A Room on Lorelei Street - Page 3

“Oh…yes,” Mrs. Garrett says, setting aside the roll sheet and looking over her glasses in a classroom where there is no air to breathe. “I got it.”

But the answer doesn’t seem enough. Her mind reaches full boil.

How the hell could a know-it-all English teacher not know how to pronounce Zoe? Zoe, for God’s sake! Where did she get her degree from? She can expel my sorry ass from here to Abilene, but she sure as hell is going to get my name right. She’s going to know how to pronounce my name. My name. Zoe.

She steps closer, her feet pushing her to the front of the classroom like in a dream.

“Zoe,” she says. “Zoe…with a loud, fucking E,” she tells Mrs. Garrett. And when she says it, it isn’t a whisper.

Zoe stands, releasing Mama’s limp hand, and thinks it probably wasn’t the heat or the cigarettes or the overcrowded classroom at all. Zoe, she thinks, and then says it aloud to make it more real. “Zoe.” But the breathless little word is lost in a room of dust and clutter, because Mama is asleep, and there is no one else to hear.

Three

She rolls down the window of her blue Thunderbird and speeds through the streets of Ruby. A smile spreads across her face when she thinks about fifth period. She is dead. Mrs. Garrett, of all teachers, the teacher who instills fear in the hearts of incoming freshmen and sends seniors flocking to the counseling office for transfers when her name appears on their schedules. Mrs. Garrett. What was she thinking?

But who knows? Maybe this once Mama will take care of it like she promised.

“Zoe!” she screams out the window and laughs.

Zoe. She likes her name. Her father gave it to her. He specially chose it for the unseen life growing in her mother’s stomach. Aunt Patsy told her. She spilled the beans to Zoe one day when she was angry at Mama. She told her what no one else would. She told her what Daddy said. Seventeen years ago, they were all jammed into Grandma’s tiny living room—Aunt Patsy, Uncle Clint, Aunt Nadine with her new baby sucking at her breast, Grandma, and of course Mama and Daddy. It wasn’t a private conversation as it should have been, but nothing in the Buckman family ever was. “You can’t get rid of it, Darlene,” he said. “There’s already a precious life growing in there. I bet it’s a little girl as beautiful as you. I’m gonna give her a name right now. Zoe. That means ‘life.’ You can’t just flush away life.”

Grandma was spitting mad. She hated Daddy, and she hated the name Zoe, but Mama went along with it because she loved the man who was patting her flat tummy. Mama made a choice and held tight to it. They were married a week later. When the next baby came along six years later, Grandma picked the name. Kyle Broderick Buckman. And Mama went along with that because she loved Grandma, too.

Zoe switches on her blinker to turn and wonders why her aunt told her the secret. She and Mama used to be best friends. That’s how Aunt Patsy met Uncle Clint, Mama’s older brother. Aunt Patsy seemed like she loved and hated Mama all at the same time—one minute making excuses for her and the next telling secrets that Grandma worked hard to keep.

Zoe turns left at the corner of Redmond and Main—the opposite direction from Murray’s Diner—but she has her detour timed. She knows she won’t be late. She has taken the same route six times now and has never been as much as a second late punching in at the restaurant. She has never been late. She never plans to be. Being on time is important.

Any first-grader knows that, she thinks.

The thought weaves into her unexpectedly, as so many thoughts do, time and again. How do you make the remembering stop? The shame is fresh, like it has been circling through her veins all along and on a whim has decided to burn hotly again. Being six years old and ashamed that she is not remembered. Getting dark. And darker. Six years old, alone, waiting to be picked up. She adjusts the sash of her Brownie uniform, turns, moves like she is busy. Like she knows someone will come soon. The appearance at least lightens the shame. Maybe the Brownie leader watching won’t know she is forgotten. The tightness in her chest grows. The tightness that says, You are alone, Zoe. No one remembers you are at Brownies. Mama had insisted. She said Zoe had to join. It would be fun. But Zoe hates it. She hates the pity a

s she sews button eyes on a puppet with a borrowed mom. Mama didn’t know about that. That moms came, too. At least sometimes. And they remembered to pick up their daughters.

Zoe checks her watch again, creating what she craves, the dependability that she knows can exist if you care enough. That’s all it takes. An ounce of caring.

About half a mile down Main she turns right onto Carmichael. It takes her into a neighborhood of old homes and deep parkways planted with huge, twisted fig trees that have turned the nearby sidewalk into a patchwork of uprooted planes of concrete. She is surprised she never drove through this neighborhood before last week. Ruby is a small town. The sign as you enter claims a population of 9,500. Nestled between the smaller towns of Duborn to the east and Cooper Springs to the west, it ups the whole population of the area to maybe 15,000. You can drive through it all, end to end, in fifteen minutes.

She wonders how she could have missed this neighborhood. She has lived all her life in Ruby. She has been left to stay the night at more houses than she can remember when Mama and Daddy forgot to come pick her up—houses of friends who never lived on a street like hers. She has slept with half a dozen boys in as many houses, all in neighborhoods far from her own. She has visited classmates’ homes and crashed parties, but nothing ever brought her down Carmichael Street until Murray asked her to deliver a rhubarb pie to his dad. “The old man’s crankier than hell, and Mom’s hoping that the sugar will send him into a diabetic coma and give her a little peace.”

Zoe appreciates Murray’s humor. She knows his dad. He comes in most Saturday mornings for hash browns and weak tea. He is a gentle, stooped man with a wobbly voice and an unstable gait, who announces his arrival by jingling the change in his pocket. Murray always saves the corner seat at the counter for him. He comes in less these days—his health failing—but Murray still saves the seat, just in case.

“No problem, Murray,” she had said and left with the pie. She didn’t pay attention to the neighborhood overly much on her way. She delivered the pie to Murray’s parents and then headed for home. Home. Walls, floors, unpaid bills, dirty dishes, Mama, and nothing more. Home. Mama would either be unconscious or want to talk. Home.

Her mind bobbed and weaved around the word, what it meant and what she wanted it to mean, so she didn’t notice the fig trees, the shaded parkways, the crumpled sidewalks, or the old but loved homes. She didn’t notice any of it until a tiny red sign high in a window wedged its way into her life.

She turns off Carmichael onto the street whose name replays in her head over and over again, a background beat that everything else melts into. Six houses down she pulls her car to a stop at the uneven curb. She opens her door, then eases it closed behind her, careful not to slam it, severing the silence and maybe the dream.

She walks around and leans against the blue car that she has come to call her own. Mama can’t drive because her license is suspended, so the Thunderbird has become Zoe’s. The chrome digs into her back and she shifts, but she won’t leave her viewpoint. She can’t. Mama herself has pinned her to this place. Daddy, too. Pinned and pushed with years of so much…nothing.

One house away she can see the tiny red sign in the upper window. She checks each day on her way to work, and each day it is still there. Each day, she leans against her car and imagines what the house is like inside—what the room is like. The house is old, so the room must be old, the floors probably polished wood, a staircase that’s worn, with a smooth, burnished banister, perhaps teeth marks where a child has chewed it. A braided blue rug rests at the top of the stairs. A calico cat curls around a chest of drawers and disappears into a doorway. Carefully chosen paintings hang on the walls, and maybe pictures of family, too. Old pictures. Loved pictures. There are probably smells in the house, too. Smells she would like. Lavender. Blueberry muffins. Freshly squeezed lemons. Cleanser. Polish. She can almost hear a washing machine, churning, churning, washing away all the dirt that a house can hold. A radio plays lightly in the kitchen and jangled, cheerful humming comes from some other room in the house. What else would be in a house like that? She allows herself fifteen minutes every day to think about it.

Beyond the short wooden fence that surrounds the property she has seen a woman stooped in the garden. The woman is old, small, and delicate-boned. Her hair is wild and her clothes mismatched. Today she is not there. Zoe wonders if she is a worker or maybe the owner of the house—the owner of the room.

Her eyes are still turned in the direction of the house, but she no longer sees it. Instead she sees her pay stubs and adds them up. With tips she brings home about $210 every two weeks; monthly that’s $420. Knock off forty dollars for gas—what does she spend on cigarettes? Twenty, thirty dollars? She isn’t sure, so she will say thirty. About forty a week for groceries—times four is $160 a month. Lunches and other incidentals probably add up to another thirty dollars? She concentrates, trying to add it in her head. “Two-sixty,” she whispers. That leaves $160. She has little saved, maybe two hundred hidden in her drawer at home, and that is because she just got paid. Where does it all go?

Mama.

Mama always forgets to pay a bill and needs a little help. “Sugar, just run down to the utility office with some cash, will you? I’ll pay you back. I’m a little short.” But Mama always seems to find the money for other things.

Tags: Mary E. Pearson
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