A Patchwork Planet Page 15

  “No,” I said. I wasn’t sure what she was getting at. “I just walk on in. I mean, it’s only their kitchen. Then I go down the hall to the bathroom. It’s no big deal.”

  She didn’t say anything more.

  I brought the Kool-Aid and three paper cups to the patio, with Opal trailing behind me, but then she said she wasn’t having any. She waited till I’d filled all three cups before she told me this. I felt a little put out, but I didn’t show it. I said, “Okay. What would you like instead?” She said she wasn’t thirsty. Both Hardesty kids sipped their Kool-Aid, watching Opal with round, sky-blue eyes over the rims of their cups.

  After that, I took Opal to work with me. We went first to Mrs. Alford’s, because today was the day her nephew was coming and I had promised to help him load his truck. He was hauling her husband’s tools to his cabin in West Virginia. Mrs. Alford immediately gathered Opal under her wing. “Come see the quilt of Planet Earth that I’ve been working on,” she said. “Come see the teeny tea set my granddaughters like to play with when they visit.” Opal went willingly—too willingly, I thought—not giving me a backward glance. It seemed to me she felt more comfortable with women.

  Ernie, the nephew, was a beefy, muscular guy, and we made short work of the loading. He told me most of the stuff would probably have to go elsewhere. “I live in a place the size of Aunt Jessie’s kitchen,” he said. “No way can I fit all this in! But she’s my favorite relative. I don’t want to hurt her feelings.”

  After Mrs. Alford’s, we stopped by the Rent-a-Back office, and I introduced Opal to Mrs. Dibble and a couple of the workers who happened to be there—Ray Oakley and Celeste. Mrs. Dibble invited Opal to stay and play with the copy machine while I went on my next job, but I said, “Maybe another time”—plucking a house key from the pegboard. “We’re off to visit Maud May after I pick up her mail,” I said. “I figure Opal will get a kick out of her.”

  “Well, you come by later, then,” Mrs. Dibble told Opal, and Celeste gave her a stick of sugar-free gum.

  But things didn’t go as well with Maud May as I had expected. First off, the nursing home had all these folks in wheelchairs lining the hall. I was used to them; I hadn’t thought about how they might affect Opal. She drew so close to me that her feet stumbled into mine, and she kept one finger hooked through a belt loop on my jeans. And then Maud May was in a fractious mood. Pain, I guess. She was sitting in a chair by her bed with her shiny new walker parked alongside, and, “Who’s this?” she barked when we entered the room.

  “This is my daughter, Opal. Opal, this is Ms. May.”

  “You never told me you had a daughter.”

  “I told you lots of times,” I said. In fact, maybe I hadn’t, but I didn’t want Opal to know that.

  “You absolutely did not,” Maud May said. “I haven’t turned senile quite yet, you know. What have you brought me?”

  “Mostly junk, it looks like. Bunch of catalogs and stuff. Somebody left a plant on your stoop; so I took it inside and watered it. Here’s the card that came with it.”

  “What kind of plant?” she demanded. She accepted the card, but she didn’t open it.

  “Something with white flowers. I don’t know. I put it in the sunporch with the others.”

  “Did you go in my house?” Maud May asked Opal.

  Opal nodded, still hanging on to my belt loop.

  “Did you touch anything?”

  “No, she didn’t touch anything. Who do you think she is?” I said. “Why would you make such an accusation?”

  “Good Gawd, Barnaby, simmer down,” Maud May told me. “It wasn’t an accusation. I was merely inquiring.”

  But I was mad as hell. I tossed her mail on the nightstand and said, “So anyhow. We’re leaving. What am I supposed to bring next time?”

  “More cigarettes?” she asked. She was using a meeker tone of voice now. “And that plant, besides, to brighten my room?”

  “Fine,” I said, and I walked out, with an arm around Opal’s shoulders.

  In the car, I said, “Next stop is Mr. Shank. You’re going to like Mr. Shank. He’s lonely and he loves to see kids.” My voice had a loud, fake ring to it that I couldn’t seem to get rid of.

  “Maybe I could just go back to Grandma’s,” Opal said.

  “Go back now?”

  “I could watch TV or something.”

  “Well,” I said. “All right.”

  It was almost noon, anyhow. I figured we could have lunch there and she’d get her second wind.

  At my parents’ house, I phoned Mr. Shank to push his morning appointment up to early afternoon. Then I went out to the kitchen, where Mom and Opal were mixing tuna salad. “Barnaby Gaitlin,” my mother said, “what could you have been thinking of?”

  “Huh?”

  “Taking a nine-year-old child to a nursing home!”

  “So?” I said. “You have a problem with that?”

  “She says there were people in wheelchairs everywhere she looked. Old people! A woman with a tube in her nose!”

  “Geez, Mom,” I said: “What’s the big deal? We’re keeping it a secret there’s such a thing as old age?”

  Yes, we were, evidently, because my mother threw a meaningful glance toward Opal, who kept her eyes downcast as she stirred the salad. “We’ll just let Opal stay with me the rest of the day,” Mom said. “I’ll take her to see Gram and Pop-Pop.”

  “Well, I don’t know whit you’re so het up about,” I told her. But I didn’t argue.

  I noticed a hollow feel in my car, though, for the rest of the afternoon. It seemed that just that quickly, I’d grown accustomed to Opal’s company When I was at Mr. Shank’s, I thought how she could have looked through his coin collection. And I knew she would have liked playing with Mrs. Glynn’s little dog.

  In the last days of my marriage, Opal was just reaching the stage where she recognized my face. I’d approach her crib, and she’d crow, “Ah!” and start wiggling all over and holding out her arms to be picked up. Then they left me. When I walked into the apartment after that, there wasn’t just an absence of sound; there seemed to be an antisound—a kind of, like, hole in the air.

  It had been years since I had thought about that “Ah!” of hers.

  Mom was miffed when I told her we’d have dinner at a friend’s house. “Friend?” she asked. “What kind of friend? Male or female? You might have told me earlier. Is this a person who knows how to cook? Who’ll give her fresh vegetables, and not just a Big Mac or whatnot?”

  “It’s someone who’ll serve all the major food groups,” I assured her.

  “Well, I want you to know that I’ll hold you to blame if Opal gets a tummyache,” Mom said.

  Sooner or later, I supposed, Sophia and my parents would have to meet. But I planned to put it off as long as possible.

  Opal took to Sophia right away. I knew she would. Not only had Sophia gone to some trouble over the menu (Crock-Pot Chicken Drumettes and mashed potatoes, hot fudge sundaes for dessert), but she treated Opal like company: dressed up for her, in pearls and a shiny blue dress, and offered her a special fruit drink with about a dozen maraschino cherries lined up on a swizzle stick, and asked her these courteous, hostess-type questions throughout the meal. Who had Opal’s favorite teacher been, so far? What kind of movies did Opal like to watch? What kind of books did she read? Opal answered gravely, sitting very straight in her chair.

  As we were leaving, I told Sophia, “Thanks,” and secretly squeezed her fingers. I could see the shadow where her breasts began, above her low, scooped neckline. “You coming by later?” I whispered, and she nodded and squeezed my fingers back.

  I asked Opal in the car whether she’d had a good time. “Yes,” she said. “That lady was nice.”

  “Sophia, her name is.”

  “She had a nice dress on.”

  “She liked you too,” I said.

  I wondered if Opal would report all this to Natalie. You never knew what a kid that age would consider
worthwhile mentioning.

  We fell into a pattern. Mornings, I drove over to my parents’ house for breakfast, but I let Opal stay with Mom while I went out on my jobs. Then I’d stop by the house again and have lunch. This was the most I’d seen of my ancestral home in years. It wasn’t so difficult, though. I guess having Opal there sort of watered the experience down some.

  After lunch, I’d take Opal to my place. She never did warm to the Hardesty kids, but she would watch TV with me or play a board game. The one called Life was her favorite. I found I couldn’t abide it myself. “There’s no logic to it,” I complained. “Look at this: the more kids you have, the more money you collect. It should work just the opposite! Children make you poorer, not richer.”

  Then I worried she would take that personally; she would guess I’d been less than ecstatic when Natalie learned she was pregnant. But all she said was, “I like the little plastic people.” And she set her mouth in that obstinate way she had and leaned forward to spin the arrow.

  I tried to keep my afternoon jobs to a minimum, so that I wouldn’t burden Mom with too much baby-sitting. Not that she complained. In fact, she put up a fight when I took Opal away with me in the evenings. I took her to Sophia’s for supper, and then the three of us went on an outing of some kind—down to the harbor, or one time to an Orioles game. Things like that.

  On Tuesday, Martine invited Opal and me to a birthday supper for one of her nephews. (She didn’t mention Sophia, who said that she could use a little catch-up time, anyhow.) We grilled hot dogs out in the yard; Martine rented the top floor of this rickety old house with a deep backyard. The nephews were all in jeans, but Opal, not knowing, had put on a party dress—one of her Dick and Jane things, with a long, flouncy sash that tied in a bow. That was okay, though, because Martine wore a party dress too. It made her look kind of bizarre. I had never seen her in anything but overalls, till now. This dress was pink, and too big for her or something, too wide at the shoulders and long in the hem. Her hair was pulled straight back off her forehead by a child’s blue plastic barrette in the shape of a Scottie dog, and she was wearing lipstick the same garish pink as the dress, all wrong on that ferocious little yellow face of hers. I said, “Whoa! You look great.” Which was an out-and-out lie, but her appearance was so startling that I thought it would be noticed if I didn’t make some comment. Martine just said, “Thanks.” I guess she thought she did look great.

  The only other grownups were her brother and his wife, who seemed at least ten months pregnant, and Mrs. Rufus, the landlady. We all sat on folding chairs, and the kids sat in the grass. Mrs. Rufus did most of the talking, telling a string of bloodcurdling tales about childbirth. If you listened to her awhile, you marveled that the human race hadn’t long ago died out. “But aren’t you the cool one!” she said to the sister-in-law. “You don’t even look nervous!”

  “Thanks,” Martine piped up. Apparently she thought Mrs. Rufus was talking to her. “I expected to be nervous, but actually I’m having a very good time.”

  Huh? Everybody stared at her a moment, and then Mrs. Rufus told how her fingers had swelled up like sausages when she was eight months along with her youngest. “We had to call in a plumber,” she said, “to saw my wedding ring off with a hacksaw.”

  The sister-in-law said, “Ho-hum,” and swallowed a yawn.

  The brother had brought two six-packs of beer. Although he and I were the only ones who drank any, it somehow had a sort of rowdy effect on everyone else—a phenomenon I’ve observed more than once. Pretty soon Martine and the kids were playing Prisoner’s Base, and Statues, and Simon Says, and a bunch of other games that I’d forgotten all about. Even Opal got involved. She loved it. By the time we left, she was as rumpled and sweaty as the nephews. Which made my mother throw a fit, of course, when I delivered her to the house. “How will I ever get those grass stains out?” she wailed. She should have seen Martine, if she thought Opal was dirty.

  When I reached home I phoned Sophia, and she came over. “You smell like a new-mown lawn,” she told me. I had this pleasantly tired, loose-jointed feeling. I let myself imagine how it would be if I lived this way permanently—watching my kid play with other kids in the yard, lying in bed later with a warm, sweet, generous woman.

  After I’d walked Sophia to her car and turned off all the lights, I caught the sky doing its color-change trick, which is possible at night but exceedingly rare. And I hadn’t even been trying! Maybe that was the secret, I thought. Let things come to you when they will, of their own accord. I went back to bed and slept like a baby.

  Opal was due to leave on Friday morning. Thursday evening, therefore, we planned to have a farewell dinner. First it was going to be at my parents’, but then it was switched to my brother’s. (Recently, Jeff had developed some kind of fixation about hosting all family parties.) This irked my mother no end, because Wicky wasn’t much of a cook. She wasn’t anything of a cook, if you ask me. It must have been her Wasp background. Food was just a biological necessity, and a boring one, at that.

  And then to make things worse, Mom took it into her head that we ought to invite Sophia. She didn’t actually refer to Sophia by name. She called her “that friend that you and Opal have been seeing so much of.” But she gave herself away when I said it was too short notice. “It’s already Wednesday,” I said, and Mom said, “Oh, I very much doubt Sophia will hold that against us.”

  I sent Opal a glare. Tattletale. She just gazed blandly back at me. “Shall I invite her, or will you?” Mom asked. “Which?”

  I considered saying, “Neither.” If I knew Mom, though, she would find a way of tracking down Sophia’s number; and nothing could be worse than Mom on the phone unsupervised. I said, “I will.” I wouldn’t, of course. I’d say Sophia had turned out to have a previous engagement.

  But I’d reckoned without Opal, who popped the question over supper that night. “Grandma wants you to come to my farewell dinner,” she told Sophia.

  Sophia turned from the stove, a pleased look lighting her face. “Really?” she asked me.

  I shrugged.

  “It’s going to be at my uncle’s, and Gram and Pop-Pop Kazmerow are coming too,” Opal said.

  “Your mother issued the invitation?” Sophia asked me.

  “Well, she knows it’s probably too short notice,” I said.

  “I’d love to come!”

  I sighed.

  “Would you rather I didn’t?”

  “These family things are such a drag, is all,” I told her.

  “You wouldn’t think so if you were an only child,” she said.

  I could see there was no hope she would decline the invitation.

  We went in her car, because we were the ones bringing Opal. (Mom had gone early, to try and wrestle some semblance of a meal out of Wicky’s kitchen. Dad was coming directly from work.) For two days now, I’d been grousing about this whole idea, but as we were driving over I suddenly got in the spirit of things. Here we were, the three of us, traveling through a warm July night, with the fireflies flickering in the woods of Roland Park and faint, old-timey jazz playing on the radio. Sophia smelled of roses. Opal swung her heels in the back seat. And we were headed toward what was almost (if you didn’t look too closely) a genuine family reunion, complete with parents and grandparents, aunt and uncle, cousins. Well, only two cousins. This was kind of a miniature reunion. But even so. When we drew up in front of Jeff’s house, we found a huge tumble of silver balloons tied to the lamppost. Wicky’s doing, clearly. Wicky was not half bad, I decided all at once.

  Opal wanted to untie the balloons and bring them in with her. She seemed so impressed by them, you’d think she had never seen a balloon before. So our entrance was fairly crowded. The balloons filled the whole foyer, with the humans having to fit themselves in between them, and then Dad and Jeff arrived on our heels, and a telephone started ringing, and Pop-Pop was asking where my car was. It took several minutes before we got sorted out and seated in the living room, and
by that time Sophia had somehow been introduced. I certainly hadn’t introduced her. I was already in the doghouse for getting J.P.’s name wrong. “What’s new, P.J.?” I said when he toddled over, and both Mom and Wicky said, “Who?” Like a fool, I went on with it. “P.J., old buddy! Yes, sir; it’s the Peej,” I babbled, till I felt the disapproval streaming toward me from across the room, and I realized I had messed up yet again.

  Jeff and Wicky lived in a very nice house, old-fashioned but modernly decorated, with a long white couch that fit together in an S-curve and Japanesey low tables and such. Still, I always felt it needed something. Maybe books, or pictures. It had this sort of blank feel. I knew my mother had given them a few paintings early in their marriage, but they had never hung them, and my dad absolutely forbade her to ask what had become of them. She said, “But it’s such a waste! Especially the Rankleston, with the barbed wire and the Brillo pads. I could take it back and hang it in your study, if for some reason they don’t like it.” Dad didn’t say what he thought of that idea, but you could guess from his expression.

  It helped, at least, that there were so many of us. All the women wore their party clothes—even Gram, decked out in a bag-shaped shift with a rhinestone horseshoe pinned to the front. Pop-Pop had his shirt buttoned up to the collar, which was as dressy as he got, and Dad and Jeff and J.P. were in suits, and I had on my birthday necktie. A fairly festive-looking group, I’d say. The billow of balloons bobbing above Opal’s head didn’t hurt any, either.

  And right from the start, Sophia was a hit. Big hit. Of course Gram and Pop-Pop already knew her. They showed off about that a little. “How’s the bank?” Gram asked. “How’s your roommate!” and then Pop-Pop said, “Stell brought the recipe for those nachos you liked so much.” This made my mother go all alert and suspicious. She started edging closer to Sophia on the couch. “Oh?” she said. “You’ve had Mother’s nachos? You’ve been to their house? Barnaby took you to visit?”—firing questions one-two-three, leaving her no room for answers. Meanwhile, Jeff was offering her a choice between white wine, Scotch, and ginger ale, and J.P. was lurching against her knees and trying to reach her pearls.