Missing Pieces Read online

  “I’ve had a lot of things on my mind. I couldn’t concentrate on the project.”

  “Try harder, Jessie, maybe you’ll come up with an excuse Mr. Novak and Mrs. Scher will really like.” She stared at me, frowning. I felt that she was looking into my mind, like looking into a smudged window. Any moment now, she’d see Jack Kettle in there.

  “I’m worried about you,” she said.

  “Anyway, I don’t like any of my ideas.”

  “Why don’t you interview your aunt Zis?”

  “I don’t see any buildings or schools that have been named after her.”

  “She’s old, she has a lot of stories, I mean she’s like history herself.”

  It wasn’t a bad idea, but if Aunt Zis couldn’t remember what happened yesterday, how was she going to remember eighty years ago?

  We parted at Ferris Avenue. I called Aunt Zis from an outside phone booth. I’d decided to stop by the diner where my mother worked. Maybe she’d have an idea for me. “Checking in,” I said to Aunt Zis.

  “Good girl,” she said.

  “Yeah, I’m good. Are you?” I made her laugh.

  The rain was coming down hard and by the time I got to the diner, I was soaked.

  “There she is,” Randy, the cook, said when I walked in. He was cleaning the grill behind the counter. “How are you, doll?”

  “Wet.” I hung my jacket on one of the metal trees. Three men were sitting at the counter, leaning over cups of coffee. “Where’s my mother?”

  “She’ll be right out. Take yourself a seat, I’ll make you something.”

  I dried my hair with paper napkins. Randy brought me a plate of toast and a cup of cocoa with whipped cream. “You do toast better than anyone in the entire world,” I said, taking a big bite. “Crisp around the edges and soft with melted butter in the middle.”

  “You’re a funny one.” He gave my head a swipe with his apron.

  I took out my pocket dictionary and started working on an assignment for Mrs. Scher, to look up four words. “With at least two syllables,” she’d said, to keep the jokers among us in check. I looked up three D words—duplicity, discretion, and derision. I knew them, but it was interesting to check them out, anyway. Duplicity. Hypocritical cunning or deception. Double-dealing. Related to the word duplication.

  I had a few uncomfortable thoughts about Jack Kettle and my own duplicity. Or was it discretion? I didn’t want to hurt Meadow’s feelings. Sure, Jessie. How about trying again? Maybe you’ll come up with an excuse you’ll like.

  My fourth word was myrtle. A relief. No guilt associated with that. An aromatic shrub with white, pink, or blue flowers and little berries. That sounded a lot better than “cow town.”

  “What are you doing?” My mother sat down next to me. “I didn’t know you were stopping by. Did you call home?”

  “Yeah. She’s there. She’s fine. I told her I’d be a little late. Ma, I need help with a project that’s due next week. You have to give me an idea for it.”

  “Me, Jess?” Her eyes roamed for customers who might want her. “I have enough trouble getting ideas for myself. When did you get this project? Did the teacher give you enough time on it?”

  “Yes, but I’ve been busy.”

  “With what? What’s more important than school?” She snapped her fingers in my face.

  I pushed her hand away. “Don’t do that. I’ve had telephone calls to make.”

  “Schoolwork first. After that, you talk to friends.”

  “I wasn’t talking to friends, I wouldn’t use that as a reason. I was calling those people. The Wellses.”

  “I thought we agreed you weren’t going to do that.”

  “No, we didn’t agree on that, we didn’t agree on anything. I wanted to call them, and you didn’t want me to, but I did. And I found a cousin of James Wells’s.”

  She stood up, then she sat down again.

  “His name is Dennis Wells,” I said.

  “I know,” she said.

  “What do you mean, you know?”

  “I know, Jessie. I know the guy. Dennis Wells.”

  “You know him? You know he’s James Wells’s cousin? You told me we didn’t have any Wells relatives.”

  She fussed with the collar of her blouse. It was a pink one she wore only to work. She didn’t like the color pink, but all the waitresses had to wear it. “Well, Jess, I thought there was nothing about him that could possibly interest you.”

  “How would you know that?”

  “Judgment call. I make them all the time. That’s what being a parent means. Okay?”

  “No. I don’t like this.” My stomach was clenched. “You’re always saying I should make up my own mind about stuff.” I took a gulp of cocoa. “How can I do that if you keep things from me? What else have you kept from me?”

  “Nothing. What is this? What do you want me to tell you? I’ll tell you.”

  “I want to know about my family. I have a right to know about my own family.”

  “And you do know. Your own family is right here. You, me, and Aunt Zis. That’s your family!” She put her hand hard over mine. “Jessie, I never bad-mouthed anyone to you. Did I ever—”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I’m trying to tell you something. I’m trying to tell you that there are things you don’t know—”

  “What things? If I don’t know, I want to know.”

  “Never mind. I don’t like to make a fuss about something that’s over with.”

  “What is it I don’t know, Maribeth?”

  “Too many things, too numerous to mention.”

  I pulled my hand out from under hers. “Are you talking about James Wells?”

  She sat back and folded her arms. “Actually, no. Dennis Wells.”

  “What about him?”

  “Come on, it’s the past. Let it be. I didn’t tell you some things because I didn’t want you to feel bad. If people did things that weren’t so great, and if they didn’t care about you, I wasn’t going to let on to you. What for? Why should a little child be hurt by knowing—”

  “I’m not your little child anymore, Ma.” I pushed the cup away. “I’m not your adorable puppet.”

  “Jessie, you are so far from being anyone’s puppet—”

  “Then just tell me, what are the things I don’t know?”

  She stood up and looked around. “Maybe we should wait until we’re home for this.”

  “You’ll forget, or you won’t be there, or you’ll be too busy.”

  She bent over, talking into my face, almost whispering. “Okay, listen. When James Wells left, when we needed help, Dennis Wells never stretched out a hand. Not even a finger. He never even called me, not once.” Her hand dug into my shoulder. “In some ways, I think that’s the worst. Didn’t even call and say, ‘Maribeth, real sorry about what happened over there, and if I can help you in some way—’”

  “Maybe he didn’t know.”

  “He knew. I ran into him one day. You were with me. You wouldn’t remember, you were too little. I told him about James Wells and he said he was sorry to hear it. That was it. That was the last I ever heard from him.”

  I chewed my lip. “Ma. This is the big revelation we had to be home for me to hear? You always say we take care of ourselves, so what difference does it make?”

  “You’re right, no difference. We did take care of ourselves. We did it! I did it and your aunt did it! No one else. That’s my point. We took care of you, we didn’t let anything hurt you, we loved you, you were the most important thing in our lives—”

  “Ma, you’re making speeches.”

  “Well, I’m sorry, Jessie! I guess you don’t understand what a little sympathy would have meant at that moment in my life.” I felt the heat of her hand on my shoulder. “I was young. I wasn’t even nineteen. Do you know how young that is, Jessie? Sure, I had Aunt Zis. God bless her. God bless her! What would I have done without her, but she was already seventy. It was scary. A b
aby, an old woman, and me.”

  “But it’s okay now, and it happened a long time ago. Can’t you forget it?”

  “Why should I? I don’t carry grudges, but that doesn’t mean I don’t remember.”

  “So what are you saying, Ma? You’re going to be mad if I go see Dennis Wells?”

  “Now you’re going to go see him? Why would you want to do that? That man doesn’t have a good heart! Haven’t I just been telling you—”

  “Maybe I’d like to find out for myself, instead of having my life always directed by you.”

  Her cheeks flared with spots of color. She walked away, to the end of the counter, and began filling sugar jars from a brown bag. I followed her. The sugar flowed into the first jar in a pure white pyramid, and she shook it down and poured in more, then twisted on the metal cap with a harsh grating sound.

  Randy, who was working at the grill, tossed a fried egg into the air and slid a slice of toast under it. “How about that, Jessie?” he called.

  “The stupid egg trick again?” my mother said.

  “Ma. I just want to ask him a few more things about James Wells. Whatever he knows, which I don’t think is that much.”

  “Okay, Jessie, that’s cool. Do what you want, just leave me out of it.”

  “You’re not in it, Ma.”

  She looked at me. “That’s what you think? I’m not in it? Thank you so much, after all these years.” She took the tray of filled sugar jars and walked away.

  EIGHTEEN

  Station WJES

  “Where are you two going, Aaron?” I looked up from the notes I was scribbling on three-by-five cards. It was a rainy Saturday afternoon.

  “Movies,” Aaron mumbled around his pipe. “You want to come with us, honey?”

  “No, she doesn’t,” my mother said. She was big in a yellow slicker and a floppy rain hat.

  “How do you know that?” I said.

  She didn’t answer me. “Let’s go, Aaron.” He smiled sorrowfully at me and followed her to the door.

  “And good-bye to you, too, lovely person, marvelous human being, Maribeth.” The door slammed. I ripped a card in half. Be calm. I ripped it in half again. Come on, you’ve had fights with her before.

  Yes, but not like this one. This wasn’t one of our quickie we-scream-we-shout-we-make-up-with-a-big-hug-and-kiss fights. This had been going on for over a week. Ten days. All I got from my mother these days were cold looks and hard words. And every time we talked, we ended in the same place—my mother wanting one thing and me wanting another, and neither one of us giving an inch.

  This wasn’t a temporary standoff. It was an impasse, which I understood to mean an impossible place to get by or past or around or through. Like being on a mountain deep in snow and no way over the top. The Donner Pass. Snowed in for the winter, no food, and what was the outcome of that? Cannibalism. The Donner Pass people ate each other. I could see why. My mother and I were already chewing away on each other.

  “Aunt Zis, ready?” I said. Out of sheer desperation I’d decided to take Meadow’s advice and interview her.

  “I’ve been ready for ten minutes.” She was sitting near the window by the dining room table, and in the gray rainy light, with her hands folded in her lap, she looked almost like a girl.

  “Let’s do a little run-through.” I turned on the tape recorder. “Just ignore this. You can pretend I’m Diane Sawyer or Connie Chung. Only a few million people will hear this.”

  She rapped my hand. “Don’t start making jokes. You have to do a good job on this for your class.”

  “With your help …” Was I being too optimistic? I looked at one of my three-by-fives. I had scribbled a dozen questions, but the real question was, what would she remember?

  “Okay, here’s how it’s going to go. I’ll start by saying something like, ‘Good afternoon, radio audience, this is station WJES, and I’m Jessie Wells, and in our—’”

  “Too many ands,” Aunt Zis interrupted.

  I cleared my throat, wondering if it was a bad decision to do this like a radio interview on tape. At least, if I wrote it out, I could fake it a little.

  “Jessie! You’re dreaming.” Aunt Zis gave me another rap on the hand.

  “Oh, sorry … so then I’ll say, ‘and in our studio today for our Interviews with Older People series is my distinguished guest, blah blah blah, okay, Aunt Zis? Simple introduction, then I say something about you’ll be telling us stories of the past, and off we go. Got it?”

  She nodded.

  I did my intro, then the first question. “Ms. Young, I believe you went to the inauguration of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt?”

  “I did. It was 1933, and I took the train to Washington. There were thousands of people there. They were there for the inauguration, and they were there to demonstrate.”

  “Why?”

  “Why! Don’t you know that was the Great Depression? Millions of people were hungry and out of work, and they wanted the president to do something.”

  “Anything else you want to tell us about that, Ms. Young?”

  “Do you have to call me that, Jessie? Call me Aunt Zis.”

  “This is supposed to be professional. If you went on a radio show, would they call you Aunt Zis?”

  “Larry King would.”

  “When you go on Larry King, you can be Aunt Zis. Ms. Young, would you tell our listeners about growing up in New York City more than eight decades ago?”

  “What can I tell you? My family was poor, but we children always had good fresh food.”

  “What kind of food?”

  “Food! My mother made stews. We ate soup. My father took us across the Brooklyn Bridge to get fresh milk. Brooklyn was all farms then. We went out to the barn with the farmer, and she milked the cow for us herself.”

  Aunt Zis was looking out the window, as if Brooklyn was out there. She started naming all the streets she’d lived on in New York City. “One fifty-nine Orchard Street, Fifteen Grand Avenue, just off the Bowery, Eighty Avenue A, near the river …” Then she told how long it took to go by train from Grand Central Station up the Hudson River to Utica, where she had a cousin. She gave the price of bread (five cents a loaf), how much a dozen eggs cost (fifteen cents), and what she’d earned on her first job (thirty-five cents an hour).

  Half an hour earlier, she’d been frantically trying to remember where she’d left her house keys. Now she was remembering things from more than half a century ago.

  Listening to her tell her stories, I realized that even though she might not remember what day it was, she had so much else stored away in her mind. Things she’d done and seen and thought about. It was as if there was a house she’d once lived in, complete with all its furnishings, rugs, dishes, drapes, and pictures, and no matter where she was, she could walk into the house at any time, touch things, look at them, enjoy them.

  I jotted notes for some closing remarks. She started talking about the Great Depression again. “People wrote songs about it. ‘Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?’ I remember that one. There were soup lines. Some people had nothing, but a lot of people were still okay. I was. I had a job. I remember how guilty I felt every Sunday morning when I treated myself to my favorite breakfast. Pancakes with strawberries, the same thing I wanted that morning your father came back. I’d gone to the market to buy strawberries. By the time I got back, he was gone again.”

  “James Wells?” I said. “He came here?”

  Aunt Zis’s soft thin cheeks trembled. “What?”

  “You said my father came back here?”

  She blinked and pushed the tape recorder away. “You’re asking me too many questions.”

  “Aunt Zis. No more questions. Just answer that one, okay?”

  “I’m tired,” she said.

  “Aunt Zis.” I hugged her, and I put my head against her chest the way I used to when I was small. “When did James Wells come back?” I asked softly.

  She didn’t answer.

  I heard her h
eart. Thumpa-a thumpa-a thumpa-a. “Why did he come back, why did he do that?”

  Thumpa-a thumpa-a thumpa-a …

  “I need a rest,” she said. “Let me go, Jessie. I’m going upstairs to lie down.”

  NINETEEN

  In a Heartbeat

  When I heard the car door slam, I got up and went out to the hall. It was nearly midnight. I’d been in bed, but not sleeping. Just waiting. My mother looked at me with surprise as she walked in. “You’re up late,” she said, then she sort of clamped her mouth shut.

  “I want to talk to you,” I said.

  She hung up her yellow raincoat and sat down on the window seat to take off her shoes.

  “I want to ask you something. Did James Wells ever come back here?”

  She took off one shoe, then the other. “What do you mean, come back?”

  “Come back, as in return.”

  “Who said that?”

  “Does it matter? Just answer me, please.”

  “Did Dennis Wells tell you that?”

  “No. Is it true or not, Maribeth?”

  “Zis said it, didn’t she? Why’d she say that, what did you do to her, Jessie?”

  “What did I do to her? You think I’d do something to Aunt Zis?”

  “I don’t know, Jessie. Would you?”

  My heart beat hard, thumpa-a thumpa-a, like Aunt Zis’s old heart. I had tumbled so far, from that high place where I was my mother’s adored child, who could do nothing wrong, to some other, more desolate spot, a bleak region where nothing I did was right.

  I forced myself to speak quietly. I whispered, because what I really wanted to do was scream and lash out at my mother.

  “Aunt Zis was upset when she realized what she’d said. She knew you didn’t want me to know.”

  “What did she say, what exactly are we talking about here?”

  “She said, exactly, that James Wells came back here one day, and she missed seeing him because she was out buying strawberries to put on her pancakes.”

  “Strawberries?” my mother said, as if I were making it up. She kicked her shoes toward the closet. “I don’t remember that.”