“Why didn’t you tell me?” Aunt Frances asked. She said, “You should tell me when the help is unhappy. Now we’re missing silver, but those women can’t get far in the jeep.”
In all of the houses I lived in, silver went missing.
Some of the help stole cars.
THE BIG HOUSE
“BUT NEXT TIME, TELL me,” Aunt Frances said. “Tell me if you think your nonna is failing — forget the nurses. Use the phone. Your uncle Billy has the keys to the house, and when the time comes, he wants to lock it.”
A year, another year, summers passed, yet they still made up a bed for me next to Nonna on the chance she could be comforted with company. Poor, forlorn Nonna! In a crib for old babies, railed and castered and made up with blankets no matter it was ninety damp degrees outside.
“Feel your grandmother’s forehead,” Miss O’Boyle said. “Feel how cold she is!”
But what I felt was soft and cared for, an unnaturally healthy grandma, clear spittle on her chin and wearing a bib, sometimes needing to be wiped. Her eyes were almost always open and wetly watching me at night.
Miss O’Boyle said, “She doesn’t want to miss what’s left.”
Nonna’s eyes showed interest when I told her Arlette stories. How Arlette ate catsup on white bread and gave me eggs for dinner and wouldn’t sit with me but ate standing up looking out at the river. Arlette’s house was by the river and was the color of the river, a house — really a shack — near a mud-brown gush ridden by kids in tires near collapse. These river-riders waved to the passing houses; they spun in greetings to the bankside: hello, good-bye, hello, good-bye. But most people didn’t wave back; they went on hosing down the porch; they went on fishing or working underneath the hoods of beat-up cars or burning trash or adding to the compost eggshells and coffee grinds — especially coffee grinds. I was too young for coffee when Uncle Billy first had Arthur take me to Arlette’s house. Mother was sick and needed quiet, “a little bit of Florida” was what Uncle Billy called it, that place where sad people went for cures. At Arlette’s there were different rules and different smells, mostly coffee. Everyone on the river drank a lot of it. The next-door mother spilled it in her baby’s bottle to flavor the milk as a kindness — besides, what other kindness could she show her baby when she was taking in laundry, taking in dogs, taking in other mothers’ toddlers. She kept her own diapered on a staked leash in the yard where it walked the rope taut, fell and walked, wagging a nippled-bottle in its teeth, or else it slept. Under the blaring sky the baby slept — dirt for a pillow at the mother’s house next door, one in a close row of three on the river. Horseflies following everywhere here and sounds that waked me, late-at-night plashes of thrown objects — bodies, large animals, bedroom furniture? I was ten when I consented to stay at Arlette’s but not so young I could sleep through such clamor. The question was who was fighting? Whoever had such energy late at night … I had thought only Mother, but Arlette, glowering the counter clean, said it was the neighbors in the lilac-colored house. “Those stupid people make noise like that.” She said, “They fight all the time.”
Noise abrupt as light, and just as startling for when it came, came late in calmed weather with not even enough heat to explain the rage in the way doors were closed. “All the time,” Arlette said, “they are screaming and clunking and gunning their car.” She said, “They used to hear me.” No one but Arlette in Arlette’s house now, not so much as a picture to prove a Walter existed, some man so big she could hear him clear his throat and spit from as far away as the road.
And why not a husband, except that Arlette was as pretty as a dog-chew — Mother had said. No fun! Done for the day, Arlette stood stunned in the drone of the TV set, forgetting I was even there, despite my croupy breathing. … I didn’t want to go to bed ever, but at Arlette’s every door gave way to where she was. Her back was to the kitchen table and the lineup of old appliances. Our dinner dishes were drying on a dishtowel; the armless chairs were seat-stacked on the table, and the speckled floor was washed. Every night Arlette did this: She did for her house what she had done every day for others. I watched, being quiet, so that I might have company.
Nonna’s wide-awake company, wet eyes on me!
I was thoughtless.
I wasn’t thinking of Nonna when I felt my way through the dead-of-night dark to say I’m home, Nonna. I’ll sleep here if you’d like. Me dressed and smelling of where I had been — some bar, some party, some car with boys.
I grew harder at Nonna’s; I grew older — fifteen.
“Where have you been?” from Miss O’Boyle to me come home — blurry, flushed, plucked. This was the beginning of boys, of my own Bobs and Ricks, and I was late coming home.
Miss O’Boyle said, “You’re just like your mother.”
“You don’t even know her,” I said, but then neither did I: only one visit to the San before she checked out with some Walter.
Miss O’Boyle said, “I know all about her.”
I only knew Mother was somewhere warm with a man she had met while resting. His name I forget, but he had been resting, too, had been a patient, too, if that was the right word for what they had been at the San.
I called Miss O’Boyle a bitch, and in private, a fucking bitch, but what did I call those boys — young men, beaux? — waiting in long cars, most often not theirs, waiting or leaning toward the passenger’s door, saying to me, “Don’t let the cold get in,” saying, “Hurry. We’re already late.”
Sometimes I let a boy wait. Sometimes I never went out but from a far-off window, undetected, watched this boy go about his waiting. I watched what I could see of him, one of those guys who yet never rang the bell for me but waited motionless in the warm car. Perhaps his horn sounded faintly, and the wind took up the noise.
“Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes,” I called out to the first serious man, a creepy boy in business school, I begged, “Please, wait!”
“You bring the boy in the room with you. Did you ever think of that?” This from Miss O’Boyle, Miss O’Boyle on some nights, who was sleeping in the chair but sleeping lightly and on her feet at my approach, largely waiting, saying, “Slow down, turn on the light, I want to see you!”
“Why?”
“Your aunt Frances, that’s why.”
“Do you have anything you want to tell me?” Aunt Frances asked, and Uncle Billy, “Is there anything you have to say? Are you meeting your curfew? Do you even have a curfew? You should not go out on school nights and on the weekends in by eleven. Eleven, twelve. We have to be able to trust you if you want to stay at the Big House. Do you think we can? Can we trust you?” Aunt Frances had the Garden Club and seats on boards in the city, yet she felt obliged to ask, “Is there anything we should know?”
I did not tell — I would not ever tell of what was spoken, of what was understood in the dark of Nonna’s room when, on her side, she was watching. She made an answering sound to the noise I was making. She hissed or spit or slapped the bed by which perhaps she meant, “Don’t do that! It isn’t nice.” But usually Nonna held still and watched; I saw the wetness in her eyes when somehow she knew where my hand was.
“Wind, breakage, often water, booming ice. “Do you hear it?” I asked Nonna.
I rushed to Nonna’s bed and was bending to her mouth to see, was she breathing, when she opened her eyes and saw me, and I was ashamed, jolted, almost excited. What was there in it for me if she died? Drama! I answered. Experience!