Rhonda the Rubber Woman

by Peterson, Norma;

  By the time Bobby pulled up in the Buick, I knew what I wanted to do. His face shone white in a slash of moonlight. “Your house?” That didn’t fit in at all with what I wanted to say.

  “There’s no one home. They’re out ‘til midnight. It’ll be all right.”

  “Oh, okay.” I nodded and sat back on the scratchy car seat, feeling like a criminal he was going to harbor.

  “I have a plan,” he said as he closed the door to his house behind us. The rooms smelled piney, like Christmas.

  “You do?” My heart leapt.

  “We can go away together.”

  “We can? That’s what you want, too?” I had already decided I didn’t care if we were half brother and half sister, I still wanted Bobby more than anything else in the world. What difference did it make anyway? We felt the same about each other as we had the day before. The only difference was he’d said some words. The sun and moon still rose and set. Birds still cooed the same songs. I’d pictured us on the road, Bobby playing with his combo, me sitting at a table and polishing up my little books of verses.

  We gazed at one another, standing close together in the vestibule. He smelled a little boozy as he put an arm around my shoulder and led me into the house. We passed underneath a sprig of mistletoe and he stopped and kissed me, a soft tender kiss.

  We settled on the sofa, where he sat sideways, facing me, pulling his knee up so it rested on the cushion between us. “I think I can get on with the combo I sat in with this afternoon. We might be on the road a lot. I’m not sure we’d have much money.”

  “Oh, Bobby, I don’t care about money. I don’t care about being on the road. I’d love being on the road with you.”

  He looked toward the fireplace for a second, then back toward me. “I’d want us to get married.”

  “Married? Can we?” My voice came out like a little girl asking if it was all right to cross the street, and for a minute, my eyes drifted to the photographs above the fireplace. Barney and Mrs. Felker at their wedding. Snapshots of the five boys clowning.

  “What I mean is, is it legal?” I asked.

  “Probably not. But who will know? Once we’re away from Marysville, we can do anything we want.” I spread my hands on his chest to feel the pumping of his heart, as if I needed to convince myself he was real. “You’re right. What does it matter? I’m already illegal. Just being alive I’m illegal.”

  “No,” he said. “Just being alive, you’re making me very happy.”

  He reached forward and gently pulled me to him. We eased together down onto the sofa and I closed my eyes.

  33

  NANCY, 1946

  My mother was in the kitchen ironing a pink bunny sweater when I got up.

  “I’m going into work for a few hours. One of the girls is picking me up.”

  “I see.” I’d just walked into the kitchen, still in my pajamas. “Well, maybe it’ll be good for you.”

  “Yeah. That’s what Mildred said.” She didn’t look up, just concentrated on the ironing as though it was the most important thing she’d ever done.

  “Is there … uh … anything you want me to do?” It was chilly in the kitchen but my palms felt sweaty.

  “No, just don’t put the salt shaker next to the sink again. The salt was all globby last night.”

  “Oh, okay. I’m sorry. I won’t.” Maybe I was wrong. Maybe things wouldn’t be any different between me and my mother after all. Maybe she’d just pretend yesterday never happened and I’d try to go along with it because I didn’t know what else to do. But I did know that I had to get away. All that pretending day after day was too exhausting. It took too much out of your life.

  I started out for Sylvia’s. The day was gray and gusty, and my ears stung from the wind. When I thought of Bobby my heart would go warm with love, but then as I remembered all the things I’d yelled at my mother it would go hard and chilly, and a minute after that, I’d be filled with fury at her for driving me to it. And underneath it all, there was guilt so strong it made my knees feel loose and my ears burn.

  I passed the Marysville School, noticed there were bunches of kids standing outside, hunched together, and wondered what was up. School should have already started. I recognized Mary Bobst and Jennie Miller in one of the groups and strayed over.

  “Oh, Nancy, I didn’t know you were back,” Mary said.

  “Just for a week.”

  “Did you hear about Sylvia?”

  “Sylvia?”

  “It was terrible. She died. There was a terrible accident.”

  Every speck of blood in me dropped to my feet.

  “Yesterday afternoon. About three o’clock,” Jennie interrupted. “Everyone in school, that’s all they’re talking about. The teachers said we don’t have to go to class if we’re too upset.”

  “What happened?” I felt faint.

  “Her brother did it,” Mary said.

  “What?”

  “He was running with the shears and he fell on her.”

  “She was stooped down cleaning the yard,” Jennie butted in. “She wanted to prune some twigs off a bush.”

  “He tripped on a root beer bottle. Florence Butz said the shears went right through her heart.”

  I stood paralyzed, thinking, if I’d gone to Sylvia’s yesterday like I was supposed to, I could have grabbed her brother before he reached her. I could have taken her the shears myself. She wouldn’t have been pruning the twigs off a bush anyway. She’d have been sitting at the rickety kitchen table drinking milk and eating Tandy Takes with me. But, no, I was too busy telling my mother how much she’d ruined my miserable life.

  34

  GEORGIA, 1946

  I knew Nancy would blow up one day. You don’t have to have an I.Q. the size of a German tank to know some things. I could see it behind her eyes practically from the day she was born. At least I learned I could put her off if I bounced and looked hurt and whatnot. If I said, “What a thing to ask your mother,” and turned away, I could keep her in line. It wasn’t that I didn’t have bad nerves to begin with, I was always flighty, I just put it on a little more with Nancy. You have to do what you can when you’re not a genius and you get flustered easy and say things that don’t always follow what everybody’s talking about.

  Sure, I haven’t been a perfect mother, didn’t cross all the I’s and T’s, but who does? And I was so young when I had her. When you’re that young, a baby seems like a toy and then before you know it, it gets a personality and turns out different than you and starts writing poems and essays and sassing you. Kids don’t grow up the way they used to, minding their elders.

  One thing, though, I truly didn’t know about Bobby, and I feel real sorry for her over that. I had no idea Bobby was Carl’s boy. The only reason I scolded about folks from the R.D. was because it seemed like a bad luck place to me after Carl. I didn’t like to think about the R.D. after Carl.

  Oh, I know Nancy would say what kind of a mother was I that I didn’t even try to find out who Carl was married to, but things were different then. Everybody didn’t tell everybody and their uncle all their business. I know these days you’re supposed to say any fool thing that comes into your head. I’ve had my fill of Nancy spouting, “Ye shall know the truth.” Well, I haven’t noticed that the truth always makes you feel like you’ve been named queen for a day.

  I remember just after Eddie took off for western P.A., I put on a couple of pounds and Cora didn’t waste a minute making Kate Smith jokes, kidding that it was for my own good. Well, between you and me and the post office, I’d say it was more that Cora was all worked up over Walt and his episodes and feeling mean and nasty and who else was there to take it out on? That was a little truth I could have done just fine without, thank you. I don’t understand why people can’t just let a smile be their umbrella.

  Anyway I did get one idea this morning when I was ironing and Nancy came into the kitchen and we both went tongue-tied. An idea that might help her out some. I suppose I owe her
something after all those years of acting like a distant cousin. She didn’t realize I was more afraid of her than anything. Plus she’s being nicer lately and I notice her eyes go scared sometimes like she can use a little help in life.

  Another thing, when she was out with Bobby yesterday I went in to straighten up the sunporch and found a poem on the table by the cot.

  I picked it up. “Come with me and I’ll show you my heart,” it said. “On the way we’ll dance through secret back roads of my mind…” After that I get it mixed up but it said something cute about kissing in the sun and then it went sad, saying people will tell you beware, don’t go there, but it ended up cute again, saying something like, look, the moon still shines.

  I figured it was a love poem for Bobby and it made me cry. It reminded me of how I felt about Carl, and then that made me cry even harder, thinking about Carl instead of Earl. Poor Earl. We only had six months together, and we were real happy. Earl was proud of me. He’d tell everybody he never thought he’d end up married to a looker like me. But at least he went happy. I made him a happy man. That’s more than a lot of people can say in life.

  The love poem gave me an idea of something I could do for Nancy and Bobby. I’d have to tell a little white lie, but so what if it helped them out for awhile. Puppy love. It never lasts anyway. Six months from now they’ll both be gaga over somebody else. The main problem would be getting the words out straight. It wouldn’t be easy talking about a thing I spent half my life pretending never happened, but I could practice. A little practice wouldn’t hurt to help out my own kid.

  35

  NANCY, 1947

  I stumbled home, crawled up on the cot, curled into a ball and cried for two days.

  Nothing anybody said or did could help. Aunt Cora tried. Bobby tried, even my mother. She sat on the edge of the cot and put an arm around my shoulder, so light it could have been made of little bird bones, and said, “You can’t go on crying forever. Sylvia wouldn’t want it.” She said the living had to get on with life; look at her, she was trying.

  Finally she called in Dr. Di Salvo, who shone a flashlight into my eyes and listened to my heart, even though I couldn’t believe there was still a heart left in me, and announced, “A bit of a breakdown, I’m afraid.”

  After that everything went foggy. I knew Bobby came every day and held my hand but the rest of him seemed far away and hazy. I kept seeing a skinny girl with puffy curls knocking at the sunporch window, calling in a muffled voice, “Nancy … Nancy … Come out to see me, Nancy.” The only thing that kept me going was remembering how I’d reached over and put Sylvia’s jumper strap back on her shoulder. At least I’d touched her. I pictured it over and over in my head. It wasn’t much but it was the only decent thing I could think of that I’d done.

  “If I’d only been there,” I whimpered to Bobby one day, and he said, “Please don’t think that. Life is a million ifs.” He sat on the rocker by the cot. “If I hadn’t told you about your father, you would have been there. I might just as well blame myself, but what good would it do? If Sylvia had gotten up that morning ten minutes earlier or ten minutes later. If her telephone had rung or if the mailman had stopped by or if her brother had decided to ride his bike or climb a tree or skin a cat…”

  I nodded and tried to memorize his words so I could recite them to myself when I was alone at night, but even though I went through the whole list—the telephone, the mailman, the bicycle, the tree, the cat—when I finished I still felt sick to my stomach and croaked to the dark, “If only I’d been there.”

  Christmas came and went. My mother and I tried to ignore it. Just a Christmas carol on the radio could send us running for our nerve pills. We had our own bottles, side by side in the medicine cabinet next to the Pond’s Cold Cream and the Cuticura. Most of the time I was asleep, dead to the world asleep. It was just as well because awake, my brain was like a pinball machine. I’d try to think straight but my thoughts would hit snags, scooting off in other directions. Backwards. Sideways. Clack. Crash. And I’d give up.

  On New Year’s Day I put on a gray skirt and a rose-colored sweater and sat in the living room. Bobby nestled by me on the plaid couch. “I’ve decided not to go to Hamlin,” he said. “I’m going to quit college and stay in Marysville with you.”

  I started to cry. Bobby and I together was something too big to think about. I couldn’t even decide what kind of an egg I wanted for breakfast, or if I wanted breakfast at all.

  He squeezed my hand, “Oh, Nancy, the last thing I want to do is make you cry.”

  “Then don’t stay,” I bubbled. I didn’t look at him, just stared at the braided rag rug on the floor.

  His voice was quiet. “I don’t believe you mean that.” I felt his breath on my cheek as he looked at me.

  Bobby gently took my hand. “You’ll get well soon, and then we’ll go ahead with our plans.” His green eyes looked so sincere I felt he must not be seeing me right, he must have me mixed up with some other girl.

  “No,” I said, loud. “I want you to go to Hamlin.” As bewildered as I was, I knew I couldn’t stand the guilt of ruining Bobby’s life. I knew Mrs. Felker would be horrified at the thought of him going off with me, and he’d think for a while he didn’t care, it was enough that we loved each other, but eventually he’d turn bitter and who could blame him?

  He jerked back, surprised at the harshness of my voice.

  “Bobby,” I whispered, putting my hand on his knee, “I can’t think of anything as complicated as going away together now.” I felt the warmth of his leg through his corduroy pants and wanted to keep my fingertips there forever. “I’m not up to it. I’ll get better faster if you go.”

  He turned my hand over, staring at my palm as though he was trying to read it. After a while he sighed, “I understand.” The next week he told me he’d signed up at Hamlin but that he’d write to me every day and come to see me every weekend, and he did.

  My mother went back to work but Mildred and Aunt Cora took turns bringing us dinner most afternoons. They’d knock on the door around five o’clock with a casserole and stories about the rest of the world. My mother and I sat at the kitchen table and listened to them like two puppy dogs trying to learn a trick. Weekends, my mother spent hours dusting her little porcelain figurines with a teeny red-handled paint brush, going over and over each Scotty dog, bunny and kitten to be sure she got every speck of dust.

  At the end of January, I went back to school. Miss Sandercock came to the apartment twice a week to help me catch up, so I could graduate with the rest of the class. It wasn’t hard. I threw myself into my school work the way my mother went at sticky floors and splotchy chrome. I read and read. Look Homeward Angel. Pride and Prejudice. Jane Eyre. I wrote two book reports a week. My favorites were sob stories, novels where everything looked hopeless but worked out in the end.

  One day Miss Sandercock asked if I ever thought of going to college.

  “Well, maybe after I fly to Jupiter and Mars,” I joked.

  She told me there were colleges that didn’t cost an arm and a leg, and I could probably get a scholarship to one of them.

  I looked at her, feeling like Alice eying Wonderland but later that week I went to the library and copied down a list of colleges in Pennsylvania.

  Bobby’s letters helped keep me going. “I watched the sunrise today and saw your eyes in the morning light,” he’d say. “I dreamt last night we danced together while Artie Shaw played ‘Begin the Beguine.’” Reading his letters helped me feel more like a real person instead of a shadowy silhouette, someone with eyes and a heartbeat.

  I’d made him promise not to talk about going off together until June, when I graduated from high school and he finished his first semester at Hamlin. “If it’s meant to be, we’ll love each other just as much then,” I’d whispered and he’d kissed me until I thought he might pull all the breath out of me.

  There were other little pinpricks of light. One cold February morning, out of the blue
I got up early and wrote a poem about a girl who spilled the beans on the reverend with wandering hands. The girl in the poem sounded like the kind of person people would remember for doing something important.

  Later that day I answered a Christmas note I’d gotten from Clark with a letter that stretched to six pages and the next Sunday morning, he called.

  “It sounds like you’ve gone through a real nightmare up there.” It was good to hear his voice. Clark was someone who could understand.

  “I have.”

  “Are you seeing a shrink?”

  “No. The doctor gave me nerve pills.”

  He sighed. “When are you coming back?”

  “I don’t know if I am.”

  “Hmmmm. Well, listen, don’t let them talk you into anything. I worry about you up there, getting sucked into some small-town rut you’ll live to hate.”

  “I know. I won’t.” I twirled the phone cord around my finger and decided not to say Bobby and I were thinking of going away together. Clark would just say we were drawn together because we were related. But with me and Bobby I knew it was different. I knew it was true love.

  “Besides, I miss you,” he said. “I really mean it. Who else do I know who can touch her nose to the floor and roll into a ball and curl?”

  I realized I missed Clark, too. I began to feel witty and debonair again, as though Clark brought out a certain spunk and spark in me. Plus, he wasn’t being sarcastic. He was being sweet, although I supposed that was pretty much the way you had to be to someone who was getting over a nervous breakdown. Still, Philadelphia started to seem exciting and full of promises again.

  “Uh, look, Nancy, I hope you realize that you have some tough work ahead. The breakdown was your body’s way of telling you to stop and take a look at your life and all the grudges and guilt that drove you to it.”