On Monday, Homer felt through the canvas of his sack to be sure the rhubarb sauce was still there. It was. He made it to the store just after the morning rush, and he did not pause at the door this time. The bells rang. The girl looked up, but she wasn’t Elizabeth.
“Hello,” she said, and she looked back down to what she had been tending to at the counter.
Homer said hello in a half voice that anyone might have in the morning, before they’d talked enough. He stood there and adjusted the pack strap which had fallen off his shoulder and waited for her to look up again.
She looked up with a quizzical expression, which cleared after a moment, and she said, “Oh, you must be Mr. Homer.”
“Homer’s my first name,” he said.
“Yes, yes!” she said. “Elizabeth explained to me that you would be coming. She left a note for you.”
He watched the girl as she rummaged in the shelf beneath the cash register. She was the same age as Elizabeth, but younger in her movements. He watched a flush come out on her cheek and neck. She was embarrassed because she wasn’t finding the note. Homer tried not to think about Elizabeth being gone. Instead he concentrated on the certainty that the note would be there.
“Here it is!” The girl stood up blushing, handed him an envelope, and pushed the hair away from her face with both of her hands.
“Thank you.” Then he cleared his throat and thanked her again more clearly. “And what’s your name?”
“Barbara.”
“No nickname?” he said.
“Sometimes,” she said.
Outside, Homer held the envelope between two fingers, so he wouldn’t crush it against his crutch grips. At the bottom of the hill, he stopped to put it in his pocket, changed his mind and opened it instead.
Dear Homer,
If you are reading this note I’m glad. It means you are back again. (Where have you been?) I didn’t get to tell you how good your potatoes tasted—they tasted new like you said. I wanted to ask you about growing them. But since you didn’t come, I looked them up in the encyclopedia. So you cut a little piece off the potato itself. As long as the piece has an eye it will work. Then I remembered Mrs. Ruscuss saying the eye is the part with the memory. Anyway, these are all considerations that I’ll take back to college with me, and I’ll see you again next summer.
Yours,
Elizabeth
It was written on blue paper, and when he was finished with it, he returned it to his pocket.
Homer went back up the incline and into the store. He loaded a shopping cart with flour, sugar, oil, eggs, and baking powder. When he finished with the purchase, he said, “Thank you. Barbara, I’ll see you again.”
He went to Robert’s house. Crossed up the walk between the two small grass patches. Through the porch, and into the living room. He was careful around the little houses in the town. He waited for the train to pass before stepping over the tracks into the kitchen.
Robert was sitting at the table with a tiny bridge in one hand and a tiny bottle of glue in the other.
Homer set his bulging sack onto the table. He went directly over to the TV and turned it off. He reached in his shirt pocket behind Elizabeth’s note and pulled out a single farmer’s match. He struck the match against the stove, held it over the gas pilot. “Robert,” he said, “you’ve never had my pancakes, and you’ve never had Jenny’s special rhubarb sauce.”
Still tired from the night shift, Robert took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes as if considering what had just been said.
HOUSE OF HEROES
I have three minutes to punch in at the Gateway Group Home, and the backdoor is locked. It shouldn’t be. It’s 10:57 P.M. and a school night, meaning most of the guys should be in bed. There are lights on downstairs. I rattle the doorknob a second time, and it flies open. Never put a refrigerator next to the door used by a lot of adolescents with violent behavior problems. It will always have a dent the size of a doorknob on its side.
Ajax is standing fifteen inches in front of me. It feels like fifteen, and I measure these things with Ajax, always calculating where he is. He jerks the sponge mop at me. “Go around, woman!” It’s more than a bark, something akin to a roar; a bellow is the way I describe it, because it’s big and dark and full of air. And as many times as I’ve been bellowed at by him, it’s one thing I don’t think I will ever get used to.
There’s a brand-new fluorescent light in the kitchen, which I hate. It’s a harsh, bright, tremulous light that would drive anyone crazy, let alone our guys. And right now, it’s making Ajax’s white T-shirt leap out at me from the darkness of his skin. Gripping the mop the way he is makes all the muscles in his right arm hard. He’s standing in front of me with that impassive look, which isn’t the least bit passive, which in fact is the lid he holds down on layers and layers of … rage.
There’s a hollow stem inside me, the kind you find in percolators, leading up from my stomach to my throat. The adrenaline bubbles up, and I have to swallow.
I use a stock phrase to describe how I manage relating to young men with violent behavior problems. “I need to have a porch on my personality,” I tell people at parties or the parents of friends when they ask. “The porch stands between their reaction to me and my reaction to them,” I explain. “For instance, if my little brother told me to ‘Shut up, or I’ll punch you,’ I might just tell him to shut up himself. I know my brother. But if one of the guys is shaking a fist in my face, I have to be more careful.” At this point the person at the party or the parent of my friend tries to look concerned. “You see, I use that little bit of space to guard myself. It helps me stay calm until I’ve had the time to think about what’s really going on. There’s always more going on with those guys than meets the eye.” Sometimes when I go on about my job like this, I feel guilty. I wonder if I don’t glamorize the work a little—make it sound dramatic so people will think that I’m interesting.
Nevertheless, standing here in front of Ajax is just another case in point. The minute he shouted, he opened my porch door. I imagine it’s the kind of screened porch my grandmother used to have, cool and shady, yet with a view of the whole street. Ajax’s shout is out there vibrating on the porch, but I’m still in the house, thinking about how I should respond. Should I just turn around and do what he’s told me?
“Is that sort of like hello?” I say, trying to make my voice come out evenly.
But he’s already turned away. The sound of metal scraping over the linoleum is just another reminder of his compulsiveness. He mops so often and furiously that the sponges wear down to nothing.
Things are not okay with Ajax. So I’m very careful about keeping my feet on the mat by the door.
“Would you mind punching me in then?” I use a matter-of-fact voice, not scared, not angry.
He walks his self-conscious, rocking walk over to the time clock, looks for a long time at the cards sticking out of the rack on the wall. He has trouble reading. Finally, he pulls out what I hope is my card and looks at it.
“Line it up on the ‘in’ space for the second day.” I’m trying not to say it like he’s dumb.
“I know!” another bellow. Thunk. He presses the lever down.
“I’ll go around, then,” and I go back out the door.
It’s so cold. Rather than walking out to the sidewalk, I take the shorter trip over the frozen snow around the house; scarda, a college friend from Norway used to call it, one of the thousands of names they have for the different ways that snow can be. I don’t know how to spell it. It’s the kind you have to step lightly on lest you break through. So I’m stepping lightly. The pine trees in the yard seem almost shriveled from the cold. Through their boughs I see the bank sign, a block away, flashing 11:01 and then -17 degrees. The few cars driving past on the road trail huge plumes of exhaust. And from the sound of the wind rattling against the storm windows, I guess that the wind-chill factor must be about thirty below. This makes me feel sorry for myself, wondering why, when i
t’s so damn hostile out, does it have to be hostile inside, too?
When I come in the front door, my eyelashes are frozen together, and I need to melt them with my fingers before I can see. The fabric of my jacket has absorbed the cold; now, like dry ice, it’s putting a chill into the room. Art and Gail, the 3 to 11 counselors, sit at the dining room table writing the night’s notes. They both shiver a little. Art looks up, but his expression indicates that he’s still thinking about his notes. Gail doesn’t even look up.
“Slightly Minnesota out there,” says Art.
“Slightly,” I say. And since it’s the middle of February, with as much winter ahead of us as behind us, that’s all we need to say or can really bear to say.
I search their faces for what kind of day it’s been, but it’s useless; they only look tired. I can see that Gail is writing a lot in the behavior problem section of Trevor’s notes.
The three of us are operating under a code of silence, since Ajax is within earshot. I can see him through the kitchen door kneeling on the floor, a bottle of 409 next to him and a rag wrapped around the tips of his fingers. He is rubbing away the scuff marks everyone has left and, using his fingertips the way he is, looks feminine. But he’s rubbing hard, which makes his muscles pretty plain to see.
“Some problems?” I ask.
Art said, “Peter is having some problems being a dishwasher tonight. He called from the restaurant twice to say the other kitchen workers are teasing him. I told him just to tell his boss and come home before he gets in trouble.”
“I was wondering about…,” I speak in an undertone and tilt my head toward the kitchen door.
“Yeah,” Art murmurs. “But it wasn’t so much his fault.”
“Read this.” Gail pushes over the note she’s been writing.
Trevor was angry with Robert [Ajax’s real name] for what he called “bossing him around.” Trevor lost control, charged Robert, and hit him in the face repeatedly. Robert did not move or try to defend himself in any way. Trevor needed to be restrained.
“Repeatedly?” I ask.
Gail nods, looking toward Art. Art puts his own fist up to his face and mimics what must have been Ajax’s blank expression while Trevor was hitting him.
“Laura, what word would you use to describe the way Ajax was?” Gail asks.
I have a good vocabulary, and the other counselors are always asking me for better words to use in their notes. “Stoic,” I say.
“Amazing self-control,” Gail says. But we all realize that Ajax’s self-control is a mixed blessing, that this incident tonight is just one more thing to be stuffed under the lid he’s trying so hard to keep in place. We’ve been watching that lid since he came, and it’s beginning to rattle the way one does when the water starts to boil. When Ajax first came a year and a half ago, he seemed very quiet and adult, but even then, though he didn’t talk much, the hard feelings would slip out. Sometimes it was just one word as he walked through the room; “Women!” he’d exclaim, like that explained it all.
My job here is a strange one. The description I found in the classifieds read: “Overnight counselor-in-residence for developmentally disabled teenagers with behavior problems.” I didn’t know exactly what that meant. But it went on to read: “Some meal preparation required; counselor is able to sleep during shift.”
At the time it seemed that it might suit me, the sleeping part in particular. And I had a degree in psychology, even if I didn’t consider it my main interest anymore. I’d kept my grade point up for four years, making myself ready for graduate school in clinical psych. But when the time had come to take my entrance exams, it seemed wrong. I realized I didn’t look forward to being a psychologist.
So instead, I used my savings to buy a round-trip ticket to Europe. I loved riding the trains and reading. I read the classics mostly. Plays. Here I was traveling through all these ancient places, like Corsica and Athens, so far from home, and I was thinking about how Aeschylus and Sophocles and Euripides hadn’t seen nearly as much of the world as I had, couldn’t really know what Freud would come up with thousands of years later, and yet they wrote as if they knew everything.
How could they know so much? They had such a little time to work with, and they were under a lot of pressure, because every year the whole city would fill the amphitheater waiting for the new play that would show them how they were doing—what they as a community needed to do better. Maybe the pressure helped the playwrights to be profound. Maybe knowing the whole city was waiting pressed them to go very deep and to teach themselves about all those things like pride and betrayal and love….
I would think about what I read, and there was something about riding the trains, the scenery speeding by my window like a long smear, that would put those thoughts into the perspective of time. If the great playwrights were able to show people certain truths about themselves thousands of years ago, why, I wondered, after all this time hadn’t we wised up very much?
I met a Scottish woman on a train in Wales. She was in her fifties, a Katharine Hepburn type, brilliant eyes, ruddy skin, and not a humble bone in her body. “Ay yer takin’ with heroes ar ye, lassie?” she had said when I told her about the great works I had been reading. She pronounced it he-rose, rolling the r. I told her that until this year I’d mostly thought of heroes as Superman types, guys who saved babies from burning buildings, saved the flag, things like that. It wasn’t until now that I learned how troubled, even unlikable, they could be.
“Well, ye jest keep reading the classics,” she told me. “They’ll always be the best board to stand on, whatever you plan to do,” she said. “I’ve a mind to send ye to my daughter where ye might lend her yer good influence.” She was talking about her daughter who made films in Ireland. Filems, she pronounced it.
As it turned out, she followed through on the idea, and I spent the last three months of my trip in a film cooperative in Ireland, doing odd jobs to help out and learning how to manipulate subjects so they made sense in the frame of a camera. Things like, standing in a field, in a horse corral, me standing just outside the frame of the camera, but trying to keep the horse inside while someone filmed him. It wouldn’t seem like much when you did it, but later when you ran the projector, you could see what the camera had captured. I loved it and flew home determined that’s what I wanted to do.
It seemed like serendipity when I returned home to find a film cooperative had started up in St. Paul while I was away. I joined, wondering how I expected to support myself, and only a few weeks later I found the Gateway ad in the paper. Everything, at the time, miraculously fell into place, giving me this sense of destiny, you know, feeling sure this was what I was supposed to do. But that was five years ago, and lately the Gateway feels like the only steady thing I have.
I’m most likely to step back and think about how this job fits into the scheme of my life when I make the residents’ lunches at night. Maybe it’s the ritual of lining up six flat brown bags on the kitchen counter, then leaning on my elbow and writing each of their names on the bags in red Magic Marker. I used to write the names bigger, but one of the guys stopped taking his lunch to school because the other kids could see from the bag that he lived in a group home. I write the names as small as I can now. Some of the names have changed from year to year. But some, like Peter, have been here as long as I. Almost every night I blank out on one of their names, the same way my mother has been known to do when asked on the spot to list the seven children in our family.
“Who lives here again?” I’ve asked Art or any one of the many second-shift counselors that came before him and then burned out. Pulling his jacket on, getting ready to leave, he’ll come look over my shoulder.
“Let’s see, Jack, Trevor, Terry…that’s three. Ajax…uhm…” Then we’ll both laugh, rolling our eyes up to the ceiling, as if we can see them through the floor as they lie in their beds. Usually it’s the one we should least forget. “Chip?” Art remembers. “You know, the little guy whose hockey stick
is lodged in the TV screen right now.”
But Art and Gail are gone, and tonight I have to remember all six names by myself. I’m on the sixth, but it’s not coming readily. “Ajax!…right.” As if he hasn’t been here, when every muscle in my body has been keeping track of his whereabouts. I hear him running water in the basement laundry tub. Brushing his teeth. Running it and running it. He washes up in the basement at night so he can take as long as he wants.
It’s one of those things schizophrenics do; both he and Peter have habits like this. Peter, for instance, used reams and reams of toilet paper when he first came to Gateway; it wasn’t unusual for him to clog the toilet twice a day. He was so small then, a twelve-year-old who looked about eight. I’d hear the elflike dit-dit-dit of his footsteps in the hallway, and I’d bound out of bed, following him to the bathroom. Outside the door I’d have to coach him. “Count the squares out, Peter. Five squares is all you need.”
“Should I wet my pants instead?” He had a high voice then. “Should I run away and go to the bathroom at the gas station?” Sometimes he would just squeal in exasperation, and outside the door, I’d picture his sweet face all flushed, and his soft bangs, and his eyes glassy.
“If the john keeps overflowing, Peter, the living room ceiling is going to cave in.” This was the wrong thing to say.
“Will we all fall through then, everyone but you, Laura?”
“It’s just not necessary to use so much paper, Peter.” He’d be a little quiet then, waiting for me to go away. But I wouldn’t. Then he’d whimper, “It is necessary,” and wail, “Absolutely necessary.”
“He has many, many of his own rules,” the consulting psychologist on the staff at the time had said in a meeting about Peter. “He always feels anxious; it never ceases, and he doesn’t know why.” This is how it is for a schizophrenic. So he makes up reasons for why his life is like this: for Peter it’s because it’s raining outside, because he’s walking on the wrong side of the steet, because the radio won’t stop talking to him personally, because he lives in America instead of Russia. For Ajax, because he hasn’t lifted enough weights yet, he doesn’t live in the suburbs, because women won’t have him.
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