“Why not?”
“I don’t want to.”
“Just for a minute, Em. Okay?”
“I can walk home,” I said. I got out of the truck and started back down the road.
He followed me, his head out the window. “Come on, Em,” he said, “come on.”
I shook my head. I felt a little bit scared, but I didn’t want to “do something” with him. It wasn’t just him. Frank August and all those other boys were like a dream now. My bad dream. Well, not all bad, but not a good dream, either. The one I’d had about Mother was my good dream.
Scuffing down the dusty road, I remembered that dream. I remembered how Mother and I had read the menu together. If I could hold on to that memory, I thought, I wouldn’t feel so lonely. I told myself the train story again. I became absorbed in it. I remembered the pink tablecloth and the happiness of leaping over it to embrace Mother. I forgot Dennis following me in the pickup.
Suddenly he yelled, “Screw you, Em!” He gunned the motor and swerved toward me as if he wanted to kill me. I screamed and jumped off the road into the ditch. The tires spit sand as he went past. I walked in the ditch for a few minutes, rubbing sand out of my eyes; then I went back up on the road and walked the rest of the way home.
“You just never know what’s going to happen,” Father said, standing in the kitchen. “Isn’t that right, girls? You just never know if you’re going to meet a certain person or not. You don’t ever think you are, and then you do. See what I mean, girls?”
A long speech for Father.
Silence descended. Sitting next to me, big legs thrusting out of cutoffs, Pamela breathed furiously. I smelled her strong sweat. It was noon, and outside the blue jays called like creaky doors opening and closing.
Father’s forehead shone with sweat; there were two dark circles under the arms of his green work shirt. But standing next to him, her hip slouched against his, Sally Pearson was cool. She was cool in a white, short-sleeved blouse and tight-fitting white jeans. She and Father held hands as if they were in high school, as if they were just a couple of kids, while Pamela and I sat at the kitchen table like grown-ups, or a pair of sour judges. We sat there unspeaking, our arms folded, as if we were adults passing judgment on our wayward children.
“Sally works in the office of the gravel company,” Father said. “That’s where we met.” He smiled. Such a rare thing, Father’s smile. And this smile! A boy’s smile, a boy’s large smile of innocent delight. It was as if, overnight, he had become someone else entirely, no longer our silent, miserable father.
“I do the paychecks,” Sally said. She smiled too, but it was different. A cool, silver smile. She was nearly as tall as Father, and she had gray hair, as if she were old like him, but that was different too. Her hair was long and shining, and anyone could see that she wasn’t much older than Pamela.
“So what do you say, Em?” she said. “Pamela, what about you? You can’t fool me — I know what you’re thinking.” She looked at Father and laughed. “Your girls don’t like me, Ray.”
“Sure they do,” he said.
“You do the paychecks?” Pamela said, breaking our silence. She blew her nose on her sleeve. “What do you do with them, shove them up your ass?”
“Pamela,” Father said. “Pamela, be nice! Don’t pay her no attention,” he said to Sally. “She don’t mean it.”
“You’re too sweet,” Sally said to him. And then, to us, “I always liked your father. And lately, we got talking and stuff, but this isn’t any fast thing. We’ve known each other a long time.”
Pamela spit on the table. The glob of spit, yellowish and thick, quivered like it was alive. “So what are you doing here?” she said. “What do you want?”
“We got married,” Father said.
“Yesterday,” Sally said. She smiled, eyeing Pamela.
Pamela stood up, knocking over her chair. “You lie! Both of you, you’re two liars.”
“Are we?” Sally held out her hand. She wore a gold wedding ring. And Father took the marriage certificate out of an envelope and laid it on the table for us to see.
Sally moved her things into Father and Mother’s room that afternoon. And later that same day, Father said we should call her “Mother.”
“Afungoola!” Pamela shouted, a curse she had picked up in her brief working career. “I’ll call her what I want to call her, and you know what that is? Nothing.”
In our room, she told me she would never call Sally “Mother,” she would not even speak to her, and I had better not, either, if I knew what was good for me.
“I wouldn’t,” I said. “Do you think I would?” I spit out the window to show her how I felt, but my spit was pale and thin.
* * *
Sally didn’t like our furniture. She got rid of the old couch first. “Who the hell said she could do that?” Pamela demanded of Father.
“It’s her house now,” Father said.
The easy chair went next, then the rugs and the bed that Mother and Father had shared. As fast as the old things went out, the new came in. Sally gave away sheets, towels, pillows. She packed up the dishes we’d always used — pale yellow with faded little flowers around the borders — and said the Salvation Army was the place for them. The new dishes were a complete set in two colors, hot pink and bright green, with a matching gravy boat, creamer, and sugar bowl. She put up pictures on the walls of barns and little girls with big eyes, changed the toothbrush holder in the bathroom, and lined the windowsills with silk African violets. “Don’t they just look so real, Em?” she said.
She talked to me all the time and never waited for an answer. She sent out words as if they were packages she was tossing on my porch as she passed and didn’t care whether I opened them or not. I knew she wasn’t afraid of me, the way she was of Pamela. They hated each other. When they were in the same room, something else was there too, taking up air and space: as if hate were solid, as if it had substance and a shape.
* * *
Weekends were the hardest time. Sally and Father were home then, touching and bumping into each other, and murmuring as if they had a thousand little secrets. Nothing was the same anymore: not Father, not the furniture, not any of us. Only Pamela sometimes seemed unchanged, but even that wasn’t true. Without Mother, she was Pamela intensified, the rocketing planet, the exploding star in free fall. She did and said anything she wanted, and no one stopped her. No one could.
Sometimes, just to get away from them all — to be by myself — I went out back and sat in Mother’s car. It still smelled like Smith Brothers Wild Cherry Cough Drops, Mother’s favorite. If only I could drive, I thought. If only Mother were still alive. If only I had been good all the time, and not just sometimes.
One day, Father got in next to me. “Hello, Em.”
“Hello, Father.”
Then he just sat there. “It’s quiet here,” he said at last. There was another silence. He twisted the new gold ring on his left hand. “Well, I just thought — I came out here so maybe we could talk.”
“Okay,” I said.
“You like to play here?’’ He took a blue handkerchief from his back pocket and wiped his face.
“I don’t play.”
“What do you do?”
“Nothing.” Could I tell him I made up stories? That I pretended? That I thought about someday? Someday, when I was grown up. When I was in college. When I was someone different than I was now.
“So you just sit out here?”
“Yes. I guess so.” I let my hand slide across the gray plush seat. It was worn, bare in spots, but I loved the soft feel of it, and the way Mother’s smell was in it.
“Well, I just thought —” He folded the handkerchief and put it back into his pocket. “You know — Sally, she’s someone good. I mean, I know she’s not your mother, but she’s good. Your sister, she’s pretty hard on Sally. Maybe you could talk to her.”
“Maybe,” I said.
“Look at this, Em.” He held out h
is hand, showing me his wedding band, gleaming gold. “She bought it for me,” he said. “Isn’t that something? And, I’ll tell you something else, do you see me drinking now? No, you don’t. I promised her I wouldn’t, and I don’t.”
I stared out the windshield. You didn’t do that for Mother. I dug my hands deep into the pockets of my green jacket. It was November already and cold in the car. I wanted him to go away. I had not hated him so much in a long time.
“She’s like a birthday present,” he said. “A pretty big surprise for me. Well, that’s all I got to say. I just thought, you know, if you could think about that.” He opened the door and left.
* * *
A few days later, Sally told me she had decided to take Mother’s car for herself “No use letting it go to waste,” she said. “Perfectly good car — it should be used. Agree, Em?”
It was another question to which she didn’t expect an answer. She took Mother’s car to a mechanic for an overhaul and when that was done she had it repainted. It had been a faded black for as long as I could remember. When she brought it home, it was vivid red, with new red-and-green-plaid seat covers and a leather wheel cover. She drove it everywhere and, one day, when she took me into town to help her with the shopping, I realized that the car no longer even smelled like Mother.
Just before Thanksgiving, Sally told Pamela and me that we had to get jobs and pay her and Father room and board if we wanted to go on living with them. “What about school?” I said.
“What about it?” she said. “What’s the problem?”
“How can I work? I go to school.”
“You ever hear of part-time? Not you,” she said to Pamela. “Full-time for you. I’m sick of you slopping around the house without doing one tiny productive thing for this family.”
“You are really messed,” Pamela said. “You think I’m going to work and then give you the money?”
“Yeah, that’s just what I think,” Sally said. “Or else you don’t get to eat. Same for you, Em,” she said. “Don’t give me that pathetic look. What are you, sixteen?”
“Fourteen. In April, I’ll be fifteen.”
“Okay, so the April after that, you’ll be sixteen and through with school.”
“What?” There was a smile on my face. I didn’t want it there, but I couldn’t take it off.
“You heard me. What do you think, you can stay in school forever? Look, get yourself a part-time job. After school, before school, I don’t care. I went to work when I was twelve, so what makes you special? Bring something into the household. Get used to it: your dad isn’t going to support you the rest of your life.”
Pamela fanned a wad of twenty- and fifty-dollar bills in front of me. “Remember how he tore up the place looking for this?”
“You mean Father?” I said. I had never seen so much money at once.
“You mean Faaa-ther,” she mimicked. “Yes, I mean Faaa-ther.”
She’d had the money all this time, she said, hidden away in a tin box under the trailer. “Our old hidey-hole,” she said, triumphant. She caressed the bills.
“But what are you going to do with it?” I said.
“Sometimes you are so so so stupid. We’re going to leave.”
“What?”
“You having trouble with your hearing?”
“Leave here? Why?”
She looked me level in the eye. “It’s either that, or I kill that bitch.”
We left one morning after Father and Sally had gone to work. We packed two suitcases with clothes and walked to the Corners, where we took a bus into the city.
“We didn’t even say good-bye to him,” I said. I looked out the window and thought of Father and how, that day in the car, he had wiped his face with the blue handkerchief and looked at me so pleadingly, as if he thought he could get me to love Sally too.
* * *
In the city, everything was different. The smell of the air and the way people dressed and talked and even how they walked. And there were so many people. They were everywhere. I stood outside the bus station with my suitcase, and I didn’t know which way to look first, or if we should go forward or back, cross the street or stay right there.
Pamela said we had to buy a newspaper and read the FOR RENT ads. So we did that. And then we called a few places and saw some apartments. She wasn’t used to walking around so much and climbing stairs, and she got cranky. We went back to the first place we’d seen, a room in an old brick building near the college. Pamela said she’d be damned if she’d live near a bunch of snotty college kids, but the apartment was on the ground floor and the landlady had said there was a mattress in the basement that we could use.
“Thurkill?” the landlady said. “That’s a funny name.” Her own name was Blossom Smith. “Thurkill?” she repeated. “What is that?”
“It’s our damn name,” Pamela said. “Anything else you want to know?”
Blossom Smith took a fresh cigarette from a pack stuck in her rolled-up shirtsleeve. “Going to school, are you, girls?” She looked at me closely.
“Maybe,” I managed to say.
“How old are you?”
“Seventeen.” My heart pounded at the lie.
Blossom Smith grimaced. “You look young for your age.” She had dyed black hair and smoked her cigarette from the corner of her mouth. “So where’re you from?” She unlocked the door to the room. The only thing in it was a lamp with a paper shade, plugged into a wall socket. “I can tell you’re not city girls.”
Pamela went to one of the windows and snapped up the shade. She hated answering questions. “These are real cheap,” she said. “They’re going to tear in a minute.”
“We can pay the first month’s rent right now,” I said quickly. “Can’t we, Pamela?”
She opened her wallet and slowly counted bills into Blossom Smith’s hand. Blossom Smith counted the bills again, then folded them up and tucked them into a front pocket of her jeans.
After she left, Pamela sat down on her suitcase. “Shit, I’m beat.”
“Me too.”
“I don’t want to do anything.”
“Me neither.”
“Just call a restaurant and send over the food.”
“Yeah!”
We looked at each other and laughed.
Later, we dragged the mattress up from the basement. It smelled like cat pee, and I didn’t want to sleep on it. We covered it with a sheet. “I don’t smell anything anymore,” Pamela said.
“I still do.”
“No you don’t.”
“Yes I do, Pamela.”
“Shut up! Get your nose in your armpit.” She laughed. “Smells sweet as roses, don’t it?” she said. She pulled her sweater over her and fell asleep.
A few days later we found a good mattress in a secondhand store called the Bargain Shop. Pamela loved that place. Every day we bought something else for our room: a bureau, a table, a chair, even a wall plaque showing geese in flight over trees. “Our little home,” Pamela said, the day I hammered the plaque into the wall over her bed.
It was a friendly time between us, almost happy. Evenings, when we pulled the shades and the lamps threw shadows against the walls, I was intensely aware that here we were, the two of us together in our little room — and outside was the rest of the world, strangers all.
December passed, and January. There were always things to do, shopping and fixing meals and taking out books from the library. I missed school, but Pamela said that if I enrolled now, Sally could find out where we were and make us come back and work for her.
I didn’t think much about money. Pamela was in charge of that. She doled it out from her wallet and checked every receipt to make sure no one cheated us. It seemed as if the supply of money would never run out. Then one morning in February, there was a knock on the door. “Sheriff’s office,” a man called. “Please open.” Three men came in and carried our things out to the curb, everything except the smelly cat mattress. Pamela hadn’t paid the rent fo
r two months, and Blossom Smith had an eviction order from the sheriff’s department.
Pamela cursed Blossom Smith, and the men who carried out our stuff, and the sheriff, and every passerby. We were sitting on the curb with all our things — the furniture and bags and boxes of clothes and kitchenware — tumbled behind us in the dirty snow.
“We have to do something,” I said.
“Well, do it then.” She put her head on her knees and pretended to sleep.
“Pamela.” I shook her shoulder. “What do you want me to do?”
She turned her face and looked up at me. “Can’t you figure anything out? You are so stupid, it’s disgusting.” A small line of snot came out of her left nostril.
I thought about walking to the corner and turning that corner and walking on and not coming back, ever. Just take care of myself. Let Pamela take care of herself.
“Your nose,” I said.
“What about it?”
“It’s snotty.”
She laughed and wiped her nose across the sleeve of her jacket. “Better?”
“Yeah.”
After a while I got up and went down the street to a medical building. There was a pay phone in the lobby that I’d used before. I called a storage company. They came about two hours later and took our stuff away.
That night we slept in the bus station. In the morning the temperature was below zero outside, so we stayed there. We used the bathroom to clean up, and ate other people’s leftover food. We slept there two more nights, dozing in the hard plastic bucket seats with their tiny attached TVs. Sometime in the middle of the third night, I woke to see the bearded face of a man looming over me. “It’s okay, don’t get scared,” he said. There was a woman with him.
“Don’t you want to sleep someplace warmer,” she said, “on a real bed?”
* * *
“Your sister seems to have some emotional problems,” the social worker in the shelter said. “How long has she been like this?”
“Like what?” I didn’t know if I liked Mr. Elias. I knew I didn’t like his questions.
“Well, take her language, for instance. It’s, uh, pretty coarse. And her body language — negative body language.” Mr. Elias shook his head. He was a little man with a hard potbelly that pressed against the desk. “And I might as well add the way she dresses — something wrong with that. All those clothes.”
When She Was Good (9780545361910) Page 6