I can see my mom’s hair all astray with the gray hairs standing out against the black. She is crying out the front windshield. It is always some deserted place.
Late at night. We are going like hell, trying to get to the twenty-four-hour gas station. Mom is mumbling at the windshield. Us kids are in the back, looking at her hair.
~
We drove to three or four restaurants that night.
I might leave Tutti. I might go to Africa. I might sail, or I might fly.
It’s not Tutti I’m leaving. It’s the phone calls. Coco calls. Says, “Is Tutti there?”
~
I did sit-ups for a while. I don’t have any willpower. I tried watching TV. I would do sit-ups first thing in the morning, or late at night. Nothing worked.
~
Tutti comes down from the cottage, wearing her blue terry-cloth shorts and her bra. There’s no one up here. It’s the middle of the week. There’s one guy, a young guy, up at number 413, but he sleeps all day. Then, around 5:30 in the afternoon, he stumbles down onto the beach and just lies there for a while, squinting up at the sky. My dog, Fido, tried to pee on him once. Fido must have thought he was a log. Fido tries to pee on every log on the beach. We come up for a week every summer and Fido loves to find the old logs he peed on last year. That’s Fido, though. If I had to describe Fido in one sentence…But then, why would I want to? Why would you ever want to describe someone in one sentence? I would want a whole book for Fido. I would insist on a whole book.
~
On my way home from work, I get going the wrong way on a one-way street. I go up onto the curb trying to get the car turned around as fast as I can. I can hear the hubcap of the front wheel bumping against the curb.
At work, earlier, Tutti called me on the phone. “Do you want to talk to Sammy?” she said.
“No,” I said. “Is there something you needed to tell me? Because I’m really busy here. It’s busy.”
“Sammy wants to talk to you. Hold on a minute.”
Sammy gets on the phone.
“Sammy?” I say. “Sammy? Are you there?”
The most Sammy will do on the phone is tell jokes no one understands. Then he laughs this laugh he’s picked up somewhere. I don’t know where he would have picked up that laugh.
~
I went out into the hall and stood outside Sammy’s door, trying to hear what he was saying. He was trying to tell somebody something, but I couldn’t understand the words he was saying.
I went downstairs to put my bike in the garage. I couldn’t get it in because of the way Tutti had parked the car.
“What is he saying in there?” Tutti said when I came back up to bed.
“I don’t know,” I told her.
~
At work, there is this door everyone is supposed to make sure stays closed so that people who don’t work at the library cannot get in.
45
THE WIND picked up the girl’s hair, then set it back down.
All the roses died that winter.
Using her fingers, she mounded up the soil. The following spring she unmounded the soil and waited. Every morning she went to the window and saw a different sky. There are limits imposed on your view of the sky that don’t seem logical. The woman looked out the window and said, “Damn.”
The next day she was up in the tree, at the top of the tree. It was as if she were seeing some edge of something, something that no one else had seen.
~
Sammy gets to ride the next-door neighbor, Veralynn’s, Batman Bigwheel. He can hardly get the pedals to go around. Veralynn is smaller than Sammy and she can get the Batman Bigwheel airborne coming off the curb in front of her house. When Veralynn’s daddy takes Veralynn in for dinner, Sammy struggles up the driveway on his tricycle and parks it in the garage. He parks it in the middle of the garage. He parks it so carefully, I don’t have the heart to move it.
~
I used to say goodbye to everything. I would run down from the cottage in my bare feet and yell, “Goodbye lake! Goodbye beach!” I would stand there in the wind, with the breeze coming off the lake, getting in my hair. “Goodbye sand! Goodbye pebbles! Goodbye sticks! Goodbye trees!” Then I would walk back up to the cottage slowly, my toes curling in the sand, saying goodbye to things as I went along.
Dad would drive us home from the beach and leave us standing in the driveway with our suitcases. Dad and Mom were divorced and Mom refused to speak to Dad. My sister and I would take our suitcases into the house and drop them on the floor. We would stand in the hall, watching, looking out the little front window, watching Dad back his car out of the driveway. Then I would go into my bedroom. There was a little space between the wall and the bed, and I would crawl into this little space. I would lie there on the floor, in this little space between the wall and the bed, and I would cry. I would cry so hard I thought I was going to break.
~
I’m sitting on the toilet when the Jehovah’s Witnesses come to our door. They ring the doorbell. Sammy runs down the stairs to see who it is. “Who is that, Mommy?” he calls. Tutti goes downstairs and opens the door. I sit on the toilet with the bathroom door open a crack, trying to hear what the Johos are saying to Tutti.
So far today I have eaten a bowl of cereal, drunk two cups of coffee, and watched a video with Sammy. Sammy made tea in his plastic tea set and brought it into the living room for us to have while we watched the video. It wasn’t really tea. It was just water that I put in Sammy’s plastic teapot from the tap in the kitchen. About halfway through the movie, Tutti got out of bed and came down and sat on the couch with us to watch the movie. Sammy gave her some tea.
Now it’s ten o’clock and the Johos are at the door and I am sitting on the toilet. The Johos are saying something to Tutti about world events. They ask Tutti what she thinks about recent world events. Tutti says she knows nothing about recent world events. This is true. Neither Tutti nor I knows anything about recent world events.
Tutti tells the Johos we are a Catholic family and that she has to go out now because she has a dentist appointment. I come out of the bathroom and go into the kitchen. I can see the Johos standing in our driveway. There are three of them. They are deciding which houses they still need to visit. One of them is talking to the other two and pointing. The other two are looking where the other one is pointing.
“Bloody Johos,” Tutti says. She looks at me. “Do you agree?”
~
Tutti says, “What are those things on your knees?”
I look at my knees. “What things?” I say.
“Those little scabs,” Tutti says. “Why do you have those little scabs on your knees?”
“I always get those,” I say. “Every year. Usually they go away.”
Tutti looks at my knees. “What is it?” she says.
“Psoriasis?”
“I guess so,” I say.
“Are you going to get psoriasis like your dad?” she says. “You’re getting more and more like your dad every day.”
~
I have all my clothes on except for my socks. I pick some black socks out from my sock drawer. I unball the socks and sit down on the edge of the bed. I pull one sock on. I sit on the edge of the bed, going up and down a little because of Sammy jumping on the bed behind me. After a couple of minutes, Sammy lies down on the bed and starts to cry.
Tutti comes into the bedroom and tells Sammy to quit crying.
“Cut it out,” she says. She stands in front of the mirror, brushing her hair.
When we get outside, it’s raining, and the rain is freezing onto the trees. Sammy’s got an apple. I put him in his car seat and he sits in the backseat eating his apple.