by Gail Rock
There was something about Grandma’s insistence on seeing the good in people that could be very irritating. Just when you were ready for anger and revenge, she would remind you that it was pointless, and you’d have to figure out some other solution. I was so angry at Constance that I wasn’t ready to give in to positive feelings yet.
“Well, you said before she needed a friend,” I argued. “And I was her friend, and look where it got me! Some friend!”
“I know,” she answered. “Sometimes bein’ friends is hard work. But a true friend don’t give up on somebody when things go wrong. You try to help out.”
“Dad says it doesn’t do any good. People like her never change anyway.”
“I think anybody can change,” Grandma said. “Why I was in my sixties when your momma died, and I came to live with you and your dad and started raisin’ a family all over again. It was a big change in my life, but I did it, and it turned out fine.”
“But you weren’t living a bad life,” I said, still arguing.
“Well, if your life is bad, then all the more reason you might want to start over fresh,” she said. “It’s like things comin’ up again in the spring—that’s really what Easter is all about—the promise of a new life. Spring is like the Lord’s tryin’ to show us that there’s always hope, and there’s always a chance for a new life. You see?”
“Yeah, I guess so,” I said. She had given me so much to think about that I wasn’t sure what I thought. Grandma was hard to argue with when it came to the subject of right and wrong. She had been working it out for some seventy years, and she was pretty sure which was which by now.
I was angry and hurt, but I couldn’t forget all the good feelings I had had about Constance when we first met. I couldn’t forget how much I liked her, and I tried to figure out what to do about it.
“Well, don’t you brood about it,” Grandma said, getting up from the table and handing me the cake bowl. “Here, you beat this thirty more strokes … that’ll take your mind off your troubles.”
She busied herself with something at the sink, and I sat there beating the cake batter furiously and counting the strokes to myself under my breath. But I was thinking about what Grandma had said about anybody being able to change.
“Do you think Constance would ever do that?” I asked. “Start over … a new life?”
“I don’t know,” said Grandma. “It’s pretty hard when you’re alone.”
I thought about Constance a lot for the rest of the day.
Chapter Six
By the following morning, I had decided to make one more try to get through to Constance. I didn’t like what she had done, but I knew she had tried to be friends with me—coming to dinner and to the style show and giving us that wonderful first acting lesson. I thought I owed her something for that.
I needed Dad to help me with my plan, so I decided to go out and visit him on his job. I often did that when I was on vacation from school. The big gravel pit where he loaded the trucks with his crane was only a mile from town, and I would ride my bike out and take him some special treat to add to his lunch. He would let me climb up in the cab of the crane with him and let me work the levers, and we would talk and then eat together. He always pretended that I was kind of in the way, but I think he liked having me come out and visit him.
I gave him a super-loud whistle through my teeth as I pulled up on my bike, and he waved at me from the machine. He put the big engine into neutral so he could shout down to me from the cab. “What are you up to?” he asked.
“Brought you some cold lemonade and some chocolate cake for an afternoon snack. Grandma forgot to pack the cake for you this morning.”
“Boy!” he said. “You must want somethin’ pretty big … comin’ all the way out here with cake and lemonade.” Sometimes he could just about read my mind, which I found a big disadvantage. I wondered if he could guess what my plan was and why I had come to see him.
“Well,” I said, “I get some cake too.”
“Yeah,” he replied. “I thought there was a catch to the deal.”
“It’s only fair! I helped make it,” I said, and climbed up into the cab of the machine with him.
“Well,” he said, “I paid for it.” He said that a lot around our house.
“That’s your job,” I said, not wanting to hear his usual tirade about money. “To pay for stuff.”
“You’re tellin’ me,” he said sarcastically. “I wouldn’t be sittin’ on this thing if I didn’t have to.”
“I like it!”
“Try it eight hours a day, and you won’t like it so much.”
He was right about that. I had once decided I wanted to be a crane operator when I grew up and spent a whole day with him on a job. It was too hot and dirty and noisy for me, and at the end of the day I had decided on another career. I enjoyed being on the machine for an hour or so, but I wondered how he could stand it every day for all those years. I had much more respect for the work he did after that day I spent with him, and I knew that his job wasn’t the fun it looked to be. I also knew he was very good at it and was proud of his skill with the big machine. I liked that about him.
“Let me run it for a minute, huh?” I asked.
“No, I want to stop and have my lemonade.”
“Oh, come on, just for a minute, just one bucketful?”
“OK,” he said, sounding irritated. “We’ll fill up that one hopper over there.” I think he was secretly pleased that I liked working the machine.
He put the machine into gear and helped me pull the big levers to scoop up a bucketful of gravel. Then we hauled it up into the air and swung the boom over to the hopper and opened the bucket to dump the gravel. Later a big gravel truck would drive under the hopper and pull a lever that would empty just the right amount into the truck.
“OK, that’s enough,” he said.
“That was neat!” I said. “I love the way it takes a big bite out of the pile of gravel …”
“Come on, now,” he said, climbing down out of the cab. “Let’s eat. I can only take a few minutes. I’m busy as the devil.”
“How do you know how busy the devil is?” I asked, climbing down with him.
“Know him personally,” he said.
“Yeah? What does he look like?”
“Oh, about twelve years old, pigtails, glasses …”
“Oh, very funny!” I said. That was a typical Dad joke—always poking a bit of fun at me to get a laugh. Most of the time he was funny, but once in a while he hurt my feelings. I seldom let on though, because I knew he didn’t mean to.
I poured the lemonade, then took a giant bite of my cake.
He looked at me and shook his head. “Your teeth are going to fall out one of these days! The way you eat sweets!”
I stretched my lips over my teeth and gave him a fake toothless smile. He did just what I knew he would do. He suddenly shoved his false upper plate of teeth out at me and made a grotesque face. I squealed in disgust as I always did, and he slid his teeth back in and laughed. It was a running gag between the two of us and his way of telling me I had better take care of my teeth or it was going to happen to me too.
We ate quietly for a few moments, and I tried to think of a way to say what I had come to talk to him about.
“Do you think Constance is one of those alcoholics?”
“What?” he asked.
“You know … where they have to go to a sanitarium and get dried out and all that stuff?”
“Oh, I don’t think she’s that bad off,” he said. “Looks like she just goes on a binge once in a while and can’t handle it.”
“Boy, she sure did yesterday.” I had already told him what had happened.
“I guess she takes after her old man,” he said. “He used to blow his top when he was hittin’ the bottle. One time when Constance was about your age, her mother had a lot of ladies out from Omaha for tea, and Constance was playing the piano for ’em, and old Jesse came downstairs all boozed up. He walked right
into the living room in nothing but his B.V.D.’s and told ’em all to shut up because he was trying to take a nap. Then he took his gun—he had this five-hundred dollar hunting rifle, all gold inlaid and carved—and he shot up every teacup in the room. They said the old biddies screamed like mad and ducked behind the sofas and thought they were all going to get killed. Nobody got hurt, but I guess they were picking bullets out of the woodwork for months.”
I didn’t say anything for a moment. At first the story had seemed funny, but then I wondered what I would have done if it had been me in that living room playing the piano.
“I wonder what Constance did,” I said.
“I bet she quit playing the piano real quick,” Dad laughed.
It didn’t strike me funny. “I bet she cried,” I said quietly.
Dad looked over at me thoughtfully. “I suppose so,” he said. “She must have had a hard time of it.”
“I feel kinda sorry for her,” I said. I waited a second, then plunged into it. “Listen, Dad. Wouldn’t it be great if we could invite her to stay at our house for a few days until she feels better?”
“Don’t start that,” he said, giving me a sharp look. He realized that’s what I had been leading up to.
“But, Dad … it would cheer her up to be around other people.”
“Forget it!”
“She could have your room, and you could sleep on the sofa.”
“What?” he said incredulously.
“Just for a few days?”
“No!”
“Let’s ask her, please?”
“We can’t have her at our house!” he said. “What would people think?”
“Who cares what other people think?” I said. “Couldn’t we?”
“No!” he said again.
“Just for a few days?” I repeated.
“Now don’t harp at me,” he said angrily.
“Well, I think we should do something to help her,” I said stubbornly. Now that Grandma’s ideas had taken hold, I wasn’t about to give them up so quickly.
He got up and started to climb back into the crane.
“Get out of here,” he said irritably. “I gotta get back to work!”
“Dad,” I said, climbing up after him. “Could I at least go over and she if she’s OK?”
“No!”
“She looks like she might be sick.”
“I don’t want you going over there.”
“We could stop by after you finish work, OK?”
“We?” he said.
“I’ll just look in to see if she’s all right.”
“No!” he said firmly.
“Please, Dad?”
“I’m not going over there and neither are you!” he said angrily. “I don’t want you to have anything more to do with her.”
I climbed right onto the seat next to him, and he gave me one of his exasperated looks. He knew I wasn’t going to give up so easily.
We drove up to the Gunderson house in Dad’s old red pickup shortly after five.
“Just see if she’s OK,” Dad said. “I don’t want you going in and staying …”
“OK,” I answered, and got out of the truck and went up and knocked on the door. I waited a few moments, looked back at Dad and shrugged. I knocked again.
Finally the door opened, and there stood Constance, looking pale and disheveled. She was barefoot and wearing a faded old bathrobe. When she saw me, she left the door standing open and turned away and moved back into the hallway as though she didn’t want me to see her.
“Hi,” I said. “I just wondered if you needed anything.”
She kept her face turned away from me. “I’m so sorry about what happened yesterday, Addie.”
“That’s OK.”
“No, it isn’t,” she said. “It was a terrible thing to do to you.” She walked slowly over to the big staircase and stood at the foot of the steps as though she were going up to the second floor. “I hope you know I didn’t mean all those awful things I said.”
“I was pretty sure you didn’t,” I said. “I didn’t mean what I said either.”
“I was feeling low,” she said. “I lost a job and I just took it out on the next person I saw, and that was you.”
Just then, Dad came in the door behind me to see what was keeping me, and she looked up and saw him. She seemed humiliated. She looked at me again and spoke to both of us.
“I’m not a Broadway star. I can’t even get a job as an actress. I work as a hostess in a restaurant … and not even a very good restaurant.”
I was so shocked I couldn’t say a word. I knew it must have been terribly painful for her to admit her failure, especially in front of Dad, and I admired her courage. Suddenly she put her hand to her forehead as though she felt faint and quickly sat down on the steps.
“You OK?” I asked.
“Yes,” she said. “Just a little dizzy. I haven’t felt like eating for the past couple of days.”
I looked at Dad and he looked down at me with a troubled expression. I knew he realized now that she really was ill, and he knew we couldn’t just walk away and leave her there alone. He didn’t like being stuck with this problem, but he had to do something.
I looked at him again. I knew it would be easy enough for me to say something, but I wanted him to do it, and I waited him out. There was an awkward silence—Constance sitting forlornly on the step, her head down, Dad watching her, and me watching him. Finally, he couldn’t stand the silence any more, and he spoke.
“I think you’d better come home with us and stay a few days.”
I almost cheered out loud. I couldn’t believe he had broken down and done it.
“Oh, I couldn’t,” Constance said to him.
“You can’t stay here all alone like this,” he said, and walked over to her at the foot of the stairs. “I mean, we’d be glad to have you.” Then he reached out his hand as though to help her up.
She looked up at him, and I think she understood how difficult it had been for him to offer his help.
“Thank you, James,” she said quietly, and she took his hand.
It was odd, but in that moment, I somehow felt that Constance had helped Dad as much as he had helped her.
Dad moved his things into the living room and Constance stayed in his room for three days. I took her meals to her on a tray. On the third day, when she felt up to it, she sat up in bed with pillows at her back, and I sat at the foot of the bed and sketched her. I wouldn’t let her see the sketch until it was all finished.
“I don’t think I want to see it anyway,” she said. “I must look like something the cat dragged in.”
“No, you don’t!” I said. “You look lots better today.”
She did look better too. The few days of rest had done wonders for her, and her beautiful face seemed softer and more relaxed. She was wearing Grandma’s best pink flannel nightgown, and her hair was brushed softly back from her face.
She smiled. “A few days of your grandma’s cooking would make anybody feel better.” She looked over at the daffodils I had put on her breakfast tray.
“You know, the other day when you brought me those daffodils,” she said, “it brought back so many memories. I remember being in New York one spring, and broke. I had just been to an audition, and I knew I had been terrible. There was a man on the street selling flowers. And I thought, if I could just have some daffodils, that would be some small bit of beauty in my life. But I didn’t have the fifty cents to buy them.” She paused and looked at me. “But if I had just come home, I wouldn’t have had to long for things like that. They were right here for the taking.”
“Why didn’t you come home?” I asked, putting down my sketch pad to listen.
“I was ashamed,” she said. “I didn’t want anyone to know the truth. I never had a lead on Broadway. I never got anything but small parts in Shakespeare, and that didn’t pay very much. The only time I was a leading lady was in a crummy stock company.” She smiled sadly at the memor
y. “Mom and Dad wanted me to come home and get married and settle down, but I stayed on and kept trying. I was too stubborn and proud to ask them for help. When they finally realized I wasn’t going to give up, they started making up stories about how successful I was.”
“How come?” I asked.
“They just couldn’t accept the fact that I was a failure. And I kept hoping for that big break, but it just never happened. I remember one winter … I lived in an unfurnished apartment with no heat or hot water. I slept in a sleeping bag on the floor, and cooked in the ice-cube tray.”
I laughed at the idea, and she smiled at me.
“I guess it sounds like fun to you,” she said. “I think some of it was, for a while. But the cold … you have no idea how cold it was. And the worst part was being afraid somebody might find out I was a failure.”
She wasn’t smiling now, and I knew it must be very difficult for her to tell me about it. “Didn’t you miss your mom and dad?” I asked.
“Yes, I did. When my mother died a few weeks ago, I just felt …” She let the sentence trail off, as though it were too painful to finish. “We never had time to know each other,” she said.
“But why didn’t you do something else, if you didn’t like the jobs you got?” I asked.
“Oh, Addie,” she said sadly, “it’s so easy to lose sight of your goal. She looked at me for a moment, and I had the feeling that she almost didn’t want to trouble me with what she was about to say.
“You go off to be an artist,” she went on, “and it’s such a long, hard climb that you can get caught up in the struggle itself, and then just surviving becomes the goal. It’s hard to think much about truth and beauty when you don’t have enough food on the table. That’s when your dreams slip through your fingers.”
She stopped for a moment, and I said nothing. I knew what she was saying was very painful for her.
“When I came home,” she said, “I guess it all hit me at once … all my family gone and twenty years with nothing to show for it. That’s what set off the drinking spree, I suppose. I just felt like everything was finished for me. I felt I was nothing.”
She began to cry, and for a moment I didn’t move, not knowing how to help her. I reached for a handkerchief from the night table and gave it to her.