A Room on Lorelei Street - Page 14

“You just trust your granny. You hear?” She places her hands on Zoe’s shoulders and holds her squarely. Zoe doesn’t move. She wants to believe. She wants to trust. She wants to hear what Grandma can say that will change it all and make Zoe wrong. She waits.

“I’ve been around a lot longer than you,” Grandma says, “and so has your mama. And right now she needs you. That’s all you need to worry about.” Grandma steps back and takes another puff of her cigarette. “Now let’s push all this nonsense aside. I’ll help you get your things together and then follow you back home to smooth things out with your mama. I’ll do that for you. I’ll make things right between you two again, you hear?”

“Yes, Grandma,” Zoe whispers.

But she wonders what Grandma has just said. She tries to grab hold of the wispy threads that said nothing, but maybe everything. How will Grandma make things right? Did she say? Where are the answers Zoe thought she would get? Is she wrong about Mama being an alcoholic? What is the nonsense? Everything that Zoe has been afraid of for so long? Or all the possibility she hoped for? Or everything about Zoe? Did Grandma ever really look into her eyes, or did she just see Daddy’s black pupils that don’t account for any time or thought at all?

Grandma reaches out to push Zoe aside to enter the room. Zoe’s room.

Zoe shifts to block her. “You can’t come in, Grandma!”

Grandma stiffens.

“It’s the landlord,” Zoe explains. “She doesn’t allow smoking. That’s all. Besides, it will just take me a few minutes…to get my stuff together. Why don’t you go finish your smoke in your car and I’ll be right down.”

Grandma takes another puff. “All right,” she says, measuring her words. Zoe knows she is happy to finish her cigarette, unhappy about taking orders. The nicotine wins the draw. “But hurry, I’ve got other things to do today.”

I do, too, Grandma. I have to go to work in two hours. Did you know that? But the words stay hidden in her head, crowding for room among all the other unsaid words. She watches Grandma return to her car to wait, her steps heavy on the stairs, heavy on Zoe’s brain.

Zoe waits until Grandma disappears around the corner of the garage, then retreats to her room. She bends down, slides her empty duffel from beneath her bed but then stands again staring at it, not sure what to put in first. She sits down on the edge of the bed, stroking the tall carved bedpost. Put something in, Zoe. Something.

But she can’t think what that first something should be.

She stares at the frayed straps of the duffel and thinks, It is over. The room is over. She was wrong. She made Mama cry. She is an ungrateful, terrible daughter. Grandma said so. And if those aren’t reasons enough to be packing her bags, she knows Grandma has a steady supply of more to take their place. She always does. All this waiting and yelling and crying for Mama.

Why?

Why always Mama?

She lets one thought tumble into another, pushing the packing away. Push, Zoe. Think. She wonders, if she were Uncle Clint’s daughter, would Grandma have come barging her way in? Would it have been worth her bother? Zoe thinks not. Mama is Grandma’s favorite. It has always been clear that she is, but why?

Zoe flips through the pages of Uncle Clint’s life like she is searching a book for answers. Something that would explain why she must now pack her duffel and leave her room. Why Mama and not Uncle Clint? He’s a nice enough man. Always clean-shaven. His hair thinning a little on top, but always neatly trimmed and combed. He has a steady job. Nothing fancy, just throwing mail at the Cooper Springs Annex, but it’s reliable. Why shouldn’t he be the favorite? Would she still have the room if he was? He treats Aunt Patsy respectfully and keeps his yard weeded and green and plants a vegetable garden every spring. He’s not the life of the party, that’s for sure, usually busying himself with chores like hauling soda from the garage, or adding ice to the cooler, or emptying the trash, or hanging out on the driveway and fiddling underneath someone’s hood since he’s handy with tools. He’s quiet, dull even, but you can count on him. Counting on someone is worth a lot. Shouldn’t that make him a favorite? Aunt Patsy calls him the salt of the earth, which Zoe takes to mean he is one of the plainer spices, but maybe the most important. But not to Grandma. She always has a cutting remark about him. If he’d gone to college, he wouldn’t be stuck in a government job. If he was thriftier, he’d have a real home instead of a trailer. If he put his foot down once in a while, he wouldn’t have a houseful of hooligans running through it all the time.

His trailer is a double-wide manufactured home on an acre of land, and the hooligans are the abundant eleven-year-old friends of her cousin, Wain. Grandma always sees the glass half empty instead of half full when it comes to Uncle Clint. Why? And Aunt Nadine, the oldest of Grandma’s kids, well, Zoe doesn’t know a lot about her, but she knows she’s not a favorite, either. She’s the mysterious aunt no one talks much about, or at least they’re not supposed to. She moved away to Brownsville when Zoe was four. Brownsville is about as far as you can get from Ruby and still be in Texas. Aunt Nadine only comes back once every several years, for a holiday, a wedding, or maybe a funeral. She came to Daddy’s funeral, and that was the last time Zoe saw her. She popped in and out in two days and stayed at a motel, which started a commotion with Grandma, but then Aunt Nadine was gone again just as fast, so the fight had no fuel. Aunt Nadine seemed to have a wall around herself as far as Grandma was concerned. Grandma didn’t have many cutting remarks for Aunt Nadine. Mostly no remarks at all.

But when Grandma talked about Mama, a change came over her. Zoe noticed her stature actually seemed to change, like she was growing bigger and stronger, and her gray, empty eyes sprang to life. What made that happen? Mama is the youngest, her baby, is that it? She has heard Grandma call Mama her miracle baby. Grandma said her female parts were scarred and torn, and the doctors with their high-falutin’ degrees said there would be no more babies. And then Mama came along and proved them all wrong…. Or maybe it was Grandma who did the proving? Was that it? Grandma had to keep on proving that they were wrong and everything about Mama was right?

Or maybe it has nothing to do with being a miracle baby at all but that Mama is so needy and Clint and Nadine aren’t? Mama is needy. Maybe that’s what it’s all about. A child who still needs Grandma, or maybe a child Grandma is still holding out hope for. Like a baby bird that has fallen out of the nest and the mother abandons the rest to save the one. Is that it? Is that why she is losing the room? Why she has to go back? Because Mama is a lost bird?

But it’s probably none of those things, and Zoe knows she can’t ask. Some things are not meant to be brought up—like Daddy patting Mama’s tummy and begging her not to get rid of the baby inside. Some things might gnaw inside of you, like the awful way Daddy died, and other things might squeeze your heart so you can’t take a breath, like watching Mama’s legs starve away. But some things. Some things. They don’t have a real life if they aren’t put to words, and it is probably best just to pack your bags and not rock the boat because if you do, you just might knock the boat clean over and make everybody drown, including yourself.

Drowning.

How painful is it? Zoe wonders.

“Beth! What are you doing? You haven’t packed a thing! You think I have all day to—”

Zoe springs from the edge of the bed. “I’m not going, Grandma.”

“What?”

The words jumped from her throat, and she’s surprised at them, too. “I’m not going back.” She pauses and then steps closer to Grandma. The surprise is over, and she adds more deliberately, “I’m never going back.”

Grandma fills the doorway, the afternoon sun squeezing past her silhouette in hot lines of light. “I heard the not going back part, but I want some explaining to go with it!”

The words are ther

e. Ready. Rehearsed a hundred times over on dark, tear-filled nights, but they are held back by fears that opening up one secret could make them all come pouring out—even ones she doesn’t want to know—fears that whisper in her ear, Be silent. Be careful.

Tags: Mary E. Pearson
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