by John Searles
The man who had been clunked by the guitar glared at me. “Great,” he said to the woman sitting next to him even as he looked my way. “I can tell what kind of ride this is going to be.”
“Shhhh,” I said to Sophie, praying that she didn’t cry herself to death. “It’s okay. Shhhh. Shhhh.”
“Can I give you some advice?” the Vegetarian Lesbian Tigress said.
At first I didn’t realize she was talking to me. But when she repeated herself, I turned to her. The last thing I needed was lip from this girl. “What?” I said over Sophie’s screaming.
“Baby-sitting 101. You’re holding him wrong. Don’t squeeze him to your chest so tight. Just keep your hand behind the baby’s head for support and let him lie in the crook of your other arm. Rock him a bit, and I bet he’ll stop crying.”
“It’s a she,” I said, indignant. And if Sophie weren’t screaming so loud, I would have let the VLT know that her perfume and snapping were probably to blame for the outburst. But Sophie’s face was so red, and I was so terrified that she’d explode in my arms, that I had no choice but to listen to the advice. I moved my hands just as she said and—voilà!—it worked. Sophie was quiet. Slowly her red skin faded to pink. She was going to live after all. “Thanks,” I said, despite myself.
“Sure thing,” she said, flashing her brown eyes again. “And if you don’t mind one more piece of advice, I’ll let you in on a secret.”
“I don’t mind,” I said, equal parts begrudging and grateful.
“Lesson number two. When you want her to take the bottle, don’t shove it in her mouth. Rub the nipple by her lip, and if she wants it, she’ll start sucking.”
“Okay.” I looked at her again as if for the first time, trying to shush my father’s assumptions about her in my mind. She was pretty, all right, but on Leon’s one-to-ten girl-rating scale she would only have been a seven and a half. Just below his eight-point cutoff. She lost points for her almost-flat chest, skinny body, and mousy hair. But she gained points for everything else. Her smooth, clear skin. Her sugary-brown eyes. She had a nose that narrowed at the top and widened in a press-me sort of way at the bottom. Her lips made me think of a kiss mark she could leave on a piece of paper, if only she were wearing lipstick. Her eyebrows arched big and wide over her eyes, like she was surprised or holding back a joke. I didn’t know whether to add, subtract, or divide for her clothes, though, because her head was sticking out of a crocheted shawl made from a patchwork of squares. Blue, yellow, pink, and green. I guess Leon would tick off a point there, but I didn’t bother. That rating system seemed sort of dumb now that I thought about it. “How old are you?” I asked without really intending to.
“Sixteen.” She put her cigarette case in her bag and took out a party pack of peanut M&M’s and Neccos candy. Enough to feed the entire bus. “How old are you?”
“Same,” I told her. “In another few days.” I couldn’t believe that my birthday was coming and I’d barely thought about it. Each year my mother baked me a chocolate cake and gathered up Leon, Marnie, and my father to sing an excruciatingly off-key rendition of “Happy Birthday.” Leon and my father always kept the song going longer than necessary with the “how old are you now?” shtick and a list of all the zoo animals that I looked and smelled like. The routine came complete with sound effects, courtesy of Leon’s armpit.
So much for that tradition.
“Want some?” she asked, holding the bags of candy out to me.
“No thanks,” I told her, pushing my mother’s flavorless gum around inside my mouth. I hadn’t eaten a thing all day, but the emptiness in my stomach didn’t seem to matter. Hunger was the least of my concerns.
“More for me,” she said and gulped down a handful of M&M’s. “So we’re both going to the Hole.”
“The Hole?”
She pointed to my ticket, which I was still holding in one hand, squeezing it between my thumb and forefinger because I hadn’t wanted to stick it in my pocket and risk dropping Sophie. All that was left of the word Holedo after the bus driver had torn it in half was “Hole.” How appropriate.
“I always notice that when they rip the bus ticket. One of those weird things.” She grabbed another handful of M&M’s and dropped them into her mouth.
“I guess you have a sweet tooth,” I said.
“I’m trying to be a vegetarian. But nothing ever fills me up, so I end up eating junk. Last night I finished a plate of steamed veggies, then inhaled half a cake and three Diet Shastas. I was healthier before I gave up meat.”
“So why are you doing it?” I asked. She was skinny enough that she didn’t need to worry about dieting.
“I feel bad for the animals,” she told me, waving a red M&M in the air as she spoke. Her fingernails were short and unpainted, unlike her guitar picks. “Think of it this way: If you saw a cow in a field, you’d never walk up and take a bite out of it. But basically that’s what you do every time you eat a hamburger.”
“I do?”
“Sort of.” She pooched her lips and looked a little perplexed by her logic. “I read something like that in my vegetarian handbook anyway. But maybe I said it wrong. Don’t listen to me. I’m the world’s worst vegetarian. Do you eat meat?”
“Yeah,” I said, feeling as if that was some sort of sin. I thought of my mother excavating a frozen red pot roast from the back of the freezer on Saturday nights so we could eat it with boiled carrots and mashed potatoes on Sunday afternoons. I pictured a bulgy-eyed cow in a field of tall grass but couldn’t imagine the steps between its standing there mooing and becoming my meal. Sophie let out a peep that made me worry she might start crying again. I rubbed the bottle gently against her lip, and she started sucking.
“You’re a fast learner,” the girl said.
My mind flashed on that night she had been standing in front of me at Cumby’s Mart holding a baby and trying to rein in the two boys at the candy counter. I had been so wrapped up in Edie that I had barely noticed her. “Were you baby-sitting that night I saw you in the store?” I asked.
“Oh, so you admit to seeing me,” she said.
“What do you mean?”
“People in Holedo have this weird thing where they see each other all the time but pretend they don’t. I never understand it.”
I thought of how I had turned away from her when she smiled at me on the bus to New York with Claude last month. So I got what she meant, I guess. But she still hadn’t answered my question. “Were you baby-sitting?”
“I have five younger brothers. Baby-sitting is in my blood.”
“Well, can I ask you a question?”
“Sure,” she said.
“Do you think this baby looks okay?”
“What do you mean?”
“Her size. She’s so small. And her head wobbles when I move her.”
She looked down at Sophie’s little face, then turned to me. “My professional opinion is that she is a hundred-percent normal. Infants are more durable than they look. And they’re always a little weird when they’re this young. She’ll get cute in a few months. Not to worry.”
Okay, so she wasn’t Dr. Spock, but her analysis made me breathe a little easier. The loose neck was normal. Sophie was tiny because she was an infant. That was all. But then Sophie spit the bottle out of her mouth and started crying again just as loud as before.
“Now what?” I said.
She reached over and felt Sophie’s bottom. “When was the last time you changed her?”
Never, I wanted to say.
The blank look on my face must have told her all she needed to know. “Don’t you have any diapers with you?”
I held Sophie in one arm and reached down with the other to pick up the bag of stuff I’d taken from Edie’s. Only one diaper was inside, and I had no idea how many I’d need. Did babies get changed every hour or every ten hours? I scolded myself for picking up those two useless books instead of a package of Pampers before boarding the bus. In the bag I also found a pa
cifier, a tube of white gunk, and a container of something marked Enfamil. I pulled out the diaper like I knew what I was doing. As I set Sophie down on my lap and tried to figure how to get her outfit off her, she shrieked uncontrollably.
“Let me help before she blows my eardrums,” the girl said. “But you better watch and learn.”
I was glad she was willing to do the job for me, but at the same time I felt like crying along with Sophie. As I watched the girl expertly unsnap the buttons around the baby’s legs, pull off the old diaper, wipe her clean, and put on the new one, I kept thinking that I had no idea how unprepared I was to handle an infant. And how was I going to manage back in Holedo with a baby? Leon would help me somehow, I reminded myself. Maybe Marnie, too.
The girl got Sophie changed and quieted down again, then placed her back in my arms. “That’s much better,” she said.
“Thanks.” I sighed with relief as Sophie nestled into my chest. I knew I should spend this ride figuring out what to do when I got to Holedo—the Hole—but I couldn’t help talking to this girl. There was something about her—her soft voice, her “before” picture hair, her plain and pretty face—that made me feel better. “This is my sister, Sophie,” I said, making the introductions. It felt funny to say “my sister” out loud. But I decided to stop wondering whether Edie had been lying to me about my father getting her pregnant. I wanted Sophie to be my sister. And until further notice, that’s what I was going to believe.
“Nice to meet you,” the girl said in a baby’s voice not unlike the one Edie used to talk to her. She shook Sophie’s miniature hand. “I’m Jeanny.”
“I’m Dominick,” I told her when she looked up at me.
I thought I saw something in those eyes of hers. Some flicker of recognition in the way her brows narrowed, then rose again. “Pindle?” she said.
I was right. “Yeah. How do you know?” In my head I heard Joshua Fuller telling me I was news in the state of Massachusetts. I figured she had read about my mother’s death in the paper just like everyone else in Holedo. Then I wondered if she had read about me.
“We used to go to school together,” Jeanny said, not mentioning my mother or me in the newspaper. “My last name is Garvey.” She looked as if she were going to say something more but stopped herself. “Jeanny Garvey” was all she said.
“I thought you went to Catholic school.”
“Well, we used to go to school together. Back in elementary. Now I go to St. Bartholomew. When I go, that is.”
“Why don’t you go?” I asked her.
“I’m in New York a lot,” she said.
“And your parents let you miss school? I mean, you just take off to New York whenever you want?”
Jeanny looked out toward the aisle, then back at me. “Let’s just say my mom is not like most mothers. She checked out a few years ago.”
“You mean she left?” I asked.
“Mentally, not physically. And she’s always preoccupied with my younger brothers. It’s all she can do to get them dressed and fed in the morning, so she hardly has the time to pay attention to what I do.” Jeanny laughed, even though what she was saying wasn’t funny. “I think as far as she’s concerned, I’m fully grown and through with my need for parenting.”
Since she didn’t mention her father, I didn’t want to bring him up. Maybe he had checked out, too. “Well, what do you go to the city for?”
“Auditions,” she said. “Protests.”
None of the girls I knew in Holedo ever seemed to care about anything outside the bubble of our town. Their goals were the flip side of Leon’s. Guys wanted to get drunk, get laid, and get a car the second they got their driver’s license. Girls wanted to get a boyfriend, get their makeup on perfectly, and get asked to the prom when the time came. No one ever auditioned or protested except in the movies and the newspaper. “What are you trying to get?” I asked her. “And what are you trying to get rid of?”
“I was trying out for a backup part in a band. And I picketed in a protest for equal pay for women.”
I heard my father’s voice begin to say something about lesbians, but I squashed him in my mind. “You sing?” I asked, since that interested me more than the protest.
“Yes,” she said. “And I yodel, too.”
“Yodel?”
“Yeah,” she said. “Want to hear?”
I didn’t think she’d really let loose right there on the bus, but I nodded anyway. She took a deep breath and a moment later out it came: “Yodeleheeeyodeleheeeeyodeleheeeeyodelheehooooooooo!”
All over the bus people were craning their necks to see where the noise was coming from, and Jeanny kept right on going. “Yodeleyodeleyodeleyodelheehooooooooo!”
“Keep it down, Heidi!” someone shouted.
That stopped her mid-yodel, and we both busted out laughing. “How did you learn to do that?” I asked.
“When you grow up in the mountains making moonshine, you’ve got nothing better to do.”
I didn’t exactly believe her but wasn’t sure what to say to that. Finally I said, “I thought you grew up in Holedo?”
“I’m kidding,” she said and jabbed my side with her elbow. I felt Joshua Fuller’s folder pinch my skin, all those stories about my mother that had led me to this bus with my baby sister in my arms. “You’re too serious, Mr. Pindle. We’ve got to loosen you up.”
I knew that she was right. But feeling that folder beneath my sweatshirt reminded me of how tangled my life had become. The prospect of loosening up, as she put it, seemed as impossible as bringing my mother back from the dead. “Well, how did you really learn to yodel?” I asked, skipping right over the topic of Dominick Pindle’s multitude of personality flaws.
“When I was little, my dad took me to see a show in New York at Radio City. They had all kinds of singers and dancers. It was like a performance pupu platter or something. Anyway, there was this one yodeler and she was far out. She stepped onstage, and as soon as the spotlight hit her, she let it rip. After that I was obsessed with yodeling for a year or so. I basically taught myself.”
“So do you yodel at auditions?”
“No way,” she said. “I sing regular there. I only yodel for cute guys who I meet on the bus.”
At that I felt a lump in my throat. I was the cute guy she met on the bus. For me she yodeled. Made a fool of herself without so much as blushing. Leon would have thought she was a seven-and-a-half. But to me she was better than that. I glanced down at Sophie in my arms, though, and told myself it was no time for me to be picking up girls when I had a baby to take care of. As much as I wanted to tell her that I thought she was beautiful, I didn’t say a thing. I let the silence hang between us as a sign that I wasn’t taking the bait. All that quiet must have left her feeling stupid, because she smiled at me, beaming those eyes for a moment more, then turned away.
“Don’t get nervous,” she said. “I have a lot of boys in my life.”
“You mean your brothers?” I asked.
“Maybe,” she told me.
“And your dad, too?”
“No,” she said. “He’s gone.”
I asked her if her parents had split up and she told me no, that her father had died two years ago. He fell on the train tracks during a snowstorm. Freak accident. “After that is when my mom checked out,” she said.
I studied her face to be sure she wasn’t messing around again. She must have known what I was thinking, because she said, “No kidding this time.”
If I opened my mouth to tell her about my mother, it would have been my first time explaining her death to a stranger. She must have known about it from the paper, but since I didn’t quite know how I would fill in the details of what had happened, all I said was “Sorry. That must have really sucked.”
“It did suck,” she said. “It still does suck. Present tense.”
She seemed to be waiting for me to say something more. And I wrestled with a way to get it out, to tell her that I knew how she felt. My mouth a
ctually opened, and I searched for the words. But nothing came, so I pressed my lips together, clenched my teeth with my mother’s gum in between.
After that we rode for a while without saying anything. Finally Jeanny let out a big yawn. She pulled off her poncho and draped it over herself like a blanket. “I’m beat. Excuse me while I take a nap.”
I wanted her to stay awake so I could enjoy the rest of the ride with her, because after that I had to start thinking about the mess I was in again. But the moment she closed her eyes, I realized I’d be able to watch her, to study her face so I could conjure up the memory of her later on my own. The way my mother must have done that day in New Mexico, recording the details of a life she couldn’t lead. Jeanny shifted her head toward the aisle and tilted her neck against the seat in an effort to get comfortable. When that didn’t work, she shifted her head forward, chin to chest.
I knew the way Leon and my father would have handled the situation. They would have put their arm around her and pulled her into them without saying a word. But that seemed wrong for me. “If you want,” I said, taking a deep, nervous breath, “you could put your head on my shoulder. I mean, only if you want to.”
Jeanny didn’t even answer. She kept her eyes closed and leaned her head toward me, resting it there as if she’d been doing it for years. She yawned one more time. And just like that, fell asleep.
For the rest of the ride I took turns watching Sophie and Jeanny. Sophie was nestled up inside her blanket with only her little bug of a face showing. It looked more like the face of an old woman than of someone just born. I noticed, too, that she had a cluster of white bumps around her nose. Under the skin like whiteheads, only she was too young for acne, so who knew what it was? Every once in a while she let a saliva bubble pop from her mouth. A line of drool managed to leak onto my sweatshirt, but I didn’t care. Jeanny, meanwhile, kept her lips parted ever so slightly, like she was ready to leap into conversation or start yodeling even in her sleep. She had long lashes. Not clumped together like Vicki Spring’s. Hers were soft black brooms that swept the skin beneath her eyes.