This was pretty good for Ruben although he’d glanced over at Rosaura’s paper and may have lifted his rock idea from her mountain. He’d asked me in class, “Ms. Knutsen, how do you spell bigol?”
“Bigol?”
“You know, like a bigol dog?”
My eyes blinked heavily, then I crouched down beside his desk and whispered, “Two words. Big. Old. B-I-G. O-L-D.”
“You did well with Ruben,” Annette said as I left the room. Later in the faculty lounge, as I pulled my sack lunch from the moldy refrigerator, she held the door open for me, and muttered, “Gonna get my bigol lunch.” Then she laughed.
I rested my back against my apartment’s stucco, trying to get comfortable on the landing. Each paragraph took only a minute to read, but I struggled over appropriate comments and then the grade. Their faces rose on the pages as I marked an F on the questioning, hurt eyes of a student who’d written an illegible half sentence, and I put an A on a cocky smile. It was too bad in a way that we couldn’t grade attitudes. Personalities. Hearts. “Your child writes beautifully, but he has a cruel, F personality.” “Your child struggles with English but she has an A+ heart.”
If I’d had a child, what would future teachers write? A wave of gratitude, not to face that question, showered my body. I suspected that I would be like my least favorite parents, the ones who showed up at Back To School Night waiting for me to tell them their child was magnificent, who stood woodenly, staring into space, unable to hear anything resembling criticism.
Or a sad parent like my mom, with too many kids and too few dreams, stuck in a miserable town. The biggest fear of my life.
As I worked my way through the papers, Florence headed to the laundry room with a wicker basket full of clothing. Later Punky came out of her apartment and sat on her steps, while Todd, pulling a wooden duck on wheels, toddled around the driveway.
I waited for Lefty Hunt, but he never made an entrance, even when Vince came up the drive with a jar of orange juice and a morning paper and plopped on Punky’s steps with her. In his shorts, tee shirt and sandals, he looked like a beach bum, all fire and air and light, while Punky smacked of San Francisco, of smoky coffee houses, and remnants of Haight-Ashbury combined with influences from all the social movements that had that strange, romantic city as their heart. Punky was dark like the night, round with water, mysterious as the moon.
Bucky followed Dudu up the driveway. Today Dudu vaunted a yellow, satiny bow. Bucky carried a piece of paper and appeared agitated, wiping at his brow over and over. The dog urinated at Mrs. Bean’s lower step, but Mrs. Bean didn’t fly out her door.
The prepubescent neighborhood boy returned to the drive to play catch with a friend, and I wagered how many papers I could finish before Mrs. Bean came out to yell at them. The thumping of their ball and the constant calls to one another annoyed me, and I wanted Mrs. Bean to chase them away. Although, with Halloween coming, she might be setting herself up.
“I’d be a door,” the sweet Liliana wrote, “cuz a door can let things in and close things out.”
“Why do they keep thending me these?” Bucky whined as Dudu peed on the water meter. He held the rectangle of paper to The Invisible Lady’s screen. “Do they think I know theth people?”
I couldn’t hear the answer. As he continued on his way, I saw he held one of those cards with an unclear black and white photo and the question, “Have you seen this person?”
The next paper was Jamie’s. I pictured her—scrawny, sitting stooped, shoulders curling protectively around her heart. In class she squinted at the chalkboard, too embarrassed to wear her glasses. I would have moved her to the front, but she feared people behind her. She sensed them sniggering. She wished to be a valentine, so she could be picked out special and given with love.
The sun shone so brightly that the reflection from the paper hurt my eyes. The world seemed excruciatingly tender. If I were still a writer, what metaphor would I choose? Could I think of anything more poignant than these?
Halloween
Maybe I’d overdosed on the beauty of the weekend, but more likely I’d sampled too many of the caramels I’d made as a Halloween treat for my students. I woke up Monday morning, promptly vomited, and decided, new teacher or not, I’d better stay home. Copies of my seating charts and rosters were in my sub folder, and I would call in my lesson plans.
I was sitting in bed drinking peppermint tea, a hot water bottle on my tummy, when Punky dropped off Todd at Mrs. Bean’s. Their conversation drifted through my window, Punky earnestly thanking Mrs. Bean, and Mrs. Bean protesting over and over, saying it would give her something to do, that she appreciated good neighbors, that it would be no trouble at all.
I dozed to the familiar, soothing neighborhood sounds.
I had no idea how long I’d been asleep when frantic pounding awakened me. Mrs. Bean stood on my landing without her wrap-around sunglasses. Tears trickled down her withered face. “Those people took that boy,” she said in her regular, crotchety voice, belying the dewdrops. “I didn’t think they could do it, but they did.”
While we waited for Punky to come home from the Unemployment Office, I searched the phone book for Child Protective Services, gave them a ring, and requested directions to the office. I pressed Mrs. Bean into my rocking chair. Sick or not, I would drive and get involved in this mess.
I’d been learning at school. Do a favor for a favor. You scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours. The sayings were simply coarser forms of The Golden Rule. If I wanted people to care whether I was well or ill, or whether I had light during a post-earthquake blackout, I might first have to care about them, to share myself. Besides, Punky was even less familiar with the area than I was. Furthermore, I’d recommended Mrs. Bean.
As I washed and dressed, a nauseous haze muffled Mrs. Bean’s incessant blaming of herself. “I don’t know how that boy got that pack of matches,” she muttered. “I don’t use matches,” she declared. “I thought it was another one of Lefty Hunt’s doings, but when I tried to explain about him, they thought I was nuts.”
While I poured tea for both of us, she rocked viciously, my poor chair creaking wildly even under Mrs. Bean’s slight weight.
“Then, after they left,” her voice turned sorrowful, “I remembered Florence lighting the wick of my lamp for me.”
Punky finally arrived. The ride to the building of the Child Protective Services was like being trapped in a horror scene of a Halloween film. Punky interspersed crying and blaming herself with choice epithets for Lefty, and Mrs. Bean, who I had not wanted to come, moaned and reprimanded herself in a harsher, but weaker, voice than she used on any neighborhood boy.
I thought of the things people say to comfort others.
“Don’t worry. Everything will be okay,” Angelo had said when I’d discovered my pregnancy. The hackneyed phrases seemed like lies. Denial. Avoidance. Not something I would offer anyone.
Punky’s unmollified rage mounted toward hysteria. Her fury whipped around in my Volkswagen bug like a spirit, and Mrs. Bean’s soul faded like a ghost slipping to a cooler clime.
Emeline Street had its own exit from the freeway, a short decline into a residential neighborhood. I panicked. This could not possibly be the way to county officialdom. I stretched my neck both ways searching for a clue.
“To the right,” Mrs. Bean croaked.
The Climax
Emeline Street dead-ended with a stand of eucalyptus to the left and a maze of buff-colored, two-storied county buildings to the right. By luck, I drove us right to the front of Building l040, the address listed in the phone book. Signs identified the two entrances “Employment and Training” and “Human Resources Agency.”
Human Resources seemed the more likely despite the opaqueness of the term. Believing that anyone who saw us entering the building must know the accusation, the alleged crime that brought us here, and that this imaginary audience must rank child abusers as I did, on par with rapists of old ladies, I blushed as we
walked up the stately brick steps.
We were all silent.
The office with its bland tan walls and frayed magazines sucked the remaining life out of us. Even Mrs. Bean’s eczema blanched and she keeled more than usual toward her bent leg.
A matronly woman with purple-gray, beauty parlor hair looked up at us from the service window.
“Where is Child Protective Services?” I asked.
“Right here.” Her alert eyes took us in without any apparent hostility.
“My child is here,” Punky said.
Even in all her agitation, Punky seemed to realize that yelling would complicate and confuse matters as well as possibly convince someone that she was, indeed, capable of child abuse. “Todd Hayes. He’s two years old.”
“He’s not exactly here,” the woman said.
“What?” Punky yelped. “Where is he then?”
The phone rang. “Excuse me,” the woman said. She swiveled in her chair.
Punky stared anxiously through the window as though she could mentally transport the matron to a conclusion with the person on the phone.
I could tell by the woman’s low, restrained voice that the caller was also upset. What a job, I thought. I helped Mrs. Bean to a chair.
When the lady finished, Punky assailed her. “Where is he? Is he all right? Can I have him?”
“I know this is frustrating for you, Mrs. Hayes, but you’ll have to wait until a worker can interview you. Many children are released to their parents’ custody, but some are not.”
“You mean they might keep Todd?” For all her animal pain and anger, Punky clearly had not considered this possibility. She knew she was innocent. Punky looked up at me with gray eyes that begged for reassurance.
I couldn’t find it in myself to tell her everything would be fine, because I had absolutely no idea what would happen. I did much better when I had the distance and space to write a note of consolation. Then I could fall back on my favorite Emily Dickinson poem:
“Hope” is the thing with feathers—
That perches in my soul—
Later I congratulated myself for not reciting the poem to Punky. Instead, I leaned over and awkwardly put an arm around her and patted her shoulder three times.
I’d always found Dickinson’s poem a comfort, because it focused on how Hope remained, asking only a crumb, but the very metaphor of a bird suggested Hope could fly away. A precarious, flighty thing.
“I don’t know the particulars of your case, Mrs. Hayes, but I imagine Todd will be released to you,” the woman said. She was as ordinary as any old woman you might see stepping from a church after a Sunday service—neat, well-groomed, with her earrings and necklace matching and her dress a simple cut and floral print, a bit like Barbara Bush, but at second glance, she appeared a sage, regarding us with calm blue-green eyes. They did not rake over us as though we could be baby beaters, but rather seemed to suggest that everything would be okay. “I’ll see if Mr. Gutierrez is ready to see you.” She rose from her chair.
Within a minute, the little man peeped through the service window at us. “Ah, we meet again,” he said melodramatically to Punky.
He didn’t object to my presence with Punky, but he asked that Mrs. Bean remain in the waiting room. We followed him to his office and sat across the desk from him while Mr. Gutierrez nicely, but firmly, reminded Punky of the prior police report which had contributed to their decision to take Todd into custody, in spite of the fact they’d seen nothing on the “previous occasion.”
“But a crazy guy made that report,” Punky protested. She explained about Lefty Hunt, and I tried to back her up, but even as we talked, it sounded like an implausible story. The suspect lacked motivation.
“And do you assume the same guy made this call?”
Punky and I exchanged surprised looks. None of us had known there was a call.
“I suppose you thought I was just in the neighborhood,” he said sarcastically. “You should take the matter of this guy up with the police. As you’ve been told, we don’t ask callers to identify themselves, so we have no way to verify your account. Asking for identification would scare away too many legitimate tips.”
We nodded in unison like a pair of Bobble heads.
“Now,” Mr. Gutierrez said, laying his hands on his cluttered metal desk, “the second reason for our decision, Ms. Hayes, is that your child was not left in proper care.”
Punky looked at her lap. “I don’t know anyone here and Mrs. Bean offered to take Todd, just for a couple hours, while I went to the Unemployment Office.”
Luckily Punky’s eyes, cast down in shame, didn’t witness the dance of the man’s eyebrows when she mentioned unemployment. Bile rose in my throat like I might vomit again. I wouldn’t have minded heaving right onto Mr. Gutierrez’s stacks of forms if I hadn’t thought it would jeopardize Punky’s case. I swallowed hard.
“I understand your situation, Ms. Hayes, but in two hours anything can happen. Your child was found with a pack of matches in his hand, and Mrs. Bean didn’t even know he had them. If he’d started a fire, would she have been able to put it out? Would she even be able to get help? Surely you can’t argue this woman was an appropriate caregiver.”
Punky’s head dipped another half inch as I silently allowed this crucifixion for carelessness in which I shared culpability.
Mrs. Bean was asleep in the chair when we emerged from Mr. Gutierrez’s office. He’d made a call to a foster home, and we sat in the waiting room with the snoring Mrs. Bean until a sturdy woman with graying hair marched through the door with Todd riding on her hip. A clumsy exchange followed, the foster parent reserved and distrusting, Punky humiliated and slightly hostile, Todd alert and not at all traumatized, simply interested in all these new twists to life.
At the touch of my hand, Mrs. Bean startled and immediately apologized for snoozing. We fled the building with Punky squeezing Todd so fiercely in her arms that the child squirmed and fidgeted.
The trip home was somber, the air laden with guilt. Mrs. Bean scolded herself for allowing the authorities to take the boy. I hated myself for recommending Mrs. Bean in the first place and for not better defending Punky in the office.
The hot air in the car pressed on us. My skin felt like a container, my lips clamped against communication. Sweat trickled from my fevered forehead and dripped down the inside of my T-shirt. I’d dressed in such a daze, I couldn’t remember if I’d combed my hair.
Wanting desperately to take a shower and a nap, I dropped off Punky and Todd and Mrs. Bean with barely civil goodbyes. I also had to call the school to tell them I wouldn’t need the sub again tomorrow. Staying home was way too complicated.
A Ticker Tocks
Mrs. Bean hunched on her steps, staring down the asphalt drive as though gazing into eternity, the big, lumpy mass of Buddha Belly cradled on her lap.
Bucky, out for the evening ritual with Dudu, spotted the forlorn Mrs. Bean. Dudu, for all his sentimental cuteness and ribbons, marched with Napoleonic firmness right up to piss at the railing of the old woman’s steps. But Mrs. Bean’s filmy eyes remained glued to nothingness. Thus, Bucky, unable to write more than vital statistics taught to him by rote, squatted down before the old woman to take on the burden of her grief.
“Whath the matter, Mrs. Bean?” he asked.
“My Buttons is dead.” One eczema-ridden hand cupped the large head and the other stroked the long hair of the precious Himalayan as the woman gazed into space. Every law of physics said the dead weight should slide from her spindly lap, whapping the concrete step and wrenching the head from Mrs. Bean’s embrace. But, a small miracle fastened the unwieldy body to the fragile legs.
“I don’t understand the people who live here.” The ratchety reproach grated through Cecile’s window and woke her. “I’ve lived here for twenty years. People here know me. They know I live back here by myself, that I can’t get around, and no one stops to say hello or to have a cup of coffee.” Her grief became less spi
ky and more generalized. Like a lumpy, failed pudding. “I don’t understand this world anymore.”
Paradox at the Center of My Heart
Outside my apartment, Mrs. Bean cried for comfort, but I was sticky with fever. The next morning I would have to face work and the chaos left by a substitute. And I’d already spent the day hauling her and Punky to the county offices.
So I kept my lights off and pretended to be asleep, hiding from Mrs. Bean’s grief and any trick-or-treaters. If Mrs. Bean weren’t such a crab, I rationalized, more people would visit her. Besides, who understood the world anyway?
The barracks didn’t attract many children, but a few shuffled past, hesitating at the darkness of my apartment, and then going on to shout “trick-or-treat” at Mrs. Bean. I imagined her treats. Old pieces of hard candy stuck to their cellophane wrappers. And then she’d expect a gracious, “Thank you.”
I tossed and turned until well after midnight, plagued by Mrs. Bean’s invective and images of papers overflowing from my desk and turning into autumn leaves that scuttled across the body of a dead, fat cat.
Florence’s Conviction
When I woke in the morning I said “rabbits” before anything else so I would have good luck in November.
Before school started, Rosaura found me in Annette’s classroom hastily chalking our agenda on the board.
“Ms. Knutsen,” she asked, “are you anorexic?”
I turned to face her with the bizarre feeling she knew I’d spent the previous day vomiting. I liked her, but she was such a nervy girl. She was nothing more than a child’s stick figure herself—no breasts to speak of and wild loops of hair on top her head.
“No,” I said crisply, “I am not.”
“Okay, then. I brought you a churro.”
She stepped closer and handed me a crisp white bakery bag dotted with grease. This gift from a girl who wore the same pair of jeans every day.
“Thank you, Rosaura.” My heart hurt like it had been stabbed. “How thoughtful of you.”
Rosaura waited, her Converse sneakers planted on the dirty linoleum. She glanced at the bag and then at my mouth.
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