Far-Flung Page 2

  One day when I came back from my morning break, Becky, the Pilgrim who ran the Bakery, told me a woman had come in and asked for me. I knew it must be my mother. About noon she reappeared with a man. They both were wearing jumpsuits and sunglasses.

  “Darling,” my mother said. “This is Henry, my manager.”

  Henry nodded. He ate one of the twenty-five-cent slices.

  “Can you come out for some lunch with us?” my mother asked. “I can’t talk in this place.”

  “I’ve got to wait a few minutes. I have some bread in the oven.”

  “I’ll take the bread out,” said Becky. “You can go.”

  “Thanks,” I said. I took my apron off and walked outside with my mother and Henry.

  “Can’t you take that costume off?” my mother asked.

  “I change at home,” I said.

  “Where’s home?”

  “I’m staying with some people in Medford. Should we go to the pub?” I asked. “It’s really the only place to eat here.”

  “Can’t we go to a normal restaurant? Henry has a car.”

  “I’m not supposed to leave the Village,” I said. “Plus I only have half an hour.”

  Henry said he wanted to take a look at the working windmill, and headed down Main Street. My mother and I went into the pub. From outside it looked like an old English pub—thatched roof, gables, and leaded glass windows—but inside it was set up like a cafeteria. We both got a chef’s salad and sat at a plank table.

  “I’m performing tonight at the Mansard House, a private clinic for alcoholic women,” my mother said. “I’d ask you to come, but I don’t think I’m ready to perform in front of family yet. I’ve drawn on quite a lot of my unhappy experience with your father, and it might be painful for you.”

  “What do you do?” I asked. I couldn’t picture my mother as a performance artist. After she left my father, she decided to become an actress, and I saw her once play Mrs. Cratchit in an off-Broadway musical based on A Christmas Carol. She sang a song called “Another Sad Christmas, Another Sad Goose.”

  “I really can’t talk about it,” my mother said. “A performance can’t be explained, it has to be experienced.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  She looked at me. “Darling, I hate to see you like this. All dressed up like a Pilgrim with no place to go.” She laughed, then continued. “No, really. I’m sorry. But we’ve got to get you out of here.”

  “What do you mean?” I said. “I like this job.”

  “Elaine, let’s be serious. You can’t be a Pilgrim for the rest of your life. Now, the reason I brought Henry along was so he could see you. He’s been very good about helping Daria with her new career, and I’m sure he could do the same for you. I do wish you weren’t wearing that dress. And the wimple! Can you take that off, so he can at least see your hair?”

  “No,” I said. “It’s a costume. I’ve got to wear it as long as I’m on the grounds.”

  “What if we went out to the car? Does the parking lot count?”

  I suddenly realized how annoying my mother was, so I said, “What’s the story with Henry?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Are you sleeping with him?”

  “Elaine!” my mother said. “What kind of question is that?”

  “Who is he? Where did you find him? He looks like a creep.”

  “I beg your pardon,” my mother said. “But Henry is not a creep. Henry has helped turn my life around. I’d still be sitting in that roach-infested apartment if Henry hadn’t taken an interest in me.”

  “That’s another thing,” I said. “Thanks for selling the apartment. What happened to all my stuff? Did you just toss it down the incinerator?”

  My mother laid down her wooden fork and looked at me for a second. “You know, Elaine,” she finally said, “just because you’re having a little trouble shifting your life into first gear doesn’t mean you have to take your frustration out on me. I am no longer the emotional quicker-picker-upper I once was. I am an adult woman pursuing her own life. I had a perfect right to do everything I’ve done, and if you don’t approve, that’s too bad. And I didn’t toss your ‘stuff’ in the incinerator. I am paying for it to be stored in a climate controlled, mildew-free warehouse in Long Island City. So spare me.”

  I didn’t know what to say. I wanted to get up and walk out, but something about the Pilgrim costume prohibited a dramatic exit. So I just sat there, and picked at the American cheese slices in my salad.

  My mother sighed. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I guess I’m a little on edge. I still get anxious about performing.”

  I still didn’t say anything. I felt a little like I felt after I took the aqua pill Daria gave me: I had to concentrate hard to remember that I was myself, sitting there.

  “Are you O.K.?” my mother asked. “Are you sure you aren’t ill? Maybe you caught something in Africa. They have some terrible diseases over there, you know. Megan Foster was telling me about her sister who got bit by some fish and started to grow scales. Perhaps you should see a doctor? Are you taking vitamins?”

  “I’m fine,” I said. “I have to get back to work. It was nice to see you. Good luck with your performance.”

  “Oh, darling,” my mother said. “Don’t sulk. I said I was sorry. Is this some kind of Moonie thing? Have you been brainwashed?”

  This time I didn’t answer. I just stood up and walked out.

  When I got to the Bakery I felt sick. I sat down in the back room, but the heat from the ovens made me feel worse, so I went out and sat on the shaded back stoop. Becky looked out the Dutch door. “What happened? Are you all right?” she asked.

  “I feel funny,” I said.

  “You look terrible.”

  I stood up, but I felt dizzy, so I sat down again.

  “Why don’t you go home?” Becky said. “Take the afternoon off. Just relax.”

  When I arrived at Curly’s and Louisa’s, my key wouldn’t fit in the lock. Someone had changed it. I knocked on the door. I knew someone was home because I could hear the radio playing. I kept knocking, and after a while, I used my foot too.

  Louisa opened the door, but only wide enough so she could see me. She had the chain fastened. “Go away,” she said. So she did speak English.

  “What’s the matter?” I asked. “Why did you change the lock?”

  “I know about you and Curly,” Louisa said. “You must go away now, before I kill you.”

  “What are you talking about? Where’s Curly?”

  “I now understand that you try to steal Curly. That you come into our happy home and try to steal him. But no way. I always suspect you.” Louisa closed the door. I knocked again, but she didn’t answer it. She turned the radio up.

  There was a paper bag on the porch containing Daria’s winter clothes. I left them there. I walked up to the corner and went into the bar where Curly sometimes went before dinner, but it was too early. I decided to wait. I ordered a vodka gimlet and got four because it was both ladies’ day and happy hour. I drank two of them, and by the time I finished the second one I knew what I wanted to do.

  I got up and left some money and took the T into Boston. I went straight to the Peace Corps offices, and explained my situation to a man in a suit. He was wearing a button that said “THE NEW PEACE CORPS.” This unnerved me since I wasn’t sure if I had been in the old Peace Corps or the new Peace Corps, or what the difference was. When I had finished my story, he didn’t say anything for a minute. We both just sat there.

  Then he said, “You did resign, didn’t you?”

  “Yes,” I said. “But it was a mistake. I want to withdraw my resignation.”

  “You can’t,” he said. “You have to reapply.”

  “But that’s absurd,” I said. “Can’t I just go back?”

  “No,” he said. “This is all very complicated. You have to reapply, and then, if you are accepted, you’ll have to be reassigned.”

  “I can’t just go back to
Slemba?”

  “No,” he said. “Why don’t you take some time to think about this? It’s probably just culture shock. It does take some time to readjust. Going back isn’t always the solution.”

  “But I made a terrible mistake. I don’t know why I didn’t stay. I should have stayed.”

  “Why didn’t you, then?”

  “Well, I thought I wanted to come back and start a life here and a career and all that, but I’ve realized I don’t.”

  “What?” he asked.

  “Nothing,” I said.

  “The Peace Corps is not an escape. You can’t use it to escape.”

  “I’m not escaping. That’s why I want to go right back. If I stay here, I’ll get another job or something, and that will be something to escape. But right now I don’t have anything to escape from. Nothing. So it’s not an escape.” I thought this was a very good point, but the man just looked at me oddly.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I really think you should give this some time and thought. If you decide to reapply, I’ll personally supervise your application and make sure it gets processed with the utmost expediency. But that’s all I can do for you.”

  I took the application he handed me and went outside and sat in the plaza and started to fill it out, but halfway through, the pen I had stolen from the receptionist’s desk ran out of ink, but it ran out slowly, so the application was all scratched out and awful looking, and I started to cry. I hadn’t cried once, during this whole ordeal, but once I started, I couldn’t stop.

  When I did stop crying, I realized my application now looked even worse: It was tear-stained and crumpled, so I tore it up and threw it away. I thought about going up and getting another application, but it was after five o’clock.

  I must have sat there a long time because suddenly I realized it was getting dark. I thought about going back to Medford and trying to talk to Curly, but for some reason I knew it would be a waste of time. And I was sick of wasting my time. The plaza was starting to look ornery in the fading light, so I got up and tried to find a bus out to Pilgrim Acres. I figured I’d stay there for the night.

  I wasn’t planning on hitchhiking, but a car stopped beside me. “Need a ride?” the guy asked.

  “Where are you going?”

  “Out to Stockbridge,” he said.

  I got in the car. It seemed like the only thing to do. The man looked back over his shoulder, and pulled into the traffic. He didn’t say anything for a minute. Then he looked over at me.

  “Going to a party?” he asked.

  I still had my Pilgrim costume on. “No,” I said. “I work at Pilgrim Acres.”

  “Is that open nights?”

  “Not usually,” I said, “but tonight we’re doing a special reenactment of the Battle of Gettysburg.”

  “Oh,” the man said. “That sounds interesting.”

  “It’s fascinating,” I said. Then I realized he might want to come see it, so I added, “If you like that kind of thing. Most people find it really boring.”

  We drove a little further in silence. Then the man said, “I’m Drake. What’s your name?”

  “Clara,” I said.

  I told Drake to drop me at the exit because I knew if the guard saw the car drive up to the main gate, he would be suspicious. So I walked down the exit ramp and the mile out to Pilgrim Acres. The park was surrounded by a stockade fence topped with barbed wire, but I knew there was a gate by the cow field that was left unlocked. I had thought the cows would be put into a barn or something for the night, but they were still in the field. They were sitting under a tree, but as I walked across the field they stood up and watched me. They looked very ghostly in the moonlight: Their white patches shone like freshly spilled paint around the holes of their dark patches, and they swayed their big heads in a sleepy, curious way.

  I climbed over the fence into the herb garden. Except for the cows, Pilgrim Acres was deserted. Even the swans in the swan pond had disappeared someplace. I walked up Main Street to the Bakery.

  For a few minutes I just stood there; it looked so lovely, all shut up and quiet, the flowers in the window boxes curled tight for the night. But then I took out my keys and went in, locking the door behind me. I was afraid to turn on the lights in case the guard could see, so I lit a candle. There were two rocking chairs in the parlor, supposedly antiques. They had velvet ropes tied across their arms so tourists couldn’t sit in them; I took the rope off one and sat down. I wondered who had sat there last—maybe a real Pilgrim.

  I sat there and rocked, holding the candle. I watched it burn down, rocking the whole time.

  THE NEAR FUTURE

  “I THINK I SHOULD HAVE got four,” Natalie said.

  We were standing in her spare bedroom looking at the throw pillows she had arranged across the back of the sofa bed. We had bought them at Ames on our way home from dropping my mother at the airport.

  “What do you think?” Natalie said. “Don’t you think it would look better if there were four? So there wasn’t any space between?”

  “I guess so,” I said.

  “Well, we’ll just pick up another,” Natalie said. She walked over to the bed and rearranged the pillows so they were lined up, touching one another. “That’s good for now,” she said. She sat on the bed, and patted the spot beside her. I went over and looked out the window. Dewey, Natalie’s dog, was standing on top of his dog house, panting. He looked up at me.

  “She must almost be there by now,” Natalie said. “It only takes about three hours to fly to Dallas.” She looked at her watch. “It must be real hot down there. When I was in Texas the road melted. They put up a road block ’cause cars were getting stuck. That’s all I remember from Texas.”

  “Texas used to be the biggest state,” I said. It was all I could think of to say.

  Natalie stood up and rearranged the pillows, spreading them back out. “Are you O.K.?” she asked. She came over and stood behind me. Dewey was still watching me. He thought I was going to do something. He barked up at us. “That dog,” Natalie said. “You’d think he’d be smart enough to stay out of the sun.” She put her hands on my shoulders. She said, “This is all going to be just fine,” and then she left me alone. She went outside and sprayed Dewey with the hose.

  I had been living in the apartment downstairs with my mother, until she decided to move to Texas to marry a dentist she had met last winter at a dental convention. She had a job giving out free samples. She stole a lot. We still have miniature toothpaste tubes. She didn’t tell the dentist she had a child; she promised me that when she got settled with him, she would tell him about me, and I could move down there if I wanted. In the meantime, I was renting Natalie’s spare bedroom for fifty dollars a month, but I didn’t have to start paying till I resumed my job at Ogermeir’s Nursery. I had been laid off on account of the drought.

  My mother waited until I was eighteen to move to Texas. This was so she couldn’t be accused of abandoning me. How I know this is that she called in to a radio program with a lawyer. I just happened to be listening. She said her name was Beth. Hello, Dave, she said, I’m Beth. She asked her question. Beth, the lawyer said, you have no legal or financial obligation to an eighteen-year-old. In the eyes of the state, such a child is an adult.

  When I was sixteen I stopped going to school. That’s legal. I had been in special education. We didn’t have a classroom—we met where they stored the paper. It looked like a closet but it wasn’t. It was a storage room. Later we moved to a different room, but it wasn’t special education anymore. It was called Headstart. The difference was, in Headstart we did things like putting things together. They didn’t try to teach us things anymore.

  A man named Hugo Trenti rented our old apartment downstairs. He slept during the day, because he worked at the pharmaceutical plant nights. He moved his bed down into the basement, where it was cool and dark, and put a sign on the front door that said “QUIET DAY SLEEPER.”

  Natalie worked at the college library. Sh
e was only supposed to work three days a week during the summer, but because it was air-conditioned, she went in every day. I went with her. I tore some things out of books but secretly. Just pictures. One night, on our way home, we stopped at Jamboree for burgers. Mr. Trenti was at the counter, eating scrambled eggs. Breakfast time for him.

  “He’s a perfect tenant,” Natalie said. “He sleeps all day and is out all night.”

  “I wonder when he does things,” I said.

  “Maybe he just doesn’t.”

  “He went to the races last weekend.”

  “How do you know?”

  “He told me. He asked me to go with him.”

  “Maybe we’ll all go to the races some night,” Natalie said. “That could be fun.” She looked over at Mr. Trenti.

  “Do you have a crush on him?” I asked. A crush means you love someone till it hurts. I had a crush on Natalie.

  “I’m too old for crushes,” Natalie said. Natalie was divorced. When my mother and I first moved in, she was living with the chemist at Schnabel’s, but about a year ago he was arrested for selling drugs. He was in prison upstate and once I went with Natalie to visit him. I stayed in the car while she went in, though. While I was waiting a woman came over and asked me to sign a petition for them to serve brewed coffee in the prison cafeteria.

  Mr. Trenti got up, but instead of leaving, he went over to the jukebox. He read the list of songs all the way through before making his selection.