Girlhearts Read online

  “She looks like she is,” I said.

  “Yeah, she’s one of those people, she’s got it, but”—he tapped his fists together—“she doesn’t know it. She’s not showing up yet. So shy. Kind of … hiding. Know what I’m saying? I call her my ‘artichoke sister.’”

  “You mean, like, the layers?”

  “Right. All there, only you can’t see what’s under them.”

  “You like her a lot,” I said.

  “Well … yeah. She’s my sister. Also happens to be one of my favorite people in the world.”

  I fell silent, wondering what it must be like to have a brother. Not just any brother, either, but one who adored you.

  “And what about you?” he said. “Who are you?”

  “Oh … me. I’m Sarabeth Silver.”

  “Little white girl, is that all you can say? Your name? Are you another artichoke child? Say something else. Tell me more,” he demanded.

  I stared at him, thick-tongued, my snowball heart crunching inside me. “Not much to tell,” I managed to say. “No sisters. No broth—”

  Then the bell rang, and we both stood up. I went down the risers next to him, in step with him, and once he reached out to keep me from slipping on a snow-slick place, and all that seemed like enough happiness for one day and, really, more than enough.

  FIFTEEN

  Saturday morning, before I was out of bed, Billy was in the living room working out. Lying on the couch, the covers half over my head, I listened to him counting off push-ups. A few days before, Cynthia and I had turned the couch around so that it faced the wall. “From here to the wall, this space is yours,” Cynthia said, her hands on the back of the couch. “Now you have a room of your own.” She made a little face. “Well, sort of. I wish it was a lot better.”

  “No, it’s great,” I said. “Thank you.”

  Billy wasn’t happy about the change. This had been his couch, his place to have a beer, read the paper, and watch TV. It had been his I’m-not-an-army-man-now-just-a-regular-guy place.

  “Me, I get to sit there by invitation only,” Cynthia used to joke. Now nobody got to sit there or sleep there or sprawl there except me. It was my place. I did everything there. Listened to music, read, did homework there—when I did it. I kept all my private things in that space, close by me.

  “Billy!” Cynthia yelled from the bedroom.

  “What?” He was running in place now.

  “Do you have to do that?”

  “Yes, I do.” He ran harder, pounded louder.

  He was home for the weekend. The first thing he always did was change from army fatigues into jeans and an old shirt. The next thing was pick up Darren and throw him in the air a few dozen times. I always liked Billy most when he played with the baby.

  “Billy, please stop!” Cynthia called. “That’s driving me mad, and probably all our neighbors, too.”

  He kept on jumping around, and I lay there waiting for him to leave so I could get up, and thinking of Mom, little bits of memory.

  Something smelled really good. Mom, are you actually cooking? I said, but the windows were rattling, and she was worried that it was a storm. I’ll see, I said. Then my eyes opened, and I sat up, surprised that I’d slept.

  Cynthia appeared, carrying Darren in his pj’s. “Billy!”

  Billy stopped running and wiped his face with a towel. “Cyn, what’s the problem?”

  I slipped down under the blankets again while they argued. Finally Billy went off to take a shower, and Cynthia carried Darren into the kitchen. I got up and folded my blankets. While I was digging around for clothes, Billy came out of the shower, wrapped in a towel.

  “Get dressed, will you please,” Cynthia said. She was hanging Darren’s laundry on a rack over the heating vent. “Don’t go around like that! Anyway, I want to go out for a walk, so you need to watch Darren.”

  “How long are you going to be gone?” Billy said. “I have a pool game with Mark.”

  “I’ll watch the baby, Cynthia,” I said on my way to take a shower.

  Cynthia didn’t answer. Not a surprise. She hardly let me do anything for Darren. Mom and I had noticed her possessiveness with him a long time ago, and we’d talked about it. Mom’s theory had been that Cynthia was overprotective of the baby because it had taken her so many years to get pregnant.

  “She said she’ll watch Darren,” Billy said to Cynthia. She—that was me. In the weeks that I’d been living with him and Cynthia, he’d almost stopped calling me by my name.

  Before I even got the bathroom door shut, I heard them arguing again. I was hoping it would be over by the time I was dressed, but as I came out of the bathroom, I heard Cynthia yelling, “This is a mess! A mess!”

  Did she mean the kitchen? Maybe. Maybe not. Her bedroom was a mess, too. The whole place was pretty much a mess, no matter how hard we tried to keep it neat. There was another kind of mess, too, mornings when she drove me to school—the mess of us rushing to get dressed, and get the baby ready, and all of us downstairs and into the car. Some mornings, Cynthia didn’t make it out of her pj’s, just pulled on a jacket and went out.

  The day before had been one of those mornings, only worse. She ran out barefoot, Darren in her arms. “I’ll go back for your shoes,” I said. There was snow on the ground. But she told me not to bother and barefooted the gas pedal all the way across town.

  Later that day, Cynthia and Billy made up their quarrel and went out together with the baby. “We’ll be awhile,” Cynthia said. “Why don’t you call one of your friends? Don’t hang around alone.”

  “I won’t,” I said. I didn’t tell her that I knew everyone was busy this weekend. Asa’s parents were having a family party, Grant had gone away the night before with her mother and stepfather to ski in Vermont, Jen had to baby-sit about a dozen of her little siblings—actually, only two of them—and Patty had said something about visiting a cousin in Connecticut.

  Patty had been a little vague, though, so I called her and got lucky. She answered the phone. “You’re home!” I said.

  “Yes, I am. We didn’t go. Want to do something? Want to meet at the mall? I need to get out of here. You’d be doing me a big favor.”

  We agreed to meet in an hour. I went right out to catch a bus. A bulky woman carrying a shopping bag sat down next to me. She was panting, that kind of wheezy breathing that comes from years of smoking.

  “You shouldn’t slump like that, dear,” she wheezed, pouring hot cigarette breath over me.

  I nodded. I’d learned in these past weeks that if I didn’t want to talk, I didn’t have to. All I had to do was nod, and most people were satisfied.

  “Try not to look so all-around droopy,” the woman said. “Try to have a more peppy-looking face; you’ll have more friends.”

  I nodded again, thinking that if advice was money, I’d be rich. If it was food, I’d be fat. If it was beauty, hands down I’d be Miss Teenage America.

  It seemed as if everyone I knew, plus 90 percent of their relatives, had taken turns giving me advice about grieving, getting over grief, getting healthy, getting with it, and getting on with my life. I’d been told I needed quiet and stimulation, company and solitude, exercise and sleep, vitamins C, A, and E, echinacea—whatever that was—deep breathing, tai chi, jogging, guts, and courage. Lots of courage. And talk. Lots of talk. I’d been told that time would heal my heart, that all wounds eventually closed, and someday all this would seem like a bad dream.

  It was a shopping list for grief. Take three with aspirin. I wasn’t surprised when teachers and friends gave me advice, or even friends of friends, but when strangers started pitching in, it made me wonder if there was a sign on my forehead begging for advice that everyone could see, except me.

  “And now I’m going to tell you something else,” the woman wheezed.

  I knew she was going to do that.

  “Whatsoever is bothering you—and don’t say nothing, because I know there is; I’ve got that quality of seeing into
somebody’s head—whatsoever, I say, do it your own way.” Then, maybe to make sure I was taking this in properly, she pinched my arm hard.

  When I met Patty and told her about the woman on the bus, she laughed. “It’s always easy to tell other people things. Don’t let it throw you, Sarabeth.”

  We shopped for a while. Patty bought socks and a few other things; then we went into the bookstore. Patty plucked a book off the NEW ARRIVALS shelf. “I saw this guy on TV the other night. He’s so funny. He could probably make even my stepfather laugh.”

  “He has confidence in himself, I bet.” I was thinking about that woman, how she’d given me advice with complete assurance that she was right and should tell me what she thought. “Where do you get confidence like that?” I said to Patty. “Like this guy on TV? Like the woman on the bus? Okay, he’s got talent, but what about her? I would never have the confidence to tell a stranger how to live her life. I wouldn’t dream of doing that.”

  “That’s because you’re a rational being, Sarabeth.”

  “And that’s a complete illusion, Patty.” We wandered through the bookstore aisles. “You always make me sound better than I am. If confidence was for sale, hey, I’d be first in line. I could use a bucketful, but I’d settle for even a pinch.”

  “You’re doing it again,” Patty said, stopping at the poetry section. “Putting yourself down.” She took a book off the shelf and turned it over to show me a picture of the author.

  I looked over her shoulder. For once, Patty was wrong. I wasn’t putting myself down. I had lost my confidence. There was nothing that I was sure about, nothing I knew absolutely, anymore. Well, no, there was one thing. I knew I wanted Mom back. That was it, the sum of everything I was clear about. Everything else in my life was just muddle and confusion.

  SIXTEEN

  To get to Travisino’s office in the Veterans Hospital, which I didn’t want to get to, never wanted to get to, but was obliged to get to, I took two buses up to Trowbridge Hospital on Seneca Road. If Travisino’s office had been anywhere else, I might not have hated going there so much.

  Nothing had changed since the day Chester Jay drove me there six weeks earlier. There was the same big green sign, TROWBRIDGE HOSPITAL, and the same maple trees lining the same snow-spattered road. And there was the same looming brick building and the same door I’d walked through. And if I went inside, I could find the same room where I’d seen the little lump of Mom in the bed, only someone else would be in it now.

  The Vets Hospital was on a road behind Trowbridge. Listening to Chester Jay, I’d had the idea that it was some great place. Maybe for him. I entered a back door opening into a dim corridor that always smelled faintly of soggy garbage. I took an elevator to the third floor, walked down a long hall, opened Travisino’s door, and looked in.

  “Sarabeth! Come on in!” He always acted happy to see me, as if he were my uncle and not my social worker. “Sit down. Tell me something,” he said. “Let’s talk! How was your week?”

  “Okay. Why is your office so cold?”

  “It’s cold outside, and this is an old building.” Then he got down to business, which, according to him, was to guide me through “the grieving process.” Which sounded like some sort of long dark tunnel. And maybe it was. “Last time you were here, we were talking about ways of knowing things,” he said. “Remember?”

  “Yes.”

  “In the head and in the belly. And we were saying the belly is the real place of feeling, and not the heart, like people always say.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” I said, walking around the office. “Only we weren’t saying it. You were saying it.”

  “Human beings get trapped in their minds; they construct ideas and fit their emotions into the ideas. But real things happen, which is called ‘experiential knowledge,’ and from this kind of knowledge, we construct, if we’re healthy, other modes of thought.”

  Listening to Travisino talk this way was like being trapped in mud. Pull out one foot and the other foot sucks you down even deeper. But I couldn’t help thinking that it was too bad I couldn’t bring some of these words home to Mom. She’d love experiential. She was a sucker for big words. “College word,” she’d say gleefully, and she’d scribble it on a scrap of paper and throw it in a drawer with the other scraps with words like dour and voracious and multitudinous.

  I looked out the window at the piles of snow. The last time I’d been here, Travisino had worked me over with tough love, and he went at it again. “Sarabeth, this ‘Yeah, yeah’ stuff is telling me you’re depressed, you’re mad, really mad.”

  “I’m not!”

  “And we both know why. You’re mad at your mother for dying. Simple as that. Listen, you can admit it. Nobody’ll put you in jail for being angry about her deserting you.”

  “Deserting me?” I rapped my knuckles against the cold window. “That’s what you call what happened to my mother?”

  “She dumped you; she left you alone in the world.” He kept at it until, just to shut him up, I said what he wanted to hear.

  “Okay, you’re right, I’m mad at her. I’m insanely furious. Is that better? Do you feel better now?”

  “You’re the one who’s going to feel better,” he said, swiveling in his chair. “You’re speaking truth; these are natural feelings. Why shouldn’t you feel mad? She should have taken better care of herself. She should have gone to a doctor when she felt so crummy. She should have—”

  “We didn’t have the money for a doctor. Don’t you know anything, you stupid man!” I leaned my forehead against the window, wishing I could push through the glass, just spread my arms and go … somewhere. Anywhere.

  The night before, late, Darren had been crying, and I’d heard Cynthia soothing him back to sleep. “Sssh, little bear, little sweetheart, little darling, Mama’s precious. Sssh, little one, go to sleep,” she sang, “little most beautiful baby in the world, little sweetheart, Mama’s precious, pretty darling.” In the darkness, I had listened to every word of love and hated it. It was awful how much I’d hated it, awful to be jealous of a baby.

  Now Travisino was talking about dreams and how they could help us understand ourselves. I tried not to listen. Did he think I was going to tell him about my dreams? Never. Dreams in which I kicked and hit people, punched walls, and wailed as if my heart was breaking all over again. The next day, I was always tired from one of these dreams.

  I’d been tired all day today, and now I was trembling, and I heard myself saying, “You’re right, it was crappy of Mom to die. She shouldn’t have done it; she shouldn’t have left me! No, she shouldn’t have!”

  I hated Travisino for getting me to crack like that, but he was nearly ecstatic over it. “That’s a breakthrough, Sarabeth! That’s great! You’re going to feel so much better after this.”

  “Oh right, just great,” I said, trying to get back the cool, sarcastic tone. I sat and draped one leg over the arm of the chair. “Maybe we’re both certifiable.” He leaned across the desk, looking interested. “Your saying I should be mad at her—that’s crazy. And me agreeing—even crazier. As if she planned her death, did it like any chore.”

  He started explaining that his saying Mom deserted me was a metaphor for an emotion, that we both knew it wasn’t logical and I didn’t have to be ashamed of my feelings, et cetera, et cetera. I wasn’t listening. I was thinking that the truth was that I could see Mom making a plan, saying to herself, Time to die, Jane, and then congratulating herself on a job well done and thinking, That should teach that daughter of mine something about real life.

  She was always so afraid I’d repeat her life, get swept away by bad luck, bad timing, or bad choices. But I was me, not her. More and more, it had irritated me the way she hovered over me.

  You don’t have that problem anymore, so quit whining.

  Mom, quit butting in, I’m just stating the facts. You could be a pain, and you know it.

  It was for your own good. Look at the way you’re talking. I didn’t brin
g you up to be a smart aleck!

  The word is diss, Mom, and if you don’t like it, stop hanging around me. Go away and be dead. Leave me alone!

  “What?” Travisino said. “What’d you say, Sarabeth?”

  I shrugged and put on a smile. “I was telling Mom to get out of my head and be dead.” I couldn’t hold the smile. I wanted those words back. Tears welled in my eyes. Travisino reached across his desk and, for once, he didn’t say anything, just patted my hand.

  SEVENTEEN

  “We came over to get some things for Sarabeth from her house and figure out what we’re going to do with the rest,” Leo said to Dolly Krall, “but there’s a lock on the door over there, and we can’t get in.”

  “That’s right,” she said. “How are you, Sarabeth?”

  “Okay,” I said. “How about you?”

  “Me, I’m always good.” She was standing in her doorway, filling it with her bulk. “I’m having the place painted, and I don’t want any old anyone going in there, so I locked it up.”

  “Painted,” I said, and before I could stop myself, I added stupidly, “You’re doing that for us?”

  “No, honey, not for you. There ain’t any more us, remember? Your mom’s gone. You’re not living there anymore. You haven’t been there for weeks. I’ve got it rented out to real nice people. They’re paying for a new kitchen floor themselves, right out of their own pocket. Soon as it’s done, they’re moving in.”

  “You rented the place?” Leo blew on his hands. We were deep in a cold snap, and he’d left his gloves in the truck. “I thought Jane was paid up a month ahead, right to the end of the year.”

  “What are you saying?” Dolly asked.

  “Renting the place when it’s still legally Sarabeth’s, that’s not exactly kosher,” Leo said.

  Dolly’s hands snapped onto her hips. “The circumstances, sir! I got people wanting to move in, I ain’t turning customers away. I’m a businesswoman. And here’s something else: I didn’t get a month’s notice from anyone. And you talk about legal,” she ended disgustedly.