. I had thought it would be sweet, like honey. That was because of the color I guess. But it burned even going down and I thought, oh this really is like hell, but after a few minutes I felt warm and kind of soft like I really was an aster behind an ear already.
I thought about what I might look like from far away.
There was the time when the woman from the news asked me if I could read. I told her yes. She asked me what. I told her Nancy Drew. And then she looked away and her hand made a pretend cut across her own throat like she was telling someone to kill a sow, and that’s how I saw that she had makeup on down to her collar, but that there was a white line of skin just where the lip of her blouse met her neck.
Now that I watch TV, I wonder if I was on it, and I think a lot about being on TV when I am doing normal things, like going to the bathroom or trying to sleep.
Right then I was wondering what kind of show would have Stan and I out back with drinks like we were best friends or even father and daughter or something, even though Estelle says she won’t let the TV people anywhere near me ever again. But I still think about it a lot and was thinking about it even as I was having a time like my first drink.
That’s when Stan asked Do you miss it? And I looked at him for a time and he was squinting his eyes again but in some way I felt like it was okay to tell him. Yes. And he nodded, like he had known it always. We sat for another time and I heard crickets, and they sounded the same as they did last year.
Fall’s a coming, Stan said, and I nodded. He squinted his eyes at me then he turned down to the glass in his hand and started to talk:
Estelle says that when they found you, you were living with your mother and father and his two other wives and twelve siblings. And that you were just about to be married off to a fifty-year-old man that was a, you know, a relation of yours of some sort. And she says this and I know it’s probably true.
Stan took a drink and then set it on the glass table and looked at me, and I took my third or fourth sip and thought how it was not so hot now. Stan fingered his chin, But I look at you and I think you’re all right. I mean your biggest problem is that you don’t know up from down since they took you away from your family. And. Stan finished his drink and nodded at me to keep it up before he started talking again. And, well I’ve been thinking a lot about it and I was thinking, well, really. He took another drink and sucked his lips in, I was thinking your father probably never had an affair. Probably never went cheating on anybody, you know?
There is my father, who I think about at night. I think about him in jail. There is my Pa who I picture surrounded by concrete that’s been painted thick with black. There are no bars when I think of him but I know he can’t get out.
Stan was staring into his drink and I waited to see if he was done, to see if I was supposed to answer the question or if it was the kind you’re just supposed to listen to.
I looked up at him, and waited.
The last memory I have of my Pa is not the day when I pointed toward the horse barn. I saw him that day, I know I did, but I cannot remember what he looked like that morning or even what he looked like being taken in a black car. The last memory I have of him is from last winter, when I walked into my Mama’s room in the afternoon looking for a needle and a thread and there was my Mama, lying on the bed, her dress up over her hips, her legs blushing, her dark-haired parts showing, her head turned from me. She did not look when I came in so I turned to leave and get a needle from another mother’s house when I saw my Pa by the window groaning and kneeling and praying like he was in pain.
As soon as I found a needle I went behind the barn and pricked my finger with it and watched the drop of blood swell up until finally it dripped onto
the dirt.
Stan did not look up at me when I looked up at him. A plane flew overhead and it sounded like a seashell Estelle had given me my first week here. There was a dull roar when she held it to my ear but it was nothing like the roar in everything else right then.
Stan cleared his throat, I just think that you seem like such a good kid, I just think maybe your father might not have been that bad. I don’t know. I just think he really probably did never do anything dishonest. Stan’s voice started to sound like its parts were breaking away from each other and he took a big drink and looked away and said Lord, there was a time, what I’m trying to say is, Estelle and I.
Stan dropped his head. We weren’t always happy and I.
Stan stopped and held his hand to his eyes like he was shading them from something. I did not know what. He breathed in and it sounded un-whole like his voice and I did not know if he was thinking about his daughter off somewhere in Tucson.
I waited and I waited and I thought of my father, all broken-looking by the window, staring up at an empty blue sky. What I would never say to Stan was: my father could be mean. I looked down at my pointer finger, red and wet from the glass.
Stan finished his drink but still had his glass in his hand shaking the little ice cubes at the bottom like they might get bigger. I did not know what to do. I did not know the answer to his question, if it was a question to answer. I did not know my father’s life even as well as I knew Nancy Drew’s life, who is a teen detective with a boyfriend named Ned, or Blanche’s life on The Golden Girls, and maybe even Stan’s now that we were having this talk together. I did not know.
But it seemed like it wouldn’t matter much to say even this to Stan, or anyone for that matter. So I nodded at him and noticed his eyes were wetting and so I looked down, like we were on TV, and I took a last big drink. Like Pierce Brosnan. Like someone with something to hide. I almost gagged.
There were the two of us sitting there with empty glasses between us when Estelle walked out and leaned on the door frame for support, pushing the sliding glass door open farther with her other hand so that a rush of house smell came out and she looked at the two of us and our empty glasses and she looked back at me like she did when I told her I’d found Rosie in this same out back, lying dead under the glass table. She’d followed me outside that day shaking her head, like it must be another thing she was going to have to explain to me, like Martin Luther King Jr. Day, and then she saw the poor dead little yapper and she looked at me and said, What Happened? and so I thought Estelle thought that I had killed Rosie and I couldn’t answer that I didn’t know, I just opened and closed my mouth with no words for the little dead dog. And now Estelle had that same look on her face now, like she was confused, like she didn’t know whether she should be angry.
Good god Stan, She’s not old enough to drink, is what she said and I thought I might be in trouble but then she sighed and sat down and said that she had just learned at bridge club that one of her closest friends, and best bridge partner, was dying. She looked tired, like something was over.
Which I guess is why she said Mercy Ann, fix me a drink, and Stan said Me too, and so I went in and fixed three drinks, one for me too which Estelle would take from me, but at least I learned how to do another thing in this place.
I came out carrying their drinks and then I went back in for the one that was mine. I watched the ice clanking on the glass as I walked outside and I looked at how it never even seemed like it would break, I mean even if I dropped the glass and the glass broke, the ice still wouldn’t.
When I came out with this glass in hand Estelle raised an eyebrow and then looked at Stan and Stan said two things while I pulled over a new chair since Estelle was sitting in mine.
Stan told Estelle that he was sorry about her friend, and also that she hadn’t won in bridge. Then he said, as I sat down on the cold plastic, We’ve been talking about Mercy Ann’s father.
Estelle looked at him hard then and nodded, then she bit her lip and looked at me. She reached her hand out over to the thin arm of my chair and took a sip of her drink so I saw that she was about to cry.
What I know from today that I did not know yesterday is that my Pa was tried yesterday, and that Estelle called Stan from the club where she plays bridge to tell him to tell me that my father would be where he was for a long time. That my mother would not sign a paper saying she would not go back to polygamy, and thus gave up her rights to us. But I didn’t know this yesterday and so I thought that Estelle’s friend must have been a good bridge player and also that there was something I didn’t understand but knew enough to know there was some kind of under-sadness in it, like two summers ago when Adaleen, who was sixteen, lost her first baby before it even got to the world.
Estelle had that kind of look on her face.
Oh hell, Estelle said then and she laughed a little, shaking her head. She took off her glasses, rubbed her eyes and they both looked at me. That was when Estelle raised her glass and said to Stan, Tomorrow let’s go get that chair, and I knew that I didn’t really need one because I never did mind the green shag but I said, Thanks Grandma, anyway and she took a drink and nodded at my own glass and said, Well you might as well call me Estelle.
That was still yesterday which is different than today. Yesterday, when the ghost of the little yapper was under the table, keeping our feet warm as the part of sky above us got cooler. When the three of us sat out back, talking about people we loved but didn’t know where they were, about times and how they change, about the things we didn’t understand, about how nothing was simple but death. Mostly it was Stan and Estelle talking, and me listening but feeling as if I did understand because of the little I knew about death and because of the lot I knew about not knowing where anyone was or how anything would be really ever again.
Yesterday there was me, feeling already that I could not go back to where I came from but thinking that it was because of the drink, and the new chair that would be coming, and what I felt myself to be understanding.
But then again, there was me, not knowing yet what I know now today from watching the news about my father on TV, not knowing yet that the roar would not ever leave the shell, but would stay in it and glow with a sound too dry to wilt.
Jeremiah
Of course, he had known always somehow that this was where the whole thing was going, had planned it, even, in a way.
Break a law, be cut free.
Free was the thing he had imagined, not why he done it but certainly not reason enough to stop him from doing it. Why he had done it was to have one thing his father didn’t. Even for a while. Why he had done it was her red hair and oak skin, the same color as a stick whittled naked of its bark. And it was done now, and it had gone to where it was always going, but now he was here Jeremiah felt like maybe he hadn’t a planned it, hadn’t a known it, or had but that it was a trick, the way he saw it being and the way it was now all happening.
What he hadn’t a known was being dropped off not even in town. A good five miles at least from anywhere. What he hadn’t known was the way that would feel. Not relief. Not some unholy exuberance. But lost. Lost in the desert. And hot. And thirsty.
That first evening, after he walked a while, he waved a truck down with an old man driving who let him get in the back of his pickup with his two yellow dogs and ride to the edge of town, one dog trying to lick his face the whole time and all the while him hearing his Pa, telling him it was time. He could still hear it after he got there and walked for a bit until he got to a town he’d been to, with his Pa, picking up things, but had never seen this way before; it had always been part of a zoo he was looking in on but now he was one of the animals. He could still hear Pa’s voice after the sun had gone down, and long after he realized in this place you need money for food and after he remembered that he knew no one, not even one child, and even heard Pa’s voice still as he curled up under a big cottonwood in the town park and fell asleep.
He woke up freezing bef
ore it was light. The grass was wet underneath him like it had turned to sweating in the night. He thought to get up and move, warm his blood. He walked the town, only two main streets really. Wide streets with old brick buildings. On the corner a café. A bank. An antique store. Spread out from there, small houses the shape of boot boxes. He felt like he was walking through a place where all other people in the world had vanished. Leaving just him. He wondered if this is what it was like in the after after. If you don’t have the wives to get you to the right heaven, to your own planet in the Celestial Heaven. If purgatory was just you walking around alone at night in a town nobody lives in and you got no money to buy anything even if they did.
’Course that wouldn’t be for him, neither. He knew where he’d go, a child of perdition. It would be worse. But probably not so cold.
He walked to the far edge of town. There was a church with a cross on it. Not his kind, not even close. The white brick of the building was lit up on the sides from lights stuck in the ground around the church, this light and all the shorter houses around it made it look tall. Taller than the gathering house at home. But narrower, more like a picture. Jeremiah hugged his arms to his body, and looked up at the big oak doors. He took his arms and tucked them inside his shirtsleeves and walked up the steps. He would huddle by the doors because there no one would move him. If someone ever came and cared.
So he huddled up even though he had been taught to stay away from these places, one of the havens of the wicked. But now he was one of the wicked. There was no use trying to stay on the right side of every rule he knew anymore because no matter what he was on the wrong side of it.
He left, so no matter what, it was over.
He would live out here until he died and then when he did he’d burn. His head fell into the crook between brick and door and he sniffed.
Strange Children Page 8