by Joanna Scott
“Penny!”
“A big gouge from a broken board —”
“Penny!”
“What?”
“Soap and water will be fine.”
“You should see a doctor, Sally.”
“Don’t worry. Let me just wash up and change.”
“Isn’t there anything I can do?”
“A cup of tea would be nice,” Sally said, lowering the towel to steal a glance at herself in the mirror.
“I’ll get the water boiling,” Penny said, but she didn’t move.
Sally said she sure was looking forward to a hot cup of tea, and Penny’s voice returned in a weak echo, “Cup of tea.”
Sally tried to find a way to tell Penny how grateful she was for her help, for the whole of it, for everything since they stepped off the bus in Tuskee, but all she could think to say was “Thanks.”
Penny mumbled something, It’s nothing, or, No problem, as she retreated from the bathroom, leaving Sally alone.
____
Alone, face-to-face with the woman she’d become, inadvertently vulnerable despite her strength, coarse in manner despite her best efforts, bruised, bloodied, but nonetheless grateful to be who she was. It was because of her innate agility, wasn’t it, that she was safe in this bathroom rather than lying in a puddle in a dark alley? The cat couldn’t have held off her assailant indefinitely — and the other man, Benny’s friend, more likely his accomplice, hadn’t he wanted to get his hands on Sally? But Sally had escaped from both of them, spoiling their plans for her, flying off into the night, leaving the two brutes to wonder where she’d gone.
She filled the sink with cold water, splashed with the bar of soap to make suds, and plunged her face in up to her ears, soaking away the dirt and blood, holding her breath in order to savor the sensation, just for a moment, of being elsewhere, floating beyond her body, separating from her condition. There, phew, she exhaled, blew bubbles through the water, and lifted up, settling back into reality.
After drying herself, she draped the towel over her shoulders and took a good look at her reflection to assess the damage. The cut above her right eyebrow was surprisingly small for the amount of blood it had produced. The same was true for the cut on her lip. It was hardly visible, really just a hairline split, though the whole lip was swollen. The main injuries were to her throbbing nose, which already was discolored with a petal-shaped bruise, and to two of her bottom teeth, one of which was loose and the other broken in half. This disappointed her. A bruise was one thing, just a temporary effect, and a cut would heal eventually. But a broken tooth was broken forever, creating a permanent gap that would remind her of what Benny Patterson did to her every time she looked in the mirror.
You can run but you can’t hide.
That was as much a lie as its inversion would have been: you can hide but you can’t run. See, she could do both. The woman in the mirror would never be found, not by the man who would be looking for her. The world was too vast, the streets of cities too crowded, and night erased the day with its concealing darkness. She would disappear into the night, Sally with Penelope beside her, the two of them too fleet and sneaky for any hunter. They would go… where would they go? To Coney Island, to the North Pole, to Timbuktu. They would go wherever Sally could find a steady job.
The thought of money occurred to her. She would need lots of it when she set out, she would need money for gas, for hotels, for the down payment on an apartment, adding up to much more than the ten dollars plus change she had in the purse.
Her purse! She’d lost her purse, probably dropped it in the alley when Benny Patterson grabbed her — her cheap vinyl purse containing sunglasses she hardly ever wore, lipstick, a nail file, a pack with one stick left of Wrigley’s gum, a pack, half-smoked, of cigarettes, a wallet with money, a photograph of Penelope, and her license with her name and address.
By now, Benny Patterson might be rifling through her purse, or maybe he was already on her trail, following a map from State Street to her apartment. Soon he’d be pounding on the door, thud thud thud of an elephant’s trunk. All that was left to do was scream, she’d scream for help, and all of Tuskee would come running to save her and Penelope.
Penelope.
The girl was standing in the doorway, holding Leo as if he were a stuffed animal, her arms encircling his fat middle. His heavy hindquarters sagged so low that his back paws brushed against the floor, and with his eyes half-closed and his tufted ears flattened to the sides, he had an expression of complete, placid compliance.
Sally’s gaze met her daughter’s in an exchange that took place entirely on the surface of the mirror. The girl was staring, dumbfounded by the monstrous, discolored thing that had replaced her mother. And Sally couldn’t help but stare back, experiencing through her daughter’s vision the mesmerizing encounter with an image too strange even to warrant an explanation. Her broken tooth and bruised nose, the skin of her right brow split and swollen into a lump over her eye, her straggly hair, her raincoat torn and spattered with blood — she saw herself just as her daughter saw her, the mother transformed into a stranger, the daughter spellbound, and the cat resigned to its fate.
It was a scene that both of them would consider pivotal through the rest of their lives, with every detail easily recollected in sharp definition, along with the sensation of being held in place by a mystery that would never be solved.
Who are you? Penelope would have asked if she could have thought of the words.
I don’t know would have been the only answer possible.
In another time and place, Sally might have been ashamed. But part of the sensation of being mesmerized was accepting the impenetrable aspect of the scene. Out of that acceptance they would each realize in their own fashion, if only vaguely, without self-consciousness or regret, that there would always be something inexplicable about the other. It couldn’t be helped.
The girl would break the spell with the defining word Mama. Sally would respond by naming her daughter, as though for the first time: Baby. Back in the realm of graspable meaning, Sally would catch Penelope in her arms, the cat would drop with a complaining squeak, and they’d hold each other to regain the feeling of familiarity.
And then Sally would recall the urgency of her predicament — danger pressing, dire need for flight, she had to change her clothes and grab only what she could fit in the suitcase, she’d send for the rest later, and she’d have to wire the bank, which reminded her of the money in the hatbox, Mason Jackson’s money, she’d need that, at least to get started.
Frantically digging through the clutter in her closet, with Penelope trailing her and Penny trailing Penelope, Sally searched for the hatbox that contained her freedom, her future, her ability to choose how to live her life.
“What are you doing, Mama?”
“We’re going on a trip, baby.”
Penny Campbell asked mournfully why she couldn’t wait at least until the morning.
Sally promised to write to her and explain. But there wasn’t time now. She had to find the hatbox, the blue hatbox with the paper bag full of money. “Here it is. Okay. Come on,” she said to her daughter. “Where’s your sweater? You can put the sweater on over your pajamas.”
“I don’t want to go.”
“You don’t even know where we’re going.”
“Where are we going?”
“The North Pole.”
“Will there be reindeer?”
“Sure.”
“And Santa?”
“Put these socks on.”
“No!”
“Yes!”
“Sally,” Penny interrupted, “why are you leaving?”
Sally couldn’t think of a succinct answer to her friend’s question, so she didn’t bother to reply at all.
“I want to help.” Penny said this in a whisper that came out strangely amplified.
Now the child was really upset. She’d thought Big Penny, as she called her, was coming on the trip, too. But Bi
g Penny was staying in Tuskee, where Little Penny was determined to stay, and to prove it she took the scarf Sally had thrown at her, wrapped one end around her wrist and the other end around the spoke of a chair. “I’m not going.”
Sally tried pleading with her sweetheart, her baby, please, she needed her, she couldn’t leave her there. When pleading didn’t work, she unwound the scarf from the chair, lifted the girl over her shoulder, and carried her out to the car while Penny followed with the suitcase.
By the time Penelope had been deposited on the passenger side, she’d given up trying to resist. As she already knew, such was the nature of the world of adults that their irrational tyranny, whatever it was called, would always triumph. There was nothing to do but stick her thumb in her mouth and pout.
Sally and Penny clung to each other in such a long embrace that Penelope knocked impatiently with her knuckles on the window. If they were taking a trip, then they should get going!
As she opened the driver’s door, Sally asked Penny to tell Buddy Potter she was sorry, to tell everyone she was sorry for leaving Tuskee without saying good-bye.
Was it possible? She wasn’t coming back? Big Penny asked. Never?
“Never?” Little Penny echoed inside the car, her tone more sullen than outraged.
Sally promised to write to Penny and explain. She said good-bye. And then she remembered something she’d been meaning to say. “Arthur Steerforth who works at the Dockery, he has a crush on you.”
“How do you know?”
“It’s obvious. Good-bye, Penny,” she called over the engine.
“Good-bye, Sally.”
She put the car into reverse, backed up, heard the sound of gravel crackling under the tires, turned the car to head toward the street. She drove slowly, at a crawling pace the first few yards, watching in the rearview mirror for headlights, in case she was being followed.
“Stop!” Penelope shrieked.
Sally slammed on the brakes, jerking them both forward. Penelope lightly bumped her nose against the dashboard, but she wasn’t hurt and didn’t complain. And she didn’t answer her mother, who called to her, demanding to be told what she was doing as Penelope opened the car door and dashed out into the night.
At first Sally thought her daughter was escaping back to the apartment, the only home she’d known. But she didn’t head home. She ran in front of the stationary car toward a dark lump ahead in the road — a dead animal, Sally presumed, just ordinary filthy roadkill, and she was telling her daughter not to touch it when the animal demonstrated that it was far from dead by standing and lazily stretching out its front legs.
The girl caught it in her arms, and only then did Sally recognize fat Leo, the hero of the night. Penelope half carried, half dragged the cat back to the car, and she held him on her lap while Sally leaned across her and slammed the door shut.
Sally drove on, unable to think of anything to say to her daughter, who sat with a sour, unforgiving look, focused on the road ahead. With each mile the silence seemed to grow heavier, more unbearable, until finally Sally decided to sing. She began by humming and then she added the words:
Walk with me, walk with me
Darlin’, won’t you walk with me…
At the intersection with Route 15, she headed north, following the river. She sang “Buttons and Bows” and the few lines she could remember from a new song she’d heard recently called “Blue Monday.” She sang “Alleluia Grace.” By the time she got to “Turn Around, Lou,” both Leo the cat and Penelope were asleep.
June 14, 2007
Yesterday morning I drove to the Bonville pier, where the Tuskee River empties into Canton Lake. There was a crane on a barge below the Lake Avenue drawbridge, which was closed for repair, and the crane’s operator sat idly in his cab, perhaps waiting for some signal from the workmen on the bridge. Farther up, between the bridge and the pier, a dredger on a second barge moved in slow motion, its steel jaws widening in a bored yawn above the surface of the water.
The river is a sludgy red at Canton Point, shallow and sluggish, too polluted from the chemical plants, I would have thought, to be attractive to fishermen. They’re here, though, dozens of them sitting on foldout stools along the pier. While I was walking out to the end, one of the fishermen suddenly braced and lifted his rod as it started to bend. I stopped to see what he would pull from the water, watched as he slowly wound the taut line, the reel signaling its progress in intervals of stuttering clicks, and by the time the top wire of the hook appeared at the surface, the fisherman’s neck and shoulders were glistening with sweat. The struggle continued as he tried to lift his prey into the air, with the line dipping and rising, dipping and rising. Finally, just when I thought the line would snap, the rod sprang backward and the empty hook flew into the air.
The fisherman’s face was shadowed by the lip of his cap, but his patient manner as he reeled in the line and steadied the hook and restrung it with bait suggested that this was the usual experience for him. It was all he ever expected, with the contest itself the reason for his effort and the source of satisfaction.
I walked on to the end of the pier. The wind mixed the sour smell of the dredged mud with smoke from fresh pitch on the drawbridge. From where I stood, it looked as though the river widened its mouth and took in the huge lake in a gulp. But I’ve seen from above, when I’m in a plane approaching the airport from the north, that the river’s current spreads in murky tendrils and eventually disperses, not so much absorbed by the lake as it is washed away.
Not far from the pier, hidden by the buildings of the marina, is a pavilion with a carousel, still closed that early in the morning, or otherwise I would have gone to ride on it. My grandmother used to bring me to the carousel when I was little. I always chose the same white horse, hand-carved, with real horsehair for its mane and tail, while my grandmother preferred to sit in the teacup and spin around and around. After the ride she’d stumble from the carousel laughing her growling laugh, thrilled by the dizziness.
It was almost inevitable that my trip to the pier and this memory of my grandmother would merge in an elaborate dream I had last night involving fish heads and carousel horses, most of which I’ve forgotten, except for the image of my grandmother spinning down the Tuskee in a teacup, gripping the handrails, her hair blowing wild.
My grandmother must have loved the way dizziness washed thoughts and memories into a blur. As a young woman she spun through her life the way she spun around in the teacup on the Bonville carousel. At pivotal moments she tended to act rashly, abandoning her plans without bothering to consider alternatives, moving so quickly from the location of trouble that she would lose track of how one thing was connected to another. Absorbed in the effort of escape, she’d forget that the same problems she’d left behind had a tendency to reappear when she came to a stop.
According to my mother, the first few times my grandmother met her boyfriend Abe Boyle was in passing, when she was on her way out the door, and she sized him up quickly, without much interest. My grandmother had other concerns and didn’t give much thought to her daughter’s evolving romantic life. It doesn’t matter, though, what my grandmother thought of Abe when she first met him. It was what she didn’t think of him that would end up having consequence.
Abe and Penelope met at a bar on a June night in 1974. They converged because one of Abe’s friends was the new boyfriend of one of Penelope’s friends. Abe was the oldest among the group and the only one from out of town. The others were former high school friends on summer break from college or working in the area. They had planned to hang out at the bar for the evening, but they ended up taking the girls back to the room where Abe lived and making an impromptu party, the numbers swelling as word got around, so by nine o’clock the group of six had grown to sixteen.
Some of the friends sat on the bed; others sat in a circle on the floor, passing around a bong and exchanging meaningful glances in lieu of talk since the volume of the stereo was turned up too loud for any
one to hear beyond the music.
I assume it was without words that Penelope and Abe first became acquainted, communicating with their eyes, shyly at first, then in a more relaxed way through the haze of smoke, and then seductively, my mother batting those famously long lashes of hers, twirling a strand of her hair around her finger while she waited for her next drag on the bong, my father conveying with his grin that he was sure the two of them belonged together.
Only when the last song had finished playing did my mother and father speak.
Nice party.
Mmm.
Sweet hash.
Mmm.
Hey.
Hey back.
You busy tomorrow?
Naw.
Wanna go somewhere?
Like where?
Oh, like anywhere.
Sure, why not.
Cool.
And all the while, even as they floated on the surface of a hazy, potted high and feigned a happy stupidity, their senses were more keenly alert than ever, greedily absorbing everything they could about the other in an attempt to consign the whole portrait to memory so that they’d have something substantial to savor, a vision detailed enough to satisfy the intense yearning they expected to feel after they’d separated for the night.
When my mother reminisces about my father, she tends to grow irritable quickly. Oh, he had that sweet smile, she’ll say. And he had that long hair, long auburn hair. He knew he was irresistible, she continues with rising anger, he thought he could do no wrong. Even after thirty years, two marriages and two divorces, she still blames Abe for seducing her and then abandoning her when she was pregnant. And she blames my grandmother for not giving her better advice about men.