JEWEL

by LOTT, BRET

Nehi, Royal Crown, ParT-Pak off the truck and filling store shelves with it, a job he promptly got, started at fifty-two dollars a week, him still living at home, Brenda Kay at age twelve tested in at age five, James and Eudine had their third baby, David, company to the other two, Judy and Mark, Billie Jean had first Elaine, then Matthe back in Jackson, Gower transferred up there when the Purvis dealership closed down, Brenda Kay and the rest of her class made handprint ashtrays, hers kept filled by Leston so that I had to empty it each morning before Brenda Kay and I headed up to the Foundation in the second car we had, an old 49 Chevrolet Burton rounded up at Bundy, Wilman met a girl named Barbara Holmes while he and his cronies from high school were out one Saturday night to the ballroom at the end of Santa Monica pier to see Spade Cooley. Wilman and Barbara’d danced, then gone over to The Clock Drive-In where, he told me the next morning, she wouldn’t let him kiss her, this Barbara Holmes a Baptist girl from East Texas and whose daddy was an actor himself and who’d been in a few movies, even with John Wayne one time.

  Her momma’d been a singer with Kay Kaiser and his Kollege of Musical Knowledge in the 40s, and Barbara herself was a Job’s Daughter. All of this was reason enough for Leston and me to give approval to them marrying eight months later at a church wedding in Culver City, to which Wilman’d been late because of his route taking too long that day.

  The two of them honeymooned up to Las Vegas just over the weekend, Wilman back at work Monday morning, Barbara back to work at the telephone company, where she was an operator, Mr. Nathan White talked the Health Department down in Redendo Beach into giving up its old storeroom to him, there being now thirty l I l r two children holed up each day in the Foundation’s house on Adams. I was in charge of organizing the carpool down there in the South Bay, each of us mothers trading off driving, though I was there each day one way or the other, Burton and Sarah had Susan, Wilman and Barbara had Brad, and those two traded having children for the next few years, baby girls to Burton, baby boys to Wilman, Jeannie, then Robert, then Jill, then Timmy, Brenda Kay at age fourteen tested in at age six, Leston was made supervisor of the heating and cooling plant at El Camino, and I talked him into selling off the house in Mar Vista for something farther down the coast, our lives now moving south from Los Angeles, what with Leston in Gardena, me and Brenda Kay in Redondo Beach. We made three thousand dollars off the house in Mar Vista, bought a two-bedroom bungalo off Sixth Street and Ingleside in Manhattan Beach, not three blocks from the ocean Mr. Nathan White put me in charge of yet another of his big ideas, the families of all the exceptional children in the Redondo Beach class saving up Blue Chip Stamps in order to buy a station wagon. A year and a half later, in December 1959, we had enough for the station wagon, and I had another aspect of my job, driving that station wagon each morning and picking up the children, driving them home each afternoon, Leston was promoted to Head of Maintenance at El Camino College James gave up being a veterinarian for teaching high school Ag. in Leveland, just outside Lubbock, Wilman was made the first Pre-Salesman for Royal Crown, quit dnving truck and was given a company car, a black 1960 Rambler, and started driving from store to store and selling from sheets of paper instead of off the truck, the truck showing up the next day with whatever the store ordered, Burton quit Bundy, took a job at Royal Crown, and for a few months followed Wilman’s Rambler with his Royal Crown delivery truck, until he, too, started as a Pre-Salesman, Annie graduated Lawndale High School still followed by that string of boys, but ended up getting engaged two years later to a California Highway Patrolman ten years her senior, him having stopped her on the new Harbor Freeway for speeding, then writing her up, then asking her out, Billie Jean wrote and said she’d be out with the babies for the wedding in December, James called and said they’d all be out for the wedding, Brenda Kay at age sixteen tested in at age six Brenda Kay at age seventeen tested in at age six Today she’d held hands with Dennis.

  CHAPTER 29.

  THE TEMPTATION IS, MR. WHITE STARTED up, AND ROSE FROM HIS SEAT behind the desk, “to make more of certain things than is necessary.” He came round the desk and sat on the corner like always, arms crossed, chin down, eyes on the floor.

  For a moment I thought he was talking about Brenda Kay and Dennis, though I hadn’t said a word to him yet, had just come into his office from passing out the lunchboxes to the children, each box masking-taped shut by their mothers, a practice we’d all gotten into what with the number of times they dropped the boxes walking to and from the station wagon, or moving into the classroom. One little girl no longer with us her parents moved to Sacramento last year, freeing up room for Candy even pushed her lunchbox out the station wagon window one morning, all I’d seen of it was a sort of small explosion in the rearview mirror, a sandwich and chips and apple all flying up into the grill of the car behind me. Now the windows were kept rolled up, all except mine.

  I’d gotten the lunchboxes passed out, had the tape open for each of them, when Mrs. Walker, one of the secretaries for the Health Center, came into the classroom, told me Mr. White needed to see me right away, that she’d watch over them for me.

  I’d turned to the children, saw all of them eating away, Brenda Kay slowly unwrapping her sandwich as if it might’ve been gold. She picked up one half of it with both hands, leaned over the table until her chin almost touched the tabletop, and bit into it. Fried egg sandwich. Her favorite, what I made for her most every day, either that or pimento and cheese.

  I’d looked round the classroom, certain I was doing it, surveying it all, just to put off meeting with Mr. White. I knew, too, he wouldn’t come down hard on me for what went on, I just knew I’d have to tell him the truth of the matter, our first day at the high school had been, in fact, a disaster.

  Not that anything bad had happened, actually, they were just themselves today. On the batteries of tests the Foundation gave, not one of them had ever placed higher than a ten-year-old’s capabilities, as far as the public school system out here was concerned, these children could make coil ashtrays and miss baskets for the rest of their lives and still get no better at it, still break down into laughter at whatever they thought was funny.

  But that wasn’t what I was in this for, the simple ritual of just killing time in these children’s lives. I’d signed on for the long haul, certainly, I’d be with my Brenda Kay until the end of my days, but not just so I could keep treading water. There was a way to fix this thing, I knew, and it had something to do with getting these kids over to West High School even if for only an hour or two a day. Only an hour out in the world, but one they might not otherwise get, some head start at the end point I figured all we mothers and fathers and brothers and sisters of these children were aiming at, solving these lives. I could just picture Mrs. Klausman doing her part to end it all before it’d even started, her marching into the principal’s office and laying in on him how horrid these children’d been, how worth nothing they were. They couldn’t even dribble a ball.

  I’d given one last look at the classroom, a room that’d been a big storage room for years before we ever came around. Now there was a blackboard on one wall, two big tables set up in the middle, the children all in their appointed chairs and eating, a heavy and huge braided rug under it all. On the walls were pictures of Lincoln and Washington and Eisenhower, circling the top of the walls cards with the alphabet in printed letters. It could have been any classroom, could have been, I saw, the classroom where I’d started teaching back in Columbia, these kids roughly the same mental equivalent as all those ornery children I’d had to deal with so many years ago.

  Then Jimmy glanced up at me, him with his crew cut, those ears, and he shivered hard, nearly dropped the banana in his hand for it. He’d seen me looking at him, and turned his back to me, took a bite off the banana, and I knew where I was, in an ex-storeroom, a room with no windows.

  But better than no room at all.

  “Got the call from Mr. Mooney, the principal at West, ” Mr. White went on. He shook his head, brought
a hand from his chest to his chin, and rubbed it, his same old moves. “Doesn’t look good.”

  “Of course, ” I started up, “Mr. Mooney’s got all his information from the girls’ PE coach, Mrs. Klausman. That’s his first mistake.”

  I stood behind the chair he always kept positioned in front of the desk, he still swooped off that desk edge and stood up, came close to you and started his pacing, all of it, I knew, designed to intimidate, to force into you who was in charge. But he wasn’t a man who I I wanted to be in charge for the thin reason of just having power. No, he wanted in charge because he knew how to get things changed.

  “Gym day, ” he said, pacing again, the same man as the first day I met him, “is our foot in the door, our way of making ourselves known to the school board, to the public education system at large. Imagine the burdens lifted from parents, imagine the opportunities afforded our children. Public education for the retarded.”

  He stopped then, arms crossed, and said, “But you’ve heard this before, ” and smiled.

  I tried to smile, tried hard. I’d heard it all before, knew there was hope for that new way of teaching in California, knew we’d come worlds from where we’d started, knew that there might come some day some day soon, if any of my prayers were answered by the same old God up in Heaven new ways to change her, bring up her learning level.

  But there were things to deal with now, today.

  I said, “Maybe there’s nothing to this, but… , ” and I paused, waited a moment before I could line up the words I wanted to give.

  “There’s always something in everything, ” he said, and circled back to his desk. His office was the opposite of that sun-filled room back up on Adams, the desk was strictly school district issue, gunmetal gray with a slate top, his chair the same color gray with a hard green leather back and seat. May, the receptionist, was still up at the old house, down here was Mrs. Walker, a white woman with hair swirled up high and sprayed into place, lips fire engine red. Who knew what the children thought when they saw her?

  “Maybe, maybe not, ” I said, and half-smiled, looked up at him. His own lunch was spread out on the desktop, an apple, two Oreos, a half-eaten sandwich on dark bread. He sat down, leaned over the desktop, picked up the sandwich, bit into it.

  “Seems I may’ve caught a couple of the children up to something.” I paused. “Holding hands, namely.”

  He looked at me over the tops of his glasses, stopped chewing. He held that look a moment or two, then slowly started to chewing, leaned back.

  He swallowed, said, “Well. It’s about time.”

  “What? ” I said, and for the first time in years I wanted to sit in that chair, wanted to plant myself there, lean my head over into my hands.

  “It’s about time, ” he said again, and now he was dusting off his hands, smiling. “I’ve had to deal with this on more than one occasion, believe you me, ” he said. “You wouldn’t believe the sorts of liaisons that begin to happen once this sort of discovery takes place, especially with this age group. Why I’ve seen ” “It’s my Brenda Kay, ” I said, quick put my hand to my forehead, let it cover my eyes.

  He stopped, and I heard him stand right up, come around the desk. Then I felt his hand on my shoulder. “I didn’t mean to make it seem…”

  he began, but stopped. “I mean, ” he said, “it’s happened.”

  “There’s always something in everything, ” I said, and brought down my hand, tried again to smile at him, still held on with the other hand to the back of the chair.

  He said, “It’s bound to happen. And it does. It has. It will. But the only way I’ve found to deal with it is simply to let them know they’re not to behave that way. Now, ” he said, and let go my shoulder. He went to the edge of the desk, stood looking at his food.

  He turned his head to me, nodded at the empty chair. He said, “Would you sit down? ” “Only if you promise not to go on the attack like you do, ” I said.

  “Promise, ” he said, and looked back at his food.

  I sat down, glad for the weight off my feet, glad my legs could ease up, let me relax. Brenda Kay and Dennis.

  “Maybe you won’t want to hear this, ” he said, “but holding hands is not the worst thing that could happen. Not at all. But, first, do not give them opportunity. Don’t let them have the chance to hold hands.”

  He paused, turned to me. “Who’s the boy? ” “Dennis, ” I said. I looked down at the gray linoleum floor, a far cry from that gleaming hardwood, from when I’d only had to worry on enrolling my daughter, on getting red clay wet enough to work.

  “Dennis, ” he said. “He’s responsive. He hears. He’ll listen.” He paused. “But if they carry on, keep holding hands even if we instruct them not to, there’s not much else we can do. Much worse can happen here. Maybe holding hands will be outlet enough.”

  I looked up. “Outlet for what? ” I said, but I’d already figured it out, already knew.

  He still looked at the desktop. “Growing up, ” he said, matter-of-fact.

  He stopped, looked at me once again. He reached up, took off his glasses, crossed his arms. Then he sat on the corner of the desk, the same old perch, and here came my old life, this same series of days that lined themselves up in front of me and told me the same thing again and again and again, take hold of it by the throat, make it work.

  Puberty fell on them, that word so filthy gone unspoken, but what I already knew was upon my baby girl. She was already seventeen, her body going through its own motions like there were things it had to do, wild things my daughter’s brain never dreamed of, every night when I gave her her bath, there were new signs, her breasts growing larger, more thin wisps of hair between her legs, all of it a mockery, I knew, sheer spite from God once again. Now here she was holding hands with a boy, their bodies like blind animals making I their way along, searching, not knowing what it was they were looking for.

  And one morning some five months ago Leston and I’d both woke up to Brenda Kay hollering out from her bedroom. I’d rolled right out of bed, rushed to her room, alive in my head the memory of her burned legs, the pain of them even as she rolled over of a morning, memories so fresh we might as well have been still back in Mississippi, the house filled with the stink of old and soaked bandages.

  I opened her bedroom door, saw her standing next to her bed, a finger pointed at the mattress. “Momma! ” she hollered. “Momma! ” “What’s wrong? ” I’d said, but by that time I already saw what she was pointing at, a bloodstain there on the middle of the sheet, and I’d had to swallow hard, keep myself from crying as I turned to her, looked at the seat of her nightgown, saw more blood there. She’d started her monthlies.

  “Jewel? ” Leston’d called from the bedroom. “What’s going on? ” “Nothing, ” I’d said, then went to the bathroom, headed for the box of napkins I’d kept under the sink for the last three or four years, me never certain when this morning might come.

  “Morning accident, ” I called out to Leston, and let him think she’d just wet the bed again.

  Take hold of it, grab it by the throat, make it work.

  Mr. White was right, of course, they’d have to be separated, separated as much as I could make certain. And there’d be much worse could happen, too. But I wasn’t going to let that happen, not at all. I’d been in charge of her all this time, I wasn’t about to surrender to letting that foot in the door. No.

  I stood, didn’t need the chair anymore. There were ways to fix this world, and us in it. There were simple ways, keep the two separate.

  “You’re right, ” I said. I started for the door. “It’s an outlet, ” I said, and steeled myself for whatever I had in front of me to do.

  “Good, ” he said from behind me, and I knew he’d sat back down, had started in on his lunch again. “And gym day does not cease as of today.

  Gym day will be on our regular agenda, every Monday, Wednesday and Friday from now on.”

  I had my hand on the door, turned the knob
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