Darnay Road (24 page)

Darnay
Road 43

Aunt
May comes to watch. I didn’t hear her come in and when I can remember I’m in
Granma’s kitchen and not over the rainbow hugging my very, very best friend
other than Easy—Abigail May. I see Aunt May standing there staring at us and
wiping under her eyes.

“I
get to stay for two whole weeks,” Abigail May says. “Maybe the rest of the
school year.”

“But
how?” I ask from her to May.

And
Aunt May is saying, “Now we don’t know for sure.”

“Mom
is thinking about it. We came on the bus, me and Ricky. Mom says she’ll see
about me getting to stay. I don’t like it in Tampa and I missed everybody so
much.” Then she remembers to hug my Granma who hugs Abigail May back and I
realize how much my Granma misses her too.

Abigail
May has had a very different time of her life in Tampa. She goes on to tell me
about the weather getting only slightly colder and how she didn’t really need
new school clothes because there is no winter like we’re used to here.

Granma
humphs on that and looks at Aunt May. Why wouldn’t she believe Abigail May
doesn’t need new school clothes? Granma rubs her thumb on her pointer and
middle fingers where she thinks I don’t see, but of course with eyes trained to
notice everything, I do. So it’s money and that means Figley and that goes with
Prunley and that stands for tight-fisted fool.

So
we’re about so happy we can’t stand it, and I have to admit this much happiness
pushes against all the sadness I’ve been feeling and it makes me feel funny,
dizzy even like my insides can’t catch up. So Granma has Abigail and me and
Aunt May and herself sit around the table and May finishes cutting the noodles
cause I couldn’t think to do it anymore.

I feel like Abigail was
never gone and I feel like she’s been gone a hundred years. There is so, so
much to tell. First off Abigail May is so mad about President Kennedy. She
tells us how they did it at public, announced it over the loud speaker just
like at Bloody Heart and kids cried. Abigail May says she hates to live in
Florida cause we’ve talked a million times how Kruschev could come right there
or Castro.

“He’ll
send Castro,” is my belief cause Castro is so close. Then I remember Easy said
it would never happen, and I feel a stab of sorrow that never goes away, not
even when Abigail is here I guess cause one person does not replace another.
Abigail May is the only one, and Easy is the only one. That’s all.

Aunt
May says we need to pray about it and God will always keep America safe, and
Granma says Castro is another maniac and the earth burps one up straight from
the pits of hell every few years. And Aunt May says the bible says rulers are
here today and tomorrow gone like dried grass. And she said to think about it
cause that’s exactly what happened to Hitler. All the mess he caused and where
is he now?

“Well
I’d take a good guess,” Granma says.

And
Abigail May and me look quickly at each other cause we know who probably told
Aunt May all that.

We
talk a while but there’s a lot of cooking going on and it isn’t long before we
make our escape to my room. Abigail runs for my bed and crashes there and flops
on her back. “I missed this room so much.”

I
flop next to her on my stomach. “Easy and Cap are gone.”

She
lifts her head and rolls on her side. “Gone…as in really gone?”

Oh
it’s so good to have her back. Only she would understand what it means to have
Easy gone, but even Abigail May can’t know my heart. Granma says only God looks
that deep.

I
tell her then, pretty much everything.

“You’re
going to marry him? You’re only ten years old!”

I
lay on my back and my arms are folded. “I already know. It’s Easy. Course I
have to finish school and he is going in the army and all.”

She
is staring at me. “What if he forgets? It’s such a long time.”

“He
won’t forget,” I say. Then I look at her. “He won’t forget. I’m pretty sure.”

“Then
why did he go like that? Did he tell you not to ever have a boyfriend when you
get big?”

“No.
But I won’t of course. I’ll just wait.”

“I
will follow him,” Abigail May sings the new Peggy March song we love, love.

She
is sitting up and then I remember. I sing Peter, Paul and Mary’s song, “Cruel
War.” It’s one of our very favorites. She sings with me because we know all the
words. When we’re done I fall to the bed again and so does she.

“You
would go to war with him wouldn’t you?” she says like it’s the gospel truth.

“Yes,”
I say feeling very noble and grown up. I have a new story blooming in my head,
Easy in an army uniform and me, also in a uniform though it’s slightly too big.
We are both wearing helmets and carrying rifles.

“I
can’t believe I went away and you fell in love!” Abigail says.

But
I loved him before she left. I loved him from the very first.

We eat and play the
Barbie Game with Granma and Aunt May. I win. Ricky comes in then and Aunt May
is upset that he wasn’t there for the meal when she told him not to be gone
long.

“I’m
not hungry,” he says, but he’s looking at me.

He
looks bigger, but it hasn’t been but a few months since I saw him last. Thing
is his hair is longer, like one of the Beach Boys, and it’s gone blonder. He
smiles at me and I don’t know why.

“Hi
Georgia,” he says.

“Hello
Ricky,” I say like I’m reading the cereal box because he’s just Ricky no matter
what.

 
And after that Abigail wants to visit the
cellar. She about loves that place. I haven’t been down there since I showed
Easy and we hugged. I have told her about it, but she wants me to again. Snow
is on the doors so we have to get the broom and sweep them. I don’t know why,
but I don’t want to go down there. It doesn’t feel like before. I don’t feel
like before. One thing is sure, if Kruschev comes I’m going to stay up top and
fight. I’m not going into a hole in the ground until they bury me for real. It
makes me so mad that he thinks he can come to America like that, or worse, get
some lunatic like Oswald to shoot our good president.

But
I don’t say all this to Abigail May. I can’t explain how I feel.

So
we lift the doors like we used to and I try not to think of Easy so strongly I
can’t be happy to just be with Abigail May. We get the doors up and go down to
the cellar door and I push it through.

Well
it always felt so mysterious here. I turn on the light and it’s just a cellar.
Just like Easy said.

But
it’s pretty warm since the furnace is here, but why would anyone want to be
down here really.

“Still
got the notebook?” she says. We do have a lot of mysteries to mull over, but I
don’t know as I’m in the mood. So I drop down on my blanket and she shakes out
hers because of possible bugs or spiders, which we don’t have because Granma
has the bugman come regularly.

But
something crinkles under me and I reach and it’s a square of thick white. An
envelope. ‘Georgia,’ it says.

“What’s
that?” she asks and she tries to grab it and I turn and hold it away from her
and I can’t stop staring at it. ‘Georgia.’

I
have no idea. But I have an idea.

She
sits back and I hold the letter in front of me and stare at it. “Easy,” I
whisper.

“Gee-manently,”
Abigail May whispers. “You just finding it now?”

My
throat is crinkly and I turn it over and slip my finger under the flap. There
is no writing there like Abigail puts on the flap when she writes—‘D-liver,
D-letter, D-sooner, D-better.’

There’s
nothing like that, just white.

I
pull out the pages. They are lined loose-leaf like we use in school, heavily
folded.

‘Deer
Georgia,’ I read, Abigail May’s head bent at my shoulder as she reads
soundlessly while moving her lips only.

‘When
you read this I will be gone. I didn’t give it to you for real becuz you know,
your granma. So I knew you cood read it down here and she would not no maybe.
Well I am going for good. I cood not do it in keeping the house and all. I
colled Mom and she wood not come back. I thought she wanted to but then she
changed on it. So I can’t keep things goin so I’m sorry. I meen we talked aboot
it all and you are the best gril I no and my frend. If I was in the army and
you were bigger then we would marry like you said. When I am older and I can
pay for a girl then I will want you only but by then you will forget me. I no
you said you would not forget but I can’t hold you to it when I will have to go
ware Uncle Sam says, even to Afrika I guess. You can write me. I don’t write
good but I will always want to here what is goin on. I think you are very
pritty. I have said that. Do you remember? I saw you that day by Moe’s and I
wisled. I scared you an I always been sorry. Very sorry about it. You are the
furst gril I ever wisled at and I made you fall in the street. I thought you
would die and it wood be my falt. But if you wood have died then I mite have
to. All the time I new you Georgia you were the best happiest thing I had. Not
had, but new. Your Granma and Ant May are good to. They just don’t know about
things but it is okay. They helped me and I won’t forget.

Will
you forget me? If you write me I will no you don’t forget me. Once I get to
Shoehorn I will be back in the field come summer. But in the winter we have
choors to. It’s a little town and we haul wood and sell that, me and my drunk
as skunk oncles. I didn’t no I could write this much. This is the most I ever
did write. I hope it’s not so bad you are thinking you can’t read it.

I
am forever your friend and I hope you are not to sad.’ I guess I love you even
but don’t tell. Maybe burn this. Thanks for all of the things. I want to give
you something so here.’

Beneath
the writing is a heart drawn evenly with an arrow through its middle. It’s
really good, with shading and all.

Then
his name—Easy.

PS
– Look in the corner
.

Abigail
gets on her feet first and hops up and down and looks at the corner but she
knows to let me go first.

I
can see the corners we sit between are empty so I hurry to the far wall and I
see the small package wrapped in newspaper and I get it and Abigail squeals and
I tear the paper off and it is a little pink transistor radio and a square
battery.

I
have wanted one of these forever and ever and now I have one and it’s from
Easy.

All
this time. If it wasn’t for Abigail May being here I don’t know how long I
would have waited to come back down here. I tell her that.

“It’s
like a miracle,” she says. She asks if she can put the battery in and I let her
do that while I reread the letter aloud this time mostly so I can hear it
myself. I know I will read it over and over until I have it memorized.

He
tells me to write but there’s no address.

“You
could just put his name and his town,” Abigail May says.

But I don’t know. I
don’t know anything but how much I love Easy.

Part
2: 1967

Darnay
Road 44

I
am reading over Tim’s shoulder in Bloody Heart’s cramped high school office
belonging to the student newspaper, “The Quill.” Timothy, the one that used to
chase Abigail May and I home from grade school, wants to be a sports writer. We
have an eight page rag, four of which is advertising. That leaves four cramped
pages for six reporters. Our chief editor Sister Margaret Martha says we have
to have a healthy variety of articles. So she has given each of us titles. I am
the political reporter which means I can interview the same three people over
and over about upcoming student council decisions.

I
have worked with Sister on a new idea. What about politics that have to do with
the United States of America? I have asked. Especially about Vietnam.

“No
Vietnam,” she says right off. “There are plenty of other issues,” she says,
“like should the church use mimes or puppet shows for its holiday and special
feast day celebrations like the church is doing in London?”

Sister
is getting very old. She is looking at me with great sincerity. It is the same
quality Granma finds in my eyes. I hope, hope I don’t look as sappy as Sister
does now.

“We…we
have a religion reporter,” I remind Sister. She is the yellow block and I am
lilac, possibly my new least favorite color.

We
are all blocks of different colors, together building a fine student paper.
That’s what Sister said at the beginning of our freshman year. That’s what got
me on “The Quill,” as opposed to, say, dance committee. I was hoping I could
use my writing skills to break down some of the current issues for our student
body. I was hoping I could write on, “The Quill,” not just for my school, but
for my country.

Sister
had to think about it. But after pretty much nagging she gave-in, allowing me
to write one article about Vietnam with the understanding that she must first
proof it and see if it fit the ‘flavor’ of, “The Quill.”

God
has spared me from mimes and puppets but the article may prove to be a greater
fire.

Like
I said, it’s a small office. Tim is mooning over me all the time. I don’t want
him for a boyfriend. I had that one lapse of judgment in grade school and he’s
never gotten over it. Now I’m fourteen years old and way, way smarter. I’m
tired of him approaching me every time there’s a slow dance at our freshmen
sock hops. He’s sweaty and I can hear him breathe and after we dance I smell
just like his Hai Karate cologne, his own personal sweat cocktail.

I
seem to attract these A students who are so timid in class they don’t
understand I’m just being kind because I feel shy too sometimes and I’m
wondering what they think about something so I might start up a conversation
like we should if we care about others. That doesn’t mean it’s time to come off
the walls at every sock-hop and make a B-line for me every time some great
brain requests, “My Girl.” I love, love the Temptations but man that song has
made my life very, very complicated.

Whatever I’m looking
for it is not in Bloody Heart’s stable of fine Catholic boys. I’ve watched them
through all of their stages and even though we are now blended with others who
have come to Bloody Heart for high school, I am not ever interested in any of
them as more than fellow human beings.

Or
how about this--me asking a boy if he thinks Vietnam is critical to the
security of saving the United States of America from the ravages of Communism
is not a coded message for rub my boobs please.

Not
so for Abigail. No one is rubbing those polka dots because we are not like
that, and far as I know except for a couple of girls who went to public grade
school and transferred into Bloody Heart for high school, and still tease their
hair like greasers, people are not rubbing things very much. But I do not
understand why Abigail May must fall in love after every Friday night at the
show or every school game/dance/English class/lunch period. It’s like love, for
Abigail May is a Scutter Road pot-hole you fall into because you are not
watching where you’re going.

Abigail
is having lots of fun in high school. I want that too. But I’m trying to figure
things out but I can’t move as quickly as she does and inside I’m serious.

Not
to put down Abigail May at all. But I don’t fit in with jocks either. I don’t
even want to. It feels to me like I’d have to lose something—myself--to do
that, the very person I’m trying to find! That’s why I gave up cheerleading
after eighth grade. I thought Abigail would too. But she’s very good at it. So
I can see why she made the team.

But
I don’t appreciate them—the jocks. That’s all I can say. I admire some of their
skill, like in basketball. You can’t be a proper Catholic and not like
basketball. But other than that I don’t understand jocks mostly. They are so
happy with each other they don’t even notice the other students. What they
don’t know, many of us are really, really happy not to be noticed. By them.

I
just want friends. People that are kind. Not some jock inviting me to ‘wear my
check-out suit’ to someone’s party who has the house to themselves because
their newly divorced mom works nightshift and they are willing to risk their
very home just so they can get in with the popular kids. That’s Jennifer.

It
is not luminous—allowing people to use you. It’s like you’ve hit your sell-out
price and it’s…a nickel.

When
that boy told me to wear my check out suit it was in front of Abigail May.
Abigail May told Ricky and he hit that boy and I told him to never ever hit any
boy because of me, and I was mad at Abigail for telling and she promised to
never ever tell him anything else again.

Now after saying all
that, what do you think, my first boy who is a friend is a football player my
same age from another grade school who has now come to Bloody Heart. He is a
really nice boy from a great big family. What I am looking for is someone who
can at least talk to you without saying mean or disgusting things or acting
like they are the best thing ever. And if they read books that’s the best
because they can tell you about their books and you can tell them about yours
and it’s like you read all theirs too even if you haven’t.

Like
Aunt May is reading an amazing book called,
The Arrogance of Power
, by
Senator Fullbright. Now I would probably never even try to read that book, but
Aunt May tells me so much about it I feel like I am reading it. And guess what,
she leaves it on the coffee table and I open the cover and it’s inscribed, “To
May from Anthony. Forever yours.”

Forever
hers? Not even Father Anthony? Well he did leave the priesthood so he can only
be a father in the usual way now. I wonder if Abigail has seen this, but even
as I close it I know I won’t tell. I know what loneliness feels like. I know
what it’s like to love someone you can’t have and maybe…you added so much to
it, you made them up. They become more of a lingering feeling and less of a
real person, so private, so deep-in you can’t even share it with your best
friend—what you feel. And you start to lock things away and you become private.
So private.

So
I meet Dennis, my football playing friend at school and he is very nice. He is
funny. I like that a lot because he makes me laugh in class and we seem to be
in a lot of the same classes.

Abigail
May and I like him the best and we eat lunch with him and he says he is not
very good on the team.

So
we don’t care at all. He cannot even play and that’s fine with me. But he does
play and he says he is always getting dragged around the field. We laugh at
that. He tells me all these funny stories of what he goes through and I go to
the games to watch him.

Then
one day he makes a great play in an important game. Everyone is talking about
it and talking about him. He may get pulled up to play on B-team with the
sophomores. That’s pretty great for just a freshman.

But
Abigail and I worry he will get a big head. We wonder if he will still be our
friend, and guess what. He is just as nice as ever at school on Monday.

But
Abigail May and I don’t pal around every minute in freshman year. She cheers
football, then she cheers basketball. It’s a lot of cheering, and I am busy
with my work on the paper and student council meetings, then I get in Junior
Achievement and it’s one project after another.

We didn’t know it would
be that way when we signed up for all of this stuff. I’m just a kid trying to
listen and figure out how to make this world a better place like John Kennedy
said, then Martin Luther King Junior, then Bobby Kennedy. My heroes. I’ve taken
something from each—from John Kennedy, courage. From Robert Kennedy love,
justice, compassion. From Dr. King the understanding that peace does not come
without the willingness to step into the right kind of conflict.

I
don’t just take anyone’s word for something because they wear a suit, or a
tie-dye T-shirt, or a habit, or a uniform, or a dress. I’ve been handed a world
that is tarnished, so tarnished I can’t see myself in its reflection. And yet I
stand, cloth in hand to find a spot I can shine. In.

Music…thank
God for music. The same songs carry us, cradle us like mothers might and I’m
guessing here. The same songs make us think and call to our hearts and minds,
even when we enter the ring from different corners.

I
am thinking all of this…all the time. But in back of it all there is the
private thing. Easy.

“There’s
a soldier here for you,” Tim says that Friday afternoon when we’re all crammed
in the office trying to lay out the stories we have labored over.

I
am working at the light-table and I look up at Tim. How can he tell me this?
How can he say ‘soldier’ to me?

“For
me?” I say.

I
try to think. I drag the scarf out of my hair. I’d had it folded, wearing it
for a headband to help hold my long heavy hair out of my face while I work.

I
don’t wear make-up. I’ve tried…just…too much trouble, and too little results to
justify the trouble. There is no reason to look in the mirror. I look
older…than ten. But not as old as I’d suddenly like to look.

I
am rambling in my head.

“He’s…well
who do you think he is?” Tim asks me.

“Who
does he say he is?” I ask.

“Just
a soldier,” he says.

I
can hear him saying that.

But
I can’t leave this room. I can’t even think. We can’t have visitors during
school time.

And
just then the bell rings signaling the end of the day, the end of school for
the week.

The
halls are suddenly flooded with students. It hits me that I should gather all
my stuff and go, so I do that, walk in a circle and try to think about how to
pack up. I fumble to clear the desk and make a neat stack of books and papers.
Then I fill my arms and leave the room, ignoring Tim’s last remark, “You’ll
see.”

I
follow the rest of the salmon upstream and veer off for my locker. I have to
try and remember my combination and it takes three tries before I get it right
and lift the lever and it clicks open.

Then
I’m barely able to figure out which books I need to take home and which I can
leave in the locker. I do my best. Then I know. What am I doing wasting time.
It must be. It has to be.

I
walk quickly then, push through, my eyes looking and looking. He’s at the exit.
I see him, in spite of the uniform. I see him, and I am not going fast or slow,
or in my body so much as my head. Just my head floating above it all as I move,
I move toward him. And a thousand things.

First, it’s him. He
takes off the hat and his head is shaved. His face toward me, his body, so
filled out and standing tall and different from the ones going past, in a
singular league and I feel his curiosity and attention so sharp, and the
students so curious, not daring to say anything.

He
has a dignity. He’s older. I know the color, the greens make my heart ache
in-between its speeding thumps. He makes my heart ache. I am eager and shy.
Confused and so clear. Wanting and dreading…what I want.

He’ll
break my heart now. It was always coming. He didn’t write like he said he
would. Four times in four years. I didn’t write much either. It was too heavy
for paper, too hard to contain…in words.

He
stained me with permanent ink. Inside.

I
get closer, so close, and kids hang around to see. I register this but it
doesn’t matter. I rise above self-consciousness. I’m just me, for a minute, not
tripping myself up, not standing in my way.