Some Things That Stay

by Sarah Willis

  In the school cafeteria I carry my tray over to a table with six girls whom I met in my class today, all of them with the latest short haircuts and tight-belted candy-colored dresses. Some are taller, or fatter, but interchangeable in their perky bright-eyed way. Across the room are the girls with the long braids or frizzy hair, wearing last year’s fashions and scuffed dull shoes. Brenda waves to me from over there. I can’t wave back since I’m holding my tray. I have already looked her way more than I am supposed to. I turn away and ask if I can sit with the popular girls.

  They say sure, eager to decide if I am a yo-yo or if I am cool. If they decide I’m cool, they will accept me temporarily. I will still have to prove myself in the long run, but I won’t have the time. When the summer begins, I will never see them. The cool kids are the ones who live in town, where they can easily get together. Those of us who live on the outskirts, where distance is too great for the constant collisions that form friendships, are forgotten. By fall, when I come back to school, I will have lost the advantage of being the new kid, and will be in the void of the slightly familiar.

  By next winter, I will be sitting on the other side of the cafeteria. By spring, I will be gone.

  The girls at this table study me as I sit down. They have no past history of me to ease them into who I am. Who I am is not a thing, like a ticket, I can take out of my pocket and hand over for admittance. But there is an advantage to this, if only for the last three weeks of school. I can be someone new this time.

  Last year a boy asked me if I was a communist, a red spy. “You don’t go to church,” he said, loud enough for everyone to hear.

  “I am an atheist, not a communist, stupid,” I said.

  Denials were no good. From that moment on I was an atheist, a communist, and a red spy, a deadly combination, especially with Joe McCarthy pointing his finger at everyone and sending them to jail. Adults would walk by us in town with their lips pressed together in tight smiles, as if they were afraid to breathe too deeply near us. Even my mother’s charms could not win them over.

  My mother said I did the right thing, telling the boy we were atheists. She only reprimanded me for calling him stupid. “He might have been willing to listen to you explain the difference between communists and democratic atheists if you hadn’t offended him,” she said. “It’s his loss,” she sighed.

  But I learn from my mistakes. “Where are you from?” a girl in a blinding yellow dress asks me, who might be a Debby, or a Trudy, or a Maggie. One of those.

  “Austria,” I say. “We lived there for the last few years.” What the hell. I have only three weeks to keep this lie together. By fall they won’t care.

  “Wow,” says a Susi or a Holly, or maybe this is Maggie. “Tell us about it.”

  I picked Austria because I did a report on it a couple weeks ago at my last school. I tell them about the Alps, the thin air, the goats. They nod and look at each other with wide eyes and I know I will be sitting on this side of the cafeteria, for now.

  Robert, Megan, and I ride the bus home. Brenda sees me and hollers that she’s saved me a seat. There is nothing I can do. Her brother, Rusty, who is near the front of the bus, smiles at me, then looks out the window. A cute, shy smile. He has freckles everywhere. My brother, Robert, sits across the aisle from Rusty and looks at him like a puppy looking at a bone that belongs to a bigger dog. Megan follows me and tries to sit in my lap, but I push her off and tell her to go find a seat of her own. The only seat left is next to a boy with slick, oily hair who is wearing a black leather coat. Megan glares at me with narrow eyes and sits with her legs turned toward the aisle.

  Brenda tells me about everyone on the bus, whispering hoarsely in my ear. The boy with the glasses and a thick ear has a mom who is blind. A girl with a cast on her leg fell off the cement ledge of the school building while trying to show off. The girl wearing the pink sweater with a hole in the sleeve had lice this year and last year. A fourth-grade boy sucking his thumb had a father who was killed by a mine. One girl eats dirt. Another has BO. There is something the matter with everyone on this bus.

  I can’t help thinking about the Burns’ boy. If someone new came to school last year, Brenda would have been saying, See that boy there? He’s real sick. He might die. He’s the one I want to hear about. I wonder what he looked like.

  I have this feeling he’s still in the house. That he’s angry at me for using his room. That I should apologize to him for something. I tell myself I don’t believe in ghosts, but when I get off the bus I look up at the window of my room. The curtain moves.

  When I go in the house my mother is sitting at the kitchen table writing on a yellow legal pad. There are crumpled pieces of paper all over the table, the floor, and even in the sink. She looks up. Her green eyes are round and glassy. Robert, Megan, and I all stop, piled up between the door and the table. “Well?” she asks. “Were there any? Tell me there were.”

  “No,” I say. “Not a single Negro in the whole school.” I know exactly what she is talking about because on the car ride from Georgia she heard on the radio that the Supreme Court ordered an end to school segregation. When she asked us if there had been talk about it at school, we had said sure, there were rumors some Negro kids were planning on coming to our school and lots of white families were going to protest by keeping their kids home if the Negroes came. This made my mother crazy.

  “They’ll think we pulled you out because we support them! If I only knew. How could I have missed it? What can we do? They need to know the truth! I’ll have to write and explain. What must they think of us!”

  It is this “us” that makes me crazy. Everything is always “us.” When I pulled my hair out, she said, “Look what you have done to us.” It was my hair. And I had nothing to do with moving us from a school that would have to be desegregated to this school that is definitely going to stay all white. Even the really poor people around here, the ones who live in those trailers, are white. I bet my parents couldn’t have picked a whiter place if they tried.

  “Are you sure?” she asks, as if we might have missed just one colored kid.

  “I’m sure,” I say.

  “It would have made it so much better if I could have written that we chose a school that was integrated. Now I don’t know what to say. Every time I start this letter I get so upset. Maybe I should wait a few days until I’m not so emotional about it.” There is a tear running down her face. This is so odd we can do nothing but stare and nod.

  Megan helps my mother pick up the yellow balls of paper. Robert opens the refrigerator. I go upstairs to my room and put on my 45 of “Hey, There” and play it over and over because there is something about Rosemary Clooney’s deep voice that always calms me down, takes me away from the things that are bothering me. But it doesn’t work this time. I remember the last letter my mother wrote, just two months ago. She read that the government might add “under God” to the Pledge of Allegiance and wrote a letter to President Eisenhower, and to our teachers, informing them that “the phrase under God is offensive.” She didn’t have any trouble writing that letter. My teacher pinned the note on the bulletin board. The few friends I had never spoke to me again, except to taunt me. Robert and Megan lost their friends too, but they had each other to play with. I wanted to kill my mother. Just remembering it makes me so mad I bite my arm until I can’t take it anymore.

  At dinner, my mother is still weepy and upset. Every time she speaks, her words come out watery like she’s talking right through a throatful of tears. My father suggests she go to bed early and she agrees. Then he tells us to clean up.

  “She’s tired from the move,” he says when he comes into the kitchen to see how we are doing. He looks at Robert washing the dishes and Megan drying. “This move was especially difficult for her,” he says directly to me.

  I get the point. I begin to wipe the counter, and he leaves.

  Tuesday the Girl Scouts and Boy Scouts have their meetings after school in the gym. Brenda is a Girl Scout
. Every girl in the school is a Girl Scout. Or a Brownie. Every boy is a Cub Scout or a Boy Scout. Everyone wears a uniform to school. Everyone has a badge. This school has four hundred and ten kids enrolled, from kindergarten to twelfth grade, and they are all walking around in freshly pressed greens and browns like perfectly wrapped packages. I pass my brother in the hall and I catch myself looking at him with hope. I want to feel like I belong somewhere, even if it’s just part of my stupid family, but he is looking at the passing boys with such obvious longing it makes me sick, and instead of a smile and a wave like I was planning, I stick my foot out and trip him. He falls. His books go flying. A Boy Scout helps him up. Another picks up his books. More badges, I suppose.

  Helen is helping my mother in the garden. They are both kneeling on the ground, turning over the earth with trowels. Helen wears a sleeveless gingham dress and a yellow sun hat tied under her chin with a white ribbon. She’s barefoot. It’s not really warm, but she doesn’t seem to mind. Next to Helen, my mother looks awkward and bony. My mother has always been well padded, as she used to say. But she isn’t anymore. I try to remember when I first noticed she had lost weight, but I can’t.

  Helen lifts up a fistful of dirt and squeezes it. The dirt falls from her hand like dark-brown rain. “It’s good earth because of the night crawlers,” Helen says.

  The garden is about fifty feet by twenty feet. Nubs of old dry growth stick up all over like partially uncovered bones. My mother and Helen have been out here for hours and only turned over the dirt in a small corner. “Tomatoes do very well in this sun,” Helen says. “We should plant five or six varieties. Mrs. Burns had the beans over there. But really, we should get the lettuce and spinach in soon. I don’t think it will frost heavy again this late in May, it’s been so warm. Maybe a light frost. Would you like to help, Tamara?”

  I can’t think of anything I want to do less than kneeling in dirt, but there is something about Helen that makes me want to please her. I love the way her hair spills over her shoulders and curls around her face in tiny little ringlets. My hair is so straight and thin. And Helen seems so happy, so pleased. I want to know why. I say, fine, I’ll help.

  “And Robert and Megan could help too,” Helen says. She smiles at my mother. “Would you like me to come into town with you, to get some seeds?”

  “Why, thank you, Helen,” my mother says. “I think I’d like that.”

  Helen stands and steps back to look at the garden, like my father steps back to look at his paintings. I can tell she is seeing this garden full, thick with vegetables, bees pollinating flowers, tomatoes ripening. I look at the garden, trying to see it with Helen’s eyes. It just looks like a big mess to me.

  My mother was a rebel. At the age of sixteen, following the death of her mother, she moved to New York City to live with her aunt and uncle. She never talks about her parents or her life before they died, but more than once she has told the story of how on her very first day in New York City her aunt and uncle took her to Saint Patrick’s Cathedral, and suddenly, looking around at the stone arches and carved saints and tremendous stained-glass windows, she began to think about all the wars fought in the name of religion, of the millions killed and tortured. Nailed to crosses and burned. When she thought of all the horrible things in the world—starvation, rape, crime, disease, and accidents—she lost all belief in God, all her belief in religion, which was that of a good Presbyterian. It was like having something taken out of her hand, something she had been holding tightly for so long, yet once it was gone, there was no memory of its weight, of its shape, of its purpose or use. And, she says, she felt stronger, as if instead of losing something, she had gained something new. She says becoming an atheist had nothing to do with the death of her parents.

  Then she went to college, and became a science teacher. She got a job at a high school in the city, and joined a small group of underground communists, but she was bothered by their anger and propaganda, and quit. To find something interesting to do with her spare time, she began modeling for art classes at the Art Students League, in the nude. The rest is history. She taught school for only three years, unless you count the time she kept us home for a year and tried to teach us herself.

  She often talks about teaching, how much she loved it, but lately she doesn’t even talk that much. I wonder why she gave up teaching, but I think it was because she got pregnant so young. I was conceived before they got married. That’s another story she tells, how I was conceived in bright and beautiful love. She doesn’t actually say that I am also the destroyer of great rebellious dreams.

  No one mentions that my mother has slowed down, that she wraps her arms about her chest instead of dragging books home from the library or writing letters to Time magazine, that she has hollow pockets under her eyes. That she coughs and can’t stop. That she sometimes walks off and doesn’t come back for hours. Megan has started following her, as if she’s afraid my mother might not come back. Sometimes when Robert and I fight, instead of lecturing us she just sighs. The sigh is worse than a lecture. We don’t say anything about her being sick, because she doesn’t. We are all like Kip, who hides under the hydrangea bush.

  Three

  My mother pats the cow’s hip. “Go on now, Edith, go on.” The cow lumbers to the barn door, where it stops, halfway in and halfway out. She blinks, the sun in her face. It looks like she’s thinking, trying to make a difficult decision. Finally, her heavy square head nods up and down a few times, as if she is agreeing on something she has decided. Still, it takes her some time to get back into motion, then climb up the hill. Cows move slowly, except when they are going to get fed a special treat, something other than hay and grass. We give Edith a special grain in the early evening, and she knows by the angle of the sun just when that’s going to be. She comes running down that hill like all get-out, more stumbling forward than running. A galloping cow is the silliest sight I’ve ever seen. The first time we saw her do that we laughed until tears leaked out of our eyes. My mother fell on the ground, right down, as if her legs gave out, holding her stomach as if it might explode. That is when she began to love Edith. She has always loved awkward things.

  On the way into town, Helen sits in the front seat next to my mother. Robert, Megan, and I are in the back seat. We each have a dollar we can spend in town. That means ten comics for my brother. He is so excited he’s bouncing on his seat and I elbow him once hard in the ribs. “Leave off, duffus,” I tell him. “Or else.” He sticks out his tongue at me. He’s so immature.

  “So, Helen,” my mother says. “Will you really be able to help me with this garden? You must be busy. Do you have a job, or plans to go to college?”

  “No,” Helen says. “I’m waiting for God to tell me what to do. I’m helping out at home right now, so that must be what He wants. It’s hard for our mother, having two jobs. My dad’s a mechanic, but the gas station he worked at burned down last summer. He hasn’t found another job yet, and he has trouble moving around because of his injury from the war.”

  Robert and I look at each other. We both want to know more about this injury, but my mother hasn’t heard a word past the God stuff.

  “Waiting for God to tell you what to do?” my mother says. The way she says this, her voice both low and very firm, I know my mother wants to grab Helen and shake some sense into her. A lecture on the folly of religious belief is forming inside her like storm clouds. The car slows.

  “Yes.” This is all Helen says.

  My mother sighs. “I can’t believe it,” she says. “So foolish.” She shakes her head.

  It is obvious Helen is completely baffled by this. Still, she doesn’t get mad. She thinks she must have misunderstood. “Pardon me?”

  But we are in town now, and my brother spots the five-and-dime. “Over there!” he shouts. “That store! They got to have comics. Park there! There’s a spot! Park there!” He’s bouncing again. The smelly tail of his coonskin hat swings against my face. I grab it off his head and hold it out the w
indow.

  “No!” he screams at the top of his voice.

  My mother screeches to a halt in the middle of the street. I bounce forward and smack my chin on the back of Helen’s seat. Megan falls to the floor.

  “What?” my mother shouts. “What?”

  Robert and I both try to explain, our stories quite different.

  “Never mind,” she says. “Just be quiet.” She pulls into the open spot in front of the five-and-dime. Robert grabs his hat out of my hand and hops out of the car before she can even turn it off.

  “Robert!” my mother shouts, then looks at me, with the same exact look my sister had when she had to sit next to the guy in the leather jacket. She’s looking at me as if this is all my fault. I think she’s just upset she didn’t get to debate Helen.

  “They’ll have seeds here,” Helen says, getting out of the car and shutting the door gently. She does everything gently.

  My father sells his pictures in galleries in New York City, but he doesn’t make quite enough to support a family of five, so he also paints pictures to order, to match the interiors of people’s homes. He calls them couch pictures. People send samples of their couch upholstery, little folds of wallpaper, swatches of curtains, patches of carpet. One lady sent a dessert plate of her best china, and wanted him to copy it. It’s best not to be around my father when these missives arrive.