Songbird

by Lisa Samson

  “Don’t call, please. They’ll just put me back into the system. Please, let me just work here … under the table. I promise I won’t be any trouble.”

  Frank put his arm on Anita’s shoulders. “I don’t know. I’m not sure about this.”

  I turned to run away but Anita hollered. “Wait!”

  I turned back around.

  “You can stay. We can’t have you running off to who knows where.”

  Frank nodded. “But only if you stay in our spare room upstairs so we can make sure you’re all right.”

  “I won’t be much trouble,” I said.

  He nodded. “I can tell that right up front.” Anita patted my shoulder. “You need anything, hon, you just ask.”

  I served up cardboard pizza and hot pretzels and heated up those Stewart sandwiches sealed in heatupable, crackly cellophane wrappers that steamed up inside as their innards — which might be grilled cheese, a hamburger (or “hamburg” as Frank would say), a cheeseburger, or a hot dog—came to life leaving a greenhousey layer of condensation I’d try not to dislodge as I opened the wrapper.

  Nobody likes soggy sandwiches, Myrtle.

  I told them I went by Charmaine, my middle name.

  After the bowling alley closed at eleven, weather permitting, Frank and I sat in green-and-white webbed lawn chairs on the upper porch of their small green bungalow. He didn’t know much about the stars, he just liked them.

  Frank’s girth resembled a farmhouse.

  After about an hour he’d say, “You tired yet, hon?”

  And I’d say, “Yeah.”

  “Well, I’ll go on home now. Anita likes me to make sure you’re okay before we nod off.”

  “I’ll be fine.”

  “Kitchen’s yours. You just fix anything you want if you get hungry. Just make sure you turned off whatever it was you turned on.”

  “Okay, Mr. Reasin.”

  He hefted off the lawnchair, comfy blubber rolling like sea billows and left with a hearty wave. Like Mrs. Evans.

  And so I sat, alone and empty under the stars.

  “A hedge of protection, Lord. A hedge of protection.” I heard the voice of Grandma Sara in my head and the profound realization that God honored her prayers echoed the most beautiful sight in the sky I’d ever seen.

  In a mildly cloudy sky, little dark puffs of cotton steamed like paddle wheelers across the dome of heaven there above the bowling alley. But the wind soon died. Behind two embracing clouds the moon slowly rose, hidden at first, and then, a fantastic white beam of light shone, a monochrome sunrise, a single ray piercing the night. My breath caught in wonder and surprise and I remembered that during the darkest of hours, God is. The moon continued to rise and the words of the song “Even So Lord Jesus Come” filled my heart despite my world of fear and turmoil, despite my race so hard in the running. Yes, Jesus, I need Your infilling, Your rich infilling.

  So come, Lord Jesus, come.

  Like the song says.

  Oh, if He’d just pull me out of here, I would so appreciate that.

  And I held my breath, waiting and watching, expectant and brave because if this was the day my Lord and Savior chose to bring me to that meeting in the air, that Jubilee of jubilees, I was ready.

  “Come Lord Jesus, please!” my voice whispered in the still silence, in the spring air of a foreign place where the flowers didn’t bloom as brightly and where I wandered in search of home. “Oh, please, Lord, come and get me now! I’m so tired. I just want to go home.”

  My heartbeat accelerated, fueled by a frenzied anticipation. Could it really be? Could this be the “crowning day when my Savior I should see,” just like the song said?

  And then I cried as the moon rose yet more, bursting from out of the clouds, brighter and brighter, clearer and brighter. And the words, “I am your way, your truth, your life, no man cometh unto you Father, Myrtle Charmaine, but by Me” stippled my memory.

  Even at fifteen, that profound knowledge that He was enough permeated my brain, scratching the itches, soothing the raw places, and maybe it’s hard to believe, but it was enough. It had to be.

  Nobody likes a religious freak though, Myrtle Charmaine.

  I mean if Mama objected to nosebleeds, how in the world could she even stomach a man dying on a cross, blood oozing from scarlet wounds into thirsty wood?

  To this day I remember that sight, and I’ve searched the sky ever since, whether on the road or sitting out under the night stars at a rest stop holding hands with my Harlan and drinking vending machine hot chocolate. I’ve never seen anything like that sky, before or since, and some folks would call me crazy, but I know for sure that God did that just for me, proving in extravagant silence that He is with me always.

  11

  Jesus never deserted me during that time on my own. Two weeks into the job, I began to choose my favorite denizens of Suds ‘N’ Strikes. Marg worked the main counter, the bowling doings on one side, the washateria on the other, her owl glasses missing nothing. Dave, the night manager on weekends never ceased to tickle me the way he’d act like a one-man SWAT team when he opened up the bubblegum machines to add more candy and prizes. I’m sure Mike and Ike would be proud to know they were so valued.

  But my favorite regular at Suds ‘N’ Strikes didn’t work at the alley, he came in every afternoon and his name was John Roberts. John Roberts always said, “Just call me John Roberts.” Nobody ever asked why until me. He said, “Because that’s my name.”

  John Roberts fell on his head when he was three years old and was never the same. That’s what Frank Reasin said and Frank’s known him since kindergarten.

  John Roberts’ mission in life was to teach the kids how to bowl. “Aim for the center of the lane! Shoot right down the middle!”

  Some kids cried right away.

  Others would smart mouth. “Hey, buddy, if I could shoot it right down the middle I would!”

  Most tried to ignore him. But John Roberts refused to be ignored. A nice lady came in one day and I watched the whole episode from the snack bar. John Roberts approached her children, offering hints.

  She smiled, tightening her dark blond ponytail, and I could tell right away she knew something peculiar flipped and tumbled within him. I poured myself an orangeade and settled in for the show. She allowed John Roberts to help each child through several turns and then, poor John Roberts went too far. He grabbed the little boy by the arm. “You’re not listening! Down the middle … like this!” And he pulled the ball roughly from the child’s arms. What a sweet little boy, I’d already decided, looking just like his mother with dirty blond hair and gentle, very round blue eyes.

  That mother sprang to her feet. “Esteban, sit with your sisters.” She marched right up the polished floor of the approach. “Look. I appreciate the fact that you’re trying to help, but I don’t yell at my children and maybe you’d better leave!”

  Roar, lady, roar!

  I clapped. I just couldn’t help myself. “That’s right! You defend your children.”

  John Roberts stayed away for two weeks. But that lady returned. Every Tuesday afternoon she’d cart in those kids, all with Spanish names, and they bowled while she did her laundry.

  And so Luella Cuestas became my best friend in Baltimore. She invited me over to her little house for crabcakes one night and I found out her husband Claudio had died four years before, not long after she gave birth to Guadalupe, her youngest.

  “I live on the insurance money and what I can make with my artwork,” she said as she poured us a cup of tea after the kids went to bed. “It won’t last forever, but it will last long enough until Guadalupe goes off to first grade and I can get a real job while they’re all at school.”

  “Your kids sure love you.”

  “I know. There isn’t anything I wouldn’t do for them.”

  “That sure shows.” I looked around her little home, an old prewar house painted pale turquoise blue on a narrow street. She’d taken me on a tour earlier. Two lar
ge bedrooms and one bathroom constituted the upstairs. A double bed and a toddler bed sat in one room, a set of bunks in the other. Downstairs a big kitchen and a living room filled up the first floor. I wouldn’t call it “neat as a pin,” a term Mama always used, but it smelled clean and flowery and signs of belonging dotted the entire dwelling like candlelight through a tin lantern: a leftover Christmas ornament made by a schoolchild hung from the kitchen chandelier, a sampler embroidered with each child’s name overlaid a portion of wall above the kitchen door. It announced the mixing of cultures that originally formed the Cuestas household.

  THE CUESTAS HOUSE

  Isabel: my soul

  Esteban: my heart

  Guadalupe: my spirit

  And all around the words little hearts and houses followed one another. The frame, nicked and battered, held it all together. Luella was that frame, I decided.

  She painted murals all over her home and chose the least everyday colors I’d ever seen on her walls. Bright yellows, reds, purples, even parrot green in the upstairs bath!

  I told her everything about myself that night. She swiped a tendril of limp hair behind her glasses and cried and cried.

  “Here I’ve been feeling sorry for myself for four years and look what you’ve been through!”

  “But I didn’t tell you this to make you feel sorry for me, I just … I … well, I don’t know why I told you. I just did.”

  “God had you do it. God felt sorry for me. Oh, Charmaine, your nose is bleeding.” She jumped up and handed me a clean, soft dish towel, just like Mrs. Evans.

  That night I took note of God’s utter resourcefulness realizing that He can even use a mother’s desertion for someone else’s good.

  Looking at the stars from the roof of the house that night, I prayed I’d see how God redeemed it for me, I prayed that somehow—anyhow, somewhere, anywhere, someday, any day—I’d look back and say, “It’s okay. I can see why it happened this way.”

  We all want answers, right? We all want someone to tell us our past pain made the present easier not only for others but for ourselves, that in the end it was worth it.

  One more thing: thank You God I’m not one of those ladies who lost their husband before the children were raised.

  12

  I started really reading my Bible that spring there at Suds ‘N’ Strikes.

  I can see Mama rolling her eyes right now. Nobody likes to hear how God helps you, Myrtle Charmaine. They want a gutsy tale of self-reliance and strong-willed gusto in the face of adversity. Why don’t you just keep God in the background where He belongs?

  Oh, hush up, Mama.

  After I’d saved enough for busfare back to Lynchburg just in case, I started branching out a little in the spring. With my weekly paycheck of eighty dollars, I paid Mr. Reasin ten dollars for my room, another ten for my food down in the snack bar even though he told me that was “Ridiculous, hon! It’s not like you eat all that much.”

  But I said, “Just take it, Mr. Reasin, have a little mercy on my conscience.”

  “Well, I’ll take the money for food only because you insist, Charmaine. And only because you made it a matter of conscience. I believe in a healthy conscience. So what are you gonna do with the rest of the money? Because if you need any clothes or personal items, that Kresge’s down the street is the place to go. Good prices. Nice people there, too. My second cousin, Cass, works there.”

  “What I need is a used bookstore.”

  His eyes lit up. “You don’t say? You like to read?”

  “Yes, sir. But I need me a little Bible.”

  We sat up on the porch that Friday night, an overcast, swollen sky butting its gloomy nose into our conversation, making us look up at its girth at every imagined raindrop. Next door, steam from the dryers on the Laundromat side billowed up like cumulus clouds, its milky mass sucked up into the breeze of a hungry storm. I pulled my coat closer around my middle.

  Mr. Reasin scratched his head. “It seemed like you had something deeper about you, Charmaine. I’ve got an extra one downstairs, or if you want, I’ll get Anita to run you over to the Baptist Bookstore. We’ve got the four-year-old class at church next quarter and she’s got to get some materials.”

  I added it up in my head. I had sixty dollars left over, just this week! No need for food other than at the snack bar. I wanted a new pillow as I’d left my real pillow in Vermont, and maybe a set of my own sheets, too. A new blanket could wait until next week. Summer clothes would have to be bought eventually, so I’d keep saving. I wanted to write to the Ferrises’ and have them send me up my clothing, but figured a clean break was better all around. At fifteen, I had no right to be on my own.

  Now I had no idea what Anita Reasin really looked like inasmuch as God made her because her look included a curly raspberry-colored perm, drawn-on eyebrows, blue mascara, penciled lips. She wore all manner of undergarment armor that showed its bumps of hardware through her tight, fine-print housedresses. The ladies at the Baptist Bookstore knew her right away.

  “Anita! How you doing today?”

  She set her purse upon the display case that supported the register. “Doing fine, doing fine.” Except in Baltimorese it came out, “Doin’ fahn, doin’ fahn.”

  “I’m looking for some good stuff for four-year-olds and Charmaine here is looking for a new Bible. Charmaine is our new snack bar girl at the bowling alley.”

  The lady smiled at me through bare lips and cat glasses. “Nice to meet you.”

  Anita pointed to our right. “The Bibles are over there. You got any questions, I’ll be at the Sunday school aisle over there to the right of all those choir robes.”

  I nodded, glad she didn’t find some other lady to help me. This was the first Bible I would buy for myself, and some events deserve a little privacy and quiet. I wanted to hear as well as feel the air of the pages as I flipped them up near my face. I wanted to smell new leather and paper by myself, and I wanted to rub the little satin ribbon-markers against my own cheek without someone telling me not to.

  Wouldn’t Mrs. Evans have loved to have been here on this day!

  The quietness of the store settled on me like Jesus’ seamless garment and my eyes danced over the stacks of little boxes containing the most precious gold, the rarest of jewels, truly the pearl of greatest price. My very real need to travel light through this world centered my gaze on the smaller boxes, and I read the word “slimline.” That sounded interesting. Sleek and easy to tote. And new! It said so right on the box.

  I reached up and pulled down the first one I saw and when I opened the box and smelled that new Bible smell that delights followers of Jesus all over the world, even more than the smell of a new car, I’d wager, I knew I’d found it.

  It was pink to boot!

  I hugged it to my chest and told God “thank You.” And I felt the breeze of the pages as I flipped them, smoothed the white satin ribbon against my cheek, breathed in the freshness of a newborn copy of God’s Holy Word, and I let my sudden tears baptize the first page to which I turned; It fell down, down, splattering upon John 11:35, “Jesus wept.”

  So Jesus wept, too, right then, right there with me.

  I suppose people in religious bookstores know when someone is having a spiritual moment and have been trained to leave well enough alone. I don’t know this for a fact, but I’ve suspected it for years. Nobody bothered me as I sat Indian-style, alone on the linoleum-tiled floor, the gray speckles floating in and out of focus inside my waxing and waning tears.

  I told Jesus, “You had a right to cry. You knew what a sorry old world this was all turning out to be. Such plans You All must have had.”

  The teardrops on the page glistened in the fluorescent lighting. I ran a hand over them smearing them into wet comets across the God-breathed, onionskin sky. Beneath the water the fine fiber buckled slightly and I tried to calm myself.

  You see, I wish, just once, Jesus would just stand before me, take my hand and we could just have a good cry
together.

  Mrs. Reasin tiptoed up and laid a hand upon my shoulder as I sat there and dried my face. She didn’t say anything, just gave me her warmth and stood there with her own eyes closed. And I knew she prayed.

  That night it rained and Mr. Reasin locked up and went home without our usual closing-time chat. I flipped on the little milk-glass lamp, running my fingers over the tiny polka dots of glass and I settled comfortably onto my bed. I opened that Bible, the Spirit Wind blowing warm inside me. I read until I slept and I awakened to my darkened room, alone and happy, and realizing that God really had a plan for me and I’d best get on with it.

  I needed to sing.

  I needed to be back in church and I told Mrs. Reasin that the very next day. I hadn’t been in church since Mrs. Evans had died.

  “Can you all use some help with the four-year-old class, Miss Anita?”

  “That would be nice, hon. We leave for church around nine in the morning. Want us to go?” She stood by the bowling-ball polishing machine. She polished a few of the house balls every day, which frustrated Mr. Frank because why waste the power on a house ball that is only going to get grimy anyway? But if you saw Suds ‘N’ Strikes and Miss Anita’s house, it would make perfect sense.

  “That’d be nice.”

  And so there I found myself among the four-year-olds, wiping noses, pouring warm Hawaiian Punch from the can, laying out butter cookies like the ones Mrs. Evans used to buy, reading stories and singing songs.

  Mr. Frank and Miss Anita just stared at me with open mouths the first time I sang. And I smiled and shrugged. “Praise the Lord, is all I can say.”

  And the gift box in my throat glimmered and shone with the anointing of the Holy Spirit. I knew that and it frightened me because like my little King James Bible says, “To whom much is given much is required.”

  13

  Do I look okay?”

  Miss Anita hugged me, and with that girdle, I swear it was like hugging a salmon, but I didn’t mind. I’ll take good hugs like that no matter what, and you can take that to the bank!

  We stood in the hot-pink women’s bathroom of the church. The choir, in which I now sung soprano, or alto, or wherever they needed a voice, began to line up outside the door. The self-conscious whispers of be-lipsticked mouths beneath the carefully made-up upper regions of the women’s faces shuffled through the louvered vent plate at the bottom of the bathroom door.