by Cathy Lamb
My throat felt like it had a fist-sized gumball stuck in it.
“When did he die?” Grandma asked.
“He died at the Bad Place on a Wednesday. Barry killed him. He sat on him. Squished him. Andrew couldn’t breathe.”
Grandma and Grandpa exchanged a horrified glance. I hugged my knees in close as the sun kept sinking toward the corn and the dark blue started blocking out the yellows.
“Andrew said, ‘Help me Tonya,’ but they grabbed Tonya. The men in the white coats. They always grabbed Tonya. Me, too, sometimes. They grabbed these.” She held her boobs. “And this.” She stood and grabbed her butt, then sat back down. “He said, ‘Help me, Helen,’ and I tried but the men threw me on the wall.”
Grandma cried. Grandpa made a roaring sound, but Helen didn’t notice.
“Tonya tried to save Andrew. She tried. His face turned red, then purple, then good-bye.” Helen snapped her fingers and her chin wobbled. “His tongue came out like this.” She dropped her tongue in the corner of her mouth. “And his eyes were like this.” She rolled her eyes back in her head. “I miss Andrew. Barry is mean.”
“Was Andrew a friend of yours?” Grandpa asked.
“Yes, he was my friend.” Helen’s eyes flooded with tears. “He watched when I was in the bathroom so Barry wouldn’t find me again. He watched out, and that made Barry mean mad.”
I saw Grandma lean over, her hands on her head. Something was wrong with Grandpa, because even in that dim light I could tell he was white as a ghost.
“I sung Andrew songs. He gave me crossword puzzles. I didn’t do them. All the noise in my head made it too buzzy, but I have them still.” She reached into the flowered bag by her side and pulled out crossword puzzles. Each of them had a picture on it. I could tell that she’d done the artwork because of the minute detail to each one, every line and dot perfect. Over one crossword, she’d drawn a stark bed, but the bed was twisted into a pretzel. Another one had a window, crooked, swerving, done in blacks and grays.
“They put Andrew in a can after they squished him,” she said.
“How do you know this, sugar?” Grandpa asked.
Helen hummed part of the opera song that came floating out to the porch. “I know because Barry took me and Tonya down to the room. Down down down the stairs.” Helen bit her lip as her voice cracked. “He made us!” she shouted. “He made us! I didn’t want to. I said no and Tonya said no, Momma, but he made us!”
Grandma reached out a shaking hand and put it on Helen’s arm. The cornstalks swayed in the distance as the sun continued to sink.
“Me and Tonya held hands, we held hands, but Barry said we needed to know what would happen!” Helen wrapped her arms around her head and rocked.
“What do you mean, what would happen?” Grandma asked.
I felt sick. I knew that Grandma and Grandpa had forgotten I was even there.
“He said if we were bad, if we were bad! If we were bad!” Helen started keening back and forth, her voice a low, raw rumble. A bat flew across our field.
“What, honey? What did he say?” Grandma asked. I saw her hands shaking. I saw Grandpa taking deep breaths, as if he didn’t want to hear what she was going to say but knew he had to.
“He said if we were bad, if we told, if we told what happened, that he was going to put us in a can, too! Me and Tonya! In a can.” She stomped her feet in place, her face twisted. “He did it to our Andrew. They put Andrew in a can. I saw it, I saw it in that dark room.”
Another bat followed, then a third.
“What room? Where was the room?” Now it was Grandpa’s turn.
“In one of the houses. Outside. Down the long, dark hall. All the dead people that got squished. They burn them up and put them in a can and put them on the shelf and I saw Andrew’s can. He was there.”
Helen started crying, quietly, her shoulders shaking. “I saw Andrew’s can. It said his name. There was a date. A number. When he died. Yep. They squished him and put dead Andrew in a can. He saved me from Barry. The voices told me to kill Barry, but I couldn’t.” She cried harder now. “I wanted to.”
Grandpa and Grandma were up and hugging their daughter, rocking her back and forth. “Sweetheart, sweetheart.”
“Poor Andrew, poor Andrew with the crossword puzzles. I don’t want to go in a can. Do you think Tonya’s in a can now? You know, Tonya? My friend?”
We were out there till the sun dropped away, the darkness descended, and the bats flew in swarms.
The next afternoon Helen started drawing on a canvas with a charcoal pencil. She drew a row of silver cans. The tin cans were labeled, “Charlotte. Andrew. Patty. Harry.” Sticking out of the cans she drew fingers or toes, human hair, and a hand. A left hand, I noticed. Each rim was painted red.
“That’s blood,” she told me. “Blood of my friends and the friends I didn’t meet there.”
The background was black and brown. In the upper right-hand corner there was a window with bars over it.
“You can’t escape. The bars will eat you.”
In the left-hand corner there was a door leading into a black room. Sitting on a bench in the dark room was a woman in a blue dress, her blond head buried in her hands.
“They put you in there first,” Helen told me. “That’s where you wait before they squish you and put you in a can on a shelf.”
Then she painted her left hand with red paint and pushed her hand over Harry’s can. “He’s dead. He’s gone. I’ll be gone soon, too.”
I was so scared I didn’t know what to do. I still played with clay and jump ropes.
“But I’ll save you, girl kid,” she told me. She put her red-painted hand right over her face and held it there. When she pulled it away I could see the handprint.
Red. A bloodred handprint over Helen’s face.
“I’ll save you.”
Whenever Helen got her period she informed my grandpa, not my grandma, that the enemy was “bleeding her, torturing her, stabbing her stomach. Can you help me?”
The enemy did not arrive after Helen returned home from the mental ward.
So besides carrying a number of drugs, the tortured vision of Andrew in a can, and injuries from her leap from a window with no bars that would eat you, she was also carrying my sister, Sunshine.
Sunshine’s father, we learned later, in all likelihood, was Barry.
Barry the rapist.
Andrew’s murderer.
Grandma was one tiny step from hysterical.
18
Portland, Oregon
“You don’t seem as harried today, Stevie,” Eileen said. “Last time I saw you…” She let her voice wander off. She couldn’t bear to say anything further.
“I don’t remember being harried. I was working in my garden.” She had come over, unannounced, as she had many times since our last “incident” with the chocolate cake, but I hadn’t heard her this time, so I didn’t have time to hide in a closet and wait till she left. She had arrived at my house this morning at nine o’clock and insisted I go with her to this teahouse with white tablecloths and tiered, sugary, rich desserts.
I hadn’t wanted to go. I told her that. She argued, and she pouted. I said no, thank you, again. Then she’d said, “We’re going or I’m staying here all day.”
The thought of her lounging around my house all day was depressing, but I was steamingly frustrated with myself because I had allowed her to bully me into coming. I had wanted to work in my garden and attach crossbeams to my rose trellises, one for me, one for Grandma, one for Grandpa, before going to my chicken dancing job.
And yet here I was, in some teahouse out in the suburbs. Why didn’t I say no to her?
“Oh, yes, the garden. You hardly ate vegetables before the cheater operation. You said they were the devil’s brew, I think. And now you’re Miss Organic Carrot. Digging in dirt, slamming things together with your hammer.”
She turned and waved, both hands, at the young, blond waitress. “Yoo-hoo.” Under
her breath she said, “The service here is terrible.”
“What’s terrible about it?” I asked.
Eileen sighed. “If you had spent more time in the high-end restaurants you would know what respectful service entails. This gal…” She rolled her eyes.
“She brought us the tea and teapot on a tray, she’s brought you extra lemon for your water, more strawberry lemonade when you drank the first glass, she exchanged some of the pink cakes for carrot when you asked, when you said something was “rotten” about the blackberry tea she brought you lemon tea, she mopped up when you knocked over your cup…she’s still smiling. What’s wrong with the service?”
“It’s her attitude. You know, the fat attitude.”
“I didn’t see it.”
“Well, you wouldn’t. After your cheater operation…” She eyed my outfit. “Hello, Mrs. Tomisson,” she murmured.
Before I could respond, the waitress came over. She smiled at Eileen, but I could see the strain. “Young lady, I need you to take away these berry muffins. They’re awful. Dry. Stale. We’ll have more of the chocolate fudge pieces.”
“I don’t think I can do that,” the waitress said. “We don’t have enough and we’re still expecting a number of other guests—”
Eileen glared at her, hands clasped over her mound of stomach. “Do it now, young woman, or I will speak to your manager.”
“Okay.” The waitress tipped her chin up. She kept smiling, to her credit.
“Now.”
The waitress turned. Eileen thought she was getting the chocolate fudge pieces. The manager came instead.
“Can I help you?” The manager, a thin, blond woman with bell-shaped hair and a soft face, stood before us.
“I’m fine,” I told her, smiling. “Everything is delicious.” No way was I going to get caught up in this.
“It’s not fine,” Eileen snapped. She listed her complaints. The manager nodded. Eileen ended her complaints with a diatribe against the waitress. “Lazy, poorly trained, snobby—”
The manager lifted one finger. “Stop.”
“I beg your pardon?” Eileen said, her chins quivering in indignation. She was Eileen Yorkson. No one interrupted her.
“The waitress did all she could to make you happy. We haven’t had such a demanding guest in here, and we’re unsure how to handle this situation.”
“I’m happy with it,” I said. “It was delicious.”
“I’m not happy with it,” Eileen snarled at the woman. “Your waitress should be fired. She obviously has trouble with serving others. She has an attitude problem and talks back to customers.”
“The waitress is my daughter,” the woman said, so coldly anyone else would have frozen in their seat.
“Then she should be taught manners.” Eileen’s words came out weak. Even she was taken aback by this change of events.
“She has been taught manners and she has been taught to serve. In fact, she recently returned from a month in Mexico where she built a church. Last summer she was in Guatemala doing the same thing. During the school year she divides her time between sports and volunteering at a food bank and teaching Sunday school. Giving back and serving is what her whole life is about.”
Eileen was staring off into space, her face flushed, chins quivering.
“Her manners were impeccable,” I said to her, “and I apologize for my…”—I paused ever so slightly—“friend. I am so sorry she treated your daughter rudely. I tried to intervene.”
I had.
But had I tried hard enough? It’s one thing to take it yourself, but what had I done to keep Eileen from the poor waitress? Wasn’t continuing to go out to restaurants with Eileen allowing the mean behavior to continue? “I’m truly sorry. I should have done more to control her.”
“Do not ever apologize for me,” Eileen snapped.
“Get out,” the woman said to Eileen.
“What?” Eileen gasped, throwing down her napkin, crumbs flying.
“Get out. My daughter has perfect manners, but I don’t. You’re obnoxious. You’re demanding and rude. Get out.” Her voice cracked, her body rigid with anger. “Out. Go. Go.”
Eileen’s face registered her shock. “No one talks to me like that! Do you know who I am?”
“I don’t give a holy shit who you are,” the owner hissed at her. “None. Get out of my teahouse and don’t come back. I will not have anyone attacking my daughter.”
“I’ll bet you were a working mother, never at home, and that’s why she turned out as she did,” Eileen muttered as she struggled to heave her body up. “She thinks she’s better than everyone, and so do you.”
“I don’t think I’m better than anyone,” the woman said.
“Your daughter’s a brat—”
Well, that did it. The woman picked up not one but two cupcakes and smashed them both, at the same time, into Eileen’s face.
“Get out!” she ordered. “Get out!”
I walked around the table, and heaved a fighting, infuriated Eileen up on her feet as she hurled expletives, her face bursting with rage, icing dripping off her chins and diamond necklace. I manhandled her out of the crowded teahouse as she hollered that she would sue the woman from here to hell, she would “close her down,” and she would regret the day she ever opened her doors. Did the woman know who she was, dammit? “Do you, you skinny bitch?”
It was ugly. It was beyond ugly. Eileen was huffing and puffing and could hardly catch her breath by the time I shoved her in the car, helped lift her feet in, and slammed the door.
I scuttled back in and saw the mother hugging her crying daughter. I grabbed Eileen’s purse, opened up her wallet, and handed $40 to the owner for the food. To the girl I handed the rest of Eileen’s money: $500.
“You deserve this and more. I am so sorry for my horrible, terrible, truly rude friend.” I reached out and hugged the girl, then turned to her mother. “If she sues you, and she won’t, but if she does, call me. I promise you I will testify on your behalf.” I scribbled down my name and number.
The owner nodded.
“I’m sorry. I am truly, utterly sorry.”
I wanted to kill Eileen.
Eileen’s father called me later and asked what happened.
I told him everything.
By the time I was done, he was crying.
“I don’t know what to do, Stevie. She’s so unhappy. She’s angry all the time. She’s making all my employees miserable, I’ve had three of my best people leave in the last three months. Twelve are threatening to quit, most of them women. The morale is horrible. And yet, if I let her go, I think it’ll kill her. But my company…”
We talked for more than an hour and then I had to garden my way back to mental health. I changed clothes, grabbed a bucket, and started weeding. I threw a few handfuls of weeds into the bucket.
Why am I such a wimp with Eileen? Am I afraid of her anger? Do I feel in some inexplicable way that I deserve her comments? Do I feel guilty about the weight loss when she hasn’t experienced the same? Is she a link to my past and I can’t let go of the link, as I’ve had to let go of other people, however unwillingly? Do I stay friends with her for purely altruistic reasons, which is that I am her only friend, and I think she would implode if I walked away? Is that a good-enough reason?
I have lost so much weight and it has been a wondrous miracle, but I’m still trying to find myself, trying to find the new Stevie.
She has been lost for so, so long, and I need to find her.
Did this new Stevie want to be friends with Eileen?
I pulled out a mongo-sized weed and tossed it in the bucket.
On Friday night I clucked and danced on a corner dressed as a chicken with scary yellow eyes. I was almost hit by a motor-cyclist who called me a “chicken shit.” I sweated profusely. An old man with a cane tried to pinch my chicken butt. Mr. Pingle said I did an outstanding job, outstanding! Sales were higher than on any other Friday. “Cluck cluck!”
On Saturday morning and Sunday morning I walked starting at six o’clock. My whole body was tense from my chicken-arm-waving exercises, my chicken dances, and my exuberance with the sign. My whole mind was numb.
Numb.
I was a dancing chicken. I was so utterly humiliated. What if Jake found out? He was out of town for the next ten days, in San Francisco for work, but eventually I would have to tell him.
I figured I could pay off around $4,500 of my medical debt, barring any unforeseen problems, like The Mobster dying, by the end of the year. But was it worth the humiliation?
Probably. It probably was. I hate debt. It makes my nerves jingle and jangle.
Before I went back to being a chicken that night, I gardened. I pulled up weeds that outrageously decided they had permission to be in my vegetable beds in the first place and I laid stone down for my pathway. I had gotten the stone for nothing off a job site I saw on the way home from work. (No, I did not steal it.) The pathway led under the three trellises and then to a corner of my yard. I wanted that corner to have a circular patio where I could make a mosaic design out of cracked china plates I had. Sunshine and I used to play tea party with Grandma’s china plates.
I had a late lunch under the canopy of my old, white, flowering cherry tree. I loved that tree, as I loved my two pink cherry trees and my tulip tree. After lunch I planted a few geraniums that my neighbor had given me, then hung up two birdhouses I had bought for $3 at a garage sale on my walk on Thursday.
As I was driving to my chicken job early that evening I briefly wondered if there was anything I could do to make more money.
I could sell the eggs from my ovaries, but I think my eggs are probably too old.
Maybe a kidney? My brain?
I hated that my thoughts kept circling around money, I did.
But money is one of those triggers, I think, for all of us. Except for the insanely greedy, the ones who would sell their own sister if it could bring in an extra hundred, I think most people simply want to survive, not owe anyone money, and go on a nice vacation now and then.