Yankee Doodle

by Loretta Welch

  “Statistics can be interesting, to a point,” Stella said.

  “Point is right. The point of all that study is to make something of yourself, and here you are, a long, long way from home and studying up with those people who have more money than sense. Making something of yourself. Even though you’re not from here, and it’s hard if you’re not from here, there you go. Just like you were born to have it. Good lord, girl, it must be hard for you.”

  “I have hope, Mrs W.”

  “And so you should, Stella. So you should.”

  FOUR

  Mrs F

  Mrs F lived on the fifth floor, and Stella had to get buzzed in every time. It was a pain with the buckets and the mops, but Mrs F had her own vacuum to use, insisted on it. It made the train ride less of a hassle every third Wednesday, she reckoned.

  Stella liked everything about the place, the lace curtains and the shiny furniture. “Mahogany wood, Stella, and you aren’t allowed buy it anymore. It’s illegal like jade and whale teeth.”

  Stella didn’t mind the knickknacks that had to be moved, one by one, or the doilies that had to be ironed every other month. Not even dusting the walls with a rag wrapped around a broom bothered her, but really, who dusts the walls? She liked that everything was tiny and in its place. Salt and pepper shakers were shaped like little lamps, tiny dogs, mushrooms. Some were very small flowerpots, and they matched. Matching things was not something to worry about when Stella grew up.

  The only thing that got her peeved happened in the last ten minutes, when Stella had pushed the couch back in place and fluffed up the pillows, checked the statues on the TV to make sure they were in exactly the right spot and stood waiting by the door with her buckets and her purse.

  “Now, are you sure you swept under the bed? I won’t have the dust we had last time.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “And what about the garbage pail? If there is an odor, every cat in the neighborhood will be scratching at my door, and I can’t stand cats.”

  “It’s clean, Mrs F.”

  “Well now, what if I pay you next time for two?”

  And Stella looked down, rubbing her toe into the mat at the door, saying as loud as she could “Bad idea,” without actually saying it. You could never get two payments out of Mrs F. She wouldn’t believe you.

  “Oh, well, wait a minute. Let me just think if I have any cash today. Things are so dear.”

  “Why do you put up with that woman?” Mrs W would ask. Stella made the mistake of telling her about Mrs F’s short memory when it came to owed wages, and Mrs W never tired of scolding her.

  Stella rode the T to Mrs F from early spring throughout the summer and late into fall. She watched the colors change in the trees along the river as the train came up over the bridge. Toward the end of November, all the leaves were off the trees, and the river took on a dusty grey color. Mrs F looked a little grey, too.

  Stella started to move more pill jars than knickknacks. Boxes of tissue piled up in every room. There was something gone funny with her joints, Mrs F reported, and her breathing was hard.

  Stella started to notice other things, too. The pantry, for example, which was really just a small cupboard between the kitchen and the living room. More medicine bottles filled the shelves, easing out the sugar and the teabags and the three kinds of store cookies Mrs F always had “for company.” Along about the first of January, the bottles got fewer, but the shelves never filled up again. Stella saw the cans of tuna, half empty in the icebox.

  “Will you make sure the bedspread is straight like I like it, dear? And don’t rush off so. I’ll need to see, do I have any cash today. That market would rob you blind.”

  Mrs F lifted her frail little body from the chair and shuffled into her bedroom. She opened the top drawer of a dresser that must have been hers as a bride. Usually, Stella was left behind a closed door when the old woman fished for her pocketbook. Of late, security was lax.

  “It’s okay, Mrs F. You paid two weeks last time.”

  Very quietly, Mrs F said, “Why yes, child, I did,” and watched Stella unlatch the door.

  FIVE

  Red Line, Or Stella Hears Music

  There seemed to be plenty of ways to make money, even underground.

  The worst job had to be the newsstand under Government Center, because you had to go two whole flights below ground level. It’s creepy to hear heavy trains rattling over your head, Stella thought, and wondered how the guy deals with the noise. People working the Park Street shop, on the other hand, could almost see the open sky at the top of the stairs.

  A lot of time, waiting on all those trains, they had entertainment. Stella was at first shocked and then thrilled to see so many people making music in the stations, collecting money for their talent with an open case or a little bucket. Some had posters, some sold CDs. Some just played their hearts out. She loved the old man with the violin who worked the Blue Line, although she worried the air wasn’t too good for him. And she always dropped a coin in the open accordion case before Blonde Bob, as she called him, a tall, lanky Texan, or so he said, who “came to charm y’all out of yer hard-earned with a little somethin’ I wrotes.”

  The most famous stop was Harvard Square, and once or twice, Stella got out on her way home. She wandered around the brick buildings and the chain stores, trying to figure out who the brainy students were, but they all looked like adults in kids’ bodies, with big handbags and smart phones. She wasn’t sure what to look at so she walked into a bookstore, and, boy, was she surprised; comics were weird these days. Could you really call them books at all? If they were, she would have done great had she stayed in school. She thought about coffee, but the shops were too full and too expensive. A simple cup of joe cost three bucks. She watched the chess games in the middle of the crowd for a while, but since she didn’t know the rules, she didn’t know who was winning. Still, it gave her a place to stand for ten minutes and not keep moving, moving, moving.

  Down past the center of the square, on a winding street, she saw street performers in the entrances to shops. They reminded her of the church fair booths, one to a storefront, and she marveled that anybody had the nerve to stand out in the street and sing or dance or juggle or ride or do magic. The bad ones she felt sorry for, but the really good ones scared her half to death, drawing bystanders in as though they had some secret magnet or powerful spell. Stella wrapped her arms around her bag and looked at these performers and bet they would all be famous someday. She pretended she was fishing for coins in her pocket and looked surprised when her hand came out empty. Stella moved along.

  One night, going home a little later than she would have liked, she saw a young couple who looked like they were from another time. They were on the middle platform in Park Street, and Stella had gotten out of the car she was riding when a group of very loud sports fans coming from a ball game got too close. She stepped out and waited for the next train, and then she waited for another.

  The boy was red-haired, wore jeans and a suit jacket and sported a weathered guitar. “Martin,” it said on the neck. He had twinkly eyes and a charming mouth that made him look older than his age, which couldn’t have been twenty. He sounded old-fashioned, Old World, maybe Irish or English, and called himself a busker. When he sang, Stella thought she was listening to a recording, his voice was so round and so sweet.

  Beside him stood a dark-haired girl, curly waves down to her shoulder, bangles up to her elbow, in a set of clothes that almost looked like a costume. Willowy, long skirt and dark blouse that made a v below her neck. The whole effect was like a studio picture, like the ones Stella’s pals had made when they graduated high school, the ones that made girls look like cameo rings. Stella could not tell if she was foreign, too, but she thought not. You could barely hear her as she tried to harmonize with her big fellow.

  Nor could Stella work out if she was happy or not. She had that soft look in her downcast eyes that came either from being a young woman in lov
e or a scared girl in a big city. Whatever it was, these two were clearly performing for keeps. They were light-hearted and serious all at the same time; they needed the money, but beyond that, they needed each other. And for the first time, Stella thought she might have seen someone, like herself, who did not quite fit into the picture. She let a few go by, and when she finally boarded a train for home, she saw the red-haired boy put his hand out to help his young lady climb the stairs.

  SIX

  Lost

  There was a spot in the middle of her back, more up than down, between her shoulders, that felt like it was going to break. She knew it wasn’t possible, because there were no bones there, but when she put her bags down and picked them back up again as the train arrived, tears came to her eyes. She had to stand against a wall sometimes to straighten up. Her posture wasn’t great, and the weight of all those supplies, all that dust swept up, and a million swipes back and forth across window panes made her ache. When the sky was blue and the birds sang at her in the evening, when it was summertime and the wind was warm, it went away when she looked up. Stella wondered how much of the ache was an old unhappiness.

  Not unhappiness, really, just that steady gnawing feeling that she didn’t belong. The trouble was, where she came from didn’t seem too cozy, either. Where was this girl supposed to be? Certain days, she figured somebody would pluck her up out of the line of people waiting at open doors and cast her back into a pool of people. Or whisk her up in the air on a dust cloud, far far away where she didn’t stand out, but where was that?

  From the Midwest, where she was “drug up,” she brought phrases like “old as dirt,” and “dark as four-forty-five,” but she never said “warsh” for “wash” or “growed up” for “grown up.” And while she knew exactly what someone meant when they said “she ain’t never came,” her diction was almost without a place. Like her. She mixed up some words, for sure. “Missouri” was “Missouruh,” and “soda” was “pop.” But it sure as heck wasn’t “tonic.” Still, she got used to the locals who took r’s out of words like “pahk” and “gahden” and dropped them at random into other words like “idear.” She worked out that Mrs F’s “hassock” was a footstool, but these “rotaries” for cars were just plain chaos, as far as she was concerned. Try to cross one in the middle of the day.

  How people talk, their language, has something to do with belonging, too. Everything from a foreign language to the inside chatter of teenagers made you a part of a group. Or a place. Or a family. And Stella felt those were all gone for her. And then she thought: These are things that made you who you are, so you take them with you anyway. Maybe you belong where you are. She just wasn’t tethered any more, like a boat without a sail. So much was lost.

  Stella knew loss was something like hurt, only deeper. Once in a while a storm comes up behind your eyes and tears can form. Most of the time, it’s like a bellyache, a little higher, and when it comes, it seeps into the rest of your muscles. Simple sadness is a little bit sweet, but when a memory is jogged, it surprises you, pushes you back with a thud, and you press your hands on top of your stomach to protect yourself when a hole opens up under your fingers, and a cold wind blows in, up under your ribs, aiming for your heart.

  The longer her mother was gone, the more it was like a clock going backward. First, the slap of final moments, too raw to hold in your head for very long, and then the plaintive days leading up to the end, mixture of hope and comfort and continual drying from the medicines, as though all moisture, all water was being drained out of the room, out of her eyes, out of her body until there was nothing but bone and skin. When exactly did she go? It’s such a gradual slide, talking to her one day, repeating for her the next, pushing her to talk, saying her name a little louder each day to keep her here as she sailed deeper and deeper into the ocean of her soul.

  And then, in Stella’s memory, she was younger, joking with doctors, visiting the sick, eating ice cream. Making fun with the plumber, the postman, the neighbor, the bus driver. And then younger still, yelling at Stella, crying from hurt, walking to town, brushing her hair. There were all the first firsts, and sometimes the second firsts: birthdays, Mother’s Days, spring, favorite flowers, when they went here together, when they went there. It was the last thing that held Stella in place, in any place at all.

  She often looked at people on the subways, all those people with ponytails, from little girls to grown men, all those bald people, small people, whole and broken people, the drunks, the preachers, the suits, and thought they were all babies, soft and tender. They were all somebody’s baby once, and every one of them, except the very unlucky, loses their mother and their father. Child, you have a long road and a lonesome one with me gone. That was something big in common, like the inevitability of ants. It did not cheer her up.

  People were alone the whole world over, and maybe, Stella thought, that makes us more alike than not. If only she could bridge the gap between her world and theirs. Everybody thinks their story is different, and it is. If we could all have half an hour to tell our stories, we would. Or would we? To the person in the shop, to the guy across the hall, to the woman standing next to you at the subway.

  If Stella could tell her own story, she would.

  SEVEN

  Roots

  Yep, I’m called Stella Dakota. Stella, named after a movie character and the stars.

  Back in the Midwest, I was just Stella, and everybody else was just everybody else. But here, they always ask me what I am. Are you Mexican? You Polish? Stella, you have got to be Italian. And to be truthful, I couldn’t say. My name is not much of anything, as far as I know. We ate spaghetti growing up, but we never called it pasta. St Patrick’s Day was another day for Dad to drink a beer, maybe a few more, with his buddies, but nobody I knew put on green clothes. I’m pretty sure we’re not Jewish; Ma used to cross herself whenever we drove by a church. Christmas was mostly about the turkey and once in a while a really good present like a baton or a baseball glove.

  Dad used to call us “Heinz 57,” same way they called mixed breeds of dogs, and he was kind of proud of it. I remember mom’s mother making something she called “Real German Strudel,” but it was just dry cake to us. And whenever Dad talked on the phone to his cousin in Topeka he would tell him to “stay away from firewater, Kemo Sabe.” I never took much notice.

  Here, everybody’s from someplace else. I like that, but I don’t always get where. It makes me feel a little like an alien, like I’m missing some big clue everybody else got. I think some of the guys in the market stare too much, but then I’m always looking at them, trying to work out where they are from. I thought somebody said Morocco, and somebody else said Lebanon, but we are all Americans, and it doesn’t make much never mind.

  Mrs W is nervous, but I started night school a couple of weeks ago. She says she worries because of all those late nights on the subway, but I think she worries I’ll fail. Or worse, I won’t fail and will move out of the neighborhood. Thing is, the thought of a new neighborhood is something I can’t even bear. Imagine that; it was like another country or the moon when I first moved in, and now I expect I’d miss it.

  In class, we all had to say something about ourselves. “Ice breaking,” they called it, even though it was about a hundred degrees hot outside. Nobody would go first, so the teacher started a game. He put numbers in a desk drawer, and everybody had to take one. Then, he shouted out one number at a time, and if you had the number, you had to say a word that described yourself. One word. Hometown was important. Or a sports team you liked. Or favorite color. And the next time your number was called, you had to say something else, totally different from the first thing. Filling in the whole picture, one word at a time, the instructor said. I guess eleven is an unpopular number, because it took him forever to say it. When it finally came around to me, I was completely worked up about my favorite color (blue and orange are neck and neck, in my view) and beside myself trying to decide on a hometown.

  So I h
ollered out Kansas, and everybody called me Dorothy from then on. I have learned to say Lawrence when asked and not mention Kansas (which is true) instead of Massachusetts (which is not). I worked it out that if you just said something that didn’t sound weird like Brunei or Alaska, people were satisfied that they had your number and just moved on. They wanted to know you were from someplace, and that was good enough. Mostly, people leave me alone about it anymore.

  Been almost five years here, two and a half since I finished high school and left Aunt Wilma’s. She was decent enough to have me live with her after Ma passed. Got me through school, and she was nice enough, I guess. She had her own way of doing things, and I got in her way lots of times. She called about every night when I first got the apartment, but she’s down to once in a blue moon now.

  It was strange coming here for a lot of reasons. Like anything else, I guess, some is good and some of it is not. Take the food. All that delicious soft food you eat with flatbread is from the Mid-east, but I never had it before I came here. And the pizza? A whole lot better, and they let you buy it in slices, which would never happen at Happy Joe’s back home. A girl in night class introduced me to Vietnamese sandwiches from Chinatown, just about as cheap as they are good, and you can take them up to the Common and watch men dressed up like Ben Franklin getting ten bucks for having their picture taken by tourists from California. The sauce was like nothing I have ever tasted, and I liked it at once. But nobody warned me about the God Almighty hot peppers. I learned that one the hard way.

  We talked about food in class, and that old feeling that I just do not, let me be clear, do not fit in here came down on me like a ton of bricks. My favorite meal? Bullheads, baby catfish, I said. I looked out at a room full of people staring at me like I had a melon on my head. We used to gut them on the sidewalk, too messy inside, and then flour them up and fry them in a pan. They were little, and you had to hold them in your hands like an ear of corn, careful not to swallow bones. Crispy and hot and delicious, there was nothing at all in the world like those little fish, if you didn’t choke to death. When you added in potato salad and iced tea, it was heaven. And in the late summer, slices of tomatoes. Tomatoes are like gold here, and they taste something like Kleenex, with a soft scrape on your teeth and the flavor of air.