When I finally tuned in on you and Judy again, you were fighting. That kind of low-voice fighting, where people still sound polite, and you can’t figure out what’s going on. Judy was saying, “You’re supersensitive, Bill, about being poor, I never meant it that way.”
And you said, “Supersensitive, my ass!”
That was the end of the low voices. Judy said she wasn’t putting up with talk like that. And you told her that was ridiculous. And she said you’d better stop calling her names. And you said she was being juvenile.
“Okay!” she said. “Okay. Stop the car! I want to get out.”
You wouldn’t stop. You said that was silly and immature, you weren’t going to let her walk ten miles back to the city.
“That’s my decision, not yours,” Judy said.
And suddenly you stopped the car. And she got out. For about two seconds, I was joyful, waiting for you to drive off so I could leap over the back seat and sit next to you, right where Judy had been sitting. Then she remembered me. “Okay, Bitsy, out! We’re walking!”
And we walked. You drove away. I was furious with her because it was a hot day, the road stunk of carbon monoxide fumes from the cars whizzing by, and besides all that, I was barefoot.
You doubled back for us. We’d been walking for about twenty minutes, and I was so relieved. But Judy was too proud to get into the car without an apology. You said you had nothing to apologize for and that she was acting even more ridiculous and immature than you had thought her capable of acting.
I think I remember all that, practically word for word, because I was really torn. I was rooting for you, and yet I couldn’t help being on my sister’s side, too, mad as I was at her. “Come on, Judy, let’s get in the car,” I said. You were leaning on the window, your arms crossed. You winked at me.
“Come on, Judy,” you said, “listen to Bitsy.”
“Forget it.” Judy started walking again. “Forget it, forget it, just forget it,” she said, passing right by you.
“I’ll forget it, all right,” you said. “I’ll forget you. That won’t be too hard!” And you drove away, then suddenly backed up, stuck your head out the window and called, “Bitsy, we’ll keep in touch. Okay?”
I said, “Yes!” And then you were really gone.
I caught up with Judy. We walked along for a while, then she started talking about you. How arrogant you were. You were so sure you were brighter, smarter, more intellectual than anyone. How you were always correcting her. “He thinks he’s so much, and he’s nothing,” she said. “He doesn’t even have a decent family!”
“Yes, he does.” I was getting crosser and crosser with Judy. I knew you came from a poor family, that your father drove a beat-up truck and went around picking up stuff from other people’s garbage and throwouts. And once I saw you downtown with your mother and she was wearing a long brown skirt and sneakers with her toes sticking out. But I thought Judy was being stupid, and I told her.
“Oh, now you’re starting in on me,” she said. And she started to cry. “You think he’s so perfect, so wonderful. Oh, I know, don’t think I don’t know.”
It’s queer how it’s all coming back to me now as I’m writing this. I can smell the tar on the road that day, it was so hot, a hot day in May, and I can almost feel all over again the gravel under my bare feet, and then hear Judy saying, “He’s impossible, impossible, you can’t say anything to him!”
And then the next thing I remember is being in my room, it’s night, it’s cool, and it’s raining outside. And I’m thinking to myself, Well, even if Judy and Bill don’t get together again, I’ll still get to see him.
But I never did. I can’t believe it sometimes. You’re so real to me, Bill. I can see you perfectly clearly in my mind, and yet—are you there, Bill? If I don’t actually see you, do you still exist?
Dear Bill,
Glancing through the newspaper the other day, I noticed the announcement of your marriage to Lucille Lacy Heller Marginy, and I want to congratulate you—
Dear Bill,
A funny thing happened last week. I was out driving with my girlfriend, Randy, and we were on Rock Cut Road and suddenly we passed your house, a little pink house sitting back there behind that old cemetery, with your father’s truck parked nearby, and all that old junk in the yard and all of a sudden I remembered that you once took me to your house. I met your brother, Tim, and your sister, Nancy. And we had gingersnaps and milk. But the funny thing is that I hadn’t even been on Rock Cut Road in years, and then, the way coincidences happen, yesterday my mother saw the announcement of your marriage in the newspaper. “Mr. and Mrs. Clarence Heller of Woodchuck Hill Road, DeWitt, announce the marriage of their daughter, Lucille Lacy Heller Marginy to William Youngman, Jr., of Rock Cut Road, Jamesville.”
My mother said, “Do you remember Judy’s old boyfriend, Kathy? Bill Youngman?”
So I said, “Sure.” And I laughed because she could even ask me such a question. Then she passed the newspaper over to me.
And she said, “Well, it’s quite a jump from Rock Cut Road to Woodchuck Hill Road. I don’t think there’s a house out there on Woodchuck Hill Road under fifty thousand.”
Oh, why am I saying all this to you? It sounds so snobby and stupid! Bill, I just can’t get this letter to you right. I want to say so many things, and it’s all coming out wrong. It sounds like I care one way or the other where you were born, and I don’t. I don’t! I—
Dear Bill,
Why did you do it? I keep wondering, why? Are you in love with her? But she’s so old. And you said to me, You better let me know when you’re sixteen, I want to be there. You said it, and I believed you, Bill! I’m growing up, I’m nearly sixteen, I’m nearly there, if only you’d waited another year!
Bill, why didn’t you write me even once? Just a postcard would have been okay. Or a call to say, Hello, how are you, Bitsy, what are you doing, what are you thinking …
If I told you all the times I made up conversations you and I could have—if you knew all the letters I’ve wanted to write you. What if I had written them? Would you have done it? Married her? Oh, God, I know I’m being an absolute jerk, but, Bill—
Dear Bill,
I love you and have ever since I knew you. I don’t think I’ll ever forget you or stop lov—
Dear Bill,
The other day I noticed an announcement of your marriage in the newspaper. We were friends a long time ago, and so I want to wish you the best of everything.
Peace.
Kathy (Bitsy) Kalman
Chocolate Pudding
Chocolate pudding is my favorite dessert. When it’s on the menu in the school cafeteria, I order four or five puddings in those little brown cups, and eat nothing else for lunch. At home, I cook my own chocolate pudding, and when it’s cooled enough for that lovely silky skin to come over the top—chocolate skin, I call it—I often eat it straight from the pot. I eat the soft puddingish part first, saving the chocolate skin for last.
I always offer Dad and Uncle some pudding, but neither one is ever interested. They don’t eat much, anyway. When they’re drinking, I don’t believe they eat at all; betweentimes, they’ll eat a hunk of cheese, some bread, a few boiled potatoes, sometimes a piece of fruit. Although they’re brothers, they haven’t the same interests (except for the drinking), nor the same sort of disposition, nor do they look alike. Uncle hasn’t Dad’s wild mop of red hair, or Dad’s white, freckled skin, or Dad’s blue eyes, either. (I often think of Dad years ago, when he met my mother and they loved each other—his eyes really blue then, not glaring and watery, and his red hair, and that beautiful jaunty smile. Uncle says girls always liked Dad.) Uncle is shorter and stouter than Dad, brown hair, brown eyes, even his skin is a sort of neutral, light-tannish color. Uncle looks as he is: calm; I’ve never seen him lose his temper.
Uncle’s mad for oranges the way I am for chocolate pudding. When I was a little girl, whenever Uncle took out the curved paring knife from the
silverware pitcher and sat down at the table with an orange, I’d come in as close as I could, leaning on his leg to watch, fascinated, as he slowly took off the peel in a perfect spiral.
“Let me have it, please, Uncle,” I’d plead, hopping up and down.
“You want a bite of my orange, Chrissy?” he’d say, dividing the orange perfectly in half with the flat of his thumb poked through the center.
“No, Uncle, no! No orange. The peel! Please, Uncle.”
“The peel?” he’d say, as if sincerely astonished at such a bizarre request.
When Uncle gave me the peel, and he always did after only a moment of teasing, I’d go under the table with it, near Uncle’s feet, and play Eskimo House. There was snow all around, but the Eskimo people inside their orange igloo were cozy and eating spaghetti out of a can the way Uncle, Dad, and I did in winter when the snow plastered itself in little bunches and clumps against the windows, and the wind shrieked across the flat fields outside our wooden trailer.
Our trailer is one long, narrow room. We do our cooking on a two-burner hotplate, we have a refrigerator, table, three chairs, an electric heater, a sink. No more, no less than we need, as Uncle says. Our privy is out back, fifteen feet from the well, as required by state law. Uncle and Dad sleep on the pullout couch, while I used to have a cot with chairs shoved against it to keep me from falling out. But now Uncle and Dad have built a wall across the back of the trailer, making a room for me. They built in a bed, desk, a few shelves. There’s a window over my bed. Sometimes when Uncle and Dad are away, I sit on my bed eating chocolate pudding from the pot and looking out the window into the fields.
One afternoon some years ago (I must have been about ten), I came off the school bus, my stomach hollow with hunger, and rushed down our dirt road. My coat was half on, my shoes were untied. I banged on the trailer as I ran alongside it. “Dad? Uncle? Are you there?” The trailer was empty; I went to the cupboard where we kept the chocolate pudding, always Migh-T-Fine in the little white cardboard box with red letters. There was no chocolate pudding. Disbelievingly, I pulled out everything, flinging around boxes and tins. Rage bubbled up in me, thickened, spilled over.
“Damn it, Dad, you did the shopping last week,” I shouted. “Damn you. Damn you, damn you, you forgot my chocolate pudding!” I threw myself down on my bed and as I did I thought of the ingredients of chocolate pudding, which were the first words I’d learned to read: sugar, cornstarch, cocoa … each word carrying a magical, mysterious weight as fine, powdery, and sweet as the granules themselves.
Revived, alert, excited, I got up and dumped cups of cornstarch, cocoa, and sugar together in a pot. I made a terrible mess, bitter and gluey, which I threw out in disgust. Then I started again. And gradually, over the next weeks, I learned to make chocolate pudding properly.
Now I make my own pudding all the time. I vary it, depending on my mood, thin and creamy, or very sweet, or thick, or dark as night. My only regret is that neither Dad nor Uncle shares my pleasure in chocolate pudding. “We’ve no taste for chocolate,” Uncle says. “Though your mother liked it very well.”
When my mother was alive, which wasn’t even till I was two years old, she and Dad and I lived in an apartment over the drugstore in Middle Square. In my room, tacked up on the wall next to my bed, I have a few snapshots from that time. Often I lie on my stomach across my bed, staring at those pictures, trying to know the people in them. One is of my father sitting on a couch, holding a baby—me—rather stiffly on his knee. He is wearing glasses and his hair falls down over his forehead. He has a serious, almost desperate, look of intensity on his face as he stares straight into the camera that my mother held. Then there is another picture of him and my mother, standing in front of their new car. My mother is shading her eyes from the sun, bending a little, smiling and squinting. She is wearing a long, full skirt, shoes with pointed toes, a blouse with buttons down the front. Her hair is flying out to one side, as is her skirt. My father is grinning, he’s got his arm around her, he looks jaunty, arrogant, a stranger to me, as strange as my mother.
It was after my mother died that Dad and I moved in with Uncle in the trailer. The two of them cared for me and brought me up. “You look just like your mother,” Uncle told me so many times. “Very much like. Except for the hair,” he always added. My hair is quite long, reddish; in this way I take after Dad.
How calm Uncle is. I’ve never heard him raise his voice. One hot summer night when the cicadas were screaming a car drove fast up our road, billowing dust behind it, and a bag of rotting garbage flew straight at the trailer.
“The world is a very ignorant place,” was all Uncle said as we cleaned up the slimy mess. “That’s a fact, Chrissy.” Another time some boys shot out our windows with BB guns, and Uncle called in the State Troopers. Two of them came, very big men in gray uniforms with broad hats and guns holstered at their waists. They walked around the trailer, looking at the windows. They seemed to know Uncle and called him Jack in serious voices, behind which I heard something else that I couldn’t identify, but which made me pace angrily behind them.
“Jack,” they said, “sure you didn’t do this yourself one night, Jack? When you were soaked? You sure, Jack?”
Even then, Uncle didn’t get angry.
But I did. I went all cold and shaking. “I was here, right here, in the trailer,” I said, “when they drove past and shot at us. Are you going to accuse me of doing it? Are you? Are you?”
“Chrissy,” Uncle said, putting his hand on my shoulders. “Chrissy, now, Chrissy.” His voice, even, calm, soothing, went around my rage, enclosed it, kept it from bursting beyond control. I believe Uncle has the same effect on Dad.
Even if someone cheats them out of their rightful pay, Uncle won’t get angry. He says it’s not worth it. He and Dad hire out to work as a team, doing odd jobs for the people hereabouts. They’ll clean out cellars, tear down old buildings, mix cement, repair roofs, or do the milking for a farmer called away from the farm. They never leave any job before it’s finished, and they give good work for their pay. At the end of a working day, they come home, take out the bills and coins they’ve earned and put them into the tomato juice can we keep on the top shelf of the cupboard.
In January the weather was bitter. Morning after morning, I woke to see my window opaque with frost flowers. Still, Dad and Uncle went out to work often and the tomato juice can was stuffed to the brim with bills and coins. The last day of January was so cold that as I ran down our frozen rutted lane for the school bus the inside of my nose felt fragile as glass. But that night in our trailer it was cozy, the electric heater humming, as I did my homework and Dad listened to Radio Australia on short wave. Uncle was in a mood to talk. “Your mother loved cold weather like this, Chrissy. There was nothing she liked so much as a walk in the cold or a snowball fight.”
“My mother was fun to be with?”
“Oh, yes, Ellen was a lovely girl, cheerful and laughing. Nothing got her down. Isn’t that right?” he asked Dad. But Dad was lost in some other thought.
“The day I see you take a drink, Chrissy,” Dad said, “is the day I’m through with living.”
Tears came to his eyes. He put his head down on the table. (Once Dad was very strong—Uncle has told me so.) I’ve seen him cry many times, drinking does it to him. When I was younger I’d shake his arm, pleading with him not to cry. Crying myself.
But now I’m sixteen, and something hardened in me. “Quit that crying, Dad, just quit it.”
Uncle tossed his orange peel into the garbage bag near the door.
Dad lifted his head. He’s half blind in one eye, from what I don’t know as he refuses to go to a doctor. He wears very thick glasses behind which his eyes, red-veined, seem to glare, but it’s only that he’s trying to see.
“Get me the cigarettes, Chrissy.” He lit up.
“Let me have a puff,” I said.
In school, girls are always collecting in the lav or standing around outside the bui
lding to sneak a smoke behind their hands. “Chrissy, got a ciggy?” they’ll say, because they know I always carry half a pack or so with me. We bend our heads together, lighting up, then pass the cigarette around. It’s very easy and friendly, and once in a while I’ll wonder if it might go beyond this to a real friendship. It never has.
“I’m sorry,” I said after a bit to Dad. “For yelling.”
“Oh, it’s a good thing you did. I cry too easily these days. I need someone to yell at me.”
“Well, don’t expect me to make a habit of it.” I mashed out the cigarette in the sink. “Uncle can yell at you.”
“Oh, not me,” Uncle said hastily, “not me,” and then, for some reason, we all three laughed.
Toward the end of February, the cold eased, and as March came in I saw the restlessness coming over Dad and Uncle. Dad listening to his broadcasts for only a few moments, then standing up, scratching his arms and his neck, whispering to himself. And Uncle putting down his book, picking it up, putting it down again. After a while, not picking it up at all.
There were chunks of dirty ice piled at the sides of the road where I waited for the school bus, while the sun, thin as a slice of cucumber, still threw enough warmth to burn into my scalp. I felt the restlessness myself, and longed for something. But what?
One night the wind blew with such force, such screaming and wailing through the trees and around the corners of the trailer, such rattling of the windows and shaking of the boards that I couldn’t sleep. I sat up in bed and pressed my face to the cold window, trembling and thrilled. I stayed that way for hours before finally falling asleep.
In the morning I felt stupid with tiredness. The wind had died. The sky was blue and calm. Sheets of light poured from the sky, and the sight of a tree, white against the sun, its branches swollen with buds, agitated me in a strange and painful way. Something will happen today, I thought, as I climbed on the bus. Something will happen. The bus jolted forward. The smell of wet mittens and peanuts came to me. Diane Lucas sat down next to me and told me about the wind blowing the roof off her cousin Eddy’s barn last night. “They came banging on our door at three o’clock in the morning,” she said happily. I nodded, looking at her little pointed chin and delicate white teeth.
Dear Bill, Remember Me? Page 10