All the Children Are Home

by Patry Francis

  IN THE FAMILIAR white tent, I dreamed relentlessly of water. When I struggled for breath, I imagined myself in the deep, pushing myself toward the air. And when the nurses increased my oxygen, I thought of how I told Coach Lois that the other girls swam like their lives depended on it. For the first time, it made sense.

  No one but Susan knew what I had seen and heard that day. Nor would they ever know, but they all saw the change in me. After I was discharged, I stayed home for a couple of weeks until I couldn’t stand Ma watching, trying to figure me out. If she stayed at it long enough, I knew she would. Just like always.

  “You’re not just lung sick like when you were a kid; this is something else,” she concluded one afternoon when she delivered chicken noodle soup to my room.

  I made no response, so she turned to leave. I knew that wasn’t the end of it, though. And just as I expected, she stopped at the door. “It’s that boy, isn’t it? The one you were planning to go to the dance with.”

  Again, I said nothing.

  “He called a couple of times, you know.”

  “Tell him I don’t live here anymore,” I said, stealing the worn-out line Dad used when the department asked Ma to take another kid.

  “Already did. To be honest, Agnes, I had a bad feeling about that kid from the first.”

  If I wasn’t lung sick and heartsick and some other kind of sick I couldn’t identify, I would have grinned. When it came to boys lurking around me and Zaidie, Ma always had a bad feeling. And to be honest, so did I. I should have trusted myself more.

  Again, she started down the hall—and again she turned back. “Best cure for what’s bothering you now is to get moving. Plan on going back to school tomorrow.”

  AT SCHOOL, I avoided my old pack and ate lunch alone with Susan; and as soon as the bell rang, I set out walking. Sometimes I heard my friends calling my name, but driven by the memory of Jimmy’s voice, I picked up my pace. At home, Ma and Zaidie were thrilled—and just a little baffled—by the amount of time I spent studying.

  “What happened to you? Get struck by lightning one day when we weren’t looking?” Dad asked when I went straight upstairs to work on a project after supper.

  “Yeah, I did,” I whispered.

  Still, there was something missing. Something I mourned even more than the loss of my friends.

  THE AFTERNOON I showed up at the pool fifteen minutes before practice Coach Lois hardly looked my way. Nor did she glance in the direction of the bleachers, where I sat in Jimmy’s old spot during practice. My old teammates clearly noticed my presence, though; and once I saw Kathy Doherty whisper something in the coach’s ear before she pointed up at me.

  I waited fifteen minutes after everyone left, hoping Coach Lois might come and talk to me. Finally, just as I was about to leave, she appeared and sat beside me on the bench. We both stared into the empty pool.

  “They look pretty good, don’t they?” she finally said. “Did you hear we took second at the Southeastern Mass Regionals?”

  “No, but that’s great.”

  I realized I didn’t have much time so I blurted out what I’d come to say. “Coach, I know I don’t deserve it, but I wanted to ask—”

  She turned to face me. “If you were hoping to get back on the team, I’m sorry, Agnes. We have a full roster, and Rebecca, the girl who replaced you—she works hard every day. To be honest, you’re right. You don’t deserve it.”

  “But I’m different now. I swear, I—” I stammered. If I were Zaidie, I could have told her about Jimmy’s home run and the cracked wishbone in my treasure box. I would have explained the Moscatelli Way—how you don’t just win for yourself; you do it for all the people who never won a damn thing in their whole life and never would. People like Ma and the mother I hadn’t seen since I was small and Mau Mau. For my beautiful brother hollering like hell in an empty bar.

  But I wasn’t Zaidie and I didn’t have those words. Still, it was as if Coach Lois heard them anyway. Or saw them on my face. Felt them.

  “Remember when I told you that if you were ever ready to commit a hundred percent, I’d like to work with you individually?” she said.

  Like my life depended on it, I thought, remembering that feeling I had in the hospital or when I was walking to the Y that day.

  But all I said was, “Yes, I remember.” Then I gave her a hug that would have even embarrassed Jimmy.

  Chapter Five

  The Magnet

  ZAIDIE

  HISTORICALLY, 1968 WAS THE YEAR OF MANY THINGS, AND BY fall, everything would change. But for Agnes and me, it began as the year of winning. Swim meets and competitions, scholarships and acceptances. Until Penn interrupted my streak and Agnes lost a 100-meter breaststroke to a girl from Waltham, it seemed like no one and nothing could say no to us.

  I tyrannized Ma with lists from my favorite magazines, starting with “Plan your College Wardrobe Now!” from Mademoiselle.

  “Who wrote this? The Filene’s company? No one in the world needs all these clothes.” Ma read the list out loud:

  “Four blouses. Three skirts with matching sweaters. A black dress and a pair of heels. For what exactly? Are you going to college or to fancy parties?”

  “Both, Ma! What do you think?”

  “Two blazers. And what’s this? Three pairs of pajamas—new ones? Good Lord, Zaida, who’s gonna see you?”

  I imagined myself drinking hot chocolate in the lounge in my cute pajamas and matching slippers, hair pulled up on top of my head the way the model’s was in Mademoiselle, but I couldn’t tell her that.

  I let her cool down for a week before I showed her “Must-Haves for Your Dorm Room,” culled from Seventeen.

  Then there was my major. When I told my parents what I’d chosen, they were even more befuddled.

  “English?” Dad said. “What’s the use of that?”

  Desperately, I turned to Ma, the one who had been buying me notebooks for years. “But I want to be a writer. You know—”

  “No one’s prouder than us of that prize you won, but you don’t want to go to college and spend all that money on something that will most likely . . .”

  “It’s like dreaming you’ll be a baseball player,” Dad chimed in. “Or a girl singer with the Beatles, for chrissake.”

  “She wanted to be those things at some point, too, remember?” Jimmy called from the foyer, where he had just come in. Late to supper as usual.

  “I never wanted to play baseball! That was you.” I burst into irrational tears. As always, that brought out Jimmy’s protective streak.

  “I guess they might as well pave over Fenway Park and close the record shops, then,” he said, switching sides. “Same goes for book writing. Hell, Dad, someone’s got to give it a shot—even if ninety-nine percent of ’em’s gonna fall on their face.”

  I headed for my room, crying harder.

  LATER, MA CAME up with a plate of Chips Ahoy like she did when we were little. As if a few store-bought cookies were the cure to everything.

  “All Dad’s trying to say is that not everyone gets a chance like you, Zaida. People like your Aunt Cille and that Michael Finn out there in Colorado”—she never called him my father—“maybe it’s different for them. But families like ours? Moscatellis and Garrisons? A couple of generations back you would’ve had to drop out of school when you were fourteen and go to work in the factory. For a hundred generations—maybe forever—no one ever got the chance. You’re coming up in a golden hour, Zaida. It wasn’t always this way, and it won’t last forever. Don’t waste it on some impractical dream.”

  “But this is what I want. What I always wanted—even though I didn’t know it. How else can I live all those lives I’ve been dreaming about?”

  A light came into Ma’s eyes the way it did when she saw one of our hopes, but then just as quickly something inside her, someone, jumped up and snuffed it out.

  “Maybe you could get a job on the paper. Study what do they call it—journalism—”

&n
bsp; “That’s not the kind of stories I want to tell, Ma. I’m going to write my own.”

  “Made-up, you mean. Fiction novels.” The disdain in her voice, much as she tried to keep it out, cut through me like a January wind.

  “It’s not something less like you think. I want to use everything I know—not just the so-called facts. I want to tell the stories that are truer than true.”

  Again, I saw that flicker. Like for just a minute she understood. But it was promptly extinguished with one of the long sighs that had squelched so many of her own dreams.

  “It’s your choice, Zaida. Your life. All I’m asking, all your father wants—is that you honor your chances.”

  Though I didn’t change my major, I would remember her words enough to write them down later the way I’d once inscribed words from Eleanor Roosevelt and Joan of Arc in my notebooks. And then a few months later, when I rose to speak to my class, I would talk about the golden hour, and would end my speech the way she had that night in my room.

  We, the class of 1968, are graduating at a unique point in history. With that comes untold opportunities, but also a great responsibility. Honor your chances. Many generations who came before you and many more who will come after may not have them.

  After that, people would rise and clap; my teachers would congratulate me; and my classmates would swarm around.

  But that day in my room, the last thing I wanted to hear was some talk about how things had been for her and Dad and a bunch of poor people who came from Italy and Ireland or wherever in steerage. I couldn’t wait till she left so I could call Charlie and talk about something—anything—else.

  Even though I kept my door closed, our nightly conversations—or maybe just the spirit of them, the goofy teenage elation—always managed to seep under the door.

  Jimmy, in particular, could pick it up from a mile away.

  “Never heard so much damn gigglin’ in my life. What kind of idiot is this kid?” Since I’d begun to date Charlie, or maybe it was even before that, maybe when Spider Johnson dropped the first college catalogue in our box, a gulf had opened up between my brother and me. He was glad for me, but it was hard not to see my success as an indictment—especially after Charlie came on the scene.

  To him, my boyfriend was everything he could never be. “Look at the two of yas. With your golden hair and your perfect teeth, you look so much alike it’s practically—whaddya call it—incest.”

  And when Nonna asked what my new amore was like, Jimmy spoke up before I got a chance. “Colleige, that’s what he’s like. The ultimate colleige.”

  He sounded like he was back in high school when he and his rat friends used to hang out at the picnic table, laughing and blowing smoke rings at the world that excluded them.

  “Be fair, Jimmy,” I tried to say. “You’re not just your car or who you hang out with—your job—are you? Well, Charlie isn’t, either.”

  “Tell you the truth, Z, those things there? That’s exactly who I am. A car on the verge of shittin’ the bed? That’s me, sister.” He stood up and thumped his chest in a way that scared me. “Best friends with a kid who lives by a dried-up river of junk. Me again.” (Another thump.) “And your Charlie? He’s the same.”

  I hated the way he said sister—not as an endearment like he used to, but as if it was something hard—a hand pushing me further away. Was I the ultimate colleige in his mind, too?

  “Only thing you got wrong is my goddamn job,” he added. “Cause at the moment, I ain’t exactly got one.”

  Ma, who was in the kitchen drinking coffee and pretending to pay attention to Nonna as she instructed her on how to make eggplant rollatini (Luigi’s favorite!) got up and came into the doorway like she’d been listening all along. As if she’d been listening since the day we were born, even before she knew us.

  “What did you say? I thought you liked that job at Simpson Spring—” And then, not needing to wait for an answer, “You should have told us, Jimmy.”

  I was almost grateful when the rage that was visibly rising up inside him was transferred to her.

  “Why? So you and Dad could sit up talkin’ about the trouble with Jimmy half the night? You think I don’t fucking hear you?”

  When Nonna, who had followed her into the room, hands covered with egg and breadcrumbs, gasped at his language, he turned back to me like it was all my fault. Everything from the lost job to the forbidden word that had worked its way from the backyard directly into the parlor.

  “Thanks a lot, Z.”

  AFTER ANOTHER ACCEPTANCE came in—this one from Smith, who offered a full scholarship—the gulf widened. “You see those pictures in the catalogue? They have teas, Z. And they dress up in gloves—inside—like they’re expecting the flippin’ Queen. In a few years, you won’t even wanna know me.” He grabbed his jacket from the hook. “Hell, maybe you don’t already.”

  “That’s not fair, Jimmy! You’re the one—” I cried out, but before I finished, the door slammed, and I was left to wonder if what he said was true. Did I resent him as much as he seemed to hate the colleiges of this world?

  I complained to Agnes that Ma and Dad paid more attention to a hook in the foyer where Jimmy hung his jacket than to anything we did. It was an old leather bomber he wore year round—even in the summer, as if it wasn’t just weather that made him cold. Or as if the seasons had stopped mattering to him; he was governed by something else now.

  Soon as Dad came in after work, he checked the hook. Was Jimmy home?

  If it was empty, he’d ask Ma where the boy had gone. As if she knew. If not, he’d look up the stairs in the direction of Jimmy’s room, obviously wondering what kind of mood he was in that day.

  As for Ma, she must’ve seen that hook, in the shape of a giant question mark, in her dreams. It didn’t matter whether the leather jacket was there or not; the question it asked was never entirely answered: Where was Jimmy? What was happening to him? Even when we heard the stereo blasting from his room—usually Hendrix or Jimmy Page—no one knew.

  Sure, Ma was still proud of Agnes’s and my accomplishments, but there was something muted about it now. As if the hook, that twisted question mark just inside the door, was always before her, obscuring everything else.

  IT WAS MARCH, the day of the state finals in swimming and Agnes’s friend Susan came running up the driveway, her face flushed, yelling to me where I was waiting on the porch. “Zaidie! Did you hear?”

  And then, when Ma stepped outside, “Mrs. Moscatelli! Zaidie! It’s Agnes, she—”

  “Dear God—what?” Ma called out, clutching her heart. “Were they in an accident?”

  Ever since Josie Pennypacker had died in front of our house, it seemed that Ma was just waiting for the next bad thing to happen. And that day she’d been particularly apprehensive. Though Nonna had offered to drive to the meet in Springfield, Jimmy had insisted they go in his car. “Nonna’s fine in town, but you ever go out on the highway with her? She drives like the little old lady from Pasadena.”

  “He’s got a point there,” Dad said, though I was pretty sure he’d never heard Jan and Dean.

  “Not a great option either way,” Ma said when Jimmy left the table. “You sure you can’t take the day off?”

  “I got two brake jobs and a total engine, Dahlia. Someone’s gotta keep this joint afloat, you know.”

  However, before she could say it out loud, Jimmy’s Falcon peeled into the driveway with Agnes in the passenger seat. All four doors gaped open at the same moment and they started up the walk, Jimmy leading.

  “Did she win?” I yelled before I saw the answer in his eyes.

  “Win? That’s not the half of it. Tell ’em, Sky Bar,” Jimmy said.

  “Yes, piccola, tell them what you do before they hear it on the radio,” Nonna added, brushing off her dress as she hopped out of the back seat a minute behind them.

  “Broke the state record in the hundred-meter freestyle is what she did. Our Agnes is All-American. Fifteen years old, onl
y started swimmin’ serious last year, and she broke the freakin’ state record.”

  “They’re coming from the paper to interview her tomorrow,” Susan added, obviously disappointed that she hadn’t been in time to break the news. “I wouldn’t be surprised if they put her picture on the front page.”

  My eyes were on Agnes, though. Though she was smiling, there was something subdued about her happiness—not a word anyone had ever used to describe my sister.

  “Oh, honey; I couldn’t be more proud,” Ma said, opening her arms, but there was a question mark as big as that hook in the hallway in her voice. Clearly, she saw what I did.

  When Jimmy passed me, I caught a whiff of booze on his breath. Was that it? I wondered. Had he and his Old Crow spoiled Agnes’s victory? Couldn’t he even hold back for one day? We looked at each other the way we did a lot those days. Rats and colleiges facing off like they did when he was in high school.

  Agnes remained quiet at dinner, and later when her friends called to congratulate her. In my room, I watched the door, waiting for her to squeeze into my little bed and tell me what was on her mind as we both stared into the night sky.

  Around three in the morning, she still hadn’t come, so I went to her.

  “Come in.”

  In the light from the moon and the tiny plug-in Dad had bought for her when she was small and afraid of the dark, I caught the glimmer of Agnes’s trophies, including the large one Jimmy had proudly carried in that day. Mutely, she slid over to make room in the bed.

  “You want to know what winning is like?” she finally said. I lay still beside her.

  “A magnet. It attracts all kind of things. Trophies like those up there, and new friends—some who like me cause I’m me, and others who just got pulled in by the force of it. Even people like that reporter who all of a sudden think I belong in the newspaper.”

  “It also attracts opportunities; don’t forget that.”

  “I haven’t, but you know what, Zaidie? The magnet itself—it’s a force that doesn’t know the difference between good and bad. It draws them both.”