by LOTT, BRET
Somebody’d thrown up in here.
But I still kept the door closed. This was the phone call, the only one that’d matter for the rest of our lives. I didn’t want the street sounds out there cutting in on this moment, didn’t want car horns and brakes screaming out to destroy this.
I put in my nickel, dialed the operator, asked for information. I told the woman at the other end the address for the National Association for Retarded Children, felt my eyes going hot as she gave me the number.
Then I called.
“N-A-R-C, ” a woman answered, and I’d been only silent, not certain what I needed to say, though I’d rehearsed it in my head enough times, Hello, I have a daughter who’s…
“Hello? ” the woman said again, and I finally managed to open my mouth, said, “Hello? ” “Yes? ” she said. “Can I help you? ” “I hope so, ” I’d said, and then, half-crying, half-laughing, I’d sputtered out all it was I had to say, about how we’d moved here. for them, how we’d planned to get Brenda Kay there as soon as we could, how I’d read in the Reader’s Digest all about these medications and about “But Miss, ” the woman cut in, and suddenly I heard how long I’d been running, how many words I’d let spill. “I’m sorry, ” I said. “I’m so sorry I just ” “The service we provide, ” she started in, me still with more words lined up in me, three years’ worth of words ready to go, “is as an umbrella group of sorts. We publish a newsletter bimonthly, work to keep abreast of new research in the field of mental retardation, and otherwise refer specific cases to specific groups. We’re not equipped here to ” I couldn’t hear her words then, for a moment the notion in me that the telephone connection’d gone bad, or that maybe I’d called the wrong place altogether. But just as quick it came to me, this was the rush of blood through me, the sound three years of hope made leaving me, Research. Umbrella Group. Not Equipped.
“Hello? ” the woman was saying, and I opened my eyes, though I hadn’t known they were closed.
I looked around, saw the cars on Pico, saw the Shell station with its rows of bright cans of oil in the window, stacked so perfect it seemed they might be the only thing in the world that meant anything, a perfect row of cans, labels all facing out and straight.
“Hello? ” the woman said again.
“I’m here, ” I said into the receiver, though I’d figured she’d see through my words, see that, in fact, I was not here, was nowhere.
“I suggest you visit the people out at the Exceptional Children’s Foundation, located at two-one-five-one Adams Boulevard, just before you hit Western, ” the woman went on. “Mr. Nathan White is his name, ” she said, “and after some preliminary testing, they might very well enroll your child there.”
I swallowed hard, closed my eyes again. I tried hard to concentrate on her words, on what she’d offered up to me, and only then did I take in her word, Enroll.
I said, “Enroll? ” “Yes, ” she said.
I said, “Mr. White? “
“Nathan White, ” she said.
So I let myself smile as we drove away from the bank and all the papers we’d had to sign, though my smile was just a small one. I said to my husband, “You know where I’m talking about. Pico Furniture.”
I turned a moment from the window to see what his reaction might be, and caught him looking at me in the rearview mirror. His eyes jumped away as soon as he saw me looking.
I picked out two single beds for the girls’ room, a fold-out sofa bed Wilman’d sleep on in the living room, a double bed for our bedroom, picked out, too, a big overstuffed chair for the living room, a dinette set for the kitchen.
And then, once we were up and ordering our furniture, putting money down on it, money perfectly fine with these people, perfectly acceptable, the man at the counter tilted his head one way, looked at Leston, and said, “You wouldn’t be new to Los Angeles, would you? ” Burton’d been leaning back in an easy chair a few feet away, and I heard him say, “They’ve been here only a little more than a month so far.”
Leston, next to me, had his wallet out, in his hand the dollars that would fill our house. He blinked, his head bowed to the wallet.
Then Burton was next to him, put his arm round his daddy’s shoulder.
The man at the counter said to Leston, “Would you be in need of a job?
” He stopped, folded the wallet, held it in his hands. Slowly he raised his head, looked the man square on. Burton’d let his arm drop, had lost the smile he’d had, too. We both knew what was going on here, Burton and me, and he gave a glance over at me. He took a small step away from his daddy, who was putting the wallet back into his pants pocket.
This was a moment could go either way, I knew. Either Leston’d want to leave California because of this moment, this humiliation unfolding with no help from us at all, or we would stay in California because of this job unfolding with no help from us at all. This moment.
And in that moment I thought of those streets, Western and Adams, thought of that row of oil cans, and of my son Burton and his tie and jacket, and found in all those pictures in my head that it was me, too, making a decision right here, right now. I decided that, no matter how much more humiliation my husband would feel, if he turned down this job, I’d step in front of him, and tell that man behind the counter Yes, indeed, he would take the job. I’d make a fool out of my husband and me both, I was bussing tables, making my piddly money each day while he drove our new car back and forth through Los Angeles. He’d take this job, whether he wanted it or not.
Leston looked at him, took in a breath. He said, “Depends, ” and I felt my hands clutching tight my purse, felt my heart go faster.
“Driving is what we need. A driver, man who can handle big trucks.
Some lifting, too. But it’s a driver we need.” The man crossed his arms, and smiled at Leston. “There’s just too much happening here these days, too much the boom. We need people.”
“I know trucks, ” he said, and smiled, still without looking at me or his son.
I took a deep breath, felt how hot my neck and face had gone thankful I didn’t need to do what I’d resolved. Thankful, too, for whatever slow coming around my husband seemed to make here in the showroom of Pico Furniture.
CHAPTER 25.
FRANK WAS THE NAME ON HIS KHAKI SHIRT, HIM LOCKING THE DOOR OF our house in California behind him, then turning to Brenda Kay and me. I’d dressed Brenda Kay up in one of the outfits I’d bought back in Purvis, and we’d gone out to the Plymouth parked there in the short driveway the tail end of the car actually hung out over the sidewalk, the drive was so short and waited for Leston to come out.
It’d taken me this long almost two months to get up the nerve to finally take this step, to finally find in me the stone piece of resolve I’d thought was so full in me all these years of persuading my husband we needed to move here.
But for two months I’d found things to do, things to do, settling us all in until there was no more settling to do, no more reason or time to put off what it was we’d moved here to do. Now here was the time, the day.
Leston was going to drive us to Pico Furniture, then I was going to take the Plymouth to Adams and Western and the Exceptional Children’s Foundation, a place I’d never been to, a place I’d never called, too afraid of what they might say.
And there he was in his Pico Furniture uniform, somebody else’s name stitched in red thread above the front shirt pocket. But it was a clean shirt, pressed last night with the new iron I’d bought over to the Sears Roebuck the week before, along with the ironing board and the pots and pans and glasses and dishes and all else went into creating a new life in a new world. We’d started with the $6, 700, then’d bought the car for $1, 600, given $100 to Gower and Billie Jean, spent $120 on the trip out, paid $1, 200 down on the house, spent $230 on food and the motel for that month and on gas and what have you while we were trying to buy the house, then’d handed over another $1, 000 for the furniture and everything that went into filling up an empty
house, then around $600 for a refrigerator and stove and washer and dryer, the washer and dryer hooked up on the porch out back, Wilman and Leston building a two-by-four and plywood roof to cover them both.
That’d left us with a little under $2, 000 to begin, but each week saw bits of that money flaking away, what with food for us all and books for Wilman and Annie, more clothes for Annie, who, it’d turned out, decided she’d bought all the wrong things back in Purvis, where that Myrtle Bancroft in the dress shop, in Annie’s words, “wouldn’t know fashion if it ran over her on Sunset Boulevard.” And that word enroll kept coming back to me, its weight and value solid and good in my heart, but the idea of the cost that word carried right along with it something I hadn’t counted on.
A million things were going on then, our children’s lives swirling up and into movement, the first piece of mail we got at the new house had been a letter from Billie Jean telling of how she’d already settled herself into married life in Purvis, though Gower was on the road most days of the week. They were planning on having kids right away, which made my heart fall and rise at the same time, who knew if they were ready, but, once those kids were there, wouldn’t that make them ready?
We’d talked on the telephone to James and Eudine, got word Eudine was farther along than they’d expected, that the next baby was due any day rather than two weeks from now, like the doctor’d first said. Burton was dating five or six girls at once, had managed even to hook up with one Julie Hesmer, daughter of the owner of Bundy Mufflers.
Wilman’d walked on to the field for football practice at Venice High School the first day of school, and’d ended up being a starter at fullback, Annie’d already ingratiated herself with a clutch of giggling girls at the junior high, though I hadn’t met any of them yet, only’d answered the phone an endless number of times to have some little chatty girl at the other end say, “Umm, is Annie they-err? ” and then laugh, doing the best to imitate the drawl Annie’d brought with her and, it seemed, was maybe even more pronounced now we were here. Maybe that was how she’d got in good with whoever these girls were, her posing as a Southern Belle at school. Who knew?
And there’d been the beach as often as possible for Burton and Wilman, and a section of Venice Beach up almost to Ocean Park everybody called Muscle Beach, where one Saturday Brenda Kay and Leston and I’d gone down to see exactly what all the fuss was, why Burton and Wilman insisted on spending every free minute they had there.
We parked right smack at the end of Venice Boulevard, lucky enough, I figured, to get a spot in one of the slots in front of the row of shops there, the sand starting only a block of storefronts down. The sidewalk was jammed with young people and older folks and all in between, all of them hurrying to whatever it was one did at a beach.
We walked past a Woolworth’s, next a little shop that sold only bathing suits, mannequins in the window wearing next to nothing, two-piece suits that showed your midriff out there for anybody to take a look at, and I wondered how soon it’d be before Annie was asking for one of those. Next to that was a fish and tackle shop, and a lawyer’s office and then a store that sold liquor right off the shelves, right here at the beach. California, I thought, California and California and California. Two-piece swimsuits and liquor and lawyers.
Then the shops ended, and we came to a strip of concrete like a narrow road that ran parallel to the ocean, still what looked a good quarter mile away across the sand. A short brick wall stood across the strip, separating the sand and the street, these houses behind us, the shops and cars and all of Venice and Los Angeles and the rest of the world.
This was where land stopped, where the beach started.
I looked to the left, wondered when we might find this Muscle Beach Wilman’d given us the loosest directions to, “Just on down to the end of Venice, Momma, ” he’d said that morning, pushing the front screen door open with one hand, his towel in the other. Burton honked his horn again, him out there in the ten-or twelve-year-old green pickup he’d bought for fifty dollars from somebody at the shop. “You’ll see us, ” he’d said, and left. He hadn’t even had any breakfast.
I looked down the beach to the right, squinted, saw what looked like steel pipes set up like a swing set way down there, people all standing around, all of them Wilman’s age, it looked like, girls with those two-piece suits on, boys in black swimming trunks. Beyond them I could see a pier out into the ocean, on it a roller coaster and buildings and flags and the like, Ocean Park, the place Wilman and Burton went, I’d heard enough times from Annie, every time they left at night.
“Down there, ” I’d said, and swallowed, closed my eyes a moment at the idea of walking through all these people with Brenda Kay in tow. It wasn’t shame, I knew, that made me feel this way, it was the looks we all got, the looks we’d gotten all our lives, and how people didn’t even know how to look at us. I held Brenda Kay’s hand tighter in mine, started off on that thin road, Leston right beside us.
Of course we got the looks from everyone, everything from the shocked, mouth-drop-open look at Brenda Kay most of the kids gave as we moved along, to the look that was no look, eyes darting away from Brenda Kay.
And, too, there were the smilers, people who purposefully met our eyes and smiled a smile full of pity, eyebrows knotted in the smallest way, lips never parting. All looks we’d lived with every time we ever left the house, and it occurred to me for the first time since we’d been in California that, in fact, these people weren’t so different, weren’t so strange and new. We’d gotten the same looks in Purvis. Always.
We came to the knots of people I’d seen, only to find there. were two or three wooden platforms set up on this side of the steel bar structure, platforms covered with canvas, dumbbells and bars and round heavy weights laid out on them. Boys and men I hadn’t been able to see from back where we’d started from were standing in the sun and lifting the bars, holding them up above their heads. Girls all ages and some boys, too, stood round and watched, sometimes clapping when the bar had a bigger number of round weights on them. They were all tan and grimacing, tough boys, I thought, waiting for the girls to see them.
On another platform a few feet up the beach was a man and woman. They were holding hands, and then the man picked up the girl, and the girl arched her body up there in the air while the man lifted her above his head, him grimacing and tan, too, the girl with a smile that looked painted on, pretend. She had on one of those two-piece bathing suits, her midriff all tan, tan as her legs and arms and face. He held her up in the air a few seconds, and then he gave her a toss straight up, and she twisted, turned, and fell back into his waiting arms, her own arm out into the air all poised and graceful, her still with that smile.
Then he lifted her again, and this time she put her hands on his shoulders, and pushed herself off his stomach, swung herself up somehow until she was doing a handstand on his shoulders, and the grimacing tan man put his hands on his hips, stared out into the crowd. Every one clapped at this, too.
California, I thought.
The bars I’d seen were at the far end of all this goings on, and we stopped ourselves at the edge of the sand, the pipes about twenty yards out.
There, each swinging from two metal rings they held tight in their hands, rings that hung on chains attached to the steel crossbar, swinging like monkeys there up above us all, only a handful of boys and girls standing and watching them, were Wilman and Burton, my sons’ muscles taut across their chests and stomachs, their skin already a deep and shining tan, so that at first I didn’t recognize them as we came up, and I thought for a moment these were just two strangers putting on a show like everybody else. They just weren’t drawing the crowds.
Burton pulled himself up until his hands in those rings were at his hips, and he held himself there, Wilman next to him, just hanging.
They both had on black swim trunks, their chests just sprinkled with the beginnings of dark hair. Burton’s face jittered with the strain of holding himself above the sand, h
is eyes closed. Wilman was smiling, arms above him as he hung there, in his face some strain, but nothing like in his brother’s.
Someone in the crowd hollered out, “You do it, Bill! Don’t be a weenie!
” and everybody laughed, started up chanting Wee-nee, wee-nee! , , Wilman smiled even more, started laughing himself, and it was only then I figured it out, this was his new name, just as Burton’d been cut down to Burt. Bill, I thought. Bill.
I turned to Leston, Brenda Kay between the two of us, her just watching, taking in all that lay before us, the sand, beyond it the green smudge of sea, her brothers here and hanging on the rings.
But it was Leston I wanted to see, his reaction I wanted.
I’d thought he’d turn, want us to leave at this newest attack on him and who he was, yet another of his children rechristened in the land of plenty.
He was only watching them, in his eyes almost the same blank look as Brenda Kay. Then he glanced at me, and smiled.
“Them boys, ” he said, and shook his head. He had a cigarette at his lips, took it out, let go the smoke, the wind out here making it disappear as soon as he gave it up. “Burt and Bill, ” he said, and he nodded at them. “Already charming the girls.”
I only looked at him, the surprise of his words like cool water, or like the warm breeze that blew in off the ocean at us right then, right there, a breeze sharp with the salt of it, strange and wonderful.
Welcome.
I turned, saw Wilman Bill was pulling himself up, the cries of Wee-nee, wee-nee! rising round him, the words, it seemed, lifting him up, making him move. Then his hands, too, were even with his hips, his face as shaking as Burton’s had. He was up, and most everybody their friends, I saw, their friends gave out a big groan. Some girls clapped and hollered out for him, and Wilman just smiled and smiled, at the same time his face filled with the hurt of holding himself there.