Grace

by Robert Ward

  Their arguments raged all night. From my dark bedroom I could hear them tearing at each other, my mother mocking him for staying in the bathroom, my father lashing out at her that she “didn’t understand,” that she “never understood anything” except her “own pathetic reality.”

  I would lie in bed, feeling numb, frightened, telling myself over and over that this couldn’t be happening to us. We were good people, happy people—a family. I’d shut my eyes and think of good times, of my father and mother and me swimming together out at Beaver Dam, of picnics we’d gone on down at the Magothy River, and of those perfect Sundays at my grandmother’s. Meanwhile, my parents continued their endless battle just outside my bedroom door.

  “You don’t love me anymore, Robert. Why don’t you come right out and say it?”

  “You’d like that, wouldn’t you? Then your martyrdom could be complete.”

  Inside my bedroom, I jammed my pillow over my head, sweat breaking out on my neck and face. I could barely breathe, but it was better than listening to them tear each other to shreds.

  Luckily, I have always had a talent for escape. I knew, for example, by the time I was five that I was going to be a writer, or I was going to be nothing. I remember my uncle Clay saying to me one day, “What do you want to be when you grow up, Bobby? A cowboy? A fireman?” and my answer was dead-certain: “When I grow up I’ll write books. I’m going to be an author.” My uncle smiled in a condescending way and said, “Well, buddy, how can you know a thing like that at your age?”—a question that produced in me a desire to smack him in the face. Lacking the words to explain what I nonetheless knew to be unequivocally true, I sputtered and blurted out, “Well, I am going to write books, and that’s all there is to it.” Though I was acting childishly, I knew that somewhere inside of me there was a talent for storytelling, an appetite for language, and that nothing and no one must get in the way of it. Indeed, the very words “I’m going to write books” seemed to come from some older, wiser place inside of me, some place already adult. In no other aspect of my life did I reveal any sign of precocious maturity. Quite the opposite. I was a silly kid and often played the class clown. But in a secret place in my heart that I discussed with no one, I knew that reading and writing were my destiny.

  I’m sure that this is what gave me the idea to go to Grace’s. A simpler explanation would be that my parents were making my life hell, and so I escaped to my kind and sweet grandmother’s. But that wouldn’t be the whole truth.

  Aside from the terrible pain of seeing my family suddenly disintegrating, the thing that bothered me most of all was that when my parents battled, I couldn’t hear my inner voice anymore. I couldn’t concentrate, I couldn’t read my sports novels (my favorites being Duane Decker’s Chicago Blue Sox novels, which featured a new book for each position, and the wonderful Tomkinsville books of John R. Tunis, The Kid from Nowhere and The Kid Came Back), and I couldn’t sit peacefully at the old rolltop desk in my bedroom and make up my own stories. Indeed, though I felt devastated for them and for us as a family, I also felt a terrible fear, maybe even a greater fear, that as they destroyed themselves they would destroy not only “me,” the boy, but the inner me as well, the writer, the artist who was just beginning to try out his wings. Since I knew I had to be a writer, that nothing or no one must stop me, I also knew I had to get away from people who were trying to drive me mad. As the battles roared on, night after night, I began to talk to myself under the covers in an ironic and distancing voice. I would say to my imaginary friend, Warren, “This is bad, Warren. This is very, very bad. They are going to drive me mad.” And Warren (whom I always pictured as having curly red hair, a red-and-blue-striped T-shirt, jeans, and black high-topped Keds) would answer back in an equally ironic voice, “They’re trying to drive you crazy. They don’t care if you become a writer or a plumber. Are you going to allow that to happen, my good man?” And there the argument would stop, for I could only imagine escape as running away from home, something I knew would be pure folly. What was a fifteen-year-old going to do out in the world? The problem seemed insoluble, and I began to dread going home from school, knowing that the dinner tension would soon burst into the full-fledged nightly scream-out that would often rage on until well after midnight.

  The answer to my problems came in the nick of time. As my home life became an unbearable thicket of parental accusations and reproaches, I began to feel a tension growing inside of me that made my head feel as though I was filled with a strange gas. I remember a day in school when I knew the answer to a riddle our beautiful redheaded health teacher, Miss Mercer, was proposing, but I couldn’t get her to call on me. I sat on the edge of the chair, waving my arm furiously. I’d figured the damned thing out when no one else had. I had to tell her. I desperately wanted her to acknowledge me, but she turned to others, none of whom knew the answer. Finally, she sighed and told the class the answer herself, which threw me into despair. Indeed, I began to sob and mumble to myself in a tragic voice, “But I knew it. I knew it …”

  Seconds later, tears came flooding down my face, and my mood went from sad to furious. Why hadn’t she called on me? What the hell was wrong with her? I knew the goddamned answer, didn’t I? I was overwhelmed with an intense and surprising loathing for Miss Mercer (whom I’d always adored). I wanted to run up to her and scream at her, “You never listen to me. Never!!”

  Instead, I sat at my desk with my arms wrapped around myself, as if I was wearing an invisible straitjacket. If I could just squeeze myself tightly enough I might not kill anyone.

  I barely made it through the rest of that school day. My classes and classmates floated by me as though they were phantoms.

  And as I walked through the little woods off Herring Run, it occurred to me that I couldn’t go back home, not tonight anyway. So, without knowing where I was heading, I began to walk south instead of east, through a muddy field of tract homes at the Alameda and Winston roads.

  I remember the scene even now:

  The great sea of mud, the half-built houses, the rolls of tar paper, loose nails, old scraps of fast-food wrappers left by the workmen. Suddenly I thought this was where I belonged, this was who I was. I walked into one of the half-constructed houses and found a fully done kitchen, a room with gleaming metal faucets and bright-patterned linoleum on the floor. I sat down, shaking with an unnamable fear.

  Someone else would live here, I thought. Someone else who had a family, and who would be a family, a real family like ours used to be …

  I felt sick then, and I threw up on the floor. Afterwards, I felt some measure of relief, and for the first time the solid world outside my head seemed to come back into focus. Things lost their translucent weirdness, and I suddenly knew where I was going.

  Why hadn’t I thought of it before?

  I would go to my grandmother’s, to Grace’s, and I would stay there. For how long, I didn’t know. Maybe a few days, maybe a whole week.

  Maybe for as long as it took my parents to miss me. If they did miss me at all …

  I got up and looked around at the gleaming metal faucets, the spanking-new stove covered in plastic, and I felt a kind of hyper-happiness. I would live with my grandmother where things were quiet, where I could think again, read and write, become who I wanted to be.

  I’d miss my parents, of course, but they could always come and see me. And I’d have the peace I needed to remain sane.

  Perfect.

  By the time I had walked all the way from school to Grace’s front porch my mood had swung again, and I was no longer confident. It seemed terribly strange to be going to her house with the intention of staying. I already missed the walk up my own street, the fact that my mother would soon be home, the sweet familiarity of the living room furniture, and especially my own room.

  I walked into her house (this was when people felt no need to lock their doors) and called out her name:

  “Gracie, it’s me.”

  “Bobby? That you? I’m upstairs,�
� she said.

  I trudged up the steps and went into her airy front bedroom. She was sewing a blouse, moving her foot up and down on the old Singer treadle. Her black alley cat, Scrounge, sat on an embroidered pillow next to her. The two of them were inseparable. Gracie treated the cat like a baby, talking to him, petting him, giving him special treats.

  “Honey,” she said. “This is a nice surprise.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Hi.”

  I walked over and kissed her, felt the softness and smelled the sweet odor of her skin. Just hugging her made me feel solid, as if by touching her I could get the character and confidence I lacked.

  “I was wondering if I could stay here tonight?”

  “Of course,” she said. “Have you told your father and mother yet?”

  I looked down at the floor.

  “No. I guess I should call them.”

  “Yes, you really should. Is anything wrong, honey?”

  “No,” I said, feeling at once guilty for lying and at the same time unable to tell her what a nightmare our home life had become. “Everything’s fine. I just thought you might need some company.”

  “Well, I always welcome company from my grandson,” she said. “And I bet you could use a snack. I have some fresh apple butter downstairs. And some cold milk.”

  “Great,” I said.

  “And let me think,” she said, smiling. “Tonight I bet I could find a couple of crab cakes. And some coleslaw for us. Of course, I don’t know if you eat real crab cakes anymore. But if not, I could always go out and get us both some of those frozen fish sticks you’re so crazy about.”

  I began to laugh, and she broke into her lovely, infectious smile.

  “No, I guess homemade crab cakes will have to do,” I said.

  “Now go call your mother and father. And then you can go play outside for a while.”

  “Great,” I said.

  I went over and kissed her again, and she patted me on the head. “You’re getting so big,” she said. “Yes, sir, I should have done it when you were little.”

  “Done what?” I said.

  “Put those books on your head, that’s what.”

  I smiled and felt bathed in her affection. That had been the family joke since I was small. “We don’t want you to get any bigger,” my grandmother would say. “So we’re going to pile books on your head so you can’t grow.” Everyone would smile at this sweet, sentimental little joke, including me. But now as I stood next to my grandmother, it didn’t seem so funny anymore. After all, I was practically grown up, and no one did seem that happy about it. It occurred to me that when I was little my parents hadn’t acted as if they despised one another, so maybe my getting older was partially the cause of their troubles. That thought depressed me all over again, and I got the call home over with as quickly as possible, so I could hustle out to the street, find Johnny Brandau, and play some ball.

  Gap-toothed, brown-cowlicked, freckle-faced Johnny Brandau and I passed his Johnny Unitas model football to each other up and down Singer Avenue. We made sensational catches as we both provided a running commentary on our brilliance:

  “Brandau goes out, runs left … cuts between the Nash Rambler and the green Studebaker. Ward goes back, dodges a lineman, and rifles a bullet which is … CAUGHT by Brandau at the Redskin 10. First down!”

  “Ward goes out, cuts left, fakes out the Lions’ defender, and grabs the ball just as it’s about to smash the Hargroves’ back window. He refuses to be denied. Touchdown!”

  As the sun went down and the streetlights came on in Waverly, I felt peace and kindness descend on me like a benediction. Tonight there would be no screaming, no threats, no “I wasted my whole life on you, you bastard,” no “I’m cursed, I’m cursed, you don’t get it, you’ve never gotten it, you bitch,” and the thought of that (or was it from sheer hysterical relief?) suddenly made me start to laugh.

  The laugh began as a giggle, but quickly developed into a full belly laugh, and then went beyond that to a kind of hysterical babble, which was more like a scream.

  Johnny looked at me, scratched his burr haircut (or his “wiffle,” as we used to call flattops back then), and shook his head:

  “You are totally crazy,” he said. “Crazy, man, crazy.”

  “I know,” I said. “I just feel … happy.”

  Which didn’t begin to get what I was really feeling—a combination of exuberance and flat-out, hysterical desperation. Finally, the fit of laughter subsided, and I was able to get my breath.

  “Hey,” I said, trying to return to normal, “I’m going to hang around for a while so maybe we could get a tackle football game up tomorrow.”

  “Yeah, well, we usually get Ray Lane and some of the other guys and go over behind City and play.”

  “Great,” I said. “I get home around three. I’ll come over, and we can go over to the field together.”

  “Okay,” Johnny said.

  “Hey, throw me one more pass. A long one.”

  He sped down Singer toward the York Road and cut left. I cocked my arm and let loose with a bullet pass. Though Johnny was athletic, the ball skimmed off his hands and smacked into the rear window of a car. I grimaced as it hit, and waited for Johnny to take a look at the window.

  “It’s okay,” he said. “Man, am I glad that you didn’t break that window.”

  “Yeah” came a voice from the front porch behind Brandau. “You’re real lucky it didn’t break, Ward.”

  I looked through the twilight and felt myself shiver.

  It was Buddy Watkins and his big brother, Nelson. They slouched on their crumbling, unpainted front porch. Their D.A. haircuts, short on top and long in the back, hung like gleaming black worms. Buddy wore a pink-and-black silk jacket hanging open to reveal his black T-shirt, garrison belt, Levi’s, and motorcycle boots. Nelson was dressed in a dirty white T-shirt, brown pants, and black Cuban-heeled, pointy-toed shoes.

  I swallowed hard and felt that there wasn’t enough air left on the planet.

  “Hey, Buddy, that your car?”

  “My mother’s car, Ward. You think you can come down here from your big-time neighborhood and pound your goddamned football on people’s cars? That it?”

  Nelson said nothing but grinned and revealed a couple of blackened teeth. Johnny Brandau stared down at his feet.

  “No, that isn’t it,” I said fiercely. Though I was scared, I was determined not to let them bully me.

  Buddy walked down off his porch and scuffed his way toward me. I stood glued to my spot, too frightened to move. He stopped a few feet away and glowered at me.

  “What are you doing over here anyway?” he said. “This ain’t your neighborhood.”

  “I’m visiting my grandmother,” I said. My voice cracked on “grandmother.”

  “Your grandmother,” he said. He twisted the word “grandmother” in such a way that it sounded obscene. “How do you like that, Nels?”

  “That’s very sweet,” Nelson said. “That’s maybe the sweetest thing I’ve ever heard.”

  “Yes,” I said, “my grandmother. And don’t say anything about her, you hear?”

  “Whoaaaaa,” Buddy Watkins said. “Listen to that, Nels. Tough guy. ‘Don’t say nothing nasty ‘bout grannnnnny.’ “

  He walked toward me and with both hands pushed me hard in the chest, knocking me back into the streetlight.

  I felt frightened, strangely disconnected from my body.

  “What are you going to do about it, Ward?” he said. “Tell me what you’re gonna do.”

  “Yeah, do tell us, tough guy,” Nelson said, laughing at me.

  I looked down at the ground. It was hopeless. He was bigger, twice as strong, and he’d kill me.

  “Screw you both,” I said. Buddy turned toward his brother. “Whoaaaa,” he said. “Ward’s breaking bad.” I felt a wave of fear sweep over me. My first night at my grandmother’s and I was going to get my ass kicked.

  Just then I heard a voice, Grace’s voice,
from her front porch: “Bobby, it’s time for dinner. Come on in.”

  I turned and looked up on the porch. Grace stood there looking down the street at us. I knew with her poor eyesight she would have no idea what was happening.

  “Saved by granny,” Buddy said. “But there’ll be another time, Ward. Meanwhile, go play in your own neighborhood, asshole.”

  “Hello, Mrs. Ward,” Nelson yelled from the porch. “How nice to see you today.”

  My grandmother said nothing, but looked in my direction, squinting.

  Buddy sneered and turned away from me, and I felt such an intense shame that I wanted to die. Because it was true: I had been saved by my grandmother. And there would be another time, another time when there was no one around to save me. And I knew, to my shame, that I couldn’t save myself.

  The next few days, however, were better, and I managed to put both Buddy and my parents’ troubles out of my mind. I was too involved in schoolwork to worry about anything else for long. I had an essay to write for English, and I had to work with a friend, Paul Cross, on our science project, which was the study of apes. (All of whom, I noticed, really did look like Buddy and Nelson.) I had little time when I got home from school but still managed to work in a good tackle football game with the Waverly gang, all friends of Brandau and Lane.

  My plan seemed to be working. I was able to sleep. My grandmother made me wonderful dinners and was generally delighted to have me around. And, in turn, I was thrilled and relieved to be with her. Each night, after I’d eaten and finished my homework, Grace would play the piano, and together we would sing hymns or old songs. The regular piano player at her church had come down with “the grippe,” and Grace had agreed to spell her for a few weeks, a promise that now worried her.

  “Lord, I’ve forgotten everything,” she said to me. “I doubt if I can play a note.”