by Liza Nelson
Each day now, each place, each person I see is cram packed with so much mystery that cannot be deciphered. Here I am getting closer and closer to you. Yet a night ago, I almost broke down and called Godiva.
This was before Haiku told me about finding anyone who knew you. I didn’t know she was even searching for anyone. Just the opposite. She said she didn’t believe I’d thought my journey through enough and sent me out to Contemplation House for a few hours.
Contemplation House used to be the Melon Place outhouse before they added indoor plumbing to the main house. Then it was fumigated and painted white inside and out. Last night was my first time inside. There was one multicolored pillow cushion to sit on, a cross between Miss Muffet’s and the giant caterpillar’s from Alice in Wonderland, and a small wood-burning stove to keep the contemplator, in this case me, from freezing to death. Eden, Delaware, must be the coldest place in the world. I don’t remember it ever being this cold at Gram’s house in Connecticut. Even borrowing Haiku’s down jacket and a pair of mittens, I shivered the whole time I was in there.
Which was good, according to Haiku, because my thoughts stayed crisp and I didn’t fall asleep even though I dreamed. Haiku told me to let go, to follow my mind into whatever thought or memory it drifted. Which I did, and naturally my thoughts drifted to you, but then somewhere along the way they veered off.
I wasn’t homesick or anything, but Godiva’s description of Mrs. Brasleton popped into my head. “She’s such a plastic purse of a woman,” she told me after they met the first time. I was mad at her for being accurate. Back then, three months ago, I wanted to believe in the Brasletons, in moral blacks and whites. I liked it when Reverend Brasleton described evil as a tangible state we could battle by following the righteous path. But in Contemplation House, nothing felt that definitive, not even my hatred for Godiva.
At least she never tried to pretend that she was like other mothers. What I resented was not that she was different in the obvious ways, but that for all her talk to the contrary, she gave me no choice to decide who I was. She was too overpowering. She couldn’t help herself; the force of her personality was a current too strong to swim against. When I was little I was perfectly happy being swept along, even if it meant never touching shore. As I got older, I could see what was being left behind, but by then I felt powerless to reach shore.
Don’t get me wrong. Recognizing that there was no way Godiva could be different did not make it easier. I did not have to forgive her to feel sad for her. And sitting there shivering in Contemplation House, I faced how upset and worried she might be. I planned to call to say I was okay, not living on the streets or anything, but then the next morning I found out about Cincinnati. It’s too important a lead to mess up, so instead of calling I’ve written to Cass, told her to go ahead and talk to Godiva, to tell her I’m fine and will be in touch soon.
WELL I’VE MET Martha. Two days ago at a restaurant in Cincinnati called Mother’s Earth. If Godiva ran a restaurant, Mother’s Earth would be it. Vegetarian, with a lot of ugly paintings for sale on the walls, the plates all mismatched pottery, the tables and chairs all mismatched, too, for that matter. I wonder why Godiva didn’t end up in Cincinnati. A lot of people like her must live there.
Not Martha. Martha is dark and sly-faced, slick as an otter, as different from Godiva as two people could be. I wonder what you found attractive about her, if you really ever did. And if you did find her attractive, how could you find Godiva attractive, too? I also wonder if you remember her as well as she seemed to remember you, which was a lot better than Godiva ever did. I wonder not just about what Martha said but what she left out. Not that it’s any of my business, Haiku’s advice about letting the past be and all. But did you really live together for three years, the way she said?
When I came into the restaurant, she was already sitting at a table. I picked her out even before I noticed the green wool gloves she told she’d be wearing; there was a way she looked up and looked away. She said she knew me immediately, too. She said I have your eyes and your walk. How would I get your walk?
She had ordered her lunch before I got there because she had only half an hour break before she had to be back at work. She’s a legal secretary of all things; she had on one of those secretary blouses that tie in a flat knot at the neck. Not that there was anything legalistic about the way she ate, shoveling in the brown rice and tofu sauté. She did not offer me any, which was fine. For once, food was not on my mind. She kept swiping at sauce at the corner of her mouth with her napkin while she answered my questions.
Only she wouldn’t really answer my questions. Instead, she’d lift her napkin and say, “I don’t know” or “I don’t remember” or “That’s quite beside the point.”
When she finished eating, she handed me a ten-dollar bill, to cover the meal, I guess, and a folded piece of paper. Then she shook my hand, limply, and walked out of Mother’s Earth. I left the ten dollars on the table and tried to follow her, but she was gone. I unfolded the paper. She’d written down the address of a restaurant in Velasquez, New Mexico. That was all, an address, but I stood in the street outside Mother’s Earth laughing out loud. I wanted to tell everyone I saw, to hug every stranger. Instead, I sang, “It’s a Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, a Beautiful Day for a Neighbor, Will You Be Mine? Will You Be Mine?” all the way back to the bus station. When people looked at me funny, I was too happy to care.
I have an address. Your address. I still shake with the thrill of it every time I realize I have it tucked beside your picture in my pocket. You are becoming concrete reality. I have hard evidence where you may be, or at least where you for sure were some time that Martha knows about. This is incredible. Should I call the restaurant? I’m dying to, but it would be a bad idea, wouldn’t it? I don’t know what name to ask for, and I don’t want you to get in trouble. Okay, I don’t want to warn you too far ahead, either.
Thank God, I bought the thirty-day pass instead of the fourteen. New Mexico is far and I’m down to my last one hundred and fifty dollars. If Haiku had not given me that hundred I’d really be strapped. This should be enough, though. Even on the roundabout route I have to take I should be there in three or four days at the most. And I’ve all but stopped eating, anyway. I’m too knotted up with the possibilities that are only days away now. Mile after mile goes by without my really noticing. I’ve lost track where I am, Kansas or Arkansas.
Not that I’m just staring into space. I’m reading a book I found under the seat in Isaac’s car on the way to the bus station. The Tao of Physics. Actually, I think Godiva has a copy. Isaac said it might be beyond my capacity to understand, which I thought was pretty presumptuous of him. He’s a systems analyst, whatever that means. Something to do with computers. He is very smart and it was obvious everyone at the farm looked up to him, but both times I was alone with him, on the ride from the Wyatts’ to the farm and on the hour-long ride to Baltimore, we could not find a common ground for talking. He would ask me a question and I would try to answer, but my sentence would just lie there wilting until he asked another question. I mean, I am not the most sociable person, not like Cass, who can carry on a conversation with anyone from three to seventy-three, but I am not completely incompetent. I can usually make small talk. Not with Isaac, though. He was nice to me. He gave me the book and all, but I guess he scared me. He was too perfect, black and handsome, always immaculate, throwing around those windy, twisty sentences I could barely follow. I couldn’t help wondering a little, more than a little, why he was at the farm, what he had done or been through to arrive there and to lead what had to be a pretty schizophrenic existence.
Is it possible you and I would have that kind of trouble talking? I mean, there are fifteen years for each of us to fill in, a lot of conversation. What if you are like Isaac? I’m used to adults who carry the conversational ball. Godiva could get anyone talking.
There was one afternoon the week before I left Esmeralda. Around 4:30, Godiva took a break f
rom working in her studio, came in for a glass of water or something, and the two of us ended up on the back stoop, eating tangerines.
“Well, Noodle, are you feeling as moony blue today as I am?”
“No.” I had no clue what she was talking about, but the calmness with which she spoke caught my attention. I could tell she wasn’t fishing. Well, of course she was, but not only that. She was talking about herself, too.
“Lately something comes over me around five or six o’clock. Maybe it’s the light fading or the drop in the temperature.” She gave me a quick shoulder hug and dropped her arm before I could begin to resist. “You’re so grown up now. I’m afraid sometimes of losing track. We don’t have time like this alone together much anymore, do we?”
At that moment, despite everything, I wanted to tell her I was leaving to find you and why. Watching our legs stretched out in front of us, I was tempted to think she might actually understand. But I couldn’t decide and hesitated. A few minutes later, she went inside to answer the phone, then drove somewhere and was still gone when I went to bed. It was a close call, wasn’t it? She can really pull a person in.
ABOUT 5:30 THIS morning, I climbed off the bus from Wichita to wait here (I don’t even know which town I’m in anymore) for a transfer to another town called Carousel, where I have to switch again. It was still pitch dark and I was half asleep, but I’ve got the rhythm of traveling by bus down now, so I felt pretty good. The stations are beginning to feel like home. The familiarity of the plastic chairs nailed down in facing rows, the Donkey Kong games going nonstop by the door, the fluorescent light that always makes me blink after a dark bus ride, the stopped-up toilets and the wet floor in the ladies’ room, the juiceless air as if every bus depot in the United States were hooked up to a nozzle of the same giant vacuum cleaner.
Normally, I prefer to stake out a half dozen seats with my bag and coat so I can get some room to stretch, some space, after being cramped on the bus, but seating was more limited than usual. Most of the room was cordoned off with nylon rope while an old man dragged a wet mop across the linoleum. A whole row was taken up by old women with their Bibles open, even at six in the morning, swapping passages and ready to profess. Scattered among the remaining rows were a couple of younger women with children, and several ageless, raceless men with yellowed skin, drooping lids and missing teeth. A few leered up under their hunched shoulders and were kind of scary but not nearly as scary as the immaculately shaven, waxy-faced man in a bright-pink jogging suit who cracked his knuckles and smiled to show off all his gold inlays as I walked past.
Not to brag, but I’m pretty streetwise by now. I can spot who will be trouble and who won’t. I always sit near the younger women. Even if they are prostitutes like Spider said (although I don’t understand why prostitutes would bother to come around bus stations where none of the men have money anyway, or why anyone would want sex with these supposed prostitutes; they’re half dead-looking most of them), they’re usually less hassle than anyone else.
The woman I put my bag down next to was pretty typical. Depressing but harmless. Scraggly hair that lacked any specific color of its own. A used-up face, not old but used up, with bad skin and faded eyes you couldn’t quite catch. Skinny as a broom handle, she still managed to be wearing clothes that were too tight. A couple of grocery bags stuffed with clothes and household items sagged around her legs; more were evidently piled under an old coat in the vacant chair between us. I knew sooner or later the woman would ask for a cigarette or the time or if I knew where to catch the bus for Carousel.
When she smiled, I smiled back and looked away. When she asked, with a nod toward the lump of child moving out from under the old coat, if I had any more gum, I gave her the rest of my pack.
“Say thank you, Crescent,” she said to the little girl, who now sat rubbing her eyes with one hand and clutching the green sticks of gum in the other. “I’m Elise by the way. This here’s Crescent. After the Crescent City, where she was born. I haven’t been back there since. Day we got out of the hospital, Crescent and me hopped a bus north, didn’t we, sweet thing?”
She flipped Crescent over on her back, grabbed a diaper out of one of the bags and changed her on top of the coat. “She’s too young for gum, I guess, but it’s something to do, don’t you know.”
I have never hung around really little kids, and I never had any interest in them, so I didn’t have much to compare Crescent against. Her skin was light brown, the color of stale chocolate. Her hair was pinkish blond and curly, squashed damp against her forehead on the side where she’d been sleeping. Her eyes were dark brown, the thick lashes wadded together with bits of dried sleep. She didn’t smile, even when her mother gave her the gum. She didn’t cry, either. I thought kids that little cried a lot. Her face was flat and expressionless. She had yet to say a word. I would have guessed that she was retarded except that her eyes were so watchful.
Elise on the other hand was as chatty as her kid was silent. She told me she was twenty-one years old, only five, well six, years older than I am. She said she was running away from a man she called her husband.
“Not Crescent’s daddy. We left him in New Orleans and no forwarding address, if you get my drift.”
“Yes, I do.” I got the drift all too well and offered Crescent a smile of more understanding. One fatherless daughter to another.
“Why are you leaving your husband?”
“To tell you the truth, honey, I don’t have good sense for men. I always pick the wrong one. But my luck is about to change. You are my sign of good luck coming.”
I didn’t see why, but I took her remark as a compliment. When the Hardee’s counter inside the station opened at six, I asked Elise if she and her daughter wanted to have some breakfast with me. “My treat,” I added.
“Sure thing,” Elise said, spitting out the last of my gum. “I don’t have an extra dime to spend.” She pulled Crescent onto her lap and changed her out of the stained red-and-white jumper suit she’d been sleeping in. Crescent submitted without expression to her arms being pulled out of sleeves and rearranged. Her chubby bare legs gave her a ruggedly healthy look, but they didn’t kick like I thought little kids’ legs always did. As Elise zipped her into a stained blue jumpsuit with a clown on front, I noticed Crescent had brand-new sneakers, the fancy kind with Velcro instead of laces.
I bought three egg biscuits, three juices and two coffees. I drink coffee now, black with a little sugar. I wanted a cinnamon raisin biscuit, too, but I couldn’t spare the money for three of them so I lived without it. Standing in line, I glanced back and watched Elise combing Crescent’s hair, kind of hugging her at the same time, but roughly. Crescent was just sitting there, not reacting to the tug of the comb or her mother’s hugs. What a solemn little kid. Elise wolfed down her egg biscuit before she broke Crescent’s apart into nice small pieces on the yellow Styrofoam plate. Gram used to cut up toast for me that way when she cooked soft-boiled eggs. Crescent picked up one piece at a time, removing the scrambled egg and chewing it first before she ate the bread.
Meanwhile Elise began to rummage through her bags, switching stuff like diapers and plastic bottles from one to the other. I assumed it was a habit from being on the road. I’d already decided Elise was a little strange, although she seemed to take good enough care of her kid.
I threw my biscuit plate in the garbage can and was standing up with my bag in one hand and my coffee in the other, about to go explore the ladies’ room. When Elise grabbed my wrist, I just missed spilling hot coffee all over the two of us.
“You’re a sweet girl,” she said, “and I can tell you’ve got people who take real good care you don’t come to harm.”
I tried to pull my arm away without arousing notice, as if anyone was paying the slightest attention.
“So I want you to take care of things for me because I’ve got to meet a man about you never mind what.” There was no way I was going to watch her things. I’d been too nice already, I realized
. I should never have offered to buy her breakfast. What had I been thinking? Hadn’t I learned by now?
“I’ve got a bus to catch in twenty minutes, Elise,” I said, shaking my wrist loose and starting to move away.
“That’s just fine. Crescent loves to ride the bus, don’t you, sweet girl?”
I wasn’t sure I’d heard right and turned back.
“What?”
Elise hooted a short, high-pitched laugh.
I stared like a dummy as Elise winked at Crescent, picked up a grocery bag and walked away. Fast. Without turning around.
Crescent didn’t try to follow. She didn’t cry. She sat still in the orange chair, her legs tucked under her, her face all smeary with margarine. I couldn’t believe this was happening, not even when Crescent raised both her small grimy hands and waved them slowly at her mother’s high heels clickety-clicking away.
I grabbed her up and ran after Elise as she began opening the door to the street. I was at the exit that fast but Elise was gone, whether around a corner, into a doorway or a waiting car there was no way to tell. No clue remained in the sooty morning drizzle. No sign of life period.
SO HERE WE ARE. I want to cry but not in front of Crescent because then she’s bound to start. But what am I going to do? The bus will be pulling in any minute, and this kid is sitting next to me as if we belonged together. What did Elise tell her to make her stay? I mean, Elise obviously expected me to take her along wherever I was going, but she had the wrong idea about where I was going.