by Jo Barney
Hank is jolted awake by her voice and her hand on his arm. “It’s okay. You’re okay. It’s just a dream, another bad dream. You’re safe.” Eleanor’s arm weighs on his chest as she stretches across him, reaching for the light switch. “Open your eyes. I’ve turned on the light, and you can see me.”
Hank shudders. He lifts his foot to let the sudden pain of a calf cramp escape. Eyes open, he finds the room, smelling Eleanor’s hair as she leans toward him. She wipes the sweat off his forehead with the sheet and tells him to go to sleep, and he does.
4
The plastic bag moves in and out. Jimmy can see his mother’s closed eyes inside it. Her lips move like she’s calling to him. He tugs at the plastic, at the red tape; nothing gives until he turns her over and finds a place where he can grab a hunk of the bag with both hands and rip it wide open. She makes a soft sound; her chin lifts; her eyes open into wet, red slits.
She asks him why he is home, says he is not supposed to be here now. She seems mad, but not the yelling kind of mad—the kind that makes her cry, like she is sad, like when he’s done something he shouldn’t have. He helps her sit up. When she asks him to use the scissors carefully, he does. He knows about scissors. He isn’t sure about the red tape—it is sticky and strong—but he’s patient, and it works out okay. Mom isn’t mad at him, only crying a little, he thinks.
She asks him to not tell Dad about the plastic bag and finding her and he promises. He knows what a promise is. It is a cross-your-heart, hope-to-die secret. What are aphids? He’ll ask his counselor when he sees him next. Dr. Kauffman knows everything. Dr. Kauffman is his friend.
In the middle of the night, his father’s yells wake him up, like they sometimes do, but Jimmy knows they are only from bad dreams. His mother explained one time that Dad had been in a war, that he still dreams of it sometimes, that he can’t help it when he yells at night. Jimmy should not be scared. His father went through a lot of very bad fighting, she told him, but his father never talks about it, and he gets mad when Jimmy asks him to tell him about the war. “None of your business,” he says. So Jimmy doesn’t say anything about getting woken up at night, about how he’s seen his mother cover up bruises with the long sleeves of her bathrobe some mornings. She doesn’t talk about the bad dreams anymore either.
This morning Mom has fixed his favorite breakfast, scrambled eggs. Actually, she has let him cook them after he cracks the eggs and uses a fork to mix them up with milk. She shows him how to turn on the burner to the M and let the pat of butter melt before he pours the eggs in the pan. Mom says that he is getting to be a good cook. They’ll work on hamburgers next time. He puts his dishes in the washer and picks up the sack holding his lunch. “I can do my lunches too,” he says, and his mother agrees.
“I bet you can. You can do a lot of things, including getting to work on time and sorting all the clothes that come in. And adding and subtracting and almost multiplying in your workbook. Which reminds me, I’ve found a book you might like. Old Yeller. We can start it tonight. We’ll surprise your father when you read it to him one of these days. He’ll be glad to know you like words.”
Jimmy hasn’t seen his father glad very often. “I’m leaving now,” he says, and on the way to the bus, he wonders whether he ever will make his father glad about words or anything else.
* * *
“Hey, Jimmy!” Janey rides the same bus he does, and she waves from the bus stop. She is a friend. He has a couple of other friends at the workshop. He eats with them, and they talk about stuff, like where they will go on vacation and what they watch on TV, and today Jimmy will talk about making his own breakfast. Janey lives with three other people, and they make their meals and do things together sometimes, like go to the zoo and to movies or even take hikes in the forest. He likes to hear what they have been doing.
He wonders whether their mothers ever visit them. He’d miss his mother if he ever went to live with other people. He’ll ask Janey today at lunch about mothers. He’ll also ask whether anyone knows what aphids are and why a plastic bag over your head is how you kill them. He shuts his eyes against the memory of his mother lying in the yard, that red tape around her neck. He can still feel how scared he was even if he did a good job of waking her up. Even if she seemed disappointed in being woken up. He probably shouldn’t talk about it at work.
5
The worst time of day is the hour after they leave and I am alone with a cup of coffee and myself. I go to the door and retrieve the newspaper. Sometimes I open it and read it. Today, I set the folded roll on the davenport for Hank. I am tired to the marrow of my bones. I cannot think of anything I should or want to do except go back to bed, disappear into the weird stories that pass across my closed eyes like roiling storm clouds.
Usually I am the star of these scenes, or someone like me, a person who is either lost or who hasn’t finished a task and who can’t remember how to do it. When anxiety forces my eyes to open, I try to bring the story to a satisfying conclusion, to find where I am going or to finish the work I need to remember. If I manage that, I will sleep without dreams for another hour or two. If I can’t think of a way out, I will lie, not sleeping, not awake, my legs itching on the inside, until I am forced to sit up and throw off the aura of disaster that’s wrapped around me.
Not finished. Lost. I have made sure that no evidence is left of my effort to “off myself.” That’s what they call it on TV. People, even famous people, do it all the time. Despite money, fame, busy successful lives, they off themselves. Why?
The grayness, I’m guessing. Like what I’m feeling right now.
I walk to the backyard, find a tab of red duct tape, and get rid of it by poking it under the dirt next to a wintered-over geranium that glows magenta over a hump of brown soil covered with tiny green sprouts waiting for spring. Some geraniums turn brown during the cold days while others begin greening up and budding the moment the sun appears, even in January. They’re optimistic, for some reason unknown to me.
I hear the phone ring. Sparks of fear constrict my breath. Not because it might be about Hank. He can take care of himself even when he’s out-of-control angry. Or others will take care of him, bring him home as they have several times, understanding his condition, sending sympathy to me with downturned eyes.
It’s Jimmy who gets lost, who doesn’t look when he crosses streets, who intimidates others with his awkward language and gestures that force confrontations, who lurks under my consciousness every moment of the day until he goes to bed at night. Hardly anyone ever calls me, except Helen, and she’s probably feeding her daughter while gossiping on the phone right now. I pick up the receiver fearfully.
“Hello? Eleanor? I hope I have the right number. This is Patsy Sullivan. I’m your neighbor in the house on the other side of the hedge. We moved in two weeks ago. I got your number from Information. Do you have a minute?”
Did she say Patsy? I breathe. It isn’t a hospital calling about Jimmy getting run over or causing a fire at Goodwill. “Hello, Patsy. I didn’t realize we have a new neighbor behind us—the laurel hedge, you know.”
“Well, that’s part of why I’m calling. The hedge. It’s huge. It will take a tractor to yank it out, if we both want that to happen. And I would like to have more light in my backyard. Maybe cutting it lower and thinning it would work. Since we share it…”
“I’ll ask my husband about it. That’ll cost money, I’m sure. He might be reluctant to join you in this project. We’ll talk about it tonight. Bye…”
“Wait. I’d also like to meet you. Being neighbors and all.”
I try to think of a reason to put off this Patsy person, but I can’t. I still have a few cookies from yesterday and a full pot of coffee. I might as well get it over with. “Come over now, Patsy. I have coffee on, and I’d love to meet you.”
“Great. Yesterday, when I was wandering around our overgrown backyard, I found a hole in the hedge. I’m going to try to squeeze through to your side. If I get hung up on
a branch, I’ll yell. Listen for cries for help. I’ll leave right now.”
Patsy might be interesting. She reaches out to strangers through a hole in the hedge. I might like her. Last person I thought that about was Helen, and I’ve regretted it lately. Careful, I tell myself as I bring out the coffee cups and hear a knock at the back door.
Patsy has dark skin. Her hair, a smooth, soft helmet framing her face, curves over her ears, along her hairline. The simplicity of her haircut focuses my attention to her cheeks, her dark eyes, her long neck. Her intense white smile makes me gasp as I try to return it. I reach out my hand. I have never touched a colored person before. I’m not even sure that’s what they are called these days.
“Hello, neighbor,” she says as she gives me a plate of oatmeal cookies. “For our coffee.” She looks around, and when I point at the dinette table, she sits and smiles again. “Thanks.”
More careful glances, smiles, nods, as we meander through the usual new-acquaintance sharing. I tell her about meeting Hank, marrying him, sending him off to Korea “way back then,” and settling down in Holgate Farms.
“I’m about ten years behind you. I had a career as a social worker, until Ray returned from Vietnam and we decided we needed a baby and to begin to live a normal life.”
“Normal life? Is there such a thing? I’ve been wondering that for years.”
Patsy smiles, sips at her coffee and puts the cup down. “I’m thinking we may have a lot in common.”
“I suppose so. War is war whether it’s in Korea or Vietnam.”
“More than that.” Patsy—chin in one hand, a cookie in the other—looks at me across the table. “My daughter has Down’s syndrome. Your son has something else.”
“Why in hell would you say that? You know nothing about Jimmy.”
“I do. I saw him, when he cried out the other day. I went to the break in the hedge to see if anyone needed help, and I heard you talk to him. I’ve seen that kind of wordless anxiety before. I suspect when he was little he played with one toy to the exclusion of most other things you offered him. Perhaps he still has things he goes back to repeatedly.”
“Legos. Now he draws. We have hundreds of intricate, beautiful patterns. We keep them in a scrapbook. I enjoy knowing something of how he sees things.”
“I interned in a school as a social worker and I’ve worked with kids like your son. Some people call it autism. No one knows why it happens. But I can tell that you are doing a good job as a mother. I’ve seen him smile and be concerned, difficult behaviors to learn sometimes.” Patsy bites at her cookie and swallows. “And we each have husbands suffering their own kind of traumas.”
“Trauma?”
“My husband, Ray, is an alcoholic. He wasn’t before he left for Vietnam.”
“What’s that have to do with my husband?”
“I heard his screams last night. Around the time that Ray hit his head on the tub when he passed out in the bathroom.”
I look out the window, try to imagine the nighttime sounds that flow between our matching bungalows on either side of the hedge. A pain-filled duet.
Patsy has been courageous enough to begin a family with her returned husband, despite the scars he brought home with him. I have lived with a wounded warrior for more than twenty years. And a handicapped son. We do have some things in common. Things beyond gossip. Intimate things I’ve never shared with anyone.
I try to smile, but my eyes run over with tears. “I’m sorry, for you and for me.” We do not speak for a moment as we empty our cups.
“Me, too,” she answers. She reaches for her sweater.
I need to ask one more question. “I’ve never had a friend like you. How do you describe yourself? Negro? Afro-American? Colored?”
Patsy gives me her brilliant smile one more time as she goes out the door and heads toward the hole in the hedge. “Just ‘friend’ will do.”
6
Patsy also sometimes wonders how she should describe herself. Actually, it’s the newspapers that are doing the naming. Afro-American. African-American. Sometimes colored or people of color. Never “Negro” these days.
She pushes through the hole in the hedge, catches her hair on a twig, yanks at it, and breaks off the offending branch, letting it dangle for a moment while she finishes her thought. I am black. That’s it. Other words also fit and are probably more important: American, friend, social worker, and, when she hears Izzy’s cries, mother. Wife, too, of course.
She opens the back door and heads for her daughter’s room. Sarah, her mother and willing sitter, has gotten there before her. “She really did it this time. Glad it’s time for me to go to yoga.” Sarah grins and hands the smelly three-year-old over to Patsy. “If you need me, I can come again next week. I’ll be off on Tuesday. How was coffee with your neighbor?”
Sarah reaches for her blue jacket, “Portland Police” embroidered on its sleeve. She is one of only a few women who have made law enforcement a career in the city. Left alone with a baby daughter almost thirty years ago, she managed to finish her college degree, apply for a police job, pass the interviews and tests, and become an officer the despite the fact that she was a mother, was a woman, and had black skin.
“It was fine. I’m just not sure if I have a new friend or a client. She has bruises, Mom. And I saw something else the other day. Something concerning.”
Sarah shakes her head. “Not your business, Patsy. In that yard and house, you’re a friend; don’t be a counselor. You have enough problems of your own. You took a leave from the clinic to work on you, not some stranger.” She pulls on her jacket and then gives her daughter a hug, avoiding the messy child held between them. “Why am I thinking about Elvis Presley? ‘If you’re looking for trouble, you came to the right place.’ This Eleanor sounds like the right place to me. I’m also remembering Jack, the sociopath who tried to murder you. Lucky I was waiting to take you to lunch in the next room.”
“Lucky you had your gun in your purse, too. Scared the shit out of him. Eleanor isn’t dangerous, Mom. She’s depressed. I’m depressed, too. Something else we have in common.”
Patsy sets Izzy down on the wooden stool and walks her mother to the door. “I know. I’m taking my meds. But maybe helping Eleanor could also help me. Next week I’ll start on the hedge in the backyard, if Eleanor agrees to join me. I think we both need something to do.”
“Just make it the hedge and not Eleanor.”
7
“What was that all about?” Hank lowers his newspaper as Jimmy and I come in through the kitchen. “Sounded like a party.”
“No party. I just met our neighbors in back and introduced Jimmy to the wife, Patsy. She’s very friendly.”
“Yeah? Too friendly? You know I don’t like getting close to neighbors. They always want something.” He raises the paper. “So what does she want?”
Before I can answer, Jimmy says, “She wanted me to get a ladder down for her. She’s nice.”
The paper comes down again. “Ladder? What for?”
“For the hedge.”
The paper lands in his lap. “What’s this all about, Eleanor? Are they going to cut down the hedge? It’s our hedge. I planted it. It’s the only thing that makes our yard private. And safe. I’m going to go over and let them know I’ll sue if they touch it.” He pushes away his footstool and gets up. “What’s his name?”
“I don’t know. Ray, I think. I only met the wife. Hank, that hedge is way overgrown. It needs to be trimmed. I told Patsy I’d help her work on it, to save money we would have to spend if we wanted to give it over to a landscaper.” I place myself in front of the door my husband is walking toward. “I’ll make sure she doesn’t cut too much.”
Hank brushes aside my hand on his arm. “Who said it needs to be trimmed? I sure didn’t. I wasn’t asked, and if I had been, I would have said no. I’m the one to say what is too much, not you. And any cutting is too much for me.” He reaches for his jacket. “I’m going to talk to the man in tha
t house. Wives don’t know shit about taking care of a yard.”
I bristle at this remark; I can’t remember the last time Hank did more than mow the grass, and that was only after considerable bitching on my part. “You can’t go now. They’re probably asleep.” Based on Patsy’s description of her husband’s evenings, he’ll be drunk by now.
“Any time’s a bad time with neighbors.” Hank leaves, not bothering to close the door behind him.
Jimmy gets anxious when his father raises his voice. His hands, fingers entwined, clutch at each other; his body rocks as he tries to think about what to do.
“Time to head to bed, Jimmy. I’ll come in after your shower, and we’ll read the next chapter in a few minutes.”
Finally, he says, “Okay,” and heads for his bedroom.
My hands grow damp as I wait for Hank’s return, listen for his footsteps on the porch. The door swings open. His cheeks are pale, not angry red. He looks directly at me, his voice, a non-agitated pitch. No signals. “The wife said her husband was in bed, sick. She will tell him I want to talk about the hedge.”
I watch him go back to his chair, pick up the newspaper, find the sports section. He doesn’t look up when I go to check Jimmy’s darkened room, and I wonder what Patsy said or did to calm Hank. She obviously didn’t argue—maybe because she hasn’t had to put up with his eruptions for more than twenty years and hasn’t run out of her own sense of calm yet.
I wince when a vision of a torn plastic bag and red duct tape floats across my eyes as I click on Jimmy’s nightlight. I’m thinking that maybe working on the hedge will help me cheer up.
I am sorting through the old gardening tools in the garage when I hear the phone ring. I let it ring, and when I finally get to it, whoever called has hung up. I pour a thermos of water and set out a couple of glasses. The phone rings again, and this time, I answer it promptly. It is my neighbor letting me know that our project is about to begin.