Homebodies

by Joan Schweighardt

  All at once Sherri remembers that she has Eduardo in her bag. She reaches her hand in and feels around. Then she pulls him out. She twists around again and hands him over to Jake. Jake says, “Neat! He’s a squeeze-head sideways.” Sherri says, “No he’s not. He’s Puerto Rican.” Jake laughs. “No,” he explains, “a squeeze-head frontways is when people have pie-shaped faces that look like a truck ran over them when they were laying on their backs. Squeeze-head sideways are when they look like a truck ran over them when they were laying on their side.”

  Sherri and Katie and Jake burst into laughter. Lizzie tries not to laugh, but Sherri sees a little one trying to sneak out of the corner of her mouth. Katie takes Eduardo next. She stares at him a long time. “Why’s his hair all wet?” she asks. Jake says, “It’s not wet. It’s just greasy.” They laugh again. Now Lizzie’s laughter is escaping out of both corners of her mouth. Katie hands the picture back and Sherri shows her sister. Lizzie cries, “Don’t stick that in front of my face while I’m driving!” But then she takes it anyway. Katie says, “Watch the road, Mom.” Lizzie gives the picture back. She says, “So tell me something about this Eduardo.” Sherri says, “He was arrested a couple of times, but he don’t get in trouble no more.” “Arrested, huh?” Lizzie says softly, nodding her head. “What for?”

  “Felony,” Sherri declares. Lizzie continues to nod. Sherri asks, “What’s felony?” Instead of answering, Lizzie says, “Where does this Eduardo live?” Sherri says, “Hackensack.” Lizzie says, “What’s his last name, Sher? Or don’t you know?” Sherri says, “I know. Rodriquez.” Lizzie asks, “Does he live alone?” Sherri says, “No, with his brother.” Lizzie says, “What’s his brother’s name?” Sherri says, “Oscar. Why?” Lizzie says, “Oh, I was just wondering.”

  Lizzie is wondering so intently that she almost misses the turn off for Carvel. They have to swerve sharply to make it. The old woman in the car behind them blasts her horn. Jake gives her the finger. Lizzie sees him in the rear-view mirror. As soon as she parks, she turns around and slaps him. Jake laughs. Lizzie says, “Who wants to help me carry?” Jake says, “Let Katie and Isabel do it.”

  Lizzie, Katie, and Isabel slip out of the truck and Jake sits forward immediately. “Listen up good, Aunt Sher,” he says. “I got a plan that’s going to make Poppie really happy. Me and you are going to find a way to take Daddy to the Bronx Zoo to see the polar bears. I think that’s what he’s been wanting all his life.”

  Sherri curls a finger and points it at Jake. “Lizzie won’t like that,” she replies.

  “She’s not gonna know. Did you use up all your grocery money this week?”

  “Yeah.”

  Jake bites his lower lip. “Well, then, a cab is out.”

  “Eduardo drives,” Sherri offers.

  “Yeah? Okay. I’m going to have to put the details together later. Meantime, you just go along with whatever I say to Mom. Got it?”

  “I got it.”

  Lizzie and Katie return with the cones and hand them out. Isabel doesn’t get one because they drip and she doesn’t like to get dirty. She is going to have to share Katie’s. Jake says, “Mom, you care if I stay over with Aunt Sher tonight? She wants to teach me how to play Poker.”

  Lizzie spins her cone against her tongue. “No, sorry, Jake. I have no intention of driving back down here again tomorrow to pick you up.”

  Jake says, “You won’t have to pick me up till Monday. There’s no school on Monday. Remember? And your pillow thing is closed then.”

  “I can’t, Jake. Once a week is enough for me. I close my pillow thing on Mondays, you’ll recall, so that I can have one day to get things done.”

  “Well, Aunt Sher,” Jake says, “I guess you’ll have to call Eduardo if you really want to play that bad.”

  Sherri opens her mouth to say that Eduardo is playing pool tonight with his friends, but then she sees Jake’s finger alight on his mouth and she remembers that she is supposed to go along with him.

  Lizzie says, “You seeing Eduardo tonight?” With her eyes still on Jake, Sherri nods. Jake nods back at her. Lizzie says, “If Jake stays over, will you phone Eduardo and tell him you can’t see him tonight?”

  Jake and Sherri nod, Jake stopping abruptly when Lizzie turns her head his way. “Oh, okay,” Lizzie says. “But you’ve got to promise to make her phone Eduardo and tell him she can’t get together with him tonight.” She turns back to Sherri. “And if you have him over while Jake is there, I’ll kill you, I swear it.”

  Jake says, “Don’t worry, Mom. I’ll make sure she behaves. I’ll stand right there and watch her dial the phone.”

  Sherri says to Jake, “We’re gonna have fun.” Then she winks to let him know she is talking about the polar bears and not the Poker.

  FRED

  Looking at your own face is a luxury. It is the sort of thing that you can only do when you have time on your hands. Fred’s life has unfolded in such a way that he has seldom had that kind of time. All the years that he shaved himself, he concentrated on the act, not the thing that was acted upon. He scrutinized this and that part of his face, but seldom the whole of it. It is a luxury, too, to feel the nurse’s hand cradling his chin. Ellen touched his face only when it had been necessary for her to extract some foreign entity from his eye. She was prudish and never intentionally allowed him to see her wearing anything less than a slip. The only times he saw her completely naked were the times when, while they were making love—which was an infrequent occurrence itself—a car went by, its headlights illuminating, for a second or two, her soft, smallish body beneath him. She would gasp then, altering, finally, the natural pattern of her breathing, and glance at the curtain on the window with longing.

  “You’re going out today,” states the nurse as she palms Fred’s cheek and tilts his head to one side. She has a fast, steady stoke. She is almost finished. “Your daughter called the doctor to get his permission.”

  Fred is more interested in the function of her fingers than on her commentaries. As far as he’s concerned, people use words far too freely, making it impossible to separate what’s important from what is not. He’s been thinking that now that he’s an old man, he can see in his face what he must have looked like as a baby. His face is soft now, as it must have been then. His skin is falling in around his features so that it looks, he suspects, as it must have looked during the time when his features were straining to grow into it. He catches only one word of what the nurse said: Daughter. That one word seems to have some relevance. He concentrates on it, and then, all at once, he remembers that he has two. “Got two,” he informs the nurse.

  She laughs and guides the razor down along his neck. “Yes, I know that, Mr. Crum.”

  Then it all comes rushing back to him, visually, a silent film in black and white. He has two daughters, one healthy and one not. The one who is healthy came first, seven years (and three miscarriages) after the war. The one who isn’t came three years after that. But Fred and Ellen didn’t know that the second one was unhealthy until her first grade teacher sent home a note. “Your child does nothing all day but roll her pencil on her desk. She doesn’t interact with the other children. When she’s reprimanded, she either cries or throws a temper tantrum. We feel she should be evaluated,” it read.

  There was one word in it that was unfamiliar to him: Reprimanded. He resented his daughter’s teacher for using such formal language to speak on so intimate a subject. His mother, a German immigrant, had never learned to speak English and could get no better job than taking in wash for the female neighbors who did speak English and were thus able to find work when they had to. His father learned English, but he was an alcoholic, and he seldom managed to keep a job for very long. In order to supplement his father’s irregular income and his mother’s meager one, Fred quit school in the fifth grade to take on odd jobs for the same neighbors for whom his mother washed. There were, consequently, lots of words whose meanings were unknown to him. He didn’t see why it was necessary f
or there to be two or three words to express one idea. All it did was confuse people like him and allow the people who weren’t like him to use the extra words as ladders. They climbed up on them and stood looking down on you.

  Fred was a proud man. He got the dictionary down from the shelf in the closet where he kept his condoms and his mother’s gold locket and he looked up the unfamiliar word. Then he went to find his wife.

  While Ellen was reading the note—which she did several times—he assured her that the teacher was mistaken. Even so, when she finally surrendered it, she put her head into her hands and began to cry. Fred crumpled the note and threw it down on the floor. As he listened to his wife’s sobs, he paced and cursed, and eventually, because his eye continued to stray to the crumpled piece of paper, lying there like a meteor that had come crashing in from the black beyond, he used his fist to make a hole in the kitchen wall. His daughter was hard to handle, it was true. But that didn’t mean there was anything wrong with her, or at least not the sort of thing that the teacher’s note implied. Yet, in spite of all his reassurances, his wife continued to cry, and, occasionally, for reasons Fred did not understand, to raise her eyes to the ceiling and beat her breast.

  Fred and Ellen took their daughter to a New York City clinic for a psychological evaluation. The doctors, two of them, questioned her for half an hour while Fred and Ellen sat in the waiting room wringing their hands. Finally Sherri emerged, and while Ellen stayed with her in the waiting room for fear that she would wander, Fred went in to hear what the doctors had to say. He entered smiling, expecting, even after he had glimpsed the doctors’ somber faces, that they would smile too and tell him that his daughter’s teacher was a crackpot who should be fired immediately so as not to cause anyone else the stress she had caused Ellen. But the doctors didn’t mention the teacher at all. Instead, they told Fred that his daughter was retarded.

  Fred and Ellen set up their lives so as to accommodate their daughter’s needs. As the town in which they had been living in South Jersey offered no special education programs, they left their friends and Ellen’s family and moved farther north, to a town that did. But Tenafly was much more costly; in order to pay the mortgage on their new house there, Fred had to take a second job. Thus, during the day, he worked as a machinist in a factory that manufactured drill bits, and at night he worked as a guard for a pharmaceutical company. Sometimes, on weekends, he got work painting people’s houses. They got by.

  Still, the Crums didn’t fit in in Tenafly. There were no other poor people in their neighborhood, no other strugglers. The neighbors all had two cars, gardens, parties on the weekends in the summer, fancy clothes, and a way of walking that made Fred and Ellen reluctant to acquaint themselves with them. The Crums stayed to themselves. With Sherri at the center, they formed a tight, protective cocoon and tried to keep their healthy daughter within it too. As she grew older, she made it clear that she found their enclosure stifling. She liked Tenafly, the neighbors, and the neighbors’ children. She wanted to be just like them, so Fred and Ellen let her go. She became a stranger to them, her presence eventually having the same effect on them as did the curious eyes of the neighbors. She packed her bags the day after she graduated from high school and went to live at a friend’s. A few months later, she went to live on a commune in New York state. A year after that, she left the commune to live with a man she had met there. The letters she wrote, notes really, spoke about college courses, parties, clubs, friends, engagements, broken engagements. Fred and Ellen could make no sense of them. Their daughter, it seemed to them, had abandoned the cocoon in order to become a creature as frivolous and short-lived as a butterfly. Every so often, over the years, she fell out of the sky to alight on the edge of their sofa, her wings trembling visibly with her longing to spread them again. She could never be coaxed to spend the night.

  The nurse finishes shaving Fred and rolls him out into the hall to sit among the others. The hall is, as usual, frigid. Fred would like to be able to ask someone to fetch his sweater for him, but he cannot seem to remember the word for the worn, green thing that hangs in his closet beside his night clothes. Nor can he remember the word for cold. “Rold!” he declared just the other day when one of the nurses was bending over him to wipe some dribble from his chin. And she looked up at him so intently that for a minute he thought he’d hit on it. But then she straightened up and called out to one of the aides, “Can we get some mouthwash in here?”

  It is absurd that he should be able to remember that he has two daughters and once had a wife and yet not the word for the thing that disturbs him most. He has been trying for days to communicate to someone that a chill has overtaken his thinning body, a chill which begins in the hall and never leaves him until he is back in his bed at night beneath the cotton blankets. But the harder he tries to lay out the words, the faster they spill into some dark abyss at the back of his consciousness. It is like trying to hold water in the palm of your hand.

  At night, when he is warm again, his memory is clearest. Sometimes he sees Ellen’s face; sometimes his mother’s. Occasionally they appear together, swimming in a sweet sea of repose, and then he finds himself longing for death. He imagines, when he rests in the dark with no distraction other than his roommate’s rhythmic breathing, that he can shut himself down if he wants to. Once he went to the hospital for an operation, and when the doctors placed the mask over his nose, he felt himself surrendering, succumbing—a feeling not unlike but far more intense than the one he experienced when he achieved an orgasm in Ellen’s arms. He feels he can duplicate that experience if he concentrates hard enough, but each time the memory stirs him, that last deep breath sucking him down into something deeper than sleep, he remembers too that he has to go on living for Sherri’s sake. Who else will make sure that she takes her pills? Her sister, no doubt, is in charge now, but who knows when she will rediscover her wings and take flight?

  Sherri hurt Ellen once. Sherri, who had been content for years to stay at home and watch TV, had, at sixteen, decided that she was ready to explore. Fred and Ellen had their misgivings. She was not a butterfly; she was still a spinning worm, would always be one. She would be crushed out in the terrain beyond their cocoon, smeared between the road and the bottom of someone’s boot heel. But Sherri insisted, and Fred and Ellen tried to adjust their attitude, as they had once changed their lives, in order to accommodate her.

  They said to each other, Maybe she’s getting better after all. Maybe that teacher was wrong. Though they didn’t admit it, each secretly looked forward to having Sherri out of the house occasionally. They were getting older, and Sherri continued to require every last bit of their emotional strength. Her tantrums had never ceased. She was loud and her loudness alerted the neighbors to the fact that the Crums were outcasts. She played her record player on high and kept the volume up on the TV. She refused to clean up after herself or to discard things for which she no longer had a need. When she was upset, she took it out on them, screaming, cursing, threatening with her fist until she had spent herself.

  The most ordinary things could provoke her outbursts. The sight of her mother’s feet, for instance, inflamed her—so that even in bed Ellen felt compelled to wear socks. Olive pits affected a similar reaction. Sherri talked to herself, even out in public. And there was worse. Sometimes she heard voices, and the voices stirred her to do unspeakable things. She removed the heads of her rubber dolls, and in a perverse effort to infuse them with life, stuffed them full of used tampons. When she saw that this failed to animate them, she threw them out the window and locked herself in her room. She became distraught every month when she menstruated and cried to be taken to the emergency room. Ellen could never convince her that the blood she lost needn’t be replaced.

  And so, even as it became clear that Sherri’s excursions were of an unscrupulous nature (for she came home stinking of men, drink, and cigarettes), her parents told themselves that it didn’t matter, that Sherri’s need to be elsewhere would pass and they
had better enjoy their freedom while they could.

  The problem was that it didn’t pass and Sherri, who was reticent at first, began to make the details of her adventures known to Fred and Ellen as time went by. Sometimes, she went out not with one man but with several. Sometimes, she drank far more than Fred and Ellen could imagine anyone drinking and still be able to find their way home. In spite of their chastisements, Sherri insisted on smoking in the house, and not every cloud that came wafting out from her bedroom smelled like cigarettes. They began to see that Sherri’s new life was dangerous, and one night Ellen decided that the time had come to abandon her brief respite and do something about it.

  As Sherri prepared to leave for the street corner on which her date or dates would be waiting, Ellen rose up out of her chair and spread herself in front of the door. Softly, she announced that Sherri was not going anywhere. Sherri’s eyes widened. She reached out and tried to detach Ellen’s arm from the door. Ellen remained rooted, and before Fred knew what was happening, there was a struggle which ended with Ellen flying across the room and landing on her back with a thud at his feet. Fred was up in a flash. He grabbed Sherri in mid-exit, spun her around, and planted his fist in her face. In his rage, he would have punched her again, but he felt his wife’s fingers clawing at his ankles, and he heard her entreating him to leave their daughter alone. Sherri slipped through his hands. And that night she didn’t come home.

  In the morning Fred and Ellen phoned the police and asked them to look for her, a heavy girl in a tight, short skirt whose purple eye-shadow would have settled into the creases above her eyes by now. The police found her asleep near some trash cans in an empty parking lot. They took pity on her when they saw the bruise on her face that was two shades darker than the remains of the eye-shadow. When they brought her home, they demanded an explanation from the Crums, both of whom had been awake all night.

  Ellen had decided to say nothing to the police about what Sherri had done to her, but with them waiting for a response and Sherri’s vapid smile visible behind them, she changed her mind. She sent Sherri to her room and broke down, telling the police everything—about the whoring, the drinking, the beating she had taken. When she showed the police her own bruises, they sat down and accepted Fred’s offer of coffee. There were alternatives here, they explained to Ellen; after conferring for a moment between themselves while Ellen was in helping Fred to fill the cups, they decided that the best idea would be to have Sherri evaluated.